Page 139 of Girl Between (Dana Gray FBI Mystery Thriller #5)

Dana tiptoed into the make-shift hospital room. Tchaikovsky played over the beep and whir coming from several monitors and pieces of medical equipment. She stared at the girl in the hospital bed, watching the tubing move dark fluid to and from her slender arm.

Dialysis. Dana recognized the hemodialysis machineinstantly. Her grandfather had been hooked up to the blood cleaning machine during the final years Dana spent with him.

The feebly thin girl in the hospital bed needed a kidney.

A quick glance at the name on the chart at the end of the bed confirmed Dana’s fears. This was Amelia Landry.

What kind of monster keeps a dying blind girl as a hostage?

From the look of her, Amelia didn’t have much time left. Yellow, papery skin, sunken eyes, blue nails, and the slow rhythmic beat of low blood pressure on her heart monitor … It all pointed to the end stages of kidney failure.

Still, Dana knew she couldn’t leave the poor girl to die in this place. Who knew what horrors Monroe had in store for Amelia?

Dr. Landry didn’t deserve to see his daughter laid out in a cemetery like a broken doll.

He didn’t have Dana’s forgiveness, but she wouldn’t wish this on her worst enemy.

The old doctor had endured inconceivable loss.

Dana knew what grief could do to a person.

Her own had driven her to some pretty dark places.

In a way, it was the reason she was here, in this mess.

She’d run into the darkness ever since it stole her parents.

She was running still.

Chasing monsters.

This is it, she told herself. The last time.

She’d stared into Levi Monroe’s fathomless eyes. His soul, if he had one, was pure evil. And she would spend whatever time she had left purging it from the earth.

Surveying the room, Dana went to work. There were plastic bins lined up under the large tarped window.

Each was labeled. Various medical equipment, drugs, food, braille books, music, clothes …

That was the bin she went for first. The clothes were Amelia’s and much too small for Dana, but she made do, pulling on a pair of black sweatpants and a dark blue t-shirt.

Dana winced as she pulled the tight shirt over her wound. It’d already bled through the gauze and makeshift bandage. Dana knew she needed stitches, but there was no time. Rooting through the bin of medical equipment, she found what she needed to patch herself up the best she could.

A loud crash in the distance startled her.

Monroe had most likely realized she wasn’t where he’d left her.

It was time to go.

Dana was halfway to the door when a soft voice made her halt.

“Dad? Is that you?”

For a split-second Dana wrestled with whether to just leave, but she’d been the girl left behind before. She couldn’t do that to someone else. This girl deserved the truth.