Page 28 of Defiant Hearts

She nodded.

Carson lowered the phone, his expression giving nothing away. “You said Lance found you afterward. Tell us about that.”

The edges of the memory prickled, sharp enough to hurt. “He came looking for me. He found me at the first hotel I stopped at. I’d gone out to the vending machine for a drink—stupid, I know, but I hadn’t eaten and wasn’t thinking straight. When I came back down the hall, my door was wide open.” Her voice dipped lower. “I hadn’t even unloaded my car yet, so most of my belongings were still with me. I didn’t go back into the room for my purse because I had my wallet. I left everything and ran.”

“Where did you go?” Hitchcock asked, breaking the silence he’d kept through the interview.

“I drove to another city two hours away. By then I was exhausted and knew I had to stop. I pulled into a motel.”

“And he tracked you there too?” Carson asked.

More tears slid free before she could stop them. Wyatt’s thumb moved over her knuckles in slow strokes, and she grasped at the small kindness even as she knew better than to lean on anyone, especially this fast.

“I don’t know how he found me.” Her voice pitched high and broke. “But he did.”

Her heart rate spiked again. Hitchcock stepped up to the bed to take her pulse, but Wyatt shot Carson a long, pointed look.

“I know you’re not feeling well, but we need everything we can get to help you,” Carson said without looking away from Wyatt.

She dragged in a deep breath. “I barely got out of the motel. There were a bunch of men, all after me. I jumped in my car, and on the way out of the parking lot, I clipped one of them. He went down, but I don’t know how bad it was. I just kept driving for the rest of the night.”

She let her eyes slip shut, so damn tired. For a moment, she didn’t have the strength to open them. It would be so easy to sleep and let the world be damned.

Forcing her eyelids open again, she fixed her gaze on Carson. “After that I found an Airbnb. I thought I’d finally lost him, but I went out for groceries and saw his truck parked in town. I drove away and left more of my things behind. At that point, I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted to stay alive.”

“You think he was going to kill you?” Wyatt’s tone simmered with a deadly fury that sent a shiver through her for a different reason.

“I know he was.”

Their faces hardened. Seeing that kind of anger on her behalf brought a strange sense of relief, even as it made her want to shrink into the bed.

“After that, you went to the mountains?” Carson coaxed.

“No.” She paused, throat thickening with pain. “I had a friend. Erin. We’d worked together years ago, before I became a traveling nurse. She was the only person I could think of who lived far enough outside my life that Lance wouldn’t think to look there. I stayed with her one night right before I went off the grid completely.”

Wyatt squeezed her fingers lightly. “Go on.”

She curled her free hand into the blanket as the memory sparked in her mind, too hot and real. “I was in the shower when he called. I heard her through the door. She said, ‘Whitley will be so excited to see you.’”

Her voice cracked. “When I told her afterward what happened, she asked if I was sure I hadn’t witnessed a training exercise. That’s how I knew she didn’t believe me.”

Her voice pitched higher, and she gulped back another round of tears that threatened to exhaust her to the point of incoherence.

Until now, she’d told them where she’d been and who she’d seen.

She hadn’t told them what she’d watched happen.

“It wasn’t a training exercise. There was too much blood.” Her fingers twisted tighter in the blanket. “I watched them kill a man.”

Wyatt went utterly still beside her.

The words were out now. There was no pulling them back.

She dragged in a shaking breath as the question that had haunted her for two months finally pushed its way out. “Did anyone else go missing when I did? Because someone should have.”

Silence engulfed the room.

She’d spent two months alone on a mountain not knowing if that man was dead or alive—or if anyone had even gone looking for him.