89
I DOVE DOWN. Yasmin’s body was gone. I could feel the tug of the moving current beneath the relative quiet of the shaft.
She’d sunk and she’d been swept away.
I filled my body with oxygen, heaving in slow, deep, saturating breaths. I pushed my fear of the water deep back into my brain.
Then I went down. The dark water was cold and clutching. It felt like death grasping at me. I stayed close to the roof of the cave that met the end of the shaft; it was smooth stone, worn by the ceaseless knife of the water. The current shoved me forward. I brushed hard against the rocks that scraped my back and my head. Agony lanced my ribs.
Ten seconds in the deep.
No pain. No fear. I pressed on. Trying not to panic, trying to stay streamlined like a torpedo to move me along faster. The blackness was complete, like nothing I had ever experienced. I kicked, kept my hands out in front of me to try to protect myself from any hidden obstruction in the pitch black, told myself I had all the time in the world.
Fifty seconds. So I guessed. My lungs began to burn. Panic tugged at the edges of my mind. A little tug and then tearing.
I saw a blossom of dim light to my left and hurled myself toward it. The light grew brighter. I kicked, I swam, trying to cut through the current to the unexpected glow. I saw a stone circle, dimly outlined from the light above, just like the shaft I’d fled. I kicked upward, fighting the urge to let the stale air—precious gold—out of my lungs. The shaft here was narrower. I went up.
And exploded into air.
I took long, huffing breaths. A grate lay two feet above my head, brown with rust. I breathed like I’d never breathed before. I tried to push open the grate. It was locked into place, with heavy iron bolts. I couldn’t get up the shaft to the rest of the complex.
But the sound of the water was loud, and this must have been the rush of current I’d heard heading from the stables into the complex. I tried to pull the grate from the stone, and I realized I was getting nowhere and losing precious strength.
I wanted to remain in this pocket of light and air, but I couldn’t. My kid needed me. Mila needed me. Had Edward killed her? I thought not; he wanted to know who she worked for.
I had to go back into the darkness.
I took the long, low, heavy breaths, looking up through the stone shaft like a baby glimpsing a distant world at the end of the birth canal. I filled my body with air and kicked back into the blackness.
The cold river swept me away. I could feel a sudden shift downward in the angle of the ceiling. Going down, further from the ground, from the surface and the sacred air. Don’t panic. Whatever you do, do not panic.
I fought the urge to turn back to the last shaft. Then I felt the stone not only above me but below me. The tunnel had narrowed into a grave. I tried to turn back, panicking now, the bubbles exploding from me in a rush, and the water swept me forward between the stone jaws.
Narrow, black stone scraping both sides of me. My mother, my father. My brother, staring into a camera, silently pleading for his life. I would be with Danny again. My child. Lucy. I didn’t want my last thought to be of Lucy. I thought of my brother, imagined I felt his strong hand taking mine.
Then no stone pressed against me. Above me, no rock. Light, a thousand miles above me. I kicked. Weakly. My muscles trying their last. Then my head burst above the water into the sweetness. I gasped, wheezed, turned into the water and vomited. I was in the river, bright with sunlight, alive.
I heard a buzz. A plane. I remembered the private runway on the map. And lying in the cold, gray wash of the river I looked up and saw Zaid’s Learjet.
Edward was gone.