Wild Justice by Kelley Armstrong Page A

unsteady.
    “I—” I forced the words through my tight throat. “I need to walk. I—I won’t run away. I just— I’m going to walk.”
    “Okay.”
    I started down the path walking as best I could on ground that seemed to rise and dip under my feet. Dimly, I could hear Jack behind me, staying his distance but keeping his eye on me.
    I kept walking, seeing those words again, all those words, replaying in my head.
    It didn’t happen. Couldn’t have happened. I wasn’t the one he hurt. It was Amy. All Amy.
    In the distance, I saw a shape through the trees. My neighbor’s run-down cabins that he’d planned to fix up to rent and never did. This spring, I’d sleepwalked into one, thinking it was
the
cabin, that I was back with Amy and Drew Aldrich. I’d dreamed I was on the cabin floor, free from my bonds, blood on my thighs, trying to get my panties back on, to dress and run for help.
    I’d told myself I was confusing my story with Amy’s. But how many times had I had that dream? A nightmare where Aldrich told me to be quiet, told me to get undressed, made me lie on the floor, and held a knife at my throat.
    Just like he’d described.
    Nightmares where I tried to be still, tried to be so still and quiet, but I couldn’t, because the terror and the pain and the horror and the humiliation . . .
    I fingered the paper-thin scar on my throat.
    I told you to lie still.
    I doubled over and threw up whatever was in my stomach. Then I stayed there, on all fours, head pounding, fingers digging into the earth. A shadow passed over me, and I looked to see Jack hunkered down beside me.
    “Tell me what you need,” he said.
    I shook my head.
    “Tell me what I can do.”
    Another shake.
    “Can I stay here? With you?”
    I nodded.
    After a minute, he said, “I’m sorry.”
    I backed up and sat down on the cold earth. “You knew. Even before you read it, you figured out what happened to me.”
    Silence. Then, “Suspected.”
    “No. You knew.”
    He had. The pieces were all there. The nightmares. The guilt. And the scar. How the hell do you cut your neck on a fence? That’s what I’ve always said, and it’s what I believed, not because I remembered doing it, but because I remembered saying it, over and over, all my life, whenever someone noticed. I’d scaled so many fences that the exact instance seemed irrelevant. I said I cut it on a fence and my parents said I cut it on a fence, so I must have cut it on a fence.
    Jack could tell the difference between a metal scrape and a knife slice.
    I wanted to say, “Why didn’t you tell me?” But that was ridiculous. He’d tried. Over and over he’d suggested that my dreams meant something, and I’d flipped out every time.
    This is what he thought I’d remember when I saw Aldrich. This is what he’d thought I might be better off forgetting. This is what he’d thought was in that journal.
    I lurched forward and threw up again.
    A minute later, he asked, “You want to talk?” I rocked back on my heels and caught my breath. I shook my head.
    “Walk?”
    Another shake.
    “Want me to get Scout?”
    Another shake, and in some deep part of me that wasn’t completely numb, I felt bad. He was fumbling to help and there was nothing he could do.
    Yes, there was. He could let me collapse against him. Hold me. Offer comfort—warm, quiet comfort. But he stayed a few feet away. Giving me space. Being careful, so careful. I’d just found out I’d been raped. He wasn’t going to presume to offer any physical comfort, and I couldn’t bring myself to cross that gap and take it.
    “I . . . I want to go inside,” I said. “To my room. Just be alone for a while.”
    He nodded and led me back.

CHAPTER 16
    I sat cross-legged on my bed and tried to process what happened twenty years ago. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
    Buried memories? How the hell did that happen? No, really. How the fuck do you forget you were raped at thirteen? That the first time you had intercourse,