AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I hated the way the excitement banked in her eyes, but I was already worried about keeping her warm enough while she was dry. I didn’t want to risk it with her wet.
“Do you want to climb back on?” I asked. “Or do you want to walk for a bit?”
“I can walk if we don’t go too fast,” she said.
We had a solid few hours on the guys at the house. And the woods were too dense even for off-roading vehicles, so there was no way they could catch up to us if we slowed down a bit for a while.
I would insist on carrying her again after a while, then double the pace for a while before night would eventually force us to bunker down somewhere. Though I doubted I would be doing any fucking sleeping until we were in a car or hotel room again.
We walked in silence, both lost in our own thoughts, but I could see the way Vienna kept lifting her hands, chafing at the bare skin of her matchstick arms as a slight breeze kicked up.
If I had to, I could strip off my shirt and let her wear it. I could handle the cold on my bare skin. She couldn’t.
I really needed to get something into her stomach, too.
I wasn’t from Arkansas, so I didn’t feel comfortable trying to forage for risky things like mushrooms. But there could definitely be things easy to identify that were safe. Raspberries, nuts, maybe if we were lucky, some dandelion greens.
It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it would be fuel that she desperately needed to keep going.
I had enough meat on me to get through a few days without food. But she had nothing left to fuel her body with left.
“Riff?” she called, her soft voice barely more than a whisper.
“Yeah?”
“I can’t walk anymore,” she said, sounding like the admission gutted her.
“No worries,” I said, turning and dropping down again. “Hop on.”
“I’m sorry,” she said as I stood with her on my back again.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I assured her as I started to pick up the pace, praying my old Boy Scout training was serving me well as we went, that we were going in the right direction, not deeper into a forest that seemed to span hundreds of acres on the map.
Thank fuck for that map, actually. For poring over it at the gas station, trailing the path we needed to take with our fingers, checking out the compass in the corner.
The sun was slowly moving across the sky toward the west, so I knew that we were heading toward the south-east. Which should, at some point, run into one of the roads on the map.
From there, I could handle this.
I had cash in my wallet.
I could get someone to drive us somewhere safe.
Then call my brother.
As soon as we stopped again, I would power up my phone to shoot him a text, then turn it back off to conserve the battery.
On my back, Vienna’s head shifted to rest against me and her body felt like it was going lax. Like she was falling asleep.
Shit.
I had to reach back and touch her, then. To make sure she didn’t fall off of me. But the idea of putting my hands on an abused woman had my stomach sloshing around.
I waited until she was even more dead weight against me before reaching back to grab the backs of her thighs, slowly increasing the pressure until I was sure she wasn’t going anywhere.
She didn’t even flinch.
I couldn’t imagine the woman had been able to enjoy some solid, fear-free sleep in a long time. Clearly, her body was making up for lost time.
