Calahan jumped to his feet and put his face close to mine. “Tell them,” he ordered. “Tell them you’ve had second thoughts. This is fucking insane! You don’t have to do this!”
All of the doubts I’d been nursing bubbled up inside me. This was insane. I wasn’t even a field agent. I couldn’t impersonate someone as glamorous and sexy as Christina. The attraction to Konstantin made this even more dangerous. To pull this off I’d have to stay objective and detached and how could I do that when he could just look at me and make me melt? One mistake and I was dead—
Doctor Franklin burst through the door, followed by an anesthetist. “Sorry we’re a little late,” he said cheerfully. “Let’s get started.”
Calahan squeezed both of my hands, hard, and gave me a pointed look.
I opened my mouth….
And thought of all the people who’d die in a gang war, if Konstantin wasn’t stopped.
I swallowed.
And lay down on the table.
The anesthetist swabbed my arm and I felt the prick of a needle. “Count backwards from ten,” he told me.
I reached seven, Calahan’s worried face blurring and distorting in front of me.
And then nothing.
12
Hailey
I SPENT FOUR DAYS in a fog of heavy painkillers, my whole face swathed in bandages and tubes in my nostrils to make sure the swelling in my new nose didn’t suffocate me. At one point, the coverings over my eyes were briefly removed and a machine shone a vivid crimson light into them. Then darkness returned.
At last, the fog seemed to lift. I was aware of being sat up and then the bandages were being unwound from my face, layer by layer. I opened my eyes. Everything seemed blindingly bright, after so long in the dark, but then it settled and snapped into clear, crisp detail. Doctor Franklin was leaning over me, brushing his fingertips down my cheeks, and smiling with satisfaction. Calahan was there, looking grim. Carrie, too.
“Everything worked,” said Doctor Franklin. “And you’re doing fine.”
I nodded. “Can I see?”
He passed me a hand mirror.
I brought it up to my face and—
Wrong.
Wrong on an instinctual, primal level. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.
It was as if reality had skipped sideways, like a train jumping onto a different track. For twenty-five years, I’d looked in mirrors and seen me. Now someone else was looking back at me from the glass and the raw shock and loss was like being punched in the gut. I’d lost me. My ears were ringing and I realized I was screaming, and couldn’t stop. Where was I?!
Calahan grabbed one arm. Doctor Franklin grabbed the other, brisk and efficient where Calahan was tender. Behind them, Carrie had one hand over her mouth, her face pale.
“Hailey, you’re having a normal reaction to major facial surgery,” Doctor Franklin told me. “Try to breathe.”
I flung the mirror away and heard it shatter. Tore free of their hands and jumped out of bed, staggering on legs that hadn’t walked in days. “Put it back!” I screamed. I backed up against the wall. “Put it back! Put it back! Put it back!” I wanted to claw at my new face, shred it and split it and pray I was still there, underneath.
“I’m going to give you a sedative,” Doctor Franklin told me, sounding panicked. Then, to Calahan, “Hold her!”
Calahan’s strong hands gripping me. A scratch in my arm.
And then nothing.
13
Hailey
THE NEXT DAY, when I’d slept off the sedative, I asked to be allowed home, saying that I felt much calmer. Calahan wasn’t fooled and wound up having another screaming match with Carrie in the hallway outside my room, but she and Doctor Franklin overruled him and discharged me. They wanted to believe I was okay.
At first, when I got home, I was jumping every time I caught my reflection in a computer monitor or a glass door. The sickening, violent wrongness of it surged up inside me and I’d almost have a meltdown. But the human brain is scarily adaptable. After just a few hours, the reactions started to taper off. When I went to bed that night and saw my new face in my water glass, it was barely a jolt at all.
That was almost scarier than freaking out.
The next morning, I groped for my glasses and couldn’t find them. I opened my eyes to search for them...but everything was already sharp. That’s when I remembered I didn’t need them, anymore. It should have felt liberating but, as I put them away in a drawer, I couldn’t help feeling a pang of loss.
Carrie had sent over Christina’s luggage from her trip to Italy. There were four cases and every one was filled with eye-wateringly expensive clothes from top designers: dresses and blouses, sweaters and skirts...God, even her underwear was gorgeous. I tried on a dress as a test. With a bit of wiggling, it slid on fine over my lower half. But... crap. I’d been right. My breasts were bigger than hers. Everything was going to be a little tight, and some of the low-necked stuff would be a no-no unless I wanted to pop out of it. It wasn’t Doctor Franklin’s fault: I could imagine Christina posing like a model, expertly thrusting out her boobs to make them seem bigger than they were, while he flushed and mumbled. And meanwhile, I did my best to hide my bust under shapeless clothes. No wonder he’d overestimated her and underestimated me. But what if Konstantin noticed?