Snow Falls in Prague; I Won't Wait for a Heartless Man novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Ring in Her Fist

Freya fights the woman with the syringe, the operating room burns, and she lets Brecken find her ring on the body. At the airport gate she watches him collapse on live television, and Bethany names the dead woman at a glance.

The buckle slid free with one hard pull.

My right hand came loose, and I swung it at the woman's mask.

She stepped back, and the needle missed my arm by an inch.

"Hold still," she said. "It's easier."

I grabbed the arm of the surgical light and dragged it down between us.

She threw her forearm up to block it.

Her hip hit the instrument cart and the whole tray went over.

A bottle of alcohol broke on the tile.

A cord snapped out of a machine on the cart, and a blue spark jumped across the wet floor.

The fire started at her shoes.

It ran up her scrub pants in a second.

She screamed and dropped the syringe.

She grabbed at my left arm, hard, and her nails tore the skin off my hand.

My ring was in her fist.

I tried to pull away and she held on to it, burning, still not letting go.

Then her knees folded and she dropped to the floor, and the ring stayed in her hand.

I did not fight her for it.

I looked at it, and I thought of Brecken.

Let him find it.

Let him think I never got off that table.

I tore at the buckle on my left wrist until my fingernail bent back and bled.

I got my ankles free one at a time.

The flames reached the curtain and then the ceiling tiles.

The woman on the floor was not moving anymore.

I climbed off the table with my gown open down my back and my belly, still flat, held in both arms.

"I'm sorry," I said to her, and I was not sure why.

She had come to kill me.

The door she had locked was the only way to the hall, and the hall was full of guards.

I went the other way, through the scrub room, past the sinks, to a steel door marked SUPPLY.

It opened onto a back stairwell that smelled of bleach.

Behind me the smoke alarm began to scream.

Boots ran in the front corridor.

A man shouted Brecken's name.

I took the stairs down two at a time and pushed through a loading door into the cold.

The guards' black SUV sat in the lot with its door half open, and they had left it running.

My bag was on the back seat, where Bethany's hand had put it down.

I took it and I did not look at the clinic.

A wet November wind went straight through the gown, and I put on the coat from my bag.

My phone was still on the salon floor.

I had cash, a debit card and a passport.

The passport had been in the bag since a trip with Brecken in the spring, and I had never taken it out.

I walked to the road and waved at a taxi with a bleeding hand.

The driver said, "Lady, are you okay?"

"Airport," I said. "Please."

At O'Hare, I stood in front of the departure board and shook.

The next flight with a seat was to Prague, through Frankfurt, boarding at 5:20.

Once I had drawn the Charles Bridge in snow for a children's book and had never seen it.

I bought the ticket with my own card, because nobody was looking for me yet.

In the bathroom I washed the blood off my hand and scrubbed my face with paper towels.

Then I walked through security with my passport out.

My hands would not stop shaking.

I put one flat on my stomach and held it there.

"We're going," I said. "Both of us. Right now."

At the gate there was a television over the seats, with the sound turned low.

The picture was a clinic on the North Shore with flames out of the upper windows.

The words under it said: FIRE AT PRIVATE CLINIC, ONE DEAD.

A reporter stood behind the police tape with her hair blowing across her mouth.

"We're told that real estate developer Brecken Lowry ran into the building after the fire began," she said.

"He was carried out by his own security team and fought them every step."

The camera cut to Brecken.

He was on his knees in the parking lot, in the good charcoal coat, his hands black to the wrist.

He was holding something small against his chest.

The reporter's voice dropped.

"We understand that a woman's body was found in the operating room, along with half of a diamond ring."

Brecken opened his hand.

The ring was in two pieces, and the stone was blackened.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he bent over and vomited a mouthful of blood onto the asphalt, and the guards caught him.

A woman in the next row put her hand over her mouth.

"That poor man," she said. "He must have loved her so much."

I did not say anything.

I pulled my collar up over my cheek and turned to the window, because a dead woman should not be sitting at gate B12.

The camera moved again, and a woman in a camel coat stepped up to him from behind the tape.

Bethany.

She put both hands on his shoulders.

Two officers walked her toward the stretcher, where a sheet lay over something long.

They lifted one corner of the sheet.

Bethany looked down for two seconds.

She did not cry out and she did not turn away.

"That's Freya," she said clearly. "That's her. Oh, Brecken, I'm so sorry."

The fire had taken the face, and she had named it on the first look.

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