Page 21 of Red Hunt

How fitting.

13

MAX

“So, where’s home?” I asked Milli while keeping my eyes on the empty road. She’d been quiet throughout the drive. Usually, I didn’t mind quiet, preferred it actually, but not right now. Now I wanted to make her feel more comfortable around me. And I wanted to get to know her better. To know that what I’d seen on those x-rays was not a current threat. And why hadn’t she taken the painkillers? A history with drugs, maybe?

I looked at her sideways. I couldn’t very well ask her all those questions even though they caused a tightness in my chest and made me antsy to know what had happened to her. The second I attempted to help her into the truck, I could feel her body freeze and her eyes getting that panicked look, like a cornered horse.

Fear edging on terror. From a simple touch. The same reaction she had at the hospital when she bumped into me and when I searched her for injuries. Combine that with her x-rays, I’d bet the lodge on a history of physical abuse. What a fucking tragedy.

She turned from the window and eyeballed me. “Moon Lake. Grocery store.”

“You own a grocery store?” I snapped my mouth shut, trapping the “aren’t you a little young for that” right where it belonged. I needed to stop thinking of her as the teenager I’d mistaken her for at first. And when had I become so age-aware?

“My grandpa does, but he’s in the hospital right now, so I’m taking care of things. We have an apartment above the store. Thanks for the ride home.”

“My pleasure.” I slowed the truck down when we reached Moon Lake. “I have your bike on the flatbed, but it’s pretty mangled. You managed one hell of a crash.”

She inhaled. “As I told you before, I managed to not hit a deer.” Her voice sounded icy, which relieved me on some kind of twisted level. If she snapped at me, there was at least a little fight left in her. And for some reason, I desperately needed her to have some fight left. “My bad. Lucky deer.”

She snorted. Which made me smile.

We arrived at the grocery store, and this time, when I helped her off the truck, she took my hands touching her body with minimal reaction.

Progress.

“I don’t have my keys; they’re in my backpack somewhere…”

Her lip quivered.

Don’t cry, please, don’t cry. I hastily grabbed her backpack from the backseat and triumphantly handed it to her. “Found that when I picked up your bicycle.”

This time her smile reached her eyes, but overall, she looked beyond tired. I exchanged the key with the backpack in her hands, held the door open for her to hobble inside, then helped her up the stairs and onto the living room couch. The stairs would be hard for her to maneuver on her own. The apartment had a clean, but old-fashioned feeling to it. One corner was set up as a workplace, with a high-end-model laptop connected to three massive displays. What was that all about?

The adjacent wall contained a slew of photos of a man with two brown-haired girls and more frames of those same girls through the passage of time. Milli had a sister. No parents in any of the pictures. No friends either. Just the two girls.

I focused back on Milli when I heard a soft moan from her.

“What do you need?”

She lay curled up on the sofa with a cushion pressed against her front and avoided eye contact. Shy?

“Something to eat?”

I looked her up and down as she sat sprawled on the couch; I let myself, for the first time, see her as a woman, a beautiful young woman, trim but womanly in all the right places. Even though I didn’t like how light she felt when I lifted her off the truck. I looked away. Checking out someone who was exhausted to the point of breaking was not acceptable.

I didn’t wait for an answer from her but made my way to the kitchen where I prepared an ice pack and browsed through the fridge. Not much to choose from, though living above a grocery store, you could probably get whatever you wanted, whenever. We couldn’t have been home more than five minutes before someone pounded up the stairs and drove my instincts into high alert. Though, as soon as I saw the young woman from the photos, I relaxed.

“Niki called me. Are you okay?” She was completely unaware of my presence. Focused solely on Milli.

Not a smart move.

I grabbed the ice pack and cleared my throat before re-entering the living room.

The young woman with the same hair color as Milli jerked to a halt in the middle of the room. She looked from me to Milli and back to me, and then crossed her arms and took a couple of steps in my direction. Confrontational.

“And who would you be?”

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