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It was a testament to their effectiveness that they hadn’t been the first thing she’d seen.
The route Jack took down to the dais was circular and slow and diverted. The six of them continued to move as a unit, but she was aware of the males creating space, then closing it, then creating it again. She had no idea why they bothered—until she realized that it was to make things seem like they were just sort of together, instead of definitively so. In fact, the coordination was so subtle and randomly unrandom that they had to have done this before, and she wondered when. Under what circumstances. But like that mattered?
When they reached the dais, her eyes locked on those posts. Down at the bases, there were bundles of chains, the blackened links piled up.
There was fresh blood on one of the trunks.
Her eyes went to the nearest guard. He wasn’t looking at her. His stare was behind her and tracking something.
It had to be that male, Apex—
Lucan looked at her. “What did you say me? What the fuck did you say to me?”
Nyx stopped short. “Wait, what—”
Mayhem leaned in. “I said you’re ugly and impotent. And when you’re changed, you’re hairy as an afghan.”
Lucan bared his fangs. “You mother—”
The two of them went for each other, their big bodies lunging around her and slamming hard, fists curled, faces flushed with aggression— and as soon as the fight started, a flank of guards poured in from the right-hand side of the dais, jogging out of some darkened place. Were they always on backup? Or was this the changing of the guard—
Jack’s hand grabbed her own and gave her a sharp pull backward.
As the other prisoners surged forward toward the fight, crumpled paper money coming out and being wagered as Mayhem and Lucan went at it, the guards circled around—and she and Jack hustled to the edge of the tremendous and growing knot of bodies, going against the flow of other prisoners who headed toward the commotion.
Pulling her along, Jack skirted the disturbance and led her into a thin fissure in the rock wall about twenty-five feet off from the dais, the fight, the guards. The pitch-black split in the cave was so narrow, they single-filed it at first, and then had to pivot and shuffle sideways when not even her shoulders could fit. The smell was moldy and stale, and she came face-to-face with an unexpected shot of claustrophobia thanks to the overwhelming stink, the prevailing darkness, and the close touch of the cramped space.
With no other orientation, she clung to the soft sounds of Jack’s movements like they were light to orientate herself with. The shifts of his clothing, the whisper of his feet, the occasional grunt as he obviously tried to squeeze his bigger size through the ever-narrowing passage, were the only reasons she could keep going.
Jack didn’t slow down. Until he had to. As the fissure became so cramped she had rock in her face, on her back, on her butt, she bumped into him.
“It’s not much farther,” he whispered. “You can do it.”
He must have scented her fear. “It’s not me I’m worried about.”
Liar, she thought.
Just when she was about to lose it, when she was opening her mouth to tell him she couldn’t go another foot, the smell changed.
Is that fresh air? she wondered.
Jack stopped and had to force his head around. Or at least she assumed that was what he did, given that his voice suddenly reached her ears more directly.
“We’re heading to the left, and we’re going to have to move very fast. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous this is.”
“I got it.”
“Nyx, I’m serious—”
“Shut up. If this fails, it will not be because of me,” she vowed.
For a brief moment, the Jackal closed his eyes in the black void of the fissure. Courage was as basic a need as air in life. Like oxygen, it kept a person alive, and in the darkest of hours, in the worst of circumstances, at the most dire of cliffs, one needed more of it than ever.
He was not surprised at Nyx’s iron resolve.
More than that, he was inspired by her. And it had been a very, very long time since that pilot light in the center of his chest had flared to life with any kind of engagement for the opposite sex. Yet here he was the now, buoyed by her steady resolve, propelled farther by her example.
If he could have dropped his lips to hers, he would have. Instead, he did what he could.
He took her where she had to go.
The last fifteen yards were the hardest, the tightest. But finally there was a glow he could focus on, and he made sure there were no sounds or smells outside before he shoved himself from the constriction. As he popped free into a shallow open area that was stacked with canned food in crates, his eyes stung in the light. Wheeling around, he caught Nyx as she fell forward, pulling her up against his body and holding her tight for the briefest of moments. As he took a deep breath, her scent replaced everything.
