Ahmare turned toward the prevailing, humid breeze. “He told me I have to go get his beloved or he’s going to kill my brother. And apparently you’re the one who’s going to take me to his female and help me get her back here. So come on, get up. I don’t have much time.”
She put the lanyard on her wrist and wound its length around her hand until she could palm the device and put her thumb on the trigger.
The male’s eyes struggled to focus on her. They were unbelievably pale now, the irises tiny as if even the dull illumination from the torches strained his retinas like brilliant moonlight.
Maybe that collar held more than just an electrical charge, she thought as she watched it blink.
“I don’t have a lot of time,” she said. “We’ve got to hurry.”
As the male pushed his hands into the hard floor, she almost went over to help him, but she didn’t want to get too close, even with that collar of his.
He was enormous as he rose to his full height.
“You go ahead of me.” She pointed with the torch. “So I know exactly where you are.”
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
“It wouldn’t matter to me if you thought you could. We both know that I can drop you like a bag of sand.”
“What did he tell you?” the male said like an incantation.
“Not here. We don’t talk here.” She motioned around. “I’ll bet you he’s watching us somehow and he can probably hear us. I have a vehicle outside. I hope like hell we can find it.”
A gust from the storm carried more moist July air down into the dungeon.
“Go,” she ordered.
After a moment, the male walked forward, and she maintained a distance between them as the floor began to rise. She told herself she measured every shift of his muscle, swing of his arm, stride of his leg, for signs he was going to wheel around and attack her. But that wasn’t the only reason she was watching him.
His body was still wet. Still glistening. Still full of deadly promise—
Not now, she told her damn libido. After three years of not noticing anything of the opposite sex, now was absolutely, positively not the time to get back on that train. And he was not the right male, at any rate. And goddamn it, she was not that kind of a female—
The male had an ass that went on for days.
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaays.
Your brother is going to die, she told herself, if you screw this up or get killed because you let your guard down around this male.
That grim reality was all she needed to refocus, and twenty yards down, they finished their gradual ascent at a plank bridge that was lowered across the moat.
Lightning flashed, the illumination ricocheting along the wet stone walls like a stray bullet, and the male covered his head, ducking as if he expected to be struck, the muscles all over his back clenching hard. And that was when she noticed that his legs were trembling so badly, she doubted he could walk.
Ahmare came up beside him. “It’s okay. You’re . . . okay.”
The male reared away from her, covering his face with his forearms as if he were going to be struck by something. That was when she noticed the fresh wounds on him. They were down both arms in a series of crisscrosses, as if he’d been lashed protecting himself within the last twelve hours.
When nothing hit him, he slowly lowered his guard. He was breathing hard, his eyes glassy and fixated as he clearly struggled with what was reality and what might be some horrible forthcoming trauma.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Ahmare said roughly.
Strange to speak his own words back to him. Stranger still to realize she meant them.
The male looked at the bridge with obvious wariness, as if he were unsure whether what awaited him on the far side was a worse hell than the one he’d been in. But he started moving, his bare feet careful over the wooden planks. She stuck with him, keeping his pace, the rain lashing at them, getting him wetter and her damp through her windbreaker.
Halfway across the moat, another strike of lightning zigzagged across the sky, and that was when she saw her Explorer over by the main entrance. The bridge she’d first used was tucked up tight, not that she had any present interest in doubling back on Chalen.
“That’s my ride.”
Abruptly, the male stopped and didn’t go any further. “I can’t . . .”
He seemed overwhelmed to the point of shutdown, the storm, the qualified freedom, the whatever-else-was-going-on-for-him clearly jamming up his brain.
She looked at the trigger box in her hand. “If you don’t keep walking, I’m going to have to use this.”
He didn’t bother glancing over at what she was talking about, and she hated to threaten him. All she knew was she had to get him into her Explorer, and she sure as hell wasn’t strong enough to pull a fireman’s carry on him.
She needed to save her brother, and Chalen had given her a weapon.
As well as a map, evidently.
6