Page 75 of Bound

One spot, up and to the right, looked just like the rest of the hardened clay but was actually a rubberized patch that glowed beneath the heat of her touch. Exchanging “Shake It Off” for a triumphant gasp, she pushed against the plastic—

Until her gasp became a yelp, blending with the whir of activated gears.

Gears that pulled the entire wall into a hidden pocket in the cavern floor.

“Well,” she murmured. “Jamie Bond, reporting for duty.”

Her light giggle bounced around the walls as she continued on.

But all too soon, she was once more not so ready to laugh.

The passage bent several directions, even curving so much to make her think she had just made a massive loop, but never did she come across any forks or crisscrossing paths. She only had two options for her journey: forward or back. Her compass indicated she had veered slightly to the east, but not so far that she was far from her original estimation of a destination.

What was going on?

Why could she not hear at least a faint bustle from the offices and kitchens on the other side of the walls? These stones were not lined with soundproofing foam…

She scuffed to a stop. Emitted a huff to match. Technically, this might be escape challenge number two.

As her head resolved itself to the fact, her heart clenched. She could not change the layout of this tunnel. It was what it was—just like so many other things about life itself right now. About the universe that would go on turning, despite her soul’s pleas that she be let off the wild ride. Better yet, that it would all spin in reverse. That she could be cast back to the night when a towering force of nature strode into a Paris alley and sucked the air from every membrane in her lungs. When that air had returned in the form of a moan from deep in her throat, as he’d pressed her body to a wall and his fingers to her clit in a secret Montmartre warehouse…

Never again.

As the syllables taunted her mind, desolation thrashed her soul.

And her will could no longer hold her tears at bay.

Never again.

“Stop it,” she rasped at her roiling heart. Somehow, as she compelled her feet to drag her forward again, she added, “Stop trying to think it will be any different, damn it!”

Because it would not be.

Time would not rewind. Or reset.

The adventure was over.

And so were she and Brickham.

Even if she could figure out where he had absconded, she was rapidly running out of time to do anything about it. Too late for undoing the damage of Evrest’s interference. Too late to beg Brickham to stay a few days more. Too late to hope that in those days, he would look at her as more than his little Paris asset.

That he would simply look at her as…more.

“Stop. It.”

She bit the words onto the air in time to the way she dug her stomps into the ground. And yes, it really was that by now. Sometime in the middle of her soul’s fissuring, the castle’s concrete foundation had become a hard dirt path. She had not perceived the change until now, when her brain took tactile pleasure in grinding her shoes against the damp earth.

A diversion she was smart to recognize, since it did not last long.

Because the ground was now…emulsifying.

In less than a dozen steps, she went from tromping across packed clay to slorping through a muddy mire.

What on earth?

In the figurative and literal senses…

She would have found a better way to express that, if not for the raw shock breaking in on her brain—courtesy of some new sounds on the air.