Katrina POV

The thing about having your life crushed at a dinner table is that nobody offers you a ride home after.

I drove myself in the old Honda, the one they kindly allowed me to keep, which was funny. Three years and I got a 2019 Honda, five thousand dollars, and front-row seats to the most unhinged plot twist of my own life.

It was 11 PM and it rained like the sky was also grieving. I drove with both hands locked on the wheel because if I didn't give them something to hold I honestly didn't know what I'd do with them. The mountains had swallowed the city behind me, nothing ahead but dark road, guardrails catching my headlights in pale flashes, and the kind of silence that pressed against your eardrums.

The rain got heavier as the road climbed, and somehow the past came flooding in.

He'd been standing at the canape table at a charity event looking at the food like it had personally offended him, I was in my second year of med school, nursing the same glass of wine for two hours because I couldn't afford another. He'd appeared beside me and said, completely deadpan. "These things taste like disappointment shaped into circles." And I'd laughed. He'd looked at me like that laugh was the most interesting thing he'd seen all night.

I married him fourteen months later in a dress that took my breath away, in a ceremony that cost more than my entire medical school tuition, and for exactly six month, I was stupidly, completely happy.

A year after the wedding, Emma had said over brunch: "Have you thought about timing? Nicholas would love a family soon." I'd smiled and said we were letting things happen naturally. That same month, she'd "helpfully" booked an appointment with a specialist. By year two I was cutting hospital hours, by year three the fellowship was gone. Every piece of myself I handed over I told myself was a loan.

Nico would find me in the kitchen at midnight after a double shift, arms sliding around me from behind, lips against my neck and I'd lean into him for exactly three seconds before my body remembered it was exhausted in a way that lived in the bone marrow, and I'd pull away, and I'd feel his arms go still around me.

Maybe if I'd been more passionate, if we had sex more, if I'd given him what he wanted, I most likely wouldn't be sitting here in a 2019 Honda, with five thousand dollars in account and nowhere to go.

The road curved sharper and I adjusted, and tapped the brakes. They felt soft.

I pressed again, harder. The pedal gave more than it should, it sank further, came back with less and something at the base of my spine went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature.

Okay. I thought, sitting up straighter. It's wet, the road's wet, it's fine.

The road kept going down and I pressed harder. Still nothing, the pedal hit the floor and stayed there and the car kept moving, kept accelerating with the gradient of the mountain, and my brain did this thing where it went very quiet before it started to scream.

Nothing.

I pumped them twice. Each time the pedal went all the way down like it was mocking me, like the resistance that was supposed to be there had simply ceased to exist, and the mountain road kept curving and I kept not slowing down.

Headlights appeared in my rearview mirror, too close for this road, too close for this weather, sitting right on my bumper like whoever was behind me had decided personal space was a concept that didn't apply to mountain roads in the pouring rain. I checked the mirror, couldn't see the vehicle through the rain and the glare. I edged slightly toward the center line to give them road to pass, but they didn't pass, they sped up.

The impact came from behind, hard and deliberate, and my head snapped forward and I heard myself scream in a voice I didn't recognize, hands wrenching the wheel while the backend fishtailed on the slick asphalt. I barely caught it, my whole body was shaking, my foot was still drilling the useless brake pedal into the floor out of pure reflex, because what else do you do...

The second hit came at an angle, caught the rear passenger corner, the car was already going sideways, and the guardrail came up fast. I hit it at the weak join where two panels met, and it crumpled exactly the way it wasn't supposed to.

Before I knew it there was no road, no rail, no ground.

I was airborne, all four wheels off the mountains and the dark rushing up to meet me and my hands were still on the wheel like that meant something, like holding harder would give me back the control that was already gone. The headlights cut through the rain and lit up nothing useful. Just trees and the terrible speed of them.

The first one hit the passenger side and the impact traveled through the chassis and into my spine like a shockwave. The second one took the mirror off in a shriek of metal I felt in my back teeth. I was still pressing the brakes, I couldn't stop pressing them even though I knew that I was going through this mountain and the trees weren't going to stop me anymore than I could stop myself.

The underbrush tore at the undercarriage. Rocks scraped the bottom like something trying to hold on. It bounced off a boulder so hard the rearview mirror cracked clean down the middle, my reflection splitting into two versions, one on each side, and I thought, wildly and briefly, that felt about right. There where two versions of me now. The one who'd driven toward the Cruz estate tonight with something almost like hope alive in her chest. And this one, the one currently losing an argument with a mountain.

The car tilted nose-first.

The airbag exploded against my face the same second we hit the water, it was white and chemical-sharp, and I felt my nose crunch and tasted blood immediately and the cold exploded. Not cold like the hospital corridors and stethoscopes against winter skin. This cold lived past cold, on the other side of it, a full-body assault that hit every nerve ending at once and then shut them down. It came through the cracks in the door, the spilt corners of the windshield, every tiny compromise in the chassis that the crash had created, thin vicious streams of river water that found the gaps and kept finding them.

I tried the door, it was jammed completely. Then I tried the window, the electric mechanism made one weak sound and died.

I was trapped. The water reached her ankles, then my knees. I could feel it rising with a slowness that terrified me more than the crash had, it didn't care I was twenty-seven years old and had not yet done a single thing I'd actually meant to do with my life.

The water reached my collarbone and I tilted my head back.

I'd hadn't even gotten the chance to find out. After everything I'd swallowed tonight, the pride, the grief, the rage, I refused to let them see, the universe was going to make me die without knowing if I was pregnant or not.

The water closed over my head and then Everything went black.

Spencer POV

I almost took the highway.

I should have taken the highway. The highway was faster, better lit, and didn't require the specific kind of attention that the mountain roads demanded in rain like this. But I'd driven the highway home four hundred times and my brain had started finishing the route without me, leaving my conscious mind alone in the dark with a sixteen-year-old boy's chart and the particular sound a waiting room makes when everything has already gone wrong.

The mountain road required both hands and focus. That was the only reason I took it.

Ten Years in emergency medicine and I still hasn't found the off switch. Sage said I was married to the Job, usually with the specific energy of someone who had decided your life was her personal renovation project. She wasn't wrong, she was almost never wrong, which was its own kind of exhausting.

But saving lives was clean and straightforward. You either did it or you didn't, and the options were medical, not emotional and I was good with medical options in a way I had proven expensively, in the form of divorce papers three years ago that I was not good with emotional ones.

Ella had said "you're more present with strangers dying than you are with me."

And I hadn't argue, that had been the problem.

I drove carefully, with both hands, full attention on the wet road ahead. Rain like this turned mountain curves into dangerous suggestions. I'd seen what happened when people forgot that, I'd treated what happened when people forgot that, and I had no interest in becoming my own patient.

The headlights appeared lower on the road, maybe two curves ahead. It was a smaller car, moving faster than the conditions needed, I eased off the accelerator and watched. I felt something in my chest, the same thing I felt whenever things were about to go sideways.

I'd learned to trust that feeling. Then I saw the second vehicle.

It had been sitting on the roadside, and it pulled out behind the smaller car with a purpose that had nothing casual in it. It closed the distance too fast. My foot was already coming off the accelerator when it hit her.

It accelerated and made contact, full deliberate force into her rear bumper, and I said something out loud in my empty car that I will not repeat.

The smaller car fishtailed and caught itself. The second hit came at an angle, harder, more calculated, and this time the guardrail met the car at the weak join and gave like it was made of something cheaper than metal, and then the car was gone, over the edge, into the dark below, and I was already braking, already pulling over, already out of the car before I'd made any decision about any of it.

I reached for my phone and emergency kit.i called 911 while I ran the embankment, gave my location and what I'd seen, the deliberate impact, hit and run, vehicle heading back toward the city and the operator told me to wait for emergency services. I told her I was an ER doctor and kept moving.

The embankment was steep and wet and didn't care. I went down hard on my hands twice, opened my palm on something sharp and kept going. The car had hit the river forty feet below, I could see the shape of it, headlights still cutting weakly through the murk before the water claimed them entirely. It was sinking and inside, barely visible through the fractured windshield was movement.

I didn't think about the temperature when I hit the water, it would've made me slower.

The cold went straight through the skin and muscle and organs. I surfaced, found the car and swam against the current with everything I had left after a fourteen-hour shift, which turned out to be barely enough.

The driver's side was folded inward at an angle that wasn't opening for anyone. I could see her through the intact window, she was young, with brunette hair suspended in the water filing the cabin, she had a head wound at her left temple already bleeding pink into the food. Her eyes were half-open. The water was at her neck.

I found a rock and turned my face away and put my elbow through the window with everything I had. The glass gave way. I reached in, ignored the edges, found the seatbelt release, felt it click and pulled her through with controlled urgency.

She wasn't breathing when I got her to the bank. I began CPR, thirty compressions, I'd done this enough times that my body knew the sequence the way it knew how to walk.

She coughed. Water came out of her and she gasped like her body had remembered at the last possible second that it wasn't done yet. I kept my hands on her shoulder and checked her pulse, she was alive.

I heard sirens in the distance. I looked up at the road, the vehicle that hit her was gone, and drove away.

I looked back down at the woman breathing shallowly in the wet scrub beside me.

St. Benedicts was twelve minutes from here, if she was in a hospital database, she was findable.

If she was findable, whoever had just driven away at a measured, unbothered speed would find her.

My phone buzzed, it was Sage's name on the screen because of course it was, because Sage called at the exact wrong moment.

I declined it and then picked the woman up, got her weight distributed across my arms, and carried her toward my car.

My private clinic was twenty minutes east. Off-system, off-record, staffed tonight by a nurse I trusted with my own life because I'd had occasion to test that trust and she hadn't failed it. The woman in my arms was breathing, she had a head wound and probable internal bruising and a body temperature that needed addressing in the next thirty minutes.

She also had someone who had tried to kill her tonight and driven away like they intended to try again.

The ambulance could have the accident report. They could have the guardrail and the tire marks and the rain-soaked embankment.

She was coming with me.

Spencer POV

Juliet Richard opened the clinic door at eleven fifty PM in surgical scrubs and an expression that said she'd been expecting something like this, which was fair, I'd never called her at midnight with good news. We had the kind of professional relationship built entirely on high-pressure situations and mutual silence afterward. She'd covered for me twice, and I'd covered for her once in a way that technically never happened. We were even.

"She's alive," I said, carrying the woman through the door. "I witnessed a deliberate hit and run. We need to be discrete."

She stepped aside. "Come in."

I carried her in and laid her on the examination table and Juliet was already moving. She checked the pupils first, then pulse, then started cutting through the wet clothing. I assisted where needed and stayed out of the way where not.

"What really happened?" Juliet asked.

"It was at the mountain road." I replied. "Someone ran her off deliberately through the guardrail into the river and I pulled her out."

"Any witnesses?"

"Just me."

"Did you call the police?"

"I called it in as a hit and run." I paused. "Then I brought her here instead of letting the ambulance take her."

Juliet's hand didn't stop working. "Why?"

"The car that hit did so deliberately." I looked at the woman on the table. "Whoever did this wanted her gone. I didn't want her in a system where the wrong person could make a phone call and find out she survived."

Juliet was quiet for a moment before speaking. "Okay, that's a reasonable explanation."

The injuries were significant but survivable. She definitely had a concussion. Three ribs were cracked on the left side, consistent with the door impact. Lacerations across her right arm and left collarbone from the window glass, needing sutures. Bruising up the left side of the neck and shoulder that would look horrible by morning. Her vitals had been unstable on the drive here but had stabilize now.

Juliet worked in silence for awhile. "She was crying before this happened."

I looked up.

"Mascara." Juliet nodded toward the woman's temple. "She wiped it at some point but didn't get it all. Whatever tonight was, this wasn't the first bad thing happened to her."

I said nothing. I'd noticed the mascara in the car. I'd filed it and kept driving.

"You're not curious?" Juliet asked.

"I'm always curious." I said quietly. "I just don't announce it."

"That's your whole thing, isn't it." She tied off the last suture. Then she looked at me. "Won't you check your hand?"

"Later." I replied.

She shook her head and checked the monitors one more time, made notes and pulled off her gloves. "She'd stable. I'll get room ready for her. And Spencer...." She stopped at the door. ".... whatever this is, be careful. People who move that fast after an accident aren't amateurs."

Then she left me alone with a woman whose name I didn't know yet and a palm that was going to need stitches.

Her clothes had yielded nothing useful. No wallet, no phone, either lost in the river or she hadn't had them on her person, which seemed strange. There'd been a paper bag, waterlogged and destroyed, that Juliet had set aside with the rest of the personal effects. Whatever had been in it was ruined.

I photographed her face and sent it to David with a single line: Need an ID. Now.

Then I let Juliet stitch my hand, drank the worst clinical coffee, and waited.

My phone buzzed thirty minutes later.

Katrina Lancaster, 27. Cruz marriage...see attached.

I read it standing in the hallway. Then I pulled up the news.

Katrina Lancaster, Wife of Nicholas Cruz, Dead in Mountain Road Accident.

I checked the timestamp. Forty-five minutes ago. The accident had occured in less than two hours before that. Vehicle recovered from River. Body not recovered, current presumed responsible.

Investigation status: closed.

I read that part four times.

Closed with no body and the investigation was closed. Labeled accidental death, tragic and condolences to the Cruz family.

I called David back. He picked up on the second ring. "You saw the news?"

"How fast can a death investigation close with no body?"

"Normally?" He asked. "Weeks. Sometimes even months."

"This one closed in under two hours."

Silence on his end, before he spoke. "That's not standard pace, Ashford. That's someone with a direct line making a very specific request."

"Cruz Family."

"That would be my guess." He paused. "The woman you pulled out... she's supposed to be dead now, and you have her."

"I'm aware of that."

"Spencer." His voice shifted into something more careful. "If the Cruz closed a murder investigation in two hours, they're not going to appreciate a loose end."

"Then it's a good thing nobody knows she's here.'

I hung up before he could tell me anything else I already knew.

I took my terrible coffee into her room and sat in the chair beside her bed.

The monitors kept their quiet rhythm. Juliet had dimmed the lights. Katrina Lancaster, legally deceased as of approximately forty minutes ago, breathed with the slow, unconscious evenness of someone whose body had decided surviving was worth the effort even if the rest of her hadn't thought of it yet.

I looked at her face.

Divorce this morning. Dead tonight. Investigation closed before the river had finished draining from her car. The mascara at her temples she'd wiped but hadn't quite gotten. The paper bag in her personal effects, destroyed, that I'd never know the contents of.

Someone had wanted her gone badly enough to plan it, execute it and clean it up in under two hours. This wasn't rage. Rage was messy and usually involved someone's hands and a moment they regretted. This was planned. Someone had built a structure around her deletion and then pulled it down so fast she'd barely had time to drown.

The Cruz.

It was the only answer that fit the timeline, the resources, the specific speed of a cover-up that required calls to people who picked up.

She didn't know any of this. Where she was right now. Didn't know that to the world she was dead. Didn't know her accident had already been filed and closed and grieved.

Now she was here. In a private room that didn't exist in any system, with injuries that would heal and a death certificate that wouldn't. Whatever came next, whatever she decided to do with the second life she'd been handed tonight entirely by accident, that was going to be an interesting conversation.

I looked at her for a long time.

Who did you make angry enough to do this to you? I thought. And do they know it didn't work?