Read Wordless for Free Online Page A

dazed me, but I was pretty sure I’d heard a snap when she landed. I wasn’t hurt, and I’d only partially broken her fall, so it must have come from her foot or leg as it met the ground. I wondered where all the blood was coming from until she tried to lift herself off of me, pressing against my chest.
    The thumb of her right hand was missing. The gaping wound glared at me, weeping red all over my white jacket. White obviously didn’t go well with trash or blood.
    I yelped at the same time she gave a stifled cry of pain. She must have somehow forgotten her thumb was cut off when she’d tried to use her hand. She almost fell on me again—albeit from a much lesser height than her balcony. I grabbed her wrist to steady her. My hand was now wet with her blood, but I hardly noticed as I pushed us both upright until we were seated in the grass facing each other.
    There was no mistaking that face, scattered strands of wavy brown hair sticking to her tear-streaked cheeks.
    It was her. The Word. She was definitely as beautiful as I’d previously thought, if not more so, but that was beside the point. I’d wanted her to show up or drop another clue from her balcony, but she’d done both in one go.
    “If you’re here to help me, stop staring and start moving,” she said. Her dark eyes were focused, looking right at me, her voice and breath ridiculously steady for the amount of pain she had to be in. “But don’t pull that bracelet off yet or we’re both in trouble.”
    After registering that she had a husky voice I would have found sexy on any other occasion, I noticed that my hand was still around her wrist, encircling it along with a black plastic bracelet.
    My fingers were sticky when I pulled away. Though her tight black shirt and pants hid most of the blood on her, save for what was on her hands, they couldn’t disguise the horribly wrong angle of her ankle.
    “Did you hear me?” she said calmly, maybe even coolly. “My ankle is broken. If I try to move and cause myself more pain, my heart rate will spike and they’ll notice.” She nodded at the bracelet, now mostly red instead of black as she held her arm upright, blood running down her wrist. It amazed me that she wasn’t trying to staunch the flow with her other hand, until I noticed what it held.
    Her severed thumb.
    “Gods,” I said, involuntarily leaning away from her. “Don’t you want to … don’t you need … a doctor or something?”
    She smiled grimly. Rather, she gritted her perfect, pearly teeth and followed my stare to her thumb. “Anything but,” she said, then took a deep breath. “I can reattach it myself, but only after I take off the monitor. That’s why I cut it off in the first place.”
    “You cut off your thumb?” My voice came out higher than I would have preferred.
    “Yes!” she said, suddenly impatient, gritting her teeth again. “That’s the only way I can get the monitor over my hand. And the longer you wait, the sooner I bleed to death, since they’ll know the moment I take it off—and the location. So I can’t heal myself until it’s gone, and I can’t get rid of it until we’re moving. Go!”
    “Where?” I asked, leaping up and looking around, as if the flower bed might hide a first aid kit or a splint.
    “To your truck! You have spare black bags in there, yes? Bring four of them.”
    “Four? Why?” Plastic bags weren’t very absorbent or very structural, as far as mopping blood or splinting a broken ankle went.
    “Because one bag would tear. You’re going to use them to carry me. You have to get me out of here, out of the Athenaeum.” Desperation was offsetting the steady tone of her voice. “You have to help me.”
    Her words hit me like another blow to the head, and I couldn’t think to argue; I simply reacted. I turned and ran, slipping across the grass and down the alley until I reached the truck. I wrenched open the door, cursing as I left bloody streaks on the white paint. Thank the Gods