23
JESSICA OPENED one eye.
A soft noise had startled her, as if someone was in her room.
The first thing she saw was a very tall ceiling that was definitely not the one in her guesthouse room. There was a window in the room—very dirty. She lay on a bare mattress on a dusty and cracked mosaic floor. There were other mattresses around the perimeter of the room, where Pengali slept, rendered in shades of grey in the semidarkness.
What the. . . ?
Jessica pushed an elbow under her. Her stomach gave a protesting growl, bringing with it a surge of bile. Sweaty skin puckered into gooseflesh as a heavy and warm weight slid off her thigh: a male arm, which twitched with her movement.
Daya. His eyelids relaxed and closed, his long eyelashes arranged in perfect sliver-moon crescents. Bluish ligh
