Slash marks. Spaced-out slash marks traveled down a narrow margin of her arm. She knew how close they were to arterial veins because of the trouble the doctor had in stitching her up.
“Judy?”
It would be easy . . . so f**kin’ easy.
She picked at a bit of gauze stuck to a suture, grew frustrated with its desire to hold on.
“Judy?”
She picked harder. This should come off easy. So easy.
“Judy!”
“What?” she said much too loud to an entirely quiet room. Rick knelt beside her, placed a napkin over her bleeding arm.
Everyone stared at her.
Karen’s eyes were wet with unshed tears, Zach and her father shifted their gazes from her eyes to her arm. Her mom and Hannah let the tears flow, and Meg’s tight jaw showed nothing but anger. Even Devon and Dina were looking at her as if she’d grown horns.
So many eyes. There was blood under the fingernails of her left hand. Her arm burned under Rick’s hand and she realized she’d done more than pick at a piece of lint.
When she started to shake, Rick placed his arm around her and helped her to her feet. “C’mon, Utah. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
Her head spun the moment she stood and her legs lost their ability to hold her.
Rick swept her up and walked her out of the dining room as if he was taking the morning paper off the front step on the way to the mailbox.
He took the stairs in silence, kicked open the door to her room, and walked straight to the adjoining bathroom. Once the water flowed to a temperature Rick approved of, he removed the napkin from her arm and placed the mess under the flow.
“Did I do that?” A good inch of what should have been healed skin now bled, turning the water pink.
“Yeah,” Rick told her.
The supplies she’d been using to dress the wound sat on the end of the counter. Using one hand Rick pulled the box over, found what he wanted, and covered her skin with a tight dressing.
“What happened?” she asked him as if he’d have the answers.
He released a long sigh and kept wrapping her arm. “You lost it back there.”
“I did?”
“Yeah. It happens.” He used his teeth to remove a section of tape. Once the bandage was secure, he stood tall with her arm clasped in his firm grip. “What were you thinking about?”
She blinked. No one else wanted to talk about what happened. They skimmed the issue, redirected the conversation, stopped talking when she walked in a room . . . not Rick.
“Why? Why this? Why did he carve deep enough into my skin only to leave me alive?”
Rick’s Adam’s apple bobbed before he managed an answer. “Maybe he heard something and was scared off before he could do more.”
Judy shook her head. “No. It would be so easy. So f**kin’ easy. He could have killed me, knew he had the advantage.” She met Rick’s green eyes and knew he’d already come to the same conclusion. “You already know that.”
“I don’t know anything, Judy.”
She slammed her free hand against his chest, taking him by surprise. “Don’t lie to me.”
He lifted his chin. “Fine. He could have killed you. Abused you more than he did.”
Good, he wasn’t lying, the same deductive thought met his eyes like when they’d first met and they were trying desperately to find Becky, who’d been abducted by her abusive parents.
“Instead he marked me. Made sure I’d always have a physical scar of his attack.”
“Which makes it personal.”
“I don’t know anyone that hateful.”
“Someone at your office. Someone who might have known about the project you were working on?”
Judy squeezed her eyes shut. “Ms. Miller spoke to me only minutes before the attack. No one knew about it.”
Rick brought her bandaged arm to her lap and gently held on to her while they spoke. “Hustle any pool since you’ve been in town?”
“That’s absurd. I don’t hustle. I play and Meg is always right there to tell anyone that I’m good. Other than you, I’ve only ever played for twenty bucks at a time.”
“Someone from Seattle?”
“I’ve thought about that. I know it sounds lily-white but I don’t make enemies. I didn’t steal anyone’s boyfriend or rat on anyone for cheating. Meg and I were loners most of our senior year. We’d go out, play pool, do a little partying, but there weren’t any casualties along the way.”
“You think this was random?”
She shook her head before she uttered any words.
“Me either.”
Her head hurt. Judy hated how much her head hurt the past week. “I should eat something.” Her entire dinner was sitting on a plate surrounded by her family.
“Do you want to go back downstairs?”
“No. Please, I can’t take one more sympathetic look, one more tear.”
Rick lifted one side of his lips in a half smile. “I’ll go get us both something to eat. So long as it’s OK that I’m exempt from the masses.”
She was much steadier on her feet when he led her into her room and tucked a few pillows behind her on the bed.
Rick returned less than ten minutes later with a tray filled with food for the both of them. He didn’t let anyone else in the room even though he struggled with the laden tray, nearly spilling it on the floor more than once.
“This smells amazing.”
“My mom’s a good cook. Lots of practice when the town you live in doesn’t have that many restaurants.”
Rick placed the food in the center of the bed, lay at the foot, and kicked off his shoes.
Judy tucked her feet under her, sat Indian style, and picked up a fork. Her stomach growled with happiness with the first bite. “I’ve missed this.”
He hummed around his food with appreciation.
She pulled up another forkful. “They want me to go back to Utah.”
Rick’s fork hesitated before he took a bite. “Is that what you want?”
“No. I know it’s going to be hard. The thought of walking back in that garage makes me physically sick. Going back to Utah now would be hiding. And who’s to say if this man is somehow after me that he wouldn’t follow me there?”
Rick swallowed, chased his food with a drink of water. “That’s a long way to travel for a criminal to seek a victim.”
She kept eating, trying hard to remove her name as the victim in their conversation. “And lightning doesn’t strike in the same place twice.”