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It was cold, still fresh with the moisture from the water. Without thinking, I pressed my lips against his harder, tilted my head, and caressed his tongue with my own. I would have eaten him alive if I thought it would quench my thirst.
I felt his lips twitch, and I knew he was smiling. Bastard. I tried to pull away but he anticipated my move, opening his mouth wider, and kissed me with a violence that was as terrifying as it was exciting.
I stopped resisting. I melted into his possessive embrace.
I was already going to live and die with this man.
I might as well enjoy it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
MARIANA
He was the one who broke the kiss, surprisingly. His face was serious again, and that made me nervous.
‘Is everything okay?’ I asked as he pulled me to my feet.
He gave me a long sidewards look, a look that held something impermeable just beneath the surface. Something I could almost, but not quite reach out and touch.
The uncertainty made me dizzy.
He stood before me and placed a hand on each of my shoulders.
‘Don’t hate me,’ he said gruffly. ‘What I’m about to show you . . . It’s mercy, baby. It’s better this way.’
My stomach lurched. He squeezed my shoulders and then let me go, unclipping a small pair of binoculars from his belt and pressing them into my palm.
I took a step back, my heels hitting the rock I’d just been sitting on. ‘I-I don’t want to look,’ I stuttered, trying to give the binoculars back. He just pushed my hands away. ‘You don’t want to see your father?’ he asked. ‘Your brother?’
I looked at him for a beat as those words sank in. He wasn’t lying.
I whipped those binoculars to my eyes and scanned the flat desert below us, seeing nothing but scrub and salty marsh broken up by the occasional boulder.
A hand covered mine, and Dornan tilted me the right way.
Two people came into view, grainy at first, but as my eyes adjusted, I choked. My father was walking along a trail, carrying something small and round in front of him — a compass, perhaps? Behind him, Pablo followed, two shovels resting across the back of his broad shoulders.
‘What are they doing?’ I whispered. ‘Do they know I’m here?’
Dornan tutted. ‘Watch.’
I took my eyes from the binoculars and glanced at Dornan for a moment. He wasn’t paying any attention to my two family members; he was watching my every expression with a severity that suggested he was waiting for me to react to something.
My stomach dipped uncomfortably again.
‘Are you going to shoot them?’ I asked quietly, staring at the sniper rifle hanging from his shoulder.
He ran his fingers through my hair, starting at the crown of my skull and combing them all the way through to my split ends, patting my back to finish the comforting gesture.
‘I won’t shoot them,’ he said. ‘Unless you attract their attention. You know what that means, don’t you? No screaming, baby. No shouting. And definitely no running away.’
I nodded in understanding, bringing the binoculars back up to my eyes.
An odd sensation of impending doom began to blossom inside me as I found my brother in the round viewing panes again. While we’d been talking, he had started to dig. For what, I wasn’t sure, but a terrifying suspicion was starting to form in my mind.
A body. They were digging for a body.
Suddenly, my brother struck something. He dropped his shovel and dropped to his knees, shifting dirt with his hands. My father joined him, the two hefting dirt and clay with their hands as fast as they could.
