Darkness Bound

46

“Second, you’re only here to observe. Opinions won’t be welcome, and you might find yourself missing your tongue if you say the wrong thing. Females don’t have quite the . . .” He searched for a word, then tried a different tack. “Let’s just say the feminist movement hasn’t reached the rainforest.” His eyes, electric green even in darkness, met hers. “Yet.”

“Got it. You’re all a bunch of tongue-chopping Archie Bunkers.”

His smile soured. “Not all, no. But enough for it turn deadly if, for instance, Gloria Steinem showed up and started burning bras.”

Deadly? Her mouth went dry. “Duly noted. Mum’s the word. And third?”

The smile vanished. When he again spoke, her heart began to flutter like a hummingbird’s at the ominous tone in which they were spoken.

“Don’t go anywhere without me. Especially at night.”

They stared at each other. Off on the distant horizon, a full moon crested a range of rolling black hills and spread her pallid glow over the treetops.

“Tell me they’re not going to hurt me,” she said, carefully watching his face. “Tell me I’m going to get out of this alive.”

He turned to her and looked down on her from his full, imposing height, his manner as intense as the look in his eyes. “No one is going to hurt you,” he insisted with vehemence. “Anyone who’s stupid enough to even look at you the wrong way will have to deal with me.”

That protectiveness again. That freely offered—and undeserved—shielding from harm.

Why would he defend her against his own kind, after what she’d written, after how she’d argued for war against them, after all she’d done? He’d said he was responsible for her safety . . . but was there more to it than that?

Do I want there to be?

After a moment of fraught indecision in which she debated the merits of opening this particular can of worms, Jack said, “I thought you thought I was a bigot.”

He answered softly, “I thought you thought I was a lying, scheming, underhanded son of a dung beetle.”

The air all around them breathed with the lush music of the rainforest. Frogs croaked. Insects whirred. Mammals chirped or called or howled. Everything smelled of nighttime and wildness, and the space between them was palpably alive. Jack felt on the verge of something vast and bottomless, a weightless, sightless sensation of falling or flying blindfolded, of jumping into impenetrable blackness and having it swallow her whole.

Why do you make me feel like this?

Why is it when I look into your eyes I feel . . . free?

“I do think you’re a lying, scheming, underhanded son of a dung beetle,” Jack agreed, letting him see the truth of it in her unguarded gaze. “I hate that you tricked me. I hate that you used me.” She hesitated, then went on, smaller; emotion constricting her voice. “I hate that I liked it so much.”

He said her name, his eyes as soft as his voice.

“I hate that I could have looked back on that night with only good memories—amazing memories—and now I can only look back and see one more betrayal.”

She’d wounded him. She saw it in the way he stiffened, in the way his glittering eyes reflected back sorrow and shame. For a moment she was brilliantly, blindingly glad she’d hurt him. For a moment it was enough that she wasn’t the only one in pain.

But then he whispered with searing, startling remorse, “I didn’t know you, Jacqueline. I didn’t know you. If I had, I never would’ve agreed to it. I never would’ve hurt you. I thought you were something else, someone else, this heartless woman who felt nothing, who only wanted to spread hatred and fear. But you’re not. You’re . . . unexpected. You’re . . .”

He hesitated, but seemed unable to continue, or unsure of what to say.

His gaze dropped to her lips.

Everything honed to a crystalline clarity. His eyes, his face, the space between them, crackling hot. A frenzy of emotion whipped her heartbeat into a thundering gallop, and it became hard to breathe.

A sinister rustling in the underbrush ripped her attention away from him to the dark forest.

Hawk whirled around. He shoved Jack behind him with one hand. From his throat he issued a low, preternatural hiss.

It was answered by more hissing from the darkness.

Jack froze in horror as she peeked around Hawk’s shoulder and saw, slinking forward in a solid line from the depths of the jungle, ten monstrously huge black panthers. Their long tails waved in sinuous harmony, their eyes shone with predatory malice, their muzzles full of sharp fangs were bared.

They moved clear of the underbrush, slowly spread apart, and sank into coiled, silent crouches.

Poised to pounce.

“I didn’t realize our lord and master would send a welcoming party,” Hawk snarled in the Old Language to the gathered animals, feeling Jacqueline’s fingers digging into his back. “You’re lucky I didn’t rip off your heads before I realized who you were!”

A flash of light, a coil of smoke, and there stood Luis Fernando, head of Alejandro’s security detail, naked as the day he was born.

Smirking.

“Su sahapu beleti immaru masku amari sumsu mimma, ahu.”

Translation: You were too wrapped up in lady white skin to realize much of anything at all, man.

“Edin na zu, Nando,” Hawk replied, shooting the naked Fernando a murderous glare. Go to the desert. It was the equivalent of “go to hell” in the ancient tongue, and was used in the same way.

How much had they heard?

If the smirk on Nando’s face was any indication, far too much.

Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. Already this was proving to be the disaster he’d foreseen, and they hadn’t even stepped foot inside the colony.