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I broke off because JD was shaking his head sadly. He stared at me, waiting for me to make the leap. I felt my jaw fall open. “He was—”
JD nodded. “The cult took him when he was just a kid. Brainwashed him. Trained him to kill. He was one of their best assassins. That’s all he knew, for years.”
I stared at Bradan, up ahead. That’s where his skills came from. And that’s why he was a little…off, like never having been to a party as a teen. For a good chunk of his life, he’d been practically a machine.
“Kian and his other brothers found him and got him out,” JD told me. “They broke the cult’s hold over him. He’s been out of it for years now. But…”
But he’d still killed people. A lot of people. Was that why he was freezing, was he having flashbacks? My distrust of him melted away. The poor guy must be wracked with guilt.
I nodded my thanks to JD and we marched deeper into the jungle.
23
OLIVIA
We walked all morning, and as the sun rose, it got steadily hotter. The tree canopy shielded us from the direct sun but the dense jungle meant there was almost no breeze. “Hotter’n a goat’s butt in a pepper patch,” muttered Colton.
Our faces shone and dripped with sweat: just moving was exhausting. But we had to keep up a brutal pace because we didn’t know how far behind the cartel were.
We had another problem, too. The heat meant we burned through our water more quickly. I’d been sharing Gabriel’s canteen and when he shook it to see how much was left, it sounded worryingly close to empty.
He offered it to me. I shook my head. “You first.” He was carrying a pack, after all, and I wasn’t.
Gabriel raised the canteen and took a slug, then held the canteen out to me.
I just stood there staring at him. I’d been watching his throat and it hadn’t moved. He’d just mimed drinking: he was saving it for me.
He must have read my expression and known I’d caught him because he looked away guiltily for a second. Then he stubbornly offered me the canteen again: I don’t care, take it.
He’d risked his life for me, come all the way here to rescue me and he was still protecting me. As I finally took the canteen and drank, my chest ached: how could I possibly give this man up?
You don’t have to, a little voice told me. You could go on the run with him.
But that wasn’t me: I couldn’t spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. I couldn’t never see my mom again. I cursed myself for not being more like him.
We marched on and then, around noon, we came to a cliff. Far below, we could see an open area with large, blocky buildings: the military base.
A cool breeze was blowing against us, a relief after the heat. But while the rest of us luxuriated in it, Cal stopped and frowned. He picked a handful of undergrowth and then tossed the stalks into the wind, watching how they blew. “That storm’s coming,” he muttered.
We all looked up at the sky: it was still blue all the way out to the horizon. But JD nodded soberly: he obviously trusted the big guy when it came to nature. “How long?”
“Late tonight,” said Cal. “Or early tomorrow morning.”
JD grimaced. “Great.”
We stopped and ate the last two ration packs and shared out the last of the water. I caught Gabriel’s eye: not good.
“Don’t worry,” he told me. “When we make it to the base, they’ll have food and water.”
It took almost two hours to pick our way carefully down the cliff and make it through the jungle to the base. Finally, in the middle of the afternoon, the trees thinned out and we saw the base’s gleaming metal fence in front of us.
“They’re getting ready to go somewhere,” said Colton, frowning. Inside the fence, a convoy of a dozen vehicles stood waiting and soldiers were hurrying back and forth, loading them with gear.
“I’ll go first,” said Gabriel. He gave his weapons to JD and then the rest of us waited at the edge of the jungle while he walked towards the base’s front gate with his hands in the air. When the guards pointed their guns at him, he stopped and called out in Spanish: American! Friendly! He turned slowly around, letting them see he was unarmed, and they cautiously called him forward.
JD and I exchanged reassured looks: so far, so good.
The guards talked into their radios, and a few moments later, a jeep drove out to the main gate. An officer climbed out and stepped forward to talk to Gabriel.
I squinted. There was something—
Oh God. I recognized him. The silver stubble. The wrinkles at the corner of his mouth.
