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“Don’t be frightened. You’re doing fine. Just remember. You will not make a sound.”
A command, not a question.
“If you wake those two pieces of shit over there, I’ll have to kill them—and that might complicate things. Understand?”’
Kill them? Kill them?
Who was this man?
“Nod your head if you agree you’ll keep quiet and do as I say.”
She nodded again. Why not? She couldn’t do anything else… But the truth was, she didn’t understand. Not anything.
He talked about killing as if it would be an inconvenience. He knew her name. He hadn’t hurt her, but he could have.
He was here to take her home.
Really?
Then who had sent him? Where had he come from? Not from the coalition’s headquarters. She was sure of that. There were men there. The director. A couple of wildlife biologists. Construction workers. Nice guys, but she couldn’t imagine one of them either threatening to cut off her breath until she lost consciousness or saying he’d have to kill somebody if things didn’t work out.
“We’re going to walk backwards. Ready?”
She nodded again and they moved back together.
It was still not yet dawn, but the sky, patchy through the canopy of trees, was growing lighter and lighter even as the distance between herself, her rescuer and her captors grew.
She wanted to turn and run.
Her rescuer must have sensed it. His hand tightened on hers, forcing her even closer against him.
“Not yet,” he whispered.
The figures in the clearing grew smaller. Trees, vines, tall bushes began to close in. At last, Alessandra could see nothing but dark green of the jungle.
Her rescuer bent his head to hers.
“Turn around.”
The sof
t, rough urgency in his voice made her heartbeat quicken. She squeezed his hand. Together they spun around.
And ran.
They were on the same path the kidnappers had taken hours earlier. It was mostly a mix of soft grasses and earth; she knew it muffled the sound of their footsteps even if, in her mind, they were as loud as booted feet pounding over asphalt.
And running was hard. Every inch of her hurt. She’d stumbled and fallen endless times, and the bruises from those moments had been made worse because of how often her kidnappers had amused themselves by dragging her after them instead of giving her the chance to get to her feet. Bugs had feasted on her exposed skin as well as in places she hadn’t thought bugs could get. Her mouth and throat were parched from lack of water. Her wrists and ankles screamed with agony where they’d been bound.
So what?
She was free.
If that meant running until she dropped in her tracks, so be it.
Not hat the man with her seemed likely to let that happen.
The pace he set was brutal, but no matter how often she slipped or stumbled, he kept moving and he saw to it she kept moving along with him.
