Page 82 of Sniper's Pride

When the ambulances finally came roaring down the dirt road, bringing with them the county sheriff’s office and the FBI and a whole lot of painful reality, Mariah was pathetically grateful to crawl up on a stretcher, surrender to the EMTs, and close her eyes at last.

The adrenaline had worn off and all she wanted was to be away from that barn. Her mother was in safe hands in the lead ambulance, and she figured they were both happy to give themselves over to the delights of Western medicine and whatever dripped from those bags. And this time, when she felt all the bumps in the road as the ambulance left the field Mariah never wanted to see again, she got to do it lying down and not stuffed in the trunk of a car.

She could really only count it as a win.

At the county hospital, she was checked over by a battalion of doctors and nurses, then admitted for observation.

“Nothing really happened to me,” she told her doctor, trying to frown despite her stiff, swollen face. “It’s a black eye, that’s all.”

“It will be a whole lot blacker tomorrow,” the doctor said, already distinguishing herself from the emergency room doctors in Atlanta by looking concerned rather than, say, annoyed that Mariah kept exposing herself to shellfish. “You look exhausted, and I mean that clinically. Lie back. Take some fluids on board. If you’re fine now, you can be even more fine tomorrow.”

The minute the doctor was gone, Mariah crawled out of the bed. She took a minute to find her balance, which was harder to do without Griffin there to hold her upright, and grimaced at the hospital gown they’d given her. But it was better than continuing to wear the same clothes she’d had on for more hours straight than she could count. She took her IV stand as a convenient walker should her legs give out again, and went to find her mother.

It took poking her head into every room along the hallway, but Mariah found her. Mama was lying in her hospital bed looking mutinous and deeply grumpy, her leg bandaged and propped up before her.

“It’s a bone bruise,” Mama said in disgust, the exact same way Mariah had saidIt’s a black eye.“I don’t need all the theatrics.”

Mariah shuffled over, then perched herself on the edge of the bed, making sure not to tangle her IV lines with her mother’s.

Rose Ellen hadn’t said a word when she’d recognized Walton back at the barn. He’d looked diminished and small as he lay huddled at Isaac’s feet, bloodied and whining, but Rose Ellen hadn’t commented on it. Shehadn’t said anything while the Alaska Force men did their thing once reinforcements arrived, taking charge of the scene and answering official questions as if they were actually the ones in charge.

Just like Mariah hadn’t said anything when she’d watched Griffin surrender his weapon to the authorities, then disappear into the back of an official vehicle without so much as a backward glance.

They’d both stood near that horrible barn, waiting their turn while draped in those funny metallic blankets. They’d held on to each other as if they had never let go in the past ten years, staring all around them as if they were shell-shocked.

Maybe they were. Mariah thought it was entirely possible she was. It wasn’t every day she ran like that—or at all—so hard and fast that her thighs now ached. She’d felt her abductor’s breath on her neck. She was sure she’d felt his fingertips graze her.

You’re going to bleed,he’d growled again.

And then he was gone.

It wasn’t every day she fielded rape threats along with death threats, or heard that she’d been dosed with birth control pills for a decade. She couldn’t decide which horrendous violation was more upsetting. And the fact that she wasn’t curled up in a ball somewhere, sobbing her eyes out, told her that yes, she was in shock.

Mariah expected she might stay there awhile.

But now she concentrated on her mother’s hand. And how good the weight of it was on her leg.

“How bad did he hurt you?”

“He punched me in the face a couple of times,” Mariah said. Her face was stiffer now, which meant ithurt to use it. She made herself smile anyway. “It’s like any given Tuesday night at Uncle Teddy’s.”

Rose Ellen didn’t smile back. “I don’t mean him. I mean the other one. The one you married.”

“David never hit me, Mama,” Mariah said softly, holding her mother’s gaze. “If you want to know the sad truth, he didn’t have to hit me. I did everything he said anyway. I guess I wanted to.”

Her mother looked older, and worse—frail. When she had always been the strongest woman Mariah knew. She told herself it was the harshness of the fluorescent lights. Or the fact that this marked maybe the only time in her life she’d ever seen her mother without her eye makeup on, deep and black and ready to make a statement.

Her tough-as-nails mother had very blond eyelashes that disappeared without mascara. She looked soft and fragile, and Mariah’s ribs hurt from keeping in all that sobbing.

“I’m sorry.” Mariah heard how choked up she sounded. And the damaged side of her face already hurt. Extra salt wasn’t going to help anything. But she couldn’t seem to stop the tears that tracked down her cheeks. “I’m so sorry for everything. For leaving. For being so bad about keeping in touch. For being the reason all this happened to you.”

“You wanted to better yourself,” Rose Ellen said, her voice as steady as the firm pat she delivered to Mariah’s thigh. “There’s not one thing wrong with that. You don’t need to apologize for doing what you always said you would and getting out of Two Oaks.”

Mariah shook her head, not willing to hand off the blame that easily.

“Two Oaks wasn’t the problem. I was the problem. I let them get to me years ago. I let them separate me from you. I don’t know if you can better yourself by pretending that the person you were before didn’t exist. That’s not improving. That’s just hiding.”

“You’re not the one who stopped calling, baby girl. I was.”

---