"Free Excerpt: Stolen Heartbeats — Chapter 1"

Chapter 1 — Leonie

The car horn ripped through the silence of the library.

Three seconds. Maybe less. An ordinary sound, mundane—an impatient driver on the street below, nothing more. For anyone else in that room, it was nothing. Background urban noise, forgotten the instant it ended.

For me, it was the detonator.

My heart slammed into overdrive. Not like some poetic metaphor you read in novels—like a brutal, visceral physiological reality, an organ that had lost all control, pounding so hard I could hear it in my temples, my throat, my wrists. Blood rushed to my face with an almost painful force. My vision narrowed, as if someone were slowly tightening a tunnel around my eyes.

No. Not now. Not here.

I'd been staring at the same page of my civil law textbook for twenty minutes, maybe more. The words danced in front of my eyes, stubbornly refusing to make sense. Introduction to Obligations. A contract is an agreement of wills between two or more persons intended to create, modify, transmit, or extinguish obligations. I'd reread that sentence a dozen times. It slid across my consciousness like water on glass, leaving no trace at all.

Around me, the university library at Lyon-III hummed with its usual activity. The steady rustle of pages being turned. The clicking of laptop keyboards. Muffled whispers between students, the occasional laugh quickly stifled. The smell of old books—that scent of yellowed paper and leather bindings—mingled with the contraband coffee someone had smuggled in despite the ban. Through the tall second-floor windows, the fading light of that late November afternoon cast golden rectangles across the worn wooden tables.

Everything was normal. Everything was perfectly, desperately normal.

Except me.

I clenched my fists under the table, digging my nails into my palms until I reached the edge of pain. It was a technique I'd developed over the months—that slight, controlled pain that pulled me back to the present when my mind started drifting toward darker waters. But today, it wasn't enough. The horn still echoed in my head, long after it had gone silent in reality. It overlapped with another horn, the one from that night, the one that screamed endlessly through my nightmares.

Headlights in the rearview mirror. The black Audi closing in, always closer. The road racing too fast beneath our wheels, the trees reduced to dark blurs on either side. Yann's scream—

Stop. Count something. Anything.

Ceiling tiles. One, two, three... I raised my eyes slightly, kept counting. Seventeen, eighteen... twenty-seven. The lamps hanging above the tables. Eight. People visible from my seat. Eleven—no, twelve, someone had just sat down near the window. Cracks in the opposite wall, where the plaster was starting to peel. Seven.

Numbers usually calmed me. They turned chaos into data, vertigo into arithmetic. That was how I'd been surviving for twenty months. Twenty months, three weeks, and four days, to be exact. Since everything had shattered, that night of March fifteenth when my life had broken apart on a country road.

But today, the numbers weren't enough.

I stood so abruptly that my chair scraped against the floor with a sharp screech that made me wince. A few heads turned toward me—I felt them more than saw them, those curious or annoyed glances, those eyes judging me without even knowing it. The law student who couldn't sit still. The strange girl who spent more time in the bathroom than studying.

I mumbled an apology—"sorry, excuse me"—and grabbed my bag with a hand that trembled slightly. No one noticed, or at least no one let on.

The bathroom. I had to make it to the bathroom.

It had become a conditioned reflex, almost Pavlovian. Every new place I went, I mentally mapped it the moment I arrived: emergency exits, quiet corners, refuges where I could fall apart out of sight. The Lyon-III library—I knew it by heart now. Ground-floor bathroom: too busy. First-floor bathroom: near the staff office, risk of being disturbed. Second-floor bathroom, at the end of the hallway near the archives: perfect. Rarely used, usually empty.

My sanctuary.

I crossed the reading room at a pace I hoped looked normal, measured, while every cell in my body screamed to run. Rows of shelves passed on either side, tall wooden sentinels laden with books that seemed to lean in, closing the space. My peripheral vision blurred more and more. The floor tilted slightly beneath my feet—or maybe it was me who was tilting.

Breathe. Walk. You're almost there.

The hallway. The door with the women's sign. I pushed it open with a clammy hand.

Checked the stalls mechanically. One, two, three. All empty. Thank God, all empty.

I gripped the white porcelain sink, fingers clenching around the cold rim. My reflection stared back at me from the mirror above—a twenty-three-year-old girl with eyes too large, rimmed in purple, cheeks too pale despite the blood hammering beneath the skin, chestnut hair escaping from a messy bun. A girl who looked like someone about to drown.

Breathe. Breathe.

But my lungs refused to cooperate. They contracted, tightened, incapable of pulling in enough air. Every inhale was a losing battle, every exhale a meager victory instantly erased by the next.

Hyperventilation. I knew the symptoms by heart: accelerated heart rate, sensation of suffocating, tingling in the extremities, dizziness, nausea. My body preparing to flee a danger that didn't exist—or rather, that no longer existed. A ghost of danger, trapped in my memory.

My legs gave out.

I found myself on the floor, back against the tiled wall, knees pulled to my chest. The tile was cold beneath my palms—that icy, hard sensation that anchored me to reality while everything else crumbled. My fingers found the grooves between the tiles, clung to them like a last certainty in a world that had just tipped sideways.

It's just a panic attack. You've had dozens. Hundreds, maybe. You know how this works. You know it'll pass. It always passes.

But the voice of reason was so faint, so distant, drowned under the roar of blood in my ears, the hammering of my frantic heart, the images flooding in despite every effort to push them away.

The road. The night. Total darkness, barely pierced by our headlights. Trees flashing past, black specters on either side. And behind us, always behind us, the headlights of the Audi drawing closer.

Yann's eyes in the rearview mirror. I could still see his look—that terror I'd never seen in him before, him who was afraid of nothing, who always laughed, even in the worst situations. That night, he'd been afraid. For the first time since I'd known him, I had seen fear in his eyes.

"Hold on, Leo. Hold on."

His voice. I could still hear it, as clearly as if it were yesterday. That voice trying to stay calm, trembling despite everything.

The screech of tires on wet asphalt. The smell of burning rubber flooding the car. The steering wheel slipping from his control, the rear end swinging out, that horrible sensation of sliding, of total helplessness.

And then the impact.

That sound I would never forget. Metal crumpling, glass exploding, the shock traveling through my entire body like a blast wave.

And then the silence. That terrible, deafening silence after the impact. That silence in which I understood, before I even opened my eyes, that something irreparable had just happened.

A sob escaped me, tearing through the quiet of the bathroom. I pressed my hand over my mouth to muffle the sounds rising up, uncontrollable, mingling with my ragged breathing in a symphony of distress.

Yann.

His name sliced through my mind like a white-hot blade, and the pain was so sharp I doubled over, forehead against my knees. Yann. My best friend since high school. My brother in everything but blood. The one who made me laugh when everything went wrong, who always knew the right words, who had held me in his arms so many times when the world was too hard to face.

Yann, who was twenty-three with his whole life ahead of him.

Yann, who wanted to be a veterinarian, who loved stray dogs and lost causes.

Yann, who was gone.

Yann, who would never be here again.

Because of me.

I counted the tiles under my fingers. One, two, three... twelve. Then the cracks in the ceiling. Four. Then my own breaths, one by one, until the numbers replaced the panic, until the arithmetic smothered the memories.

I didn't know how long I stayed like that, curled up on the cold bathroom floor. Long enough for my tears to dry, leaving salty trails down my cheeks. Long enough for my breathing to return to something resembling normal. Long enough for the shame to start mingling with the relief—that familiar shame of having broken down again, of still being this shattered girl who couldn't even handle a simple car horn.

My phone buzzed in my jeans pocket.

I pulled it out with a still-trembling hand. The screen showed a message from Camille.

4:23 PM: I'm coming to get you. Stay where you are.

How did she know? She always knew. Something in the way I'd left the room, maybe. Or simply that connection between us, forged by years of friendship and these last twenty months of shared secrets.

I typed a clumsy reply: Bathroom 2nd floor. I'm fine.

The most worn-out lie in my repertoire. I said it so often it had almost lost all meaning.

---

Camille found me five minutes later.

She pushed open the bathroom door without knocking, her gaze sweeping the space before locating me. Still sitting on the floor, back against the wall, arms wrapped around my knees.

She said nothing. She didn't ask useless questions. She simply sat down beside me, her shoulder against mine, her presence warm and solid like an anchor in the storm. Under the harsh fluorescent light, her red hair blazed—the only splash of color in that cold, white space.

The silence stretched between us, but it wasn't a heavy silence. It was a silence of understanding, of knowing. The silence of someone who knows your pain without needing it explained.

"A car horn," I murmured finally. "Just a stupid horn in the street."

"I know."

"It's so pathetic."

"It's not pathetic."

She said it every time, with the same quiet conviction. And every time, I didn't believe her.

Outside, in the hallway, footsteps echoed. Muffled voices. Normal life continuing, indifferent to my distress, as it always did.

"You can't keep going like this," Camille said after a moment. Her voice was gentle but firm. "You know that, Leo."

"I know."

"It's been twenty months. Almost two years."

"I know."

"The attacks are getting more frequent. You're not sleeping. How much weight have you lost since September? Ten pounds? Twelve?"

I didn't answer. She was right, about everything. But being right didn't change anything.

"Then do something," she pressed. "Anything. But do something."

I closed my eyes. Because "doing something" meant talking. Really talking. And talking meant revealing what I'd been hiding for twenty months. The truth about that night. About the accident. About what I'd never told anyone.

About Mathis.

About the innocent man rotting in prison for a crime he didn't commit.

Because of my silence.

"I have an idea," Camille said, breaking my train of thought. "Come with me to Riviere-Azur. For spring break. To my parents' house."

Riviere-Azur. Her hometown, lost somewhere in the hills of the southeast, between Valence and the first foothills of the Alps. She talked about it often—the river winding between stone houses, the vineyards covering the hillsides, the silence of nights without light pollution.

"Away from Lyon," she continued. "Away from school, exams, from... from everything that reminds you."

She didn't finish her sentence. She didn't need to. We both knew what she meant.

Away from him. Away from Mathis.

Even though I hadn't seen Mathis in months, even though the restraining order was supposed to keep him away, his presence haunted every corner of this city. The cafe where we'd met. The apartment we'd shared for two years. The streets we'd walked together, back when I still believed in happiness, before I discovered the monster beneath the mask of Prince Charming.

"I can't run forever," I whispered.

"It's not running. It's catching your breath. It's stepping back to see more clearly, to think more clearly. You're allowed to give yourself that."

I opened my eyes and looked at my reflection in the mirror above the sink. That girl who had lost so much in twenty months—her best friend, her innocence, her ability to sleep through the night without waking up screaming. That girl carrying a secret too heavy for her shoulders.

But that girl was still here. Still standing. Even curled up on the cold tile floor of a university library.

"Okay," I said.

The word came out before I had time to hold it back, weigh it, regret it.

"Okay?" Camille repeated, her eyes widening with surprise.

"Okay. I'll come with you. To Riviere-Azur."

The smile that lit up her face was almost worth the price of admission. She wrapped her arms around me, tight, as if she were afraid I'd change my mind—and maybe she was right to be afraid.

Because that night, when I fell asleep in my tiny studio in La Guillotiere, I had the same nightmare as always. The road. The headlights. Yann's scream.

And Mathis's face in the rearview mirror of the Audi.

That face I had never described to anyone.

That face that had condemned me to silence for twenty months.

---

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This book contains sensitive themes: domestic violence, psychological abuse, PTSD. If you are affected, contact 1-800-799-7233 (National Domestic Violence Hotline).