Jennifer Lynne is a homicide detective working on one of the most horrific serial killing cases New York has seen in the last decade. When she and her partner get a lead on the suspect, they catch him with his seventh victim. But things go south and...
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Everything around me is cold. It clouds around me, nipping at my weak points. It's almost as if frostbite is waiting behind a wall, slowly seeping through me more and more as the exterior crumbles. It hurts, but I want to reach out to it, to feel for anything concrete, but I can't. I...can't feel my own body.
The coldness is there, but I've lost sense of myself. My consciousness is hanging, acknowledging that I'm here, that I can feel the pain, but I can't feel myself anymore. As my mind tries to search for my body, I'm being shred of my sanity. I want to grab onto something, to call out, to scream. But I can't.
Then, as if at the mere thought, a warmth is awakened. It sparks underneath the cold, burning through it and spreading into me. I can feel it slide through me, and I can feel my body again. It moves into the soles of my feet and along my legs. It travels inside my stomach and reaches my heart. There, the heat increases. I'm no longer cold. No. I'm warm. Too warm.
Too warm. It burns hotter and hotter. It scrapes along my skin and sears my flesh, causing a tedious sizzling. I want to put it out, but how? It hurts. It hurts, it hurts!
I gasp, my eyes tearing open, and I sit up fast. Too fast. The overbearing lights around me causes me to squint with tears. The heat still flows through me. I turn to my left and all of the pain and frustration spews out of me and onto the white flooring. I snivel, wiping at my mouth, the heat simmering in my chest as I taste bile and sterility.
What happened? Where...am I? I look around to see white walls and sleek furniture. To my left, hospital machines beep. I follow the chords on them to needles in my arm. Fuck. I hate hospitals.
"Jenny," I hear a soft voice. I look over my shoulder to see Drake sitting in a chair at my bedside. He sits slumped, his brown eyes alert and his hair pushed around. He reaches out to me. "Are you okay?"
I shake my head. I'm fine. "What happened?"
Drake laughs to himself. "That's what I'd like to know."
At first, I don't say anything. I want to hear from him. But he just stares back at me, and I know he wants to hear from me first. I sigh, clenching my eyes shut, and the last several moments I had before passing out come flooding back, nearly knocking me back into the tide.
"I...fell?" I start slowly. I look at him and he nods. "I don't know how though. I didn't trip, I don't think. It was something that hit me hard enough to throw me on my ass."
His eyes sweep my chest and stomach before glancing at the machines behind me. "The doc said you weren't shot."
I know that. I can tell. And yet, I instinctively run my hand over my chest to check. "It hurt like hell. Have you ever been hit in the head or chest by a softball? It was like that, but way way worse." I clutch my throat. "I couldn't breathe, Drake." It felt like all of the air in my body was sucked out by a vacuum. "And then..." I pause, the words trapped.
