Read Hold Me Like a Breath for Free Online

keys still dangled from the ignition, the engine still hummed.
    Garrett lingered an extra moment. “This shouldn’t take long. And everything’s okay. I don’t want you to worry.”
    â€œI’m not.” I would’ve sounded believable if my voice wasn’t quivering. If I weren’t clutching fistfuls of my dress.
    â€œYou’re cute when you’re worried.” Garrett winked, and then he too was out in the darkness and humidity and I was alone.
    I tried to lower my window—just a crack, enough to let in voices but not even mosquitoes—except Carter must’ve engaged some sort of child lock. I stared out the tinted glass, watched as their shadows grew gigantic on the wall as they approached the warehouse, then disappeared around its corner.
    No matter how hard I concentrated, my eyes couldn’t adjust enough to make sense of the dark. Maybe it was the placement of the parking lot lights—how I had to peer through them to see the warehouse beyond.
    After they’d left this afternoon, I’d rushed to the clinic to model different outfits for Caroline. She’d teased. We’d laughed. I’d blushed and daydreamed about the lovely combination of me, Garrett, and NYC.
    But in my daydreams, Garrett hadn’t been wearing a gun.
    And now we were parked somewhere made of shadows and secrets and fear that sat on my tongue like a bitter hard candy that wouldn’t dissolve.
    The car still smelled like them. Their seats were still warm when I leaned forward and pressed my hands against the leather.But I couldn’t see them. What if the dark decided never to spit them back out again?
    This wasn’t the Business as I knew it: secret transplant surgeries that took place at our six “Bed and Breakfasts” and “Spas” in Connecticut, Vermont, Maryland, Maine, Massachusetts, and South Carolina, where we saved people like Kelly Forman. She’d been ten when she needed a kidney transplant, but her chromosomal mutation—unrelated to her renal impairment— earned her a rejection from the Federal Organ and Tissue Agency’s lists. According to them, Down syndrome made her a “poor medical investment.” FOTA wrote her a death warrant. We saved her life.
    She graduated from high school a few weeks ago. The past nine years since we’d met—she wouldn’t have had those without the Family Business.
    That was enough. That was all I needed to know. Illegal or not, that was
good
.
    I heard something. A crack so sharp it echoed and seemed to fill the spaces between my bones, making me shiver. I prayed it was a car backfiring.
    Then it happened again.
    My stomach jumped to my throat, crowded out my lungs, and made it impossible to breathe. I tried the door handle, but it wouldn’t open. Not the first, second, or eighth time I jerked on it. Not even when I pulled hard enough for it to bite into the insides of my fingers.
    Terror was a thing with claws that squeezed my throat and demanded I keep yanking and yanking on the handle. Itwhispered my worst memories in my ear, flashbacks to my tenth birthday when we’d gotten news of an FBI raid at the Nantucket clinic. The local police on the Family payroll had failed to tip them off, so the staff hadn’t had time to activate the spa facade. Things had escalated quickly, badly: handcuffs, gunshots.
    A second call had come in while my family was singing “Happy Birthday”: Keith Ward had passed away from bullet wounds. The candles melted all over my Empire State Building cake; I’d been too busy gasping for air to blow them out. And what was the point? It was far too late to wish Garrett’s oldest brother would be all right.
    Keith had been a thug with a gun. Garrett … he couldn’t be.
    They had to be okay. They
had
to be.
    I was so focused on that noise and looking out the front of the car, it was perfectly reasonable that I jumped and screamed when