Against his better judgment Ethan drew a business card from his jacket and handed it to the waitress. “You see her again, would you give her this?”
She read the card. “You’re a ways from home, Sheriff Jemmet.”
He pocketed his wallet. “Heading back now.”
She nodded and pinned the card up on the small cork-board next to the register. She turned back, clearly hesitant, and then said, “With you looking for her, maybe I ought to give you this.” She reached under the counter and brought up a square plastic basket filled with odds and ends. From it she took a short strand of silver-linked miniatures.
“Where did you find this?”
“She dropped it on her way out. Looks like the clasp broke. By the time I saw it over there”—the waitress pointed to a spot near the entrance—“she was already gone.”
Lori had taken off something from her wrist and dropped it on the nightstand. He vaguely remembered seeing a glint of silver.
“When she comes back looking for this,” he told the waitress, “you give her my card and tell her to call me.”
Ethan didn’t examine the charm bracelet until he was back in the Escalade. It was an expensive, custom-designed piece made of pure silver and stamped in three places with maker marks, which would help him when he tracked down who had made it. From the fine, twisted links hung seven exquisite charms: a rosebud, a star, a crescent moon, a quill, a book, a crystal ball, and a cameo. Diamond chips accented five of the charms; the crystal ball had been fashioned from a dark blue moonstone.
The cameo, an oval of onyx set with a circle of rubies, had an ivory carving of a man’s face in profile. He turned over the minuscule portrait and saw three words engraved in fancy script.
Essere Libero Valori.
“Italian.” Ethan didn’t speak the language, so he couldn’t translate the phrase, but he could Google it later. It was the last word that fascinated him:
Valori
. “Valori. Lori.” He repeated the name, drawing out the syllables until he realized what the English version might be. “Valerie.”
He tucked the bracelet into his breast pocket, feeling a little smug now. He knew women and their trinkets, and something this personal and expensive had to be dear to her. Aside from her cheap watch, it had been the only jewelry she had worn. Whoever Lori/Valori/Valerie was, whatever she was running from, she’d be back for her bracelet. When she called him, he’d make the trip down the mountain one more time.
And then, Ethan decided, he’d slap the cuffs on her and take her back with him.
Chapter 5
A
jolt brought Lilah out of the darkness and somewhat awake; she felt so sleepy she almost slipped back at once. Something held down her chest and legs, the weight of a heavy arm, a leg. Someone was beside her, in her bed. Then she felt the hard, cold surface under her and wondered how she’d ended up on the floor.
Opening her eyes took a very long time, and when she did pry her lids apart, they felt gummy, as if they’d been sealed with defective glue. Blinking to clear her blurred vision, she began to register other things. A blue tarp over her, covering her from head to toe. Something metal around her right wrist. The sense of being exposed came from her body; she was naked. Her right arm had gone numb, but not enough to miss the sensation of a long stretch of warm skin over hard muscle.
A body.
She squinted in the dimness, trying to see who it was, where she was. Short, black bristles of hair no more than a quarter inch long covered a scalp, curved over an ear. She shifted her gaze down, and saw part of a cheekbone, the tapered end of a wide black brow, the jut of a hard jaw.
A man was right next to her. A strange, unconscious man.
A
naked
man.
Lilah swallowed against her dry throat, her head swimming with sensory overload. “Help.” It came out like a cough, short and wheezing. She tried again. “Help. Me.”
The head next to her face turned slowly, exposing more of his face. He opened his eye slowly, only partway, and stared at her. From the one she could see, he had dark eyes, framed by lashes beaded with drops of water. Sweat streaked his skin and collected in little pools by the bridge of his nose and the corner of his mouth. He tried to pull back, only to go still. A muscle throbbed in his cheek as his jaw shifted.
“Drugged,” he breathed out, his voice more air than sound. “Taken.”
“Me?” She watched his head move in a small nod. “You?” Another nod. “No. Please, no.”
The man didn’t say anything, but she felt something move against her neck. His fingers, stiff and clumsy. His was the arm draped across her, and he was using it to try to reassure her.
Lilah didn’t dare close her eyes again. “Where? Who?”
“Truck.” The lines beside his mouth deepened as he tried again to move, and managed to slide a little of his weight over her right arm. “Men. Two.”
Lilah went still, listening. Now she felt the motion of the truck beneath them, heard the hum of the engine. The truck traveled at a steady speed, but she didn’t hear any signs that there were men around them. She couldn’t try to move until she knew for sure.
She gazed at the man beside her and swallowed against the dryness until it receded. “Are they GenHance?” He nodded again, confirming her worst fears. “Where are the men?”
He shifted his eyes up toward the sound of the engine.
Lilah felt his rigid body tremble, and saw pain in his eyes before he shut them tightly. He was in worse shape than she was, perhaps having some reaction to the drugs he’d been given. She moved the lead weight of her left arm, forcing it up until she felt the back of his arm under her hand, and held on as he shook.
“Easy,” she said, over and over.
Gradually his convulsive movements slowed and then stopped, and he released a breath against her cheek. A moment later his left hand moved from her neck, his fingers sliding up until he cupped her cheek.
He opened his eyes, blinking away sweat that was now pouring down his face from his hairline. “Must. Escape.”
Her heart constricted. “You’re too sick.”
Now he moved his head from side to side. “Better. Stronger. Soon.”
Lilah understood the string of words. He wasn’t convulsing, he was fighting the drugs—or they were wearing off. She watched him as he rested, although like her he kept his eyes open and on her face. She tested her limbs, grimacing as her right arm began to wake with a wave of pins and needles. She managed to lift it, startled by how heavy it was, and then she saw the reason why as her flexing fingers touched the backs of his.
“They handcuffed us together.”
He nodded slowly.
“Jackasses.” She tried to hold his hand for a moment, but they were knuckle to knuckle, so she could only rub the backs of her fingers against his. He had huge hands. “My name is Lilah.” She glanced down at his neck, where the only thing he wore, a length of chain with two metal tags, lay against his skin. She could read one of them. “Walker Kimball.” She looked into his eyes. “You’re a marine.”
Walker’s expression turned curiously impassive, as if he was waiting for some negative reaction. From the beginning the war had never been popular, but Lilah knew the troops who were sent over to fight in the Middle East were never consulted as to whether they thought it was worthwhile or not. They were sent there to fight, many of them to die, in a conflict that probably made as little sense to them as it did the rest of the world.
The other tag was an enameled navy blue football helmet with the icon of a white horse with an orange mane. “Looks like you’re a Denver Broncos fan, too.” Lilah smiled. “Were you coming home on leave?”
“No. War.” He struggled to get the next word out. “Afghanistan.”
“They took you from Afghanistan? From the fighting over there?” He nodded, and Lilah felt sick. “How?”
“Wounded. Alone.” And then he said one last word that chilled her to the bottom of her heart. “Sold.”
Aphrodite and her other Takyn friends had told Lilah about GenHance’s plans to harvest their DNA and use it to create a superhuman vaccine, one they intended to sell to factions and governments for use on their covert operatives and soldiers. Walker must have been purchased for use as a test subject; who better to experiment on than a real soldier who had been left for dead? No one would ever know what had really happened to him. The military would simply list him as one of the missing in action.
“We have to get out of here,” she told him, gripping his arm with her free hand. “How much do you weigh?” She’d drag him out if she had to.
“Too much. Rest.” Walker moved his hand to stroke his palm over her hair. “Soon.” He gave her a small, grim smile before he repeated, “Soon.”
Until that moment the enormity of the situation hadn’t actually registered, but the gentle touch of his hand brought it home. He was hurt; she was helpless. They were probably going to die, and not quickly or cleanly. Lilah clenched her teeth, fighting back a sob.
“Don’t cry.”
Walker had shifted his head so that his lips brushed the edge of her ear, the words breathed without voice. If she had woken up alone, Lilah realized, she would have called out loud for help until the men had stopped and come for her. They’d already stripped her out of her clothes and done God only knew what to her while she was unconscious. She didn’t want to think of what they’d want to do to her if they’d found her awake.
His hand was moving again, brushing over the hair at her temple, not as awkward now. She had never understood exactly what it meant to be trapped, to be powerless in the face of indifference and cruelty. The men who had drugged and abducted and stripped her had no mercy. Her feelings, her needs, didn’t matter. They had denied her even the most basic decency.
It had to be worse for Walker. Left for dead while serving his country, alone and suffering, perhaps making his peace with the brevity of his life, only to have his body stolen and sold like a piece of meat . . . it was too much.
“Lilah.”
She hadn’t realized that she was silently weeping until she opened her eyes and looked through the shimmer of her tears. They softened his stern features, and for the first time she realized how handsome he was, like some dark angel, the light in his eyes glowing in two slivers, as if reflecting some divine flaming sword.
“Sorry.” She gulped back another sob, aware that she had to guard against making any sound that might be overheard by the men driving the truck again. “Where are they taking us?”
“Denver.”
She had no way to tell where they were now. Once, she’d driven straight from Lake Gem to Tupelo, Mississippi, and that had taken her twelve hours with two short rest stops. Since drugs rarely affected her as they did normal people, she guessed she had been unconscious for six, maybe eight hours. That put them in the center of Alabama. With roughly fifteen hundred miles between them and Denver, they had maybe twenty-four hours left.
In another hour or two, Lilah felt sure, the drugs would wear off completely, and she’d be able to attempt an escape. Walker wasn’t Takyn like her, however, so he would need more time to recover. She might be able to free herself from the cuffs, but abandoning him was not an option. Everything depended on how fast he could shake off the drugs they’d used on him.
“Soon,” he murmured, as if he were reading her mind.
He flexed his fingers against hers, and she bent her arm, bringing up their bound hands between them so she could see the cuffs. They had been cinched too tight to work off. She still felt so weak she couldn’t hold their hands up longer than a minute before her muscles began to tremble.
“I’m afraid,” she whispered to him.
“I know.” He shifted his arm down so that he held her waist in a half embrace. “We will escape.”
He could barely move, and she was still so listless she could barely think straight. “How?”
“Together.”
A medieval Italian villa on an uninhabited, windswept island off the coast of Scotland should have seemed at the very least incongruous; instead it nestled like a crown jewel at the base of a treeless cliff. As the two visitors approached, the ornate marble casements and hand-glazed tile work did seem to collectively sniff over being transplanted to such wild surroundings.
Guards emerged from the gated entrance, both armed with automatic weapons, and searched the couple with brisk competence before instructing them to wait. One remained behind to watch them as the other placed a call to the main house.
“Nice place,” Nicola Jefferson said as she studied the scrolled, white-painted iron gates between them and the villa. The wind coming off the sea tugged at her long ponytail of white curls. “Who did he steal it from? A pope?”
“I believe it was a gift from a grateful subject.” Gabriel Seran, her companion and lover, smiled a little, his green eyes glowing with affection as he ignored the villa and kept his gaze on her face. “You are nervous.”
“No, I’m not.” Nick shoved her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. “Just remind me never to volunteer to be his Secret Santa.”