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“Nope. That was to make it harder for them to track you.”
“Epic failure.” The crazy man in the silver car had caught up to them anyway.
“Not true. He doesn’t know where you’re at right now, so I bought us a little time.”
She raised her chin defiantly, hating to admit it was true. “You wouldn’t have needed to do anything of the sort if you’d just left me at the clinic.”
“Okay, maybe you’re right about that.” He glared at her. “Because you’d be dead!”
She jumped at the venom in his voice. “Why? Who’s after us, Mato? Who was that man?”
“It doesn’t matter.” He shifted the gun in his hands, wincing in agony as he lifted it into firing position. “The only thing thatmatters right now is how fast we can run and how well I can fire this thing.”
“Clearly, you can’t.” Without thinking, she reached out to close her hands around the barrel of it.
He stared in horror at her. “Prim,” he groaned as she gently lowered the barrel and slid the gun from his grasp. To his credit, he made no effort to fight her for it or pull the trigger.
Without dropping his gaze, she laid it on the hood of his car. Then she drew his hand closer, palpating her thumbs along the swollen portion of his thumb.
He gritted his teeth, panting heavily as she found the fracture.
“It’s broken,” she said sadly. “Two broken hands in the space of a few weeks. That’s some doorway you’ve been banging into.”
“You have no idea,” he rasped. His eyes grew red-rimmed.
“How’d you really break your hands, Mato?” She glanced around them, looking for a way to splint his thumb.
“Not how. Who.” There was a heavy note to his voice that made him sound older than his years. “Ain’t never been much of a rule follower. That didn’t set too well with these new guys.”
“Maybe I’m starting to feel grateful that you aren’t much of a rule follower.” He’d just out-maneuvered the man who’d tried to shoot her, and he’d done it with two broken hands. There was a lot of good left in Mato Paddock.
Her gaze landed on an orange number two pencil tossed on the floorboard of her side of the car. She crawled back inside the car to retrieve it. Holding it against his hand, she gauged the length she needed and broke it as close as she could to the needed size. Then she viciously ripped the hem of her tunic to remove a strip of fabric. Sometimes a person had to improvise.
She swiftly set the broken bone, then secured it to the pencil splint to hold it in place. “Now remove my cuffs so I can hold the gun for you.”
“Can’t. Don’t have the key.”
“Mato Paddock!” She couldn’t believe he was still going to hold her captive after she’d tended yet another broken bone for him.
“It’s the truth,” he insisted, walking to the hood of the car and picking up the gun again. “Don’t worry, though. My trigger finger still works.”
If you say so.She jolted at the rev of a motor in the distance.
“Come on, Prim! That’s probably him.” Mato took off running.
She plowed after him through the underbrush. As they ran, she allowed her mind to drift. She had no idea what lay ahead for them or if they’d even be alive for much longer. At that moment, there was only one thing she was sure of.
I am not alone.
CHAPTER 11: NOT ALONE
Prim had been raised by a single mother who’d taken her to church every Sunday to make sure she had some sort of Father figure in her life. She’d lost her biological father to heart disease when she was still an infant, and her mother had never remarried. Never even dated again. It was a little crazy, considering her choice of careers as a professional matchmaker, but that was Prim’s childhood in a nutshell.
The only Father I’ve ever known is You, Lord.
Funny now that everything had been taken from her — the man she loved, her job at the clinic, her freedom, her cell phone — that her faith was still intact.
She glanced up as she ran, finding comfort in the way the sun was glinting here in shiny jagged shafts through the Christmas green branches of the evergreens. It was like running through darkness lit by the tiniest shards of hope. Somewhere nearby, a creek trickled.
