Chapter 1
The darkness of the coma wasn't empty. It was crowded with someone else's filth.
My transplant surgery had been a textbook medical success, but post-operative complications dragged me down into a heavy blackness. Yet my mind refused to quiet. I was tethered to another frequency, forced to listen to the jagged thoughts of a man recovering in the very same ward. The organ registry had matched us cleanly. He had been a completely healthy, willing donor, a man who registered voluntarily to give away a portion of his liver while hiding a double life behind a mask of lies, believing it was hilarious to save a life after taking so many.
While I lay motionless in the coma, his mind bled further into mine, revealing what he kept hidden from the clinic. He was a strangler. A predator who viewed any tool as a weapon, from a garrote or plastic bag to his own IV tubing or bare hands pressed hard into a throat. I tasted the frantic breath of victims who had trusted him, feeling the exact moment their airway collapsed.
Worst of all was his obsession with a specific blonde nurse who checked vitals every four hours. He wasn't looking at a caregiver; he was calculating how easily he could loop his IV line around her windpipe or crush her trachea from behind.
I wanted to scream, but my body was paralyzed, an endotracheal tube jammed down my throat. I told myself it was just a drug-addled hallucination.
It is just a nightmare, I chanted silently in the dark. He is just a sick man in the next bed.
Then, the static cleared. My eyelids fluttered and slowly opened.
The harsh recovery room light hammered my retinas. My upper abdomen throbbed where the new tissue had been integrated, the suffocating blackness replaced by a choking panic as my lungs fought the ventilator.
The door clicked open. Footsteps padded across the linoleum.
Stepping into my field of vision was the blonde nurse. She moved quickly to the head of the bed, silencing the monitor.
"Easy now," she said softly, reaching for the controls. "You're going to feel a gentle pull. We are going to slide this breathing tube out very slowly."
I nodded. She carefully withdrew the thick plastic line up and out of my windpipe. I leaned weakly to the side against the mattress, gasping, coughing up bitter phlegm while pressing a hand tightly against my abdomen to keep my fresh transplant stitches from tearing open. Tears streamed down my face.
She offered a tired, professional smile, handing me a small paper cup of ice chips. "Welcome back. You gave us quite a scare."
I forced the ice chips down, resting weakly against the pillows. A sharp ache throbbed across my midsection. Driven by the memory of the nightmare, I grabbed her wrist with a shaky grip, coughing shallowly to protect my core.
"You need to run," I rasped, my voice cracking into a whisper. "The man in the next bed..."
A metallic rattle shattered the room. The privacy curtain was violently ripped back.
Standing in the gap was the donor, his eyes wide with a sickening, playful euphoria. In his hand, he held the clear plastic length of his own IV tubing, unhooked and dripping saline onto the floor. Before she could turn around, he stepped forward, looped the cord around her throat, and yanked back with brutal precision.
The clipboard slammed to the floor. The nurse choked, her hands clawing futilely at the plastic biting into her neck.
I slammed my hand onto the call button, over and over, the red light flashing uselessly on the wall as alarms began to blare. My core burned fiercely against the fresh stitches, but my body was far too weak from the coma to stand or fight.
The killer leaned his head over her collapsing shoulder, staring directly into my eyes as her feet kicked weakly against the linoleum. He didn't care about the alarms screaming down the hallway.
A slow, wide smile split his face as he leaned down, whispering over her dying gasps.
"Press it all you want," he purred softly, watching her eyes turn glass-dull. "Even if they stop me now, you'll feel me breathing inside you for the rest of your life."
