Page 76 of When the Smoke Clears

And through it all, the only thought I couldn’t shake was her. Isla. The picture of her face in my head, and the bone-deep knowledge that if I went down, I’d never see her again.

I don’t share that part.

“You could have died,” she whispers.

“Yeah.” The word scrapes out of me, rough and reluctant. My thumb strokes her wrist, needing the contact as much as she does. “But I didn’t.”

Gabe rubs his jaw.

Isla turns to him. “What are you thinking?”

Gabe’s brow furrows as he stands and paces for a moment before leaning against the back wall. “This was a set-up. This wasn’t random.”

I admit what I’ve been thinking. “I agree. A stolen van would’ve bolted at the first sight of me. Or at least tried to hide. This person wanted me to pull them over.”

“It was a trap,” Gabe says, a note of anger creeping into his voice.

Isla looks between us. “You don’t think it could just be a coincidence?”

Gabe shakes his head slowly, his eyes dark with conviction. “I don’t believe in coincidences. It’s all connected. Especially after what my contact just told me.”

CHAPTER 18

ISLA

“My mom was murdered?” The words scrape past my teeth.

“Yes.” Gabe’s voice has no sugar coating.

Grief doesn’t come as tears this time. It comes as a free fall, like somebody just opened a trapdoor under my ribs. The floor tilts. I lock my knees until the room stops its slow carousel.

“What did he find?”

“He found MDMA metabolites,” Gabe says, “and a heavy dose of a beta blocker.”

“MDMA?” Luke rasps from the bed.

“Ecstasy,” I say automatically. “Together with a beta blocker? With her heart? It could’ve stopped it.”

I scan the mental catalog of her medicine cabinet. No beta blockers that I remember. And ecstasy? It doesn’t fit. Even when she was drinking heavily, she never did hard drugs.

Gabe continues. “By the time the lab reruns her samples, any traces will have vanished. The death will be ruled ‘natural causes’. Whoever killed her was counting on that.”

Luke’s eyes snap wide, pupils nearly swallowing the iris. He props himself up against the bedrail, wincing. “Isla, are you okay?”

My throat tightens. If I let the panic loose, I’ll crack in half. I press my palms to my thighs, forcing myself steady. “Who would do this to her? She was a nobody.”

The word tastes wrong as soon as it leaves my mouth. Nobody. She was my nobody.

Luke gently tugs on my fingertips, forcing me to look at him. “It doesn’t make sense. Yet. But there’s a reason. It may or may not have to do with you directly, Isla. But we’re going to find out.”

He says it like a vow, and I feel it in my bones. Luke has always been a man who keeps his word, even when it breaks him.

He shifts, drawing in a ragged breath, then falls back with a pained grunt.

I snap into work mode, putting all else aside. I slide the IV pole aside, and my fingers trace his shoulder lightly. “Do you remember when you took your last pain med?”

He quirks a grin. “Not long ago, Nurse Isla.”