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Pain she could handle. Pain helped her to forget, but it also helped her to remember.
Pretend to go along while slowing them down.
A cold calm settled on her as she remembered that moment in her training when she’d discovered that focusing on the pain allowed her to ignore the fear.
Pain eclipsed fear, and once fear was masked, she’d been able to think.
To plan.
Morgan and Freya had said SEALs would be most likely to be sent in to rescue her if she was taken. These two boys—and they were children, sixteen or seventeen at most—were no match for Navy SEALs.
Slow them down.
She stumbled again, this time allowing herself to fall.
Bassam grabbed her headscarf, his fingers digging in and gripping her hair beneath the cloth. He yanked her up and twisted around to face the sandstone wall they’d just crawled through. She found her back pressed to his front—a human shield—as a dark shadow emerged from the tunnel.
Her heart lurched as Bassam’s knife pressed to her throat.
Her ankle burned. She remembered staring down at it in the hospital, when it was puffed up like a cantaloupe and the doctors told her she’d been lucky to keep her foot and all she could think was that she’d trade her foot if she could have her fiancé.
But no. The cards she’d been dealt left her with two hands and two feet and an empty heart.
“Stop! Don’t come any closer!” Bassam shouted in English.
Behind them, lights came on, shining in the direction of the tunnel, and now she could see that at this end, the tunnel had become a crevasse in the sandstone wall. Whoever had made the tunnel had dug through to a natural opening. If they had Nabataean ancestors, they’d have done them proud.
But then, the tunnel could have been dug in the last century BCE. She hadn’t exactly been able to examine the passageway while being dragged and pushed through, and from what Rafiq had said, this area was an archaeological site.
The lights—which she guessed from the engine rumble that had preceded the glow, were headlights from a vehicle—illuminated a man in full combat regalia, standing directly in front of the crevasse. Another man crouched behind him, having not quite reached the point of being able to stand fully upright before Bassam had put the knife to her throat and ordered them to halt.
The SEAL—she assumed he was a SEAL—kept his gun pointed just to the left of Diana as he raised his NVGs with one hand. His eyes scanned her face, probably the only thing he could see backlit as she was by bright beams of light.
She shifted so her shadow cast on him. She was the cause of the eclipse, not the moon.
But then, Diana was goddess of the moon, so she could embrace this role.
“Dr. Edwards,” the man said. Not a question that needed answering. An acknowledgment to let her know his being here was intentional.
The only parts of his body not covered by clothing or gear were his eyes and the skin of his upper cheeks. Both eyes and skin were brown.
His eyes were neither cold nor warm. All business.
She was his mission.
The arm around her waist tightened and the knife at her neck shifted to a scarier angle. But even as she stood frozen, she wasn’t afraid. And not because she was focusing on pain. No. It was because Bassam couldn’t kill her. If he slit her throat, the SEAL would kill him.
If they managed to escape and then he killed her, his terrorist buddies would kill him. That was what Bassam had said when he caught his brother attempting to rape her.
Diana was valuable to the organization.
So valuable, the Four of Diamonds, Makram Rafiq himself, had visited this desolate little wadi to question her.
She—not the brothers who guarded her—was important to Rafiq’s organization.
But…if she helped them escape with her, she’d raise their status. She could make them important too.
Now that her mind wasn’t clouded by fear, she thought of that meeting with Rafiq, and a fire lit inside her.
