This is how you showed her. By scaring her so bad she fled into the woods and got herself killed.
She’s not dead, she won’t die. I won’t allow it.
I was panicking, something else that had never happened to me before, besides falling in love with a woman after taking her into my arms for mere moments a few months ago, and vowing that somehow I’d improve her lot in life.
And look now. Some protector you turned out to be.
“Forgive me, Mia.” I stripped off my clothes, slipped the bedsheets out from under her, slid in beside her, and covered us over. I turned on my side and pulled her to me, cradled her against my chest. Then I held her tight and rolled over, so she lay on top of me, skin to skin. It was the best chance for her survival, if she was suffering shock and hypothermia.
If she lived, I’d have to rejoice and be glad in the fact that she was alive for the split second before she murdered me for this. I couldn’t blame her.
I wrapped my arms around her, and I listened to the rain pour down. And I prayed that she’d wake up.
five
. . .
Mia
It was so warm.Warmer than an upstate New York summer. I couldn’t for the life of me figure why my body felt this hot. It had been a long winter and a frigid spring. Summer was supposed to have started a few weeks ago, but East Greenwich hadn’t figured that out yet.
When I first got here, I’d rented one of Harvey’s apartments and then moved to another when the ceiling collapsed. Neither one had a real HVAC. It was more like random scrap metal that led from the inside to the outside. Better for letting rats in than keeping cold air out.
I wasn’t at my apartment.
I worked hard to lift my head, but my neck wasn’t right. And it hurt like all hell.
Pain shot down my back and up into my skull all at once, and I groaned.
“Easy there.”
The warm and sturdy bed I lay onmoved, shifted beneath me, and I moved with it, rolled and deposited lightly onto the real bed.
What thefuckwas going on?
I fought like hell to sit up, to pry open my eyes. Nothing worked. Had Harvey drugged me?
It all came rushing back at once, the whole nightmare: the call to escort a client to a private event, the drive, that horrific cabin and the axe murderer within. My escape.
But it hadn’t been an escape at all. And this nightmare was real.
I forced my eyes open and shoved myself up into a seated position. The burning pain in my hip struck me so hard my vision swam. I clamped my lips shut to keep from screaming, clutching at the blanket around me to keep from passing out.
Those hands that had come for me through the water in my overturned car sat at my eye level, pulling on a pair of jeans, zipping, and buttoning them.
My client turned captor.
He sat down on a wooden chair next to the bed. My eyes adjusted, bleary, one swollen and obstructed, the other mostly clear. I fixed them both on him anyway, and glared.
He handed me a glass of water. “You must be thirsty,” he said.
I frantically searched my brain for memories after he pulled me from my car. But there were none.
If he’d assaulted me, I couldn’t remember it. Drugs, probably. Exactly what had happened to Sammy, down at the club. He’d drugged me.
He hadn’t chopped me into little pieces with that axe and dissolved me with his gallon of acid back in the living room, and I guess I had to thank my lucky stars for that.
Then again, maybe he liked to draw out his murders.
