A gentle breeze carried through the desert, ruffling the soft hairs on the back of her neck. She shivered. She was cold, she realized. Freezing. She needed to get somewhere warm, fast. She needed water and bandages and medicine.
She needed to know what had happened.
“Cait?” Her voice came out as a hoarse whisper. Her throat was raw from the man choking her. When she tried to swallow, it felt like a knife cutting straight through. “Cait?” Louder this time, but still nothing.
She took a few deep breaths, engine oil and Cait’s shampoo and the strange sweet smell the man had left behind. She listened hard, ears straining, waiting for the sound of the engine to reappear, but the silence had settled like a fresh blanket of snow.
She couldn’t say how long she stayed like that, her senses heightened and alert, breath caught tight in her throat like a small, trapped bird, waiting for something to break.
A whiptail scurried across the dirt. It saw her and froze, eye trained on hers, black and unblinking. She could sense the workings of its mind, feel the febrile patter of its heart beneath its skin, before she blinked and the spell was broken. The lizard skittered into the brush.
She struggled to her feet and limped over to the Jeep. She moved slowly. She knew what she would find, and she knew she didn’t want to see it: Cait’s body bloodied and mangled, her dark hair thick with blood, her eyes the dull flat black of the dead.
She bent double, retched onto the sand.
“Please no, please no.”
Dread built in her like a wall, each step another brick. She reached the driver’s side, placed a careful hand on the jagged edge of the window, leaned forward.
The Jeep was empty.
Rebecca scanned the horizon, looking for any trace of her. The road stared back, blank and empty. She moved over to the passenger side—Cait’s side. The door was hanging open, and there were drag marks in the dirt leading to the truck’s tire marks. She followed the tracks out onto the road, saw where they crossed back over the median and headed east.
He had taken Cait.
Was she still alive?
Why had he left Rebecca?
She was a witness. She had seen his face.
Maybe he’d thought she was dead.
She remembered the look on his face when he’d opened the door and seen her in the driver’s seat. Pure, undiluted rage.
She wished she’d fought harder.
She cupped her stomach with her hands. When he had kicked her, she had tried to curl herself up and shield her baby from the blows, but she knew that his foot had connected at least once. She lifted her shirt and saw the pale pink bloom of a bruise beginning to form. Her baby.
Who was that monster?
And now he had Cait.
Would he come back for her?
She remembered the taillights heading east. She turned her eyes to where the Jeep was languishing in the dust. One of the headlights was dangling by a wire, and there was a long, vicious scrape along the driver’s side, the shattered window dark and gaping like a missing tooth. She peered inside. The keys were still in the ignition.
She glanced to the east, half expecting to see the truck’s headlights bearing down on her again, but the road stayed dark. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been out—it could have been a few seconds or an hour. Even if he stayed on the same road, there was no guarantee she’d be able to catch him. And if she did—then what? What was she supposed to do about it?
Cait was the one he had been after all along—not her. This wasn’t her responsibility. She wasn’t even supposed to be out here with Cait—the girl had admitted that herself. She had lied to get Rebecca in the car with her, and lied about her motives, and all the while she’d been planning to betray her. Sure, she’d owned up to it eventually, but was that really enough? Cait had set out to destroy her life, and she’d put them both in danger in the process. Rebecca didn’t owe her anything.
This was her only chance. She was eighteen weeks pregnant. The window was closing. She touched her fingertips to her stomach.
She remembered the knock on the door, the man thrusting the summons at her, the thin smile on his face before he turned and ran back to his car. The hearing was scheduled for eleven a.m. at Lubbock County Courthouse,