Read Online Stefan (Lost Nights Series Book 1) by Jocelynn Drake - Free Book Online Page B

nearly gone. By then, I’d simply shut down. My mind was going around in useless circles, trying to pull up the woman’s face from my memories, but there was nothing there. Just an infinite void as if she’d been swallowed whole by the nothingness.
    At the police station, they’d had to get someone help me wash the blood off my hands before taking my fingerprints, because I couldn’t get my body to move if I wasn’t being pushed or prodded. Everything had become a painful blur of shouting, cold rooms, hard chairs, and bright lights. After an hour of being shouted at by a detective, they finally brought in an interpreter who had a somewhat gentler touch, but they were still looking for me to confess to the gruesome murder. In the end, I managed to ask for a lawyer and I didn’t speak again.
    Dawn was starting to break over the city when I was finally shoved into an empty cell. There was a thin pallet on the floor and a toilet, but nothing else. I was starting to get the impression that they thought I was either a danger to myself or maybe just those around me. My life was crumbling and I couldn’t fathom how it had even happened.
    Was this a result of my accident?
    Five years ago, I had been involved in a horrible car accident that had left me in a coma for three months. I came out with some brain damage that forced me to go through over a year of therapy to relearn many basic things and improve my motor functions. Yet after surviving all of that, what bothered me the most were the enormous gaps in my memory. There were chunks of my past, particularly the year before and after the accident where I remembered nothing. There had been a few other smaller incidents since the accident where I had trouble with my memory, but it tended to be smaller things.
    But this? This was too big. I lost too much time. And the violence? I wasn’t a violent person. I couldn’t hurt another person even if it was to save my own life. At least, I didn’t think I could. Was I more damaged than the doctors had led me to believe? Had they missed something in their hundreds of tests?
    Sitting on the floor on the pallet with my legs drawn up to my chest, I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes, only to be greeted with the images of the dead woman bleeding across my floor. I was never going to sleep again. Rubbing my burning eyes, I sighed. It was shame that Stefan was already trapped in his secret liar for the day. I had little doubt that the vampire could help me find the truth of what had happened in my apartment.
    And then a puzzle piece finally clicked into place. My stomach lurched and I slapped my hand over my mouth as I fought to keep the stomach acid down. A vampire could have arranged this. When I’d first met Stefan, he’d said that he could wipe my memories. He could make it so that I wouldn’t remember ever meeting him. Had a vampire gotten into my apartment and arranged it all? Had I been attacked and threatened, forced to kill the woman so that I wouldn’t be killed myself? Was this retaliation against Stefan in some way? He’d said that I might be in some kind of danger because of stupidly calling attention to myself that evening in the piazza, but I had never expected something like this.
    Launching myself at the door, I started screaming for a guard. Someone had to start digging into this. I was innocent. I had to be innocent. I couldn’t have killed another human being — not in cold blood. I had to clear my name and the way to do that was through the vampires.
    It felt like more than an hour passed before a guard finally arrived and then it was trying to find an interpreter because my Italian sucked, and then it was a matter of finding someone who would listen to me. After several hours of frustration, I was shoved back into my cell with the distinct impression that nothing was being done. I didn’t think that it was so much that no one believed me, though there was obviously a few who didn’t, but that