Read The Taking for Free Online Page B

they seemed to hate each other and that they couldn’t be in the same room for five minutes without freaking out on each other. I hated the blame I could feel oozing from my mom, and the weird stuff my dad was fixated on, and the way the air between them was overflowing with bitterness. But I hated even more the guilt inside me, simmering just below the surface like it was ready to boil over at any moment. Like this was all somehow my fault.
    I clenched my fingers into fists and hid them beneath my legs, where no one could see them, all the while screaming silently inside my own head, where no one could hear my inner tantrum. I bet I could implode, disintegrate into ash on this very spot where I was perched in my hospital gown on the edge of the bed, and no one would even notice.
    I was still answering, or rather not answering, Gary’s questions when a man came in carrying what looked like a blue tackle box filled with test tubes and gauze and white tape and needles.
    “Kyra Agnew?” he asked, as if he had a habit of wandering into the wrong room. He gave Gary a strange look, and I wondered if everyone knew why I was here.
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Just need to get a little blood for the lab before you go.” He grinned and set his box down while he pulled on a pair of latex gloves. He checked the ID bracelet on my wrist against the name on my chart and started getting the tubes and a needle ready.
    Gary pointed to the hallway. “We’re all done here. I’m just gonna have a word with your parents and then we’ll see you back at the ranch.” He leaned down then, not a cop thing but an Austin’s-dad thing, and kissed me on the cheek. “It’s good to have you back, Kyr. Let us know if you need anything. Anything at all.”
    My eyes stung. I didn’t want to cry, but I kinda was anyway. Even though I hadn’t had the chance to miss anyone, it was nice to know they’d missed me. “Thanks,” I croaked.
    When we were alone, the lab guy examined the crook of my arm. “This’ll only take a second. Anyone ever told you you have great veins?”
    I shrugged because I’d heard that before.
    He seemed pretty young, but I had no idea how to judge that. By the tattoos that covered the parts of his arms I could see? The piercing in his eyebrow that he tried to cover up with one of those little round Band-Aids but was obvious anyway?
    “How old are you?”
    He grinned down at me. “Why? You worried I don’t know what I’m doing? I’m twenty-four, but I been doin’ this for two years at least. I’m the best around; you won’t feel a thing,” he bragged.
    Twenty-four. Just three years older than I was now, and two years older than Austin and Cat.
    My eyes roved over him as he wrapped a strip of rubber around my upper arm and tapped one of the blue vessels that bulged. “Don’t make a fist,” he told me when I started to curl my fingers. “It’s not necessary.”
    He said some things that were probably meant to be distracting, but all I could think was that we could be friends if we wanted to, we were that close in age. He caught me staring, and I dropped my eyes to the needle as it plunged into my arm.
    I’d never been squeamish—not even when it came to watching my own blood being drawn—so it was strange when I felt the prickling, the tingling around the needle.
    “Is it supposed to feel like that?”
    “Like what? Are you feeling a little light-headed or anything?”
    I shook my head. “Just . . . it’s kinda . . . tingly.”
    He popped the second vacuum-sealed vial into the syringe, and it rapidly began filling with blood. He glanced at me and then back to his task, releasing the rubber strip from my upper arm with a snap. “I’m sure it’s fine. And we’re . . . just . . . about . . . done. . . .” With those last words he set the vial back in his box of tricks and reached for a cotton swab, setting it on top of the needle in my arm as he tugged to pull it free.
    But it didn’t budge.
    He