more interesting pieces of art where the color contrast would be an asset. There was only so much that could be done with a white display wall.
An arm grabbed tight around her throat, her hair tangled by a hand and yanked back, bringing her face to the sky, and something cold touched her skin. “Don’t move.” She felt a knife blade against her throat and didn’t try to even breathe. “They should have paid me; you’ll mention that to them. They should have paid me.”
She felt something hot and wet swung into her hands, and he was gone. She struggled to blink away choking tears and looked down.
The guy had eviscerated a cat.
She dropped it. She didn’t throw up or stagger or faint. The rushing in her ears removed the present from her thoughts, and the next time she blinked Bryce was standing in front of her.
“Saw him, couldn’t stop you, couldn’t reach him.” She could hear the anger in his quiet words and the tenseness in the man as he became the only thing in her world. The man had big hands, tough hands, and they were wiping junk off hers without appearing to be brisk about it, but the blood was going away. He was using his shirttails, she vaguely realized.
“Take a breath.”
The words settled inside deep enough she did so.
“That’s the way.” His face looked like a boxer’s might about the time his eyes narrowed and he punched straight into your face, but he still smiled at her. Not angry with her, incredibly, not angry with her for walking into this mess.
“Sorry, Bryce. Taking the trash out was stupid,” she tried to whisper, only to find her voice hoarse.
He ignored the words and finished with the basics of his task. “Good enough to get you under a hot tap to take care of the rest.” His arm settled around her waist before he let her try to take a step. “Remember the stairs.”
“Yeah.”
She wasn’t fully ready to be out of that shock, she realized as she misjudged the doorway and hit the doorpost.
Bryce was punching in security codes behind her on the pad and then walking her toward the downstairs restroom. “Towels?”
“The narrow closet, where we keep the cleaning supplies.”
She didn’t look toward a mirror, nudging it open so as not to be able to see an image of herself afraid, nor did she look at her hands under a stream of hot water turning red with remaining traces of the cat. She just closed her eyes and used the soap.
“Good. Use this.” Bryce pushed a washcloth into her hands, and while she soaped it, his rough hands pushed back her hair and wiped at traces of the tears. “Hold still, Marie. This will sting a bit.” He wiped something across her face that came as a cold shock and then a bitter smell.
“What?”
“All done.”
The guy hadn’t cut her, she was sure of it, but something had been on his coat sleeve pressed in tight to her face. “Thanks.”
“Connor’s coming.”
She thought herself too shaky to want that attention but nodded. “Okay.”
She wrapped her hands in another dry towel and tried to smile at Bryce. “I’m going to go change and drink some coffee and forget that just happened.”
“You won’t, but it’s a good first few steps. You want me to come up?”
“Better to know you’re down here making sure no one else does.”
“I’m coding the doors so you can’t step outside on me again without an alarm blaring at you to rethink it.”
“A good plan.”
He knew. He knew something had been said. He knew a lot more had happened in those seconds than she had said. He knew but wasn’t even nibbling to find out; he’d just called Connor. She squeezed his arm and went toward the narrow stairway, glad now that it took hands against both walls as she walked upstairs.
“Let me see.”
Marie turned her hand for Connor to see the bruise spreading across the side. She’d broken two fingernails. She’d gouged the man, she thought, in the first-instinct move as the arm came around her neck. She’d reached up to grab him and didn’t remember doing it.
Connor, sitting on the footstool in front of her chair, looked all cop as he held her hand and inspected the bruise. His expression had changed in those first few moments when he had seen her from an intense emotion to the pulled-back care he was taking now. She was relieved, part of her, that she wasn’t being asked to swim in his heavy emotion right now too. She couldn’t absorb any more.
“The clothes you changed out of?”
“On the towel in the bathroom. It registered enough that you might want them so I didn’t throw them away.” Her voice sounded tired, she thought, listening to herself, and a bit too calm, like it had happened last year instead of less than half an hour ago.
Connor brushed back the hair that kept sliding forward to cover her face and held her gaze with his. “You’ve got to start at the beginning and tell me every sound and smell and movement you remember. Everything matters, Marie. No matter how far-fetched the thought you had.”
“It was fast and without hesitation. He had every move planned, I think. A thick heavy coat, not those new lightweight-fabric thermal coats, but an old heavy fabric, bulky. He had an arm around my neck and a handful of my hair pulling my head back, and I could still feel all that fabric smothering me.”
“A sense of the coat’s color?”
“Dark, I’d suppose, because I had no sensation someone was even there before he was already behind me. The Dumpster lid kind of echoes in that brick alley and maybe I didn’t hear what I should have, but the movement-I didn’t see him coming, didn’t sense him. He was just there.”
“Taller than you?”
“No more than an inch or two, he was pulling my head back and into him, so his shoulders were right behind mine. Kind of tall, thin, I think, under that coat, and strong in the arms, young. I remember smelling what I thought of as metal and something bitter and maybe grit. The knife he held had to be already covered in the cat’s blood, I guess. My eyes burned when he let me go, irritated, like there was grit in them. It was fast, Connor. Bryce was already there before I was even blinking and seeing again.”
“Young in his voice, his build?”
“Just an impression from all the energy, the speed of it, and maybe the voice.”
“He said something.”
She struggled to keep her gaze on his. “I didn’t understand it.”
“Tell me anyway. Word for word if you can.”
“I won’t be forgetting it. He was angry as he said it. He said don’t move and then he said-” she took a breath and quoted-“‘they should have paid me; you’ll mention that to them. They should have paid me.’”
Connor paled, she realized in the part of her mind that was watching him watch her, and she pushed away the memory of the alley to focus again fully on him. “That means something to you.”
“Yes. It does.” His hand raised to brush swiftly along her cheek. “Thanks for the quote; that will help. Do you have any other impression of him, of his voice, of how he moved or carried himself?”
“Just that he seemed tense and angry and maybe very revved up. His voice was hard…” She bit her lip.
“What, Marie?”
“I’m not going to say I’ve heard it before, but it was familiar to me-you know what I mean? Like I had heard it before and felt mad before too. Not a memory of the voice but an emotional reaction to it.”
“Recently?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry; that’s probably scrambled brains talking right now. I’m not sure what it is I need to convey about the voice. But I remember reacting to it and not just the words. Who was supposed to pay him, Connor? The cops? Daniel? Who am I supposed to tell?”
“Marie…”
“You promised to tell me what was going on.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t, not about this, even now. Not without risking other people.”
