by J. R. Ward
Ahmare entered with her gun up and her thumb on his collar’s trigger.
As she looked around, he measured the twenty-by-twenty space with the eye of a host and found the single bunk, rudimentary toilet stall, and bare metal floor wanting only in ways that didn’t matter.
Who the hell cared if you had something soft to lie on? This place was a catch-your-breath-on-the-escape salvation.
Or, in their case, a wait-out-the-day launchpad.
Duran leaned back out and reattached the camouflage drape on the hooks. Then he shut the vault door and entered the lock code. The good news was there was no other way in. The bad news was there was no other way out. Hopefully, Chalen’s guards had had to back off because of the approaching sun. He did not want the conqueror knowing about this cave.
“Shit,” he muttered.
The female wheeled around, her ponytail swinging in a wide arc behind her head. “What?”
“I meant to get a pair of scissors from Nexi.” He took off his backpack and scratched his beard. “I have to lose all this hair before we infiltrate.” When she just stared at him, he frowned. “What.”
“I guess you are really taking me there.”
“Yes, I am.” He sat down on the floor, crossing his legs. “Let’s food up and get some sleep. Soon as night falls, it’s going to be nonstop until you either get what Chalen wants or you die trying.”
As she joined him, she put her gun away, but kept that trigger in her hand.
“You can relax.” He took the sandwiches she and Nexi had made out of the backpack. “If I were going to hurt you, I wouldn’t be handing you calories.”
“How far away are we?” she asked as she accepted what he held out—and kept that trigger on her thigh. “How much more do we have to travel.”
Frustration that had nothing to do with her made him want to argue the point that he wasn’t going to get aggressive on her. He started eating to keep himself from wasting hot air.
“Not all that far.”
“How far.”
As she stared at him, he knew it was a fair question. Hell, after what he’d seen and experienced in the cult, he knew all too well the dangers that came with putting your life in the hands of another. And he was tempted to tell her everything: the location of the hidden entrance to the cult’s underground facility, the plan for after they’d breached the security system, where Chalen’s beloved was kept, and how to work the evac.
There were two problems with full disclosure. One, it had been twenty years, and although he knew the cult was still going strong—because the Dhavos had relished his role as a demigod too goddamn much to ever give it up—there was no knowing what had changed since Duran had last been there. What intel he had could be obsolete, and without him to figure things out? She was going to fail spectacularly.
The second reason he kept quiet? He had to remain indispensable or he lost his only leverage with her. There was going to come a moment when he was going to need to go his own way, when their objectives of infiltrating the compound and evading capture were going to shift to separate imperatives.
When her goal to get the beloved and his only chance for revenge were going to take them in different directions.
There was no telling when this split was going to occur, and because of the way Chalen had set this up, she was supposed to bring Duran back to that cell in the conqueror’s dungeon. Not going to happen. And he had to make sure she was placed in the position of having to choose between her brother’s life and his own freedom.
It was his only chance.
As the grim reality of their “relationship” resonated with him, he thought it was ironic that his version of freedom was about killing another. It wasn’t a safe home, a mate, or even an absence of physical pain.
Freedom was murdering his father for everything that had been done to his mahmen. And then, if he lived through that?
He was going to return to Chalen’s castle. But not as a prisoner.
So no, he could not provide her with more information.
Abruptly, Duran’s eyes lowered to her mouth—and a thought that was truly, fundamentally, incredibly unhelpful ricocheted like a stray bullet through his head: He wished he could provide her with other things.
Like his blood . . . his sex.
That he went to such an inappropriate place, even if it was only in his mind, made him recall when her scent had first registered. There was something about this particular female that kindled him, and he couldn’t explain it. Back when he’d been in the cult, there had been no sex allowed—at least not unless the Dhavos decreed it, and then it involved the great male himself.
Duran had always been too worried about rescuing his mahmen to think much about the ban or to follow through on whatever might have, ever so briefly, turned his eye. And then when he’d been in the dungeon? Taking those veins had been about survival, not attraction.
This female . . . Ahmare . . . had changed all that for him. Not that either one of them were in a position to do anything about it. Or, in her case, so inclined.
“Water?” he asked as he held out a jug.
This had to be what canned corn felt like, Ahmare thought as she chewed and looked around at all the metal.
The bunker had been fabricated from sheets of steel bolted together, the seams overlapping and riveted with vertical lineups of bolts. For some reason, the orderly rows of hexagonal heads made her think of the old Victorian dresses that had been in her mahmen’s closet, the buttons down the backs evenly spaced in their hooks or holes like well-behaved pupils.
Taking another bite of the sandwich she’d made with the Shadow, she found the bread and salami all texture, no taste in her mouth. But it wasn’t like she was eating to enjoy.
“More water?” the prisoner said.
As she took what he held out and drank again, a part of her brain acknowledged that she was placing her lips where his had been.
Her eyes went to his beard. She could see nothing of his mouth with the long growth and she decided that was a good thing. Unless, of course, everything under there was ugly, then maybe it would help—because she shouldn’t be thinking about things like lips . . . and tongues.
His lips. His tongue.
The trouble was, his scent in her nose, replacing as it did the tinny high notes of the metal-laced air, was working telephone lines on her switchboard that hadn’t rung in a very, very long time.
And then there were his shoulders. Under the well-washed flak shirt he’d put on, they shifted as he took his bites, unbaggied a second sandwich, drank more water. Every time his arm rose, his bicep pulled the sleeve so tight she knew its seam was straining, and every time his arm went down, the shirt seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, a test passed.
His hair was drying now that they were out of the humidity, the waves turning into curls at the long ends, and she had a feeling it would be soft to the touch in a way his body would not. The shampoo he’d used in the Shadow’s shower had left it all shiny—or maybe it had just been soap that he’d rubbed all over his head.
Funny, she couldn’t smell whatever it had been. Usually at the gym where she worked, she had to train her nose away from all the bodywashes, Biolages, and colognes, the human need to artificially enhance their scents a reflection of their subpar olfactory range.
She had this male in her nose and down the back of her throat—
Stay focused on Ahlan, she told herself. What she needed to do was—
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
As the prisoner spoke, Ahmare jerked and had to catch up with what the syllables meant.
“You’re staring at me,” he said as he finished the sandwich. “And I can only guess you’re worried about how the day is going to go. So let me just get that out of the way. I’m not going to touch you.”
The fact that her libido felt a sting of rejection made her want to bang her head into one of the walls until she left a dent in the shape of her own face.
H
e pointed over to the bunk. “You can sleep there.” Then he pointed across the way in the opposite direction, to a bare wall. “I’ll sleep here. And you always have that trigger. You can drop me in a heartbeat, isn’t that what you said?”
Yes, she had been reminding herself of that fact at different points in this shitty adventure they were on. But concern for her personal safety hadn’t been why she’d been staring at him now, not that he was ever going to know the real reason.
“So tell me about your brother,” the prisoner said as he packed up the empty baggies, picking one to hold all the others.
Ahmare took a deep breath and figured talking was better than silence. “He’s about six-five, so a little shorter than you. Dark hair like mine. Eyes my green color. He came along sixty years after me. I was excited.”
Such basic statistics. That told nothing about Ahlan, really.
She stared down at the half-moon that she’d made in the bread when she’d taken her bite. “Live wire, Ahlan was—I mean, Ahlan is—a live wire. And that was a great characteristic before the raids, something that made the house come alive. After my parents were killed, though . . .” She shook her head. “He went off the rails. In that regard, we both played to type. I doubled down on the self-control, he became a firework going in a thousand different directions. I refused to think about my grief, burying myself in learning skills in self-defense and weapons that came too late. He ran from his, following any distraction he could.”
Clearing her throat, she looked up. “I can’t finish this sandwich. Do you want it?”
The prisoner reached out, and it was then that she noticed two out of his five fingers had no nails.
“They pulled them off so many times,” he explained, “that they stopped growing back.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as he popped what she’d given him into his mouth and put his hand palm up in his lap so the nail beds didn’t show.
“How did Chalen get involved in the story?” he asked.
She opened her mouth to speak. But couldn’t seem to get any words out.
The prisoner’s brows went low, but he didn’t seem offended. It was more like bad memories were coming back to him.
“My father gave me to Chalen,” he told her. When she recoiled, he smiled. At least she thought he did. It was hard to be sure because of the beard. “My father is a very superstitious male, and superstition becomes a hard fact if you believe in it enough.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My father believes that if you kill a direct descendant of yours, you suffer a mortal event yourself. It’s like in his mind, he and I are intrinsically tied together, and if he causes my death, it’s tantamount to committing suicide. He’ll die as well.”
“I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
“It’s an Old Country thing.”
“I was born in the New World.”
“So was I. The old ways live on, though, don’t they.” He planted his palms flat behind his hips and leaned into them. “He also believed I was going to come after him one night. Tricky situation for a guy who has plans to live a long life. His personal Grim Reaper out in the world, tracking him, waiting for him to slip up, and yet he couldn’t eliminate the threat.”
“You make it sound like you’re his killer.”
“I will be.”
Ahmare blinked at this. “Why?”
“He raped my mahmen. Repeatedly. That’s how I was born. He had her once and couldn’t stop. When her needing came, he took her over and over again. The nature of his addiction to her crippled him, and I believe his plan was to kill her as soon as he had his last hurrah during her fertile time—like a goddamn alcoholic going on a bender. But then when it was over, it dawned on him that he might get in trouble with that whole can’t-kill-my-young thing. He had to wait to see if it took, if she got pregnant, and she did. I have no doubt he hoped she and I would both die on the birthing bed because I heard he had repeated nightmares that what he had sired would exact revenge for the way the conception had happened. No such luck on the maternal/fetal funeral, and then, horror of horrors, I was a son. Like a female wouldn’t be strong enough to take revenge?”
“So he gave you to Chalen so someone else would kill you.”
“Bingo.”
“You were a member of the cult, then?”
“I was born into it, yes.”
“And what happened to your mahmen?”
“My father kept her alive because he was in love with her and he liked to torture her with his presence. The second she died of natural causes, he sent me to Chalen. He might have done that sooner, but I look like him, and every time she met my eyes, it was like he was right with her. He’s a sick fuck.” There was a long pause. “She loved me, though.” As the prisoner’s voice cracked, he cleared his throat. “I don’t know how . . . but she loved me as her son. How the hell could she do that? She should have hated me.”
“None of this was your fault.”
Bleak eyes met her own. “No, I’m just the living, breathing symbol of everything she endured. I wouldn’t have been able to be like her if the roles had been reversed.”
“A mahmen’s love is the greatest force in the universe.” Ahmare thought of her own family. “It is sacred. It’s stronger than hate. Stronger than death, too. Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the day and I can swear my mahmen’s hand is on my shoulder and her sweet voice is telling me all will be well because she will never leave me. It’s as though, even from the Fade, she watches over me.”
But if that was true, Ahmare thought, how had her brother gone down such a bad path? Surely the female watched over him, too?
“I will never understand it,” the prisoner said.
She refocused. “You don’t have to. You don’t even need to accept it because every breath you take and each beat of your heart does that. Your sire might have been evil, but love won in the end, didn’t it?”
There was another long period of quiet.
“No,” he said eventually. “I don’t think it does.”
13
SO HOW GOOD ARE you with a knife?”
As the prisoner asked the question, Ahmare had a quick image of her stab—har-har—at decapitation.
“Average,” she said as her stomach rolled. “Why?”
“I need to get this off.” He tugged at his beard and hair. “And without scissors and a razor, I’m going to need help.”
“Mirror,” she added.
“Huh?”
“You’d also do well to have a mirror.” She shifted onto her knees and unholstered her hunting knife. “But I can do it. My father used to shave with a straight edge and he taught me how.”
“You mind if we go over there?” Duran nodded at the bunk. “I’m aching.”
As he got his height and weight off the floor, he grunted and there were cracking sounds, like branches snapping during the dry fall. Also a pop or two that made her wonder if he wasn’t going to need to have a bone set.
“How old are you?” she blurted.
“I don’t keep track of those things. But I am certainly too young to be moving like this.” He limped over and groaned as he sat himself down on the thin, bare mattress. “Too many broken things healed in bad ways.”
Ahmare took her time getting to her feet. Otherwise, it felt like she was showing off the fact that she didn’t hurt all over.
As she approached him with the knife, she was amazed that he sat there so calmly as someone he didn’t know came toward him with a shiny blade capable of doing damage—
Without warning, the Mississippi delta of blood spilling from Rollie’s open, ragged neck barged in, an out-of-order interloper that she would rather have stayed away from her proverbial establishment. God, if she never thought about that death again, it would be too soon. The trouble was, she couldn’t ignore the fact that the last time she had had this hilt in her palm, it had been to kill.
Now, it was to shave.
Could
she be like the blade? she wondered. Could she turn away from carnage and return to the mundane? Along those lines, after all this, what would she be like, if she survived?
She thought of that hand analogy that she’d given the Shadow, the one where Rollie’s dead fingers penetrated the big divide in her life and contaminated her peaceable past. Except maybe the contamination hadn’t started with Rollie. Maybe it had started with the raids, with the death of her parents. Maybe that was the beginning of everything turning toxic and her present circumstance was a trickle-down of her parents’ blood being spilled.
Maybe she’d gotten the timeline wrong, even if her conclusion was right.
“Well?” the prisoner prompted.
She had come to stand before him, she realized, and she was staring down at his bearded face without seeing him.
“Sorry,” she said as she put the trigger in her back pocket and tried to focus on how she was going to get rid of that facial hair without cutting him.
When he reached out and took her hand, she jumped, but all he did was hold on to her, a solid, surprisingly calm anchor amidst the chaos.
“It’s okay.” His voice was soft. “I know what it’s like to have the world disappear behind things you’d rather not re-see. You can take your time coming back, and not just because we’ve got hours ahead of us.”
Ahmare looked down at where they had unexpectedly connected. His palm dwarfed hers, but the warmth of his skin was exactly the same as her own.
His thumb, his nail-less, bruised thumb, stroked over her twice.
Then he dropped his hold and tilted his chin up, ready whenever she was.
Tears formed in Ahmare’s eyes, making him wavy. She could handle anything but kindness, she realized.
The female was absolutely stunning, Duran thought. And not in the conventional sense.
It wasn’t even about her physical presence. In fact, as the conviction overtook him, he couldn’t have described any of her features. He couldn’t even see her.
Because it wasn’t about her face or her body.