The Reaper's Runaway Princess novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Dog on the Table

Mara can't turn away a hurt dog, so Wyatt carries it in and she saves it; she tells him he gave her back to her husband, and he warns her that her husband will be in the county by Friday.

Mara did not move from the stool.

The man at the glass kept his hand where it was, and rain ran off his sleeve onto the step.

Then he bent down and lifted something from the sidewalk, wrapped in his jacket.

A paw hung out of the sleeve.

Mara was off the stool before she decided to be.

She stopped with her hand on the lock and looked at his face for the first time in six years.

Wyatt Garrison had gotten older.

There was gray in his beard now and a new line cut between his eyebrows.

His eyes were the same, and they were fixed on her.

"Please," he said through the glass.

"Is that your dog?"

"I hit him on the pass road. I was driving here and he came out of the dark."

She opened the door.

"Table. Now. Don't touch the blanket, and don't talk to me."

He carried the bundle past her and set it on the steel table with more care than she remembered him having for anything.

It was a hound mix, brindle, with a split ear and a back leg bent the wrong way.

The dog's eyes rolled toward her, and she put her hand flat on his ribs.

"Hey, sweet boy. I've got you."

Her voice came out calm, and her hands were already working.

The gums were pink, the heart fast but steady, and there was no blood in the mouth.

"Hold his head," she said.

Wyatt moved around the table and cupped the dog's jaw in both hands.

She clipped fur, flushed the cut, and set the leg while he talked low into the dog's ear.

"Easy, boy. She's good. She's the best there is."

Mara almost smiled, and hated that she almost did.

The tabby in the back kennel mewed once, and the room went quiet except for the rain.

She felt Wyatt watching her hands.

"You still do that thing with your tongue," he said. "When you concentrate."

"Don't."

"I'm just saying."

"You get to say nothing. Hold his head."

He held it.

She wrapped the splint and checked the dog's pulse, and her own pulse was louder than his.

Six years of running, and here he stood in her clinic, bleeding at the knuckles, with the same shoulders that used to block the clubhouse doorway so no one could see her cry.

She wanted to hit him.

She wanted other things, and those she put away fast.

"He'll live," she said at last. "He needs the night here, and fluids. Then you take him and you go."

"Mara."

"My name is Mara Sizemore. You'll want to remember that."

"I know what your name is." His voice dropped. "I've been saying the other one for six years, in my head."

"Then say it to someone else."

She stripped off her gloves and turned to the sink so he wouldn't see her hands.

"I'm not here to take you back," he said behind her.

"That's funny. You did it so well last time."

The water kept running.

She heard nothing from him at all.

When she looked up, he had gone white under the beard.

"Say that again."

"You called my father from the bridge. You gave me back."

Wyatt took one step toward her and stopped.

"We never gave you back."

"I know what I know."

"Mara, I would have burned the whole club to the ground first. I nearly did. We were..."

"I don't care what you were."

"Who told you that?"

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me."

"It matters to me that I was nineteen and married and then twenty-one and bleeding in a locked room, and you weren't there." Her voice shook, and she let it. "I don't owe you a story. Get your dog in the morning."

He looked at her for a long time.

Then he nodded once.

"All right," he said. "I won't make you hear it tonight."

He took his jacket off the counter, and stopped with his hand on the door.

"There's one thing you do need to hear."

"I said..."

"Dean has a friend inside the club who still talks to him. Your husband left Denver this morning with eight men."

Her hand closed on the counter.

"Rodney would have told me."

"Would he?" Wyatt asked, very softly, and did not wait for an answer. "They're headed north. He'll be in this county by Friday."

The bell above the door jingled behind him.

Through the glass she watched him cross the street and lean against a black truck, with his bandaged hand pressed over his eyes.

Four days.

She turned to the brindle dog asleep on her table and her own face, reflected in the dark window, looking back at her.

She had told Rodney she was staying.

Nothing had changed except that now she had a deadline.

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