The worst thing, though, was the long hunting knife he held in his right hand. As she watched, he fed it through his left hand. The blade came away wet with blood.
Sassy bit the inside of her lip, struggling to remain calm. “You don’t look so hot, Ryder.”
He continued to stare fixedly at the carpet. “I had to come back,” he said dully.
“Not on my account, I hope,” Sassy replied, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. The nail gun hung heavy in her grip at her side.
At last, he did look up. The emptiness in his gaze sank through her like a stone. “I came back for you.”
Her mouth dried. Determined not to let her voice shake, she countered, “No offense, but I could’ve done without the reunion.”
He straightened his long body to standing, the effort drawing the motion out gradually. He fisted his hand around the knife wound. Blood ran down his arm to his elbow in rivulets. She saw it between his fingers. It dripped to the floor, soaking into her carpet.
It was on the bed.
Was all that blood from what he’d done to himself…or from what he’d done to Rogue? Was that why Sassy couldn’t find her? Her mind raced, blind panic threatening to overrule the cool voice of reason that told her to watch and wait for him to make a move.
“I came back for you,” he said again, taking a step toward her.
She fought not to back up a step. “Don’t come any closer,” she warned.
He didn’t seem to hear her, moving to the halfway point between them. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
She narrowed her eyes on him, recalling the vague sense of familiarity she’d felt upon meeting him for the first time. “What don’t I remember, Fletcher?” she asked, hoping the sound of his name would ignite a flicker of life in those eerie, dead eyes.
“My name’s not Fletcher,” he claimed. “It’s Weston Childress. Does that ring a bell with you, Haseya?”
It didn’t. Not even a little bit. She remained silent, unsure how to proceed. She had to keep him talking to allow Nick enough time to alert the authorities, for Nick to get here. His name was on a loop through her mind.Nick. Nick, I need you…
The movement of Fletcher… Weston’s mouth sharpened her focus. She zeroed in on his grim smirk, the first show of emotion she’d seen from him. It wasn’t pretty. She almost wished he’d go back to his dead-eyed stare. “Okay, your name’s Weston. Now tell me what you did to my cat.”
“First, you listen. I guess it’s easy to forget the kid from Moab that you screwed over ten years ago.”
“What are you talking about?” she demanded.
“We were once competitors,” he revealed. “The two most promising art students Utah had seen in a long time. That grant you won that sent you to art school in New York? It was supposed to be mine.”
“Who says?”
“You might want to hold on to any more smart-ass remarks,” he advised. “I’m feeling a mite stabby.”
She eyed the blood still dripping from his closed hand. “I noticed. You want to put some pressure on that? Some iodine? Your blade could be rusty.”
“Shut up,” he said without raising his voice. She’d have rather he yelled it at her. His calm was unnerving. “The executors who awarded you the college grant promised it to me. They made me believe I had it in the bag. And I needed it. While you were enjoying high school, I was nursing my mother through lymphoma.”
She pressed her lips together, careful with her words now. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not,” he said, cracking another unfeeling grin. “Her name was Letta Childress. She gave me her name after my piece of shit father took off while she was still pregnant with me. It was her and me against the world for years until cancer decided it was going to take everything from us. Her treatment costs were exponential. She couldn’t get insurance with a preexisting condition. She managed to get Medicaid, but it wouldn’t pay for the clinical trial that might have been more effective than the chemo that broke her body down piece by piece until there was so little of her left, she couldn’t work. She damn sure couldn’t take care of me. I took on the role of caretaker. I tried dropping out of high school, but she wouldn’t let me. She said I had a future. She said my art would make me a household name, that it would take me places—places she’d never had a chance to see because life kept its boot on her neck. She said I would be in museums, that I’d make enough off my work to provide for both of us, cancer bills be damned.”
Sassy knew this story didn’t have a happy ending, for Letta Childress or her son. “What happened?”
“I didn’t have money for art school, obviously,” he continued. “What little money we had saved went into her treatment. But with the grant, I’d be well on my way to making all my mother’s dreams come true. She was there that night they awarded it to you, wearing her head scarf to hide her missing hair. She was emaciated, barely strong enough to walk, but she wanted to be there when they called my name. When you took the stage in my place, I thought the heartbreak would kill her.”
The wordsI’m sorrysurfaced once more. She couldn’t say them. There was nothing she could say to make up for the struggle between a mother and son she’d had no understanding of at the time. Her compassion for both of them, however, battled her fear. She looked at the knife again.
If he could cut himself, what would he be willing to do to her?
A tattoo on his wrist caught her eye. She’d never seen it. He’d always been buttoned up before. The longhorn skull stared at her out of empty eye sockets. It was a dead ringer for the artist’s mark she’d found on the bar rod outside the gallery.
