Page 18 of Red Hunt

Niki settled down at the computer in the ER and waved me to her side. “Can you fill me in on any details?”

“Of course.”

“What happened?”

I rubbed the back of my neck again. “I was on my way home. When I stumbled across her bicycle, I stopped the truck. She had some kind of accident and fell off the bike and off the road. It looked like she slipped down the ravine a couple of feet; a small fir tree broke her fall. She wasn’t in shock when I got there, but she was shivering and cold, so it might’ve been a couple of hours. I tried to assess the damage. There was no hemorrhaging going on. She couldn’t put weight on her left leg. I guess her ankle is either severely bruised or broken, and her knee was extremely pressure-sensitive. I splinted her leg and called 911.”

There was a ping on her computer, and Niki Michaels stopped talking and clicked on the documents that had just come in.

Milli’s x-rays.

And even though I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t look away.

The x-ray pictures slowly opened. There was one of her head, one of her chest area, both arms, and her legs. Niki picked the skull first, then the ones for her legs. She zoomed in on the ankle and knee area, but there didn’t appear to be any fractures.

Milli got lucky.

Then Niki clicked over to the next one. I heard her sharp intake of breath at the same time my eyes zeroed in on the x-ray, and what I saw there froze me in my tracks. There were at least three fractures visible on her ribs. And her arms looked like a fucking disaster. Niki inhaled sharply, then zoomed in on each of the healed fractures I had seen. “Freaking hell.”

I balled my hands into fists and deliberately slowed my breathing. Freaking hell, indeed. So many fractures on someone so young could only mean three things. Either she had a serious problem with her bones, had been in a serious accident, or she had suffered severe abuse. Didn’t the doc mention she’d had enough drama and agony in her life? I took a step to the side and turned until I faced Niki but couldn’t see the x-rays anymore. This was a severe breach of protocol. I shouldn’t have seen the x-rays.

Niki looked up. Our eyes met, and we didn’t need any words for us to know Milli’s history couldn’t have been an easy one.

I nodded once. “Can you tell her I’m waiting outside, and I’ll stay as long as someone gets word out to me if she has to stay overnight?”

Niki nodded. “Thank you.” That was all she said, but it was more the things she didn’t say, the things she conveyed with the sadness pooling in her eyes.

I turned around, left the emergency room, and went to the waiting room as I had intended to do in the first place. I knew both far too much and far too little about Milli, but the one thing I knew with a disturbing certainty was that I wouldn’t leave her to fight for herself. Couldn’t leave her to fight for herself.

Not anymore.

12

MILLI

Niki supported my back, the pressure against my skin comforting, and helped me sit up. “So, about your guy.”

“My guy?” I didn’t have anyone, let alone a guy. What the hell was she talking about?

“Max.”

Oh, Max… I tried to conjure up the picture of his face but couldn’t. It was just a hazy memory since I hadn’t gotten a good look at him other than in the half-shadows of his headlamp. Only his voice. I would never forget his voice, like a beam of light cutting through the darkness, quenching my desperation up on that mountain. And now he was here? Why did he come here? Why wait in the hospital for a complete stranger?

“Max came here to check on you and see if everything was all right,” Niki said.

“How do you know him?”

Niki shone her light into my eyes. “Do you have a headache? Dizziness? Anything?”

I shook my head.

“I told you he’s our new EMT guy. I hadn’t met him, but what I’ve heard from the guys, he’s top-notch. You’re pretty lucky he found you.”

And now he was waiting outside—a stranger. The familiar fear bubbled up in me. I was bad with people, had always been bad with people. Not only in my behavior toward them but also in knowing how to assess anyone to know if they were good or if they were out to hurt me. My people skills seriously sucked. But not online. Online, I’d met a few good people. People on my side. People I could trust, fighting against the same enemy.

“Don’t you want to meet him?”

Nope. No desire whatsoever. I was tired, my whole body hurt, and I really didn’t want to meet anyone, let alone this man who saved me. But the way Niki looked at me as if that guy was the best thing since the invention of ice cream, how could I tell her that?

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