Page 6

She's alive. My hand is shaking, and I grip the doorjamb until it stops. After a year of dead ends, she's lying in my hay.

She used to watch me exactly like that. On fight nights she perched on a hay bale by the back door, the preacher's girl in a sundress who'd snuck out past curfew.

One night a fighter swung at me after the bell, and I dropped him with one punch. Every other woman in that barn turned her head from the blood. Delilah looked straight at me without blinking, and the heat in her face told me she wanted me to cross that barn and put my hands on her.

I turned my back on her and kept it turned all night. She was nineteen, and I was years older and running an illegal fight ring on my family's land. Walking away was the one decent thing I knew how to do.

I flip on the work light beside the door frame. One caged bulb throws yellow across the hay, and I make myself look at all of her.

Her hair's been hacked off at the jaw, ragged, like somebody did it in a hurry with whatever was handy. One cheekbone is swollen. She's curled on her side with her right arm pinned under her, and her shirt hangs off her like it was made for somebody else.

Then I see the boots. They're men's work boots, too big for her by a size or more, laced so tight the leather bunches at her ankles. Dried blood has soaked into the toes and splashed up the shafts, and I’m betting none of it came from her feet. With that much blood on them, whoever wore those boots before her isn't going to need them back.

Gray mud cakes the soles, the kind you pick up kneeling at a creek bank or in the trampled mud around a stock tank. Grassburs, the spiked seeds that grab anything that brushes past them, bristle all over her pant legs with the cedar needles. Nobody dropped her at my gate. She walked here, through somebody's pastures.

"You can't stay in this barn," I tell her, even and unhurried, the same tone I use in the ring when two men are about to kill each other. "Too many doors. You're coming to the guest house. It's got a lock, and you'll be the one who turns it."

She studies me for a long moment. Then she pushes up on her left arm, and it takes her more than one try.

When she finally gets her knees under her, her right fist comes out from under her body around a folding knife. She keeps it down along her thigh with the blade turned in. That's how you carry a knife when you mean to use it and don't want the other man to see it coming.

She took a dead man's boots, and she walked here with a knife in her fist.

I understand that knife better than anything else in this barn. If I'd been gone a year and come back starved and beaten like her, I'd be holding one too, waiting to see what the next man through the door tried.

I don't go to her. I want to cross that floor more than I've wanted anything in a year, but I stay in the doorway, where she can see all of me and both my hands.

"Keep it," I say. "I won't touch it, and I won't touch you unless you tell me to."

She gets a boot under her, stands, and sways hard.

My hand comes up before I think about it. I catch it halfway and lower it back to my side.

"Grab my arm or don't," I say. "Your call."

She grabs a support post instead. Her knuckles go white on the wood, and she sucks air through her teeth until the swaying quits.

Once it does, she lets go, crosses the barn under her own power, and walks past me out the door, close enough that I could put a hand on her back. I keep both hands right where they are.

At the truck I open the passenger door and step back. She climbs in with one arm clamped against her side and the knife still in her fist, and she doesn't make a sound.

I've watched bull riders limp out of the arena with busted ribs, cussing and spitting blood. She doesn't so much as gasp where I can hear it.

I take the mile of ruts through the cedar brake at a crawl so they won't jar her, with cedar grown so thick on both sides that the branches scrape the doors. She rides pressed against the passenger door with the knife in her lap, and she watches the side mirror until we pull up to the house.

She's checking for a tail, and that's something people learn when they've been hunted. I want to know who hunted her.

The guest house sits behind the main house, a small limestone place with a tin roof and a porch across the front.

I park with my bumper nearly touching the steps, unlock the door, and open it. I step aside so she can see straight into the unlit room before she has to walk into it.

She stops on the porch and studies the doorway, the window beside it, and finally me.

"Water," she says. It's the first thing out of her mouth since I walked into that barn, and her voice is cracked and hoarse. "And a door that locks."

"You'll have both. I want to call a doctor."

"No doctor." Her grip tightens on the knife.