Page 86 of Sniper's Pride

Mariah had spent a lot of time coming up with scenes in her head over the years, imagining what it would be like to see David speechless.

But the reality was far better than anything she could have cooked up.

She took advantage of it and kept on. “But I’ll tell you what. He was much too comfortable with his threats and his fist. That tells me that I’m not the first girl who’s seen that side of your father. So I don’t think it really matters if anyone believesme.There’s going to be a line out the door behind me. You can count on it.”

And it took her a moment to realize that the harsh panting wasn’t hers. It was David’s.

“He begged me to leave you in the gutter where I found you,” David sneered. “But I thought I could make something out of you. I thought I could take a piece of crap that belonged in a toilet—”

This wasn’t a new line of complaint. But this time, Griffin was here.

And he’d obviously had enough.

Mariah didn’t see him move. One minute he was staring down at David like a stone carving. The next, David’s arm was extended at a painful-looking angle, and Griffin was forcing him out the door, wrenching David’s shoulder to bend him forward.

Mariah heard cursing from the hallway, then David’s blustery shout, but he was cut off. Fast.

And when Griffin returned to the doorway, he stayed there, gazing at her from a distance.

Where he was probably more comfortable, she knew. No matter how it made her ache more.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

“The least I can do is take out the trash.”

Something bright and heady swelled there between them. But Griffin turned his head, looking at a distraction out in the hall.

“Griffin...” Mariah began, desperate and shaky and determined to hold on to him, no matter what it took.

“The police are here,” he told her, his voice too calm. Too deliberate. Too much like the way he’d talked to her so long ago, when she’d stepped off that ferry and seen him, and her world had changed forever. “It’s going to be a long interview. If I were you, I’d get dressed.”

He stepped into the hall, closing the door behind him. Mariah sat where she was, her hands in fists and her eyes blurry with some mixture of emotion and fury. She didn’t want to move. But she was entirely too Southern not to think that a coat of armor might not be amiss if she was about to be grilled by the authorities on such a host of unpleasant subjects.

And when she came out of the bathroom some time later, she was dressed in clothes she didn’t have to ask to know Griffin had found for her. She’d done what she could with her hair, washed her face, and tried her best to look less like a zombie and more like a human being. Out in her room, she found two detectives waiting for her and Isaac standing by the window, the same way Griffin had earlier.

But Griffin himself was nowhere to be found.

Twenty

Mariah talked until she was hoarse, Isaac interrupting from time to time to corroborate her story or add detail. And then she did it all over again with the FBI.

When all law enforcement officials were gone and her throat was worn out, she was poked and prodded some more by the doctors, then released.

But when the nurse rolled her out in the mandatory wheelchair, it wasn’t Alaska Force she found waiting for her at the hospital entrance.

It was her family.

“Y’all sure know how to throw a homecoming party,” her sister Britney drawled through the open window of her pickup truck. “I was fixing to stay mad at you for the next ten or twenty years at least. But look at you. You’re much too pathetic.”

“Somebody has to teach you how to make sure the other guy looks worse,” her brother Justin chimed in, shaking his head as if Mariah had let down the whole family.

A position he’d taken every time any one of their relatives had gotten into a scrap, now that she considered it.

None of them hugged, because McKennas weren’t huggers, save for the most dire and horrendous of circumstances—like a mother-daughter meeting up for the first time in years after having been kidnapped and hauled off to some ratty barn deep in the countryside.

But when her brother and sister packed her up into the pickup, settling her in the backseat next to Rose Ellen, Mariah had to admit it felt as good as a hug might have. Tucked up in a pickup with her family, headed down a Georgia highway toward home.

At last.

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