Week 447 – OMG!

“OMG! I’m so sorry,” Graham said on a gasp when the rock he’d been tossing from hand to hand slipped away from him as he caught sight of a tiny waif of a woman running through the trees. Unfortunately the rock had hit her in the head and she’d fallen to her knees.

Had he hurt her?

Was this her? The sister that the man Dylan had been looking for?

As he took a step closer he took in the woman cowering before him. She had huge golden brown eyes that were almost too big for her thin face, she was thin, and she wasn’t properly dressed to be running around outside. The oversized t-shirt hung off her small frame, and it looked like it was a man’s, her brothers? Beneath that she had on a pair of leggings and nothing on her feet.

What the hell?

“Are you okay?” he asked as he moved cautiously closer, noting how the woman curled in on herself, trying to make herself a smaller target. There were bruises on her pale skin and there was something wrong with one of her arms. “You’re Sasha, right?”

At the sound of her name panic unlike anything he’d seen before crossed her features. Of course working his job he’d seen fear, people trapped in precarious positions, people who thought they were going to die, but this was different, deeper.

“It’s okay,” he soothed, trying to sound reassuring, even as unease prickled his skin.

Dylan had said his sister had suffered a breakdown, that she wasn’t stable, wasn’t rational, that she might make wild claims and fight against him if he found her and tried to take her back to his brother. But something about the man felt off. Still the man was her brother, and it wasn’t his place to interfere in a situation he didn’t understand.

“Come on, let me get you inside, out of the cold, back home to your brother.” When he reached out a hand to her, not only did she look at his hand like it was a snake about to strike, but the whimper that tore from her lips, tore through him, leaving him shaken and more unsure than ever.