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“Stop!”

The shouted word startled her.

She looked off to her left to see Ryan, his head craned toward her, his eyes cloudy but horrified. He swallowed hard and in a much weaker voice, he repeated, “stop.”

Then his body went slack, and his eyes closed.

Jessie vibrated with shock. It was as if, for a moment, she stepped outside of her body and looked down at herself. She was straddled over a barely conscious man, about to thrust a rolling pin handle down his throat in the hopes that it might come out the other side.

She was, until just this moment, an unthinking ball of fury, consumed with inducing as much pain as possible, unconcerned with anything else, including her own husband’s welfare.

She’d gotten so caught up in destroying the man that she’d completely forgotten that Ryan’s life hung in the balance, that if he didn’t get help soon, he wouldn’t make it.

She felt all the anger drain out of her as her shoulders slumped. The man’s garbled screams were barely audible to her as she pulled out her handcuffs, slapped one on his wrist and the other to a leg of the very butcher block he’d tied her to.

She slowly got to her feet and made her way over to her cell phone, which was resting on the breakfast table next to Ryan’s. She called HSS. Beth answered.

"I need EMTs to our address ASAP," she instructed. "The killer poisoned Ryan and followed us here. I need you to get Dr. Amelia Roth here, too, with the antidote. Tell her that the killer gave Ryan a more concentrated version of the poison, so she needs to use whatever dosage will work. Ryan is unconscious and in bad shape."

"Got it," Beth said, her voice quavering ever so slightly. "You're on speaker, so we all heard. Detective Valentine is calling for EMTs now, and Jamil is calling Roth. But Jessie, are you okay?"

“The suspect is incapacitated and handcuffed,” she answered. “I’m not in any imminent danger.”

“I understand,” Beth said. “But are you okay? How are you?”

Jessie thought about it for a second.

“I don’t know,” she answered.

It was the truth.