The world began to resolve itself in sharp, jarring, staccato beats. The relentless pulse of techno music vibrated through the walls and rattled the windows of the club. Every frantic, high-pitched note was like a thousand electronic nails hammering into the back of my skull.

  Chirp, chirp, chirp.

  From somewhere beside me came a wet, rasping wheeze. Asmund, his lungs desperately fighting for air.

  I tried to push myself up, expecting to feel the cold, wet, gritty, oil covered concrete of Jernbanetorget beneath my palms. But something was wrong. The ground had changed; it was unnaturally smooth and soft.

  The filthy, biting stench of diesel fumes and ammonia had vanished, replaced with something else, something sharp, bitter and sterile.

  Then the light hit me. A cold, harsh glare that slashed through my eyelids and scoured my retinas. My eyes screwed shut, my neck cramping into tight knots the moment I tried to snatch my head away.

  My muscles seized instantly into a twisting agony that crashed over my body like a landslide. A harsh gasp tore from my mouth as my breath caught and my throat clamped shut, leaving me gulping for air.

  Chirp, chirp, chirp.

  The music became a frenzied cacophony.

  “Asmund!” I tried to scream his name, but my tongue stuck to the cloying, coppery film that coated my mouth.

  “Take it easy, Heidi. Breathe.” A jagged voice cut through the jarring chaos surrounding me.

  My eyes flashed open, and a dazzling white glare assaulted my vision and burned through the haze.

  “Heidi, can you hear me?”

  The world was a jerking mass of white and grey. The shadows in the alley blinked in and out of focus. The damp brick walls that loomed high over me one moment would suddenly glitch and hiss the next, flickering into a chaotic fuzz of static.

  “I… What…” I fought to force the words past my lips, my tongue moving like a heavy lead weight.

  “Don’t try to talk,” the voice said. “You’re in the hospital.”

  Chirp, chirp, chirp.

  Beep, beep, beep.

  Slowly the crackling haze began to fade, and a room took shape around me, emerging from the jagged white noise. The first thing to take form was a bright fluorescent tube on the ceiling above me, casting a cold, buzzing light over the room. Rising up around me weren’t the hard, rough walls of the city but a grey plastic curtain hanging from a dull aluminium rail.

  Beyond that thin veil, the sounds of misery and suffering bled through. A wet, wheezing, spluttering cough on my right, a constant, guttural groan to my left.

  “Just keep your arm still for me.” The nurse, a large woman in her late fifties, said.

  Her red, dark-rimmed eyes were fixed on the beeping machine at the side of my bed, tracking the line of my pulse. Her grey hair was pulled back into a tight bun, which stretched the skin of her forehead smooth. Her white tunic seemed to pulse in the humming light.

  “Your tox report is a mess. It’s a wonder that your heart didn’t give out on you in the ambulance. God only knows what they put in the stuff you girls are buying on the streets these days,” she said. “Your friend is the only reason you’re not downstairs in a drawer. She kept your airways clear until the paramedics arrived.”

  She moved closer, her shadow falling over me as she adjusted the bag of fluid that was hanging beside me and inspected the clear plastic tube that snaked into a vein.

  “Don’t you go fiddling with that now, you hear me?” She drew her lips tightly together as she focused on the canula in my arm. “We’re full and I really haven’t got the time to be fussing over you.”

  “Asmund?” I forced my mouth to make the shape of his name.

  “The boy they brought you in with?” The nurse finally looked up at me. The tight lines at her lips seemed to loosen as she exhaled in a deep sigh. She shook her head. “I don’t know, dear. They took him straight into surgery. He wasn’t in a good way.”

  As the nurse plucked the clipboard from the end of my bed, images of the previous night flashed in front of my eyes. The glint of the blade, Asmund’s body crumpling to the ground. The sound of the knife cutting through flesh, the screams…

  “Is he going to be ok?”

  The nurse didn’t answer me; she was busily scribbling something down on my notes. The sound of her pen was a grating scratch in my ears. As soon as she had finished, she replaced the clipboard and slipped out through a gap in the curtains.

  “She’s awake now. You can speak to her.” The nurse’s voice drifted back through the plastic sheeting.

  Suddenly, a figure loomed on the other side of the curtain, casting a dark shadow.

  There was a dry rustle as the figure stepped into my bay. He was tall with closely cropped grey hair. The scent of coffee and tobacco smoke followed him as his shoes clicked on the floor.

  “Good morning, Miss Bjornson.” He said, his cold grey eyes scanning over me. His sharp gaze seemed to dig into my mind and strip me bare. “My name is Inspector Skarsg?rd. I’m with the Oslo Police.”

  Police!

  Why was he here? Did he know something? My mind instantly snapping back to Grandfather’s cabin, to the blood and the violence. To the secrets I had abandoned there.

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  “By all accounts, it seems like you had an eventful night last night,” he said, pulling up a blue plastic chair, its legs screeching across the linoleum floor.

  “A drug induced seizure and front row seats to a knife fight, that’s quite the evening.” His eyes were locked on me as he sat down.

  “Asmund, how is he?” I forced the words out, scraping the back of my throat raw.

  “Mr Hansen’s alive.” The policeman said. His expression never changing as he took a black leather-bound notebook from his breast pocket, the chair creaking under his weight. “Tell me what happened last night. What do you remember?”

  Hesitating for a moment, I drew in a deep breath, the sharp essence of disinfectant filling my chest before exhaling loudly. There was no reason to lie about the alley.

  “Asmund tried to help me. Rune attacked him.”

  “And this, Rune,” Skarsg?rd said, flicking over a page in his notebook with a snap, “he’s the boyfriend that you ran away to Copenhagen with?”

  Boyfriend? Copenhagen? My shoulders jolted as the word hit me. These were the lies Lars had used to cover my disappearance; how did he know about that?

  A sudden, damp, icy sweat beaded on my forehead and slid down my skin. The steady, rhythmic beeps from the machine next to me spiked. They leapt from a steady rhythm to a hurried, uneven gallop.

  Skarsg?rd’s steel-grey eyes darted to the monitor, drawing narrow as his gaze fixed on the blinking green line, watching as it spiked erratically across the black screen.

  “Copenhagen?” my voice quivered.

  “A witness on the scene,” he turned back to me, his jaw set firmly. “She told us that you had just got back from Denmark?”

  Then a smile crept across my face as the realisation settled on me.

  Lela!

  Of course! She would have already given her statement, and even to the police she had stuck to our story. She had lied to an inspector to protect me.

  I took a deep breath.

  “Yes, that’s right,” I lied, nodding my head. “But things didn’t work out in Copenhagen, so I came back home. But that has nothing to do with Rune. The first time I met him was last night in the club.”

  “Can you give me a description of him? His surname or address, perhaps?”

  I shook my head. “He was in his late forties, perhaps, shaved head. He has a flat near Jernbanetorget somewhere. That’s all I know.”

  The thought of Rune sent a cold shiver rippling across my body.

  What would have happened to me if I’d gone back to that place with him? Once again Lela had saved me, her and Asmund. And once again, my actions had ended with someone getting hurt. Because of me, Asmund was laying somewhere in this hospital. What state he was in at that moment, I just didn’t know.

  My eyes met the inspector’s. “Rune wanted to take me back to his flat. I didn’t know what I was doing; I wasn’t thinking straight. Asmund tried to help me, tried to get me away from him… but Rune had a knife. That’s all I remember.”

  Skarsg?rd nodded, his pen scribbling across the page.

  “And what about you, Heidi?” The droning tone of his voice never changing, “The doctor’s report mentions suspicious scarring and old bruising on your body. You didn’t get those last night, did you? If not Rune, has someone else been hurting you? Is that the real reason you came back to Oslo? Were you running away from something… or someone?”

  My chest fluttered like a bird trapped in my ribcage. Suddenly, I could hear them again. They were back, their sharp claws scrabbling on the floor beneath my bed.

  “It’s a trap.” The voices hissed at me, “He knows. He’s trying to catch you.”

  My gaze fixed on a small crack in the light blue painted plaster of the wall.

  “No!” My voice snapped with a coarse grit that rubbed the back of my throat raw. “Things just didn’t work out, so I came home. That’s all.”

  “As you say, Miss Bjornson,” he said, one eyebrow raising to a sharp point, his gaze brushing over the monitor screen one last time.

  “But if you think of anything else, please give me a call.” He continued, standing as the chair shrieked against the floor. “Although I’m sure that we’ll chat again soon.” He turned to leave but stopped momentarily to glace back over his shoulder at me. “Watch yourself, Heidi. I see far too many girls like you every day, and things rarely end well for them.”

  And with that he slipped out, leaving only the constant beep of the monitor and the wheezing from the other side of the curtain.

  Sinking back into the pillows, my eyes fixed on the flickering strip light above my head. The bleeps slowed to a steady tempo, but my breath still rasped against the back of my throat.

  The room jumped, glitching and flickering around me like an old videotape. My heavy eyelids dropped, and I slipped back into the darkness.

  ****

  Eyes flicking open, a dry rustle of the curtain snapped me out of my daze.

  “Hey, how are you doing, babe?”

  Lela slipped through the gap in the curtain. Her dark hair was tangled and unbrushed. Her makeup was smudged; the dark lines of her mascara streaking her cheeks.

  “What were you thinking?” She said, sinking into the chair beside my bed, as her dark-rimmed, bloodshot eyes met mine with an unwavering stare. “The doctors said we could have lost you.”

  Blinking away the hot, stinging tears that were filling my eyes, blurring the fluorescent light. I tried to speak, but the words jammed in my throat.

  Something inside me twisted. Yet again I had doubted Lela. Once again, I’d let Lars’ poisonous words get into my head. Even dead, he was still pulling at my strings. But Lela, she had been there to rescue me. She was always there.

  “Don’t you ever do that again.” She spoke in a low, gentle voice. Her hand wrapped around mine, her skin soft and warm against me. “You had us all in a panic when you ran out on us at the restaurant.”

  “I’m sorry,” I managed to choke out the words. “I… I didn’t think you cared anymore. I thought I was just getting in the way.”

  Lela let out a quiet, weary sigh. “Babe, how can you even start to think that? You’re my best friend and I love you,” she said, her grip tightening on my hand. “Where have you been? We’ve been looking for you since the moment you vanished.”

  “We?” I stuttered before the realisation hit me. “Asmund! Is he ok?”

  Lela’s grip loosened slightly, her lips drawing together tightly into a bloodless line as she sucked in a shuddering breath. “The doctors said he was very lucky. If the blade had been a few centimetres either side… Never mind about that, it’s going to be a while before he’s back on his feet, but he’s going to be ok.”

  The breath that I hadn’t even realised I had been holding slipped out of my mouth, a long, ragged exhale of relief.

  “Can I see him?”

  “Not just yet, babe!” Lela said, her thumb stroking soft circles on the back of my hand. “You’ll have plenty of time when you’re feeling better. Besides, they’re only letting in immediate family at the moment. Ingrid’s been with him since he came out of the operation room.”

  Ingrid, my body flinched at her name. Just the sound of it stung my ears.

  The plastic rings of the curtain rattled against the rail once more, as a tall man wearing a bright white coat stepped into the bay.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Bjornson, or would you prefer Heidi?” He said, his voice hollow.

  “Heidi’s fine,” I murmured.

  Nodding, he bit his lip as his eyes scanned the clipboard at the foot of my bed.

  “My name’s Dr T?rresen. It looks like you’ve been a lucky girl, Heidi. Your bloods are all looking good and your heart rate is finally stable. We’ll keep you in overnight for observation, but I think you should be ok to go home tomorrow.” His eyes suddenly fixed on mine with a paralysing stare. “Do you have somewhere to go, somewhere safe?”

  “I…” my voice quivered. Biting my lower lip, I glanced at Lela from the corner of my eye. “I don’t know, I…”

  “Yes!” Lela’s clear voice interrupted me. “She’ll be coming home with me.”

  The creatures under the bed laughed, a hissing, rasping laugh.

  “Really, Le-Le?” I said, my head nodding enthusiastically. “You’d really have me back after everything that I’ve done?”

  Lela looked at me, her dark eyes so wide that for a moment I thought I might tumble into them.

  “And this time, I’m not going to let you out of my sight,” she said, the corner of her lips turning up, a smile breaking through her tired features.

  Sinking back into my mattress, I let my focus drift back to the ceiling. The doctor spoke, but his voice became a low drone as he lectured me on how to better look after myself.

  Glancing back at Lela, lines of pity and concern spread from the corners of her eyes. The purple bruise still stood out starkly against her pale skin.

  “I won’t leave your side, Lela.” I whispered softly as the cold something smiled inside me. “I promise.”

  The beep, beep, beep settled to a steady, metronomic beat.

  Tomorrow I would be back with Lela.