The fluorescent lights of the hospital buzzed faintly above Cordelia as she folded the last of the sterile linens onto the cart. Her body was exhausted, but her mind wouldn’t stop racing. Every smile she’d forced through her shift, every patient she’d tended to, every polite nod to a coworker—it had all been a mask stretched over the gnawing dread inside her.
Max.
The ache for him was constant, like a missing limb. Every time she came home to the silence of her apartment, every time she walked through the door expecting the soft thump of his paws or the whine of his greeting, she felt her chest hollow out. And now, with the bloody box Reid had sent her burned into her memory, Cordelia was sure of one thing: Reid will not show mercy.
And Reid would kill him if she didn’t comply, in a hea
