Hours counted. Seconds . . . counted.
Except now, after the double cross and Chalen’s new assignment of what was probably a suicide mission, she was back where she’d been as she’d tracked Rollie and tried to figure out how to kill him: Waiting with a bomb in her lap, the ticking minutes driving her crazy.
As she was whipped by branches and vines, taken deeper into the forest by a stranger, she tried to figure a way around losing time during the day.
She tapped Duran’s shoulder. When he didn’t respond, she tapped harder.
His bearded face turned to the side. Over the din, he said, “Almost there—”
“Stop!” she yelled. “Stop now!”
“. . . you hurt?”
She’d clearly missed the “Are” at the beginning of that. “We need to think about this! There has to be a way—”
As he ignored her, and refocused on the tangle ahead, she realized that if she made him halt just to have a conversation that went nowhere, she was only wasting the very thing she couldn’t stand losing—like a plane crash survivor in the desert using the last of her water to wash her face instead of drink.
But goddamn it, when the hell was she going to make any forward progress here?
Finally, he slowed. Stopped.
“Get off,” he said.
She was already on that, and she was also on the trigger to that collar—in the event this pre-dawn ride was merely an excuse to confirm her opinion about this damp, bug-ridden, leaf-choked place being where the bloated corpses of women were found. Or, in her case, females. Not that her remains would last long. Even with the canopy of vines and tree leaves overhead, the warning prickle on her skin told her that the sun was gathering momentum on its rise.
“We go on foot for the rest of the way.”
Ahmare was grateful as he took off at a jog, that backpack of his strapped on so tight, it was like the saddle on a horse, nothing loose and slappy.
The way he held off branches and ducked and dodged was impressive, and she found herself mirroring his movements, the two of them becoming dance partners to the tune of such classics as “Up in Smoke in Ten More Minutes,” “Where the Fuck Are We?” and the old standby “Jesus Christ, When Will We Get There.”
And then everything became darker and a little cooler as they hit a gradual rise.
The vines backed off and the tree trunks grew smaller and the canopy lifted enough so she wasn’t getting smacked in the face. Underfoot, there were rotting layers of decomposing leaves, a tiramisu of terrain.
Great, they’d gotten through the salad course. Now they were on to dessert.
Rocks now. Granite outcroppings with crevasses.
They were skirting the base of a mountain, cool air coming down from a summit that she could not see, the rivers of temperature change so distinct, she knew exactly when she entered and left them.
The prisoner stopped next to a rotting stump. Picking up two sticks, each about three feet in length, he laid one next to the other at an angle.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, looking up through the trees.
She blinked hard at the shockingly pale sky, her retinas yelling at her.
“Come on, this way.”
When she didn’t jump back into the run, he grabbed her hand and dragged her along as her eyes watered and her sight was limited to mostly blurry what-is-that.
The prisoner jerked her to a halt. “Squeeze through here.”
Trying to focus, she wondered what the hell he was talking about. There was no “here” that she could see, just a collection of massive boulders that seemed to have been dropped like balls from the hand of a god at the foot of the mountain they were going around.
“Here.”
He changed her angle, pulling her around to reveal . . . yes, there was a slice of a gap in there.
Ahmare went think-thin sideways, her windbreaker scraping the lichen on both front and back. Soon enough, the compression gave way to a larger hidden belly illuminated only by the fissure she’d gone through. When the prisoner joined her, she was so close to him, she got his hair in her face.
Click.
The flashlight he outed beamed around. “Just where I remembered.”
She had no clue what he was talking about. There was only more of the blackened rock wall of the narrow cave—
The prisoner reached up and dropped a camouflage drape that had been hooked into the stone, the heavy-duty fabric painted and stitched to disguise its true, man-made identity. Behind the folds, a stainless steel door streaked with the earthy blood of the forest gleamed like a mud puddle.
The prisoner punched something into a keypad mounted on the left side at waist height. There was no series of beeps. Nothing lit up. Nothing released, either.
“Damn it.” He repeated the sequence. “Come on—”
Like a sleeper who’d hit the snooze button, some kind of system woke up and there was a dull thunk followed by a slide that resonated too loudly for there to be much grease on whatever was moving.
The hiss was less air lock, more not-been-opened-in-twenty-years.
As Duran went in first, Ahmare wanted to be flashlighting things, but she had his trigger box in one hand and a gun in the other.
There was no telling what was in there, and she was taking no damned chances.
12
EXACTLY AS HE’D LEFT it, Duran thought as he stepped inside the bunker and motion-activated lighting came on.
The hideaway was a stainless steel room set into the base of the mountain, a proverbial bread box buried in the earth. He’d built and outfitted the place over the period of a year and a half, and the hideout had been crucial for his revenge plan. He’d stolen money from the cult’s vast resources to have it constructed, siphoning cash out of the cult’s vault and then paying humans, who had no idea they were working for a vampire, to complete the project. The electricity that fed it had likewise been purloined from the spiritual compound, miles of cable buried underground.
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.