Page 82 of Weight of Guilt

He glanced at Wren again. Her color was good. Her pupils looked fine. She was already trying to get her feet under her.

He rose. “Lock this door behind me. Call your sister. Then call Luke.”

“I will. Now go!”

He wasted no more time.

He hit the porch, leaped down the steps, and ran.

The woods. That’s where the man had probably gone. It made the most sense.

Forty yards out, the trees closed over him and the moon disappeared.

The temperature dropped. The ground went soft underfoot with leaf litter and wet rot. Branches he couldn’t see raked his forearms.

He kept moving.

Something small snapped to his right. He froze, his body poised to act.

Then a possum meandered from the brush.

He almost wanted to laugh. But he didn’t.

Instead, Nash planted his feet and listened.

More branches cracked. Something was moving fast to his right, downslope, away from him.

This sound came from something larger—like a person.

Like the intruder.

Nash ran toward the sound.

Then the noise ahead of him stopped.

Nash froze in his tracks and forced himself to stand still. He listened.

Nothing.

No branches. No brush. No feet on leaves.

The man had stopped running, he realized.

Nash didn’t like that.

A scared man kept running. This man had stopped, which meant he wasn’t scared. It meant he was calculating odds.

Chapter

Forty-One

I’m close enough to hear him breathing.

He’s a big man, and he’s hurt. I can hear that too. It’s obvious in the catch in his breath, the way he’s working to keep his pain quiet.

But he’s not succeeding.

He came into these woods fast and stupid, and now he’s standing eleven feet from me, and he has no idea I’m so close.