He Called Me His Weapon, So I Died and Came Back Free novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Calla

She wakes in a hospital bed as a waitress named Calla Salisbury, learns the gala shooter fell into the harbor and was never found, and sees a Stalworth man asking at the desk for women brought in from the water.

I woke up, and my back didn't hurt.

That was the first thing, before the white ceiling and the beeping and the tube taped to my hand.

For nine years there had been something open on my back. Now there was only a pillow, and it was cool.

A woman was asleep in the chair beside the bed.

She was small and freckled, with short red curls, and she wore a navy paramedic's uniform with the sleeves shoved up.

She had her boots up on the bed rail.

I tried to say hello. What came out was a dry croak.

Her eyes snapped open.

"Calla!"

She was off the chair and gripping my shoulders before I could move.

"You absolute idiot," she said. Her voice cracked in the middle. "Four minutes. You had no pulse for four minutes, and I was the one doing compressions."

I stared at her.

I did not know her. I did not know the name she was calling me, either.

Then I looked at my own hands on the blanket.

They were not my hands.

They were a little softer and a little paler, with short bitten nails and a white scar across the knuckle of one thumb.

My heart rate jumped on the monitor, and she saw it.

"Hey. Hey, it's okay. Breathe."

A doctor came in, then another, and they shined a light in my eyes and asked me my name.

"Calla," I said, because she'd said it.

"Last name?"

I looked at the woman in the uniform.

"Salisbury," she said quietly. "Calla Salisbury."

"Do you remember what happened?" the doctor asked.

"Water," I said. It was true.

"You went in off the Pell Street dock," the doctor said. "You were under a good while. Some memory gaps are normal. They usually come back."

I nodded slowly and let them think it.

When they left, the paramedic sat on the edge of the bed and held my hand carefully in both of hers.

"I'm Pru," she said. "I know you don't, right now. I'm Pru Lindell, I'm your roommate, and I'm going to tell you everything every day until it comes back."

"Okay," I said.

"Our rig got the call. Woman in the water." She laughed, and it wasn't a happy sound. "I didn't know it was you until I rolled you over."

She was crying, and she wiped her face with the heel of her hand, angry about it.

I had spent nine years around people who hurt me or watched me get hurt.

Nobody had ever cried because I was alive.

"Thank you, Pru," I said.

She blinked, and then she cried harder.

When she went to find coffee, I lay still and tested the body, one limb at a time.

The legs were weaker than mine. The shoulders had less in them.

But when I put my thumb against the inside of my left wrist and tapped it twice, my breathing slowed and my head went quiet.

The habit had come with me.

The TV on the wall was on with no sound. I found the remote and turned it up.

A reporter stood in front of the Hartwell Hotel.

"Police say Dermot Wainwright, thirty-eight, head of Wainwright Freight, was killed by a single rifle shot from a nearby rooftop on Saturday night."

A photo filled the screen. It was the man on the balcony, laughing, with the white rose on his lapel.

"A second shot was fired from the hotel's north roof," the reporter went on. "Witnesses saw a person fall from the harbor dock. Divers searched for two days and recovered nothing."

Two days. I had been dead, and then not, for two days.

"An anonymous reward of fifty thousand dollars has been offered for information about the shooter's remains."

Fifty thousand dollars. Corvin didn't give things away.

He wanted the body, because a body would tell him whether I had really gone.

I turned the sound off.

I could not go back to that warehouse. I could not be Sparrow, and I could not even be seen as her.

I could be a waitress with a bitten thumbnail and a friend who cried.

So I made the decision there, in a hospital bed with a stranger's pulse in my wrist.

I would never be anyone's weapon again.

Pru came back with two coffees and a vending machine muffin.

I was reaching for the cup when I saw him through the glass in the door.

He stood at the nurses' station in a grey jacket, a big man with a flat nose.

I knew him. He had stood on the warehouse wall two days ago and watched Corvin hit me.

"Any women brought in from the water this week?" he asked the nurse.

I made myself keep my face still.

He turned, and his eyes went across the room and across me.

They stopped on my left hand.

I looked down and saw it, resting on the blanket, tapping twice against my wrist.

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend