Page 42 of Inflict

It took him far too long to realize her feet were bare.

He’d carried her out of the house before he’d set fire to it earlier. He hadn’t bothered to take note of her lack of shoes, only that she needed a jacket. She had no clothes, but for the white dress on her back that barely covered her arse. No shoes, and he hadn’t noticed very much that might have belonged to her at the Russian’s place.

A sad reality was starting to stare him in the face.

Connor chose to ignore it for the moment.

“Well, feck,” he grunted. “All right, then. Come here.”

Connor picked Evelyn up, cradling her frame as he headed toward the back of the brownstone. He was all the more aware of just how light she was when he held her, how she felt like nothing more than a damn feather in his arms. She should have weighed at least one-twenty to one-thirty, but the girl was lucky if she weighed even a hundred pounds.

Too light.

She needed food.

He could feel her feckin’ bones.

Sickly and frail.

It bothered him.

“Hungry?” he asked as he unlocked the back door.

Not shockingly, Evelyn didn’t respond.

“You can speak if you want to,” he grumbled as he walked through the brownstone, heading towards his main room. “It’d probably help us both.”

Nada.

He’d just gotten Evelyn sat down on the leather couch and was reaching for the light switch when the cell phone in his jacket pocket started to ring. The jacket she was wearing. Evelyn damn near jumped out of her feckin’ skin at the sound, her wide-doe eyes looking to him with a mixture of horror and confusion.

He missed the time before cell phones, when people had to reach him by calling through to the house line, or sending someone over with a message. Now, mobile phones made it easier for him to be at people’s beck and call twenty-four-seven.

“It’s all right—just that stupid phone,” he said, reaching inside the pocket of the jacket to retrieve the device. She flinched away from him, looking as though she was afraid he might hit her or something for having the phone. With the still-ringing Nokia in his hand, he said, “Hey, relax, love.”

Evelyn eyed the phone in his hand, still wary in her features as she settled back into the couch.

Connor checked the caller ID on the screen, and cussed a blue-streak before picking up the call. “What?”

“That is not how you answer a phone call from me, lad.”

“It is when I just got home, Sean.”

“Don’t get too comfortable sitting on your arse like an eejit. I want you at the church tomorrow morning—you can fill me in on the details of how the night went.”

“Morning is in two hours or so. Church is in a few hours after that. I’ve been driving all feckin’ night. I’m not making that trip to Jersey. I’ll be over there on Tuesday. Talk now.”

Connor swallowed hard, passing the silent, stoic Evelyn a glance. She was staring at the wall, back into one of her blank trances where the rest of the world didn’t seem to exist. He wondered how often she found herself in those empty spaces inside her head.

“Fine,” Sean said harshly, “now, then. How was it?”

“It was grand,” Connor said, “same as it always is.”

That was as much as he was giving to Sean.

“Did you check the place?” his father asked.

“Sure.”