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But it made no sense.
Why was she all the way out here?
How had she gotten so hurt on flat land?
I stepped around her prone form, and felt my heart seize in my chest when I finally got a look at her.
She hadn’t fallen, gotten into some random mishap in the woods at night or some shit like that.
She’d been beaten.
Fucking brutally, too.
“Fuck,” I hissed, dropping down to my knees. “What hurts the most?” I asked, looking at the dried blood around her nose and lips, the slashes of little cuts across her cheeks, and the bruises steadily setting in across her pretty face.
“My wrist,” she said, making me notice the way she was cradling it to her chest with her other hand.
That made sense.
If she tripped or was pushed, the natural instinct was to break your fall, to throw out your hands. But, of course, like a lot of our instincts, it was wrong. You should break a fall with your forearms, not your hands. And this was why. Wrists were weak. They broke way too easily when forced to hold up the force of all your body weight and its momentum toward the ground.
“And my ribs,” she added, her lip trembling.
“Alright. I have to move you,” I told her, voice holding warning. “And it’s gonna hurt like fucking hell,” I added.
To that, she let out a little snort. “Don’t sugarcoat it,” she said.
“What? And have you call me a liar in about twenty seconds?” I asked as I moved forward, sliding one hand under her, then the other. “Here goes,” I told her before lifting her up.
I didn’t do it slow and easy.
The fuck for?
Just to prolong the pain involved in the move.
I yanked her up and off the ground, holding her against my chest. So when she cried out, it was real close to my ear, making my heart twist.
“I know,” I agreed. “I’m a fuck,” I added, cradling her carefully as I slowly got to my feet. “Got a bit of a walk to my car,” I told her. “Then I think the hospital is only fifteen or twenty minutes away,” I added, seeing Storm trotting beside us, happy to have the assistance he’d worked so tirelessly to get for his owner.
“I can’t go to the hospital,” she insisted, body going tense.
“Hate to break it to you, but you gotta. Lot of things I would tell you to shrug off. Issues with your ribs isn’t one of the things you wanna fuck with. If they’re broken, they could nick a rib and then you’d suffocate to death from the inside out. Sound fun?” I asked, glancing down to find her looking up at me, a mix of bone-deep terror and just the slightest hint of amusement in those pretty gray eyes.
“Besides,” I said when she didn’t reply. “I won’t let whoever did this come back and finish the job.”
Her gaze slid away at that.
“If he knows I’m still…”
Alive.
If he knew she was still alive, he’d come back and finish the job.
Judging from the fingerprint bruises on her throat, he damn near accomplished his goal already.
A fuck who would do this shit to a woman, yeah, they might be batshit enough to come back and finish the job.
Not if I was watching for him, though.
