by Julie Miller
Those eyes, and these quiet moments together, had become as necessary to surviving her sentence here on Devil’s Fork Island as keeping her secret from Boone Fowler was. That’s where the calm feeling came from. Bryce Martin was a mighty mountain who could withstand the storm spinning around them. It was only natural to seek shelter beside him.
Even in his weakened condition, Bryce had a hearty appetite. In no time he’d polished off the bread and drunk the last of the broth and a cup of water. With a flattering thoroughness, he licked the last crumb and drop off his fingers and thumb. “I’ll bet you could even make a brick taste good.”
She liked the musical cadence of his voice, even if his words didn’t make sense. “Why would you eat a brick? Is that an Americanism?”
“It’s a compliment.” He handed her the cup. “Good stuff.”
“Thank you.”
Unlike Fowler’s men, Bryce didn’t make fun of her ignorance or berate her when she couldn’t quite grasp the intricacies of American slang. Maybe his funny accent, hick, she’d heard Marcus Smith say, helped him understand how difficult communication could be—and made him sympathetic to how lonely a soul could get when not allowed to express herself.
Tasiya carried the cup and pitcher into the passageway and picked up a man’s shirt and the manacles she’d taken off his body.
Whatever verbal shortcomings Bryce lacked, there was little that his eyes missed or failed to communicate. She felt him watching her as she draped the heavy chains over her arm and sorted through her keys. When she dropped them to the floor, she sensed the shift in his focus. As she stooped to retrieve them, his gray eyes stared at the keys with an intensity that had matched his silent warning to her in the interrogation room. When he lifted his gaze to where the door stood ajar, Tasiya quickly rose and pushed it shut.
He was thinking escape, wasn’t he? Debating whether or not to take advantage of her visit. Maybe she was wrong to trust Bryce too quickly. Wasn’t freedom every prisoner’s dream?
If she could be free—if she could free her father—wouldn’t she be willing to take advantage of Bryce?
But freedom wasn’t an option for her. Even survival didn’t look all that promising if she managed to allow one of the prisoners out of his cell.
Surely Bryce was too injured to try anything. And as cruel as it seemed, once she put him back in his chains, he’d be even less likely to try to bolt. She truly didn’t think he would harm her—his actions and his eyes had told her that. But if Fowler and Smith found out what she’d done tonight, they would have no qualms about punishing her.
Tasiya slipped the keys deep into the pocket of her jeans, just in case she was wrong about Bryce Martin. “I do not know if Mr. Fowler only sent me to make things worse for you, or if it truly was important for him to find out about this Cameron Murphy who upsets him so.”
Bryce didn’t seem put off or surprised by her own subtle interrogation. “Maybe both.”
“Why does he hate him?”
“Colonel Murphy—the man I work for—put him in prison once. We intend to do it again.”
The chains weighed heavily in her arms. Neither one of them needed to explain that thus far, the only person who’d successfully captured anyone else was the man Bryce and his friends were after. “What did Boone Fowler do?”
“Killed Murphy’s sister. Plus a bunch of other innocent people. He masterminded a plot to escape from a Montana prison, orchestrated more terrorist attacks in the name of patriotism, killed two innocent soldiers and stuffed the rest of us into this hell-hole to be used as pawns in whatever scheme he’s planning next.”
Tasiya clutched the shirt that Fowler had insisted would be treatment enough for the wounded prisoner. Why waste first-aid supplies when he could simply hide the wounds from the camera? Let the guy sleep it off for a few days, Fowler had ordered—if he could stand and talk, they could find him.
But she wasn’t used to hearing such bile in Bryce’s voice. The man he’d described wasn’t all that different from Dimitri Mostek and King Aleksandr. The emotions Bryce revealed weren’t all that different from the resentments and frustrations locked up inside her.
Not for the first time since coming to America, she battled with her conscience. How could she allow men like Bryce to suffer so that her father wouldn’t have to?
She crushed the faded cotton in her fists. Maybe it was only a rationalization to ease her guilt, but she was helping him. She couldn’t set him free, but without her help, he and his friends would surely starve. Without her help, he might not recover from his beating.
It was enough of an excuse to fix a polite smile on her face and walk back to the cot.
“Let us not talk about him anymore. Here.” She shook out the khaki shirt—the biggest one she could find. “It is clean. You need something to protect your wounds.”
She helped him into it, easing it slowly over his back and shoulders. Even that much effort seemed to tax his strength. He rested his elbows on his knees and leaned heavily against them. Tasiya breathed a little easier about him attempting an escape.
She held out the chains next. “I must put these back on you. I do not want anyone to question how you removed them.” But his skin was still so raw; it hurt her just to look at it. “Perhaps only the wrists.”
He pushed himself upright and spread his feet apart on the floor. “Better do ’em both. I don’t want Fowler or Smith suspicious about you…bein’ kind to me.” Tasiya reluctantly snapped the manacles around his wrists, then knelt in front of him to lock his ankles together. “You better head on back to wherever you’re bunkin’ out, too. I don’t want anyone to come lookin’ for you and find you here.”
But Tasiya didn’t want to leave just yet. “No one comes into the kitchen where I sleep. And the sentries are posted outside the building at night. Unless I make too much noise and wake someone…”
Despite her hesitancy to trust and her guilt at deceiving him, Tasiya didn’t want to be anywhere else. Though she could never tell him why, he understood the things she was feeling. Cocooned by the night, in this remote corner of the compound, she’d found a soul mate. So Tasiya gave herself another job to delay her departure. Rising in front of him, she reached out and helped him button his shirt. “Tell me about your Oh-sark.”
Bryce’s big fingers stopped on the button above where she had paused. He lifted his face, and their gazes locked together.
Maybe she’d found something else, as well.
Tasiya was sinking, deep and fast, into the gunmetal depths that seemed so like home to her. The heat from his body seeped into her hands and she felt herself leaning. Or perhaps he’d inched closer. His gaze dropped to her mouth, and her lips parted as the breath inside her swelled with anticipation. He caressed her lips with his eyes, awakening every female instinct inside her with the raw desire stamped in his features.
She was struck by the bold notion of closing the gap between them and pressing her lips to his. She wanted to crawl into his lap and burrow inside him, to soak up his heat and be sheltered by all that strength. She wanted to kiss him. To be kissed by a man as wild and rugged as the snow-capped mountains of her homeland. She wanted to be taken from her world of vicious words and violence and simply be a woman that a man wanted—the way Bryce Martin’s eyes said he wanted her.
She curled her fingers into a handful of shirt and skin, and let her eyes drift shut. Just one kiss…
But Bryce had a saner notion in mind.
She blinked her eyes open as he pried her hands from his chest and pushed her away.
“It’s Ozarks,” he stated, emphasizing the z and the s.
“What are Ozarks?” she asked, carefully mimicking the word. She wondered if she should be feeling grateful rather than disappointed that Bryce had kept her from making a fool of herself. And she’d been afraid of trusting him!
“It’s a place.” Tasiya sat down beside him as he rolled up his sleeves. “Ancient mountains, worn down to rugged hills and exp
osed rock. In southern Missouri and northern Arkansas.”
Those were states she knew from her studies. Gradually she began to relax. The more he talked, the more she reminded herself of why she’d been drawn to him in the first place. “They look like your Rocky Mountains, then? I have seen them in pictures.”
“Nope. The Ozarks are green.”
“What makes them green?”
“Water.”
“We have many beautiful lakes outside our capital, St. Feodor. Where does your water come from?”
The tension seemed to be easing from Bryce, too, as he talked about his home. He leaned forward over his knees again, away from her. But it seemed to be a posture that gave him some relief rather than an intentional snub. “Rivers. Man-made lakes. Natural springs. There’s a lot of underground water there. A lot of caves carved out by water.”
“The foliage there must be very lush.”
“Yep.”
Behind his back she smiled at his funny word. “Are there flowers? Grass?”
“Trees mostly. Lots of ’em everywhere you look. Oak, maple, elm, locust. With lots of good cedar. It smells fresh and clean out in the woods.”
Not much like this place, in other words. “Green is the only color of your Ozarks?”
“Nope. On the hillside, if you look close among the taller, darker trunks, in the spring you’ll catch a glimpse of white or pink flowers. Those are the dogwood trees. In the fall, all the leaves change colors. Bright red. Gold. Orange.”
The subtle longing in his deep-pitched voice spoke to the kindred soul inside her, as though he knew what she needed more than she knew herself. She shouldn’t fantasize about passionate kisses. This strange, budding friendship was already more than she could ask for. “Your Ozarks sound very beautiful.”
“Yep.”
“I should like to get permission to see it one day. Where do you get a travel voucher in your country?”
“You don’t have to get permission. You just go. The United States isn’t like this place.” He shrugged, then winced as if the gesture had caused him considerable pain. Tasiya found herself holding her breath along with him until he slowly exhaled and could speak again. “You can go wherever you want, whenever you want to.”
He didn’t have to register travel dates with the Ministry of Security? Report in at the local town hall upon his arrival? “You did not need travel papers to go from Missouri to Montana?”
He shook his head. “I needed a change of scenery so I up and went. That’s where the job was.”
“Even a woman could do this?”
He huffed a sound that might have been a laugh and angled his head to look at her. “Hell, yeah.”
“Incredible.”
Her father had told her similar stories about his childhood, how he remembered taking drives to visit his grandparents in the country. Sometimes they enjoyed themselves so much that on the spur of the moment they would decide to stay the night—or a whole weekend. But that was before the reign of Aleksandr Petrov and the restrictions on travel she had always known.
Curious at how casually Bryce talked about moving from place to place, Tasiya tucked one leg beneath her and scooted closer. “Tell me more about your country. The Grand Canyon. And New York City.”
“Ain’t you talked out yet?” He’d spent what little strength he had left, no doubt.
“The men here ignore me as if I do not exist except to serve them. I hear no ‘Good morning.’ No ‘Good night.’ No ‘How are you feeling?’ No one else tells me what a beautiful country you have.”
“That ain’t right.” He turned away and stared out into the passageway. “But talkin’ i’n’t my best thing.”
Tasiya frowned, unseen behind his back. Did he honestly have no idea of the effect he had on her?
On impulse, she leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “You do it beautifully, Bryce Martin.”
She fished her keys from her pocket and headed for the door, hoping she didn’t look as startled by that little kiss as he did. The urge to offer him a kindness—to thank him for his solace—didn’t surprise her. The fact that she wanted to offer him so much more than a peck on his whiskered cheek did.
As she reluctantly locked the steel bars behind her and gathered her things, the rattle of chains diverted her attention.
Bryce wobbled on his feet, bracing one hand against the wall for balance. But he was standing.
“’Night, Tasiya Belov.”
She nearly burst into tears at his sweet chivalry, knowing that this wounded giant had truly listened to her, despite his pain. A forbidden bond had been forged between them this night, inside this horrid prison where they were both held captive.
They’d traded comfort for comfort, strength for strength.
And for the first time since that fateful night in Lukinburg when terrorists had shattered her world, Tasiya had hope.
“Good night, Bryce Martin.”
Chapter Seven
TASIYA CLUTCHED the collar of her jacket together and huddled against the mist blowing off the water.
Devil’s Fork Island was small enough that, from the port between the old stone fortress and the newer fiberglass docks, she could see the two long inlets that formed the trident shape giving the island its name. But the island was large enough that when the ferry chugged around the tip of the westernmost peninsula, the jetty and dock blocked it from view.
The landscape where she’d stopped to breathe in fresh air and remind herself what the sun looked like was wild and barren of animal life except for the large sea birds that fed and nested along the shoreline. And while the prison compound stood like a weary, yet unbending sentinel on the windward side of the island, here, along the half-mile path, Tasiya felt as if she might be standing in the middle of an unspoiled nature preserve. If she closed her eyes and tipped her face to the warmth of the sun, she could almost imagine what it was like to be free.
But the strident hum of the electronic security fence rebooting around the perimeter was a harsh reminder that she wasn’t free. Maybe she’d never truly been free. Growing up in the increasing oppression of Lukinburg society, she hadn’t been allowed to continue beyond basic schooling to become a chef. She couldn’t travel from place to place—wherever she wanted, whenever she wanted, the way Bryce had described living in America—without being documented at a checkpoint. Not even to visit her mother’s and grandparents’ graves in the countryside outside St. Feodor. All she could do was work a menial job or become a man’s mistress.
His victim or his slave.
Shaking with a suppressed anger that blotted out the November chill, Tasiya opened her eyes and looked around. There wasn’t a guard in sight, and a quick check of her watch said she still had ten minutes before she had to report back to the kitchen.
Such a generous privilege, she noted with sarcasm. After fifteen days of reliable work, Boone Fowler had granted her permission to walk down to the docks unescorted to deliver a list of supplies she needed from two men heading to the mainland. But he’d given her a strict time limit on her freedom, and reminded her that there was no way on or off the island without being detected. How were time limits and restrictions any different from the life waiting for her back in Lukinburg?
Seized by a rebellious urge after twenty-seven years of being the dutiful citizen who knew her place, Tasiya left the path and hiked up a shallow slope to the edge of a rocky drop-off overlooking the island’s western shore. In vain, she peered along the horizon, seeking some sign of the beautiful, free America Bryce had described. But there was no land, no civilization. The stormy gray Atlantic sluiced over the rocks below, then ebbed and rolled into waves that seemed to throw themselves against the matching sky in the distance.
Not that she’d have any chance of reaching the mainland on her own. She couldn’t swim that far. The island’s ferry and two speed boats were heavily guarded. And since she hadn’t seen any sails or heard heavy engines or sounding buoys since she’d arrived, she guess
ed they weren’t on any shipping lane where she’d have a chance of flagging down a passing tourist or tradesman for help.
Tasiya grasped the corkscrew tendril the wind plastered against her cheek and tucked it behind her ear. There was no sense depressing herself by noting how far she was from America proper, or how much farther she was from Lukinburg and her father.
Her only ally was the battered giant locked in solitary confinement.
The kindness and resolute determination beneath Bryce Martin’s gruff manner and harsh exterior had awakened something deep inside her. An urge to fight back, to do more than resign herself to a life of servitude and discontent. And while she would not jeopardize her father’s life, she wouldn’t sit idly by and let Bryce be slowly tortured to death, either. Above all, she would not let Boone Fowler and Marcus Smith break the big man’s spirit.
Letting her attention slide back to her immediate surroundings, Tasiya began forming a modest plan. The foliage on Devil’s Fork Island had all been beaten down to a sandy color, including the sturdy, thigh-high grass that clung to the gritty soil and rippled in the breeze like an extension of the sea itself.
Reminded of the reeds that grew around Lake Ryanavik, she reached down and plucked a blade. The whole shaft, from tip to roots easily came loose in her hand. She rolled the three-foot stalk between her palms and tried to snap it in two. A satisfied smile curved her lips. With the daily beating it took from the elements, of course it grew to bend and not break. It was fibrous and strong, yet pliant to the touch—perfect for basketweaving.
One of Tasiya’s most useful homemaking skills was making do with whatever she had on hand. With an island full of this unique grass, she could make a basket to carry the bread and water to the prisoners, instead of pushing that noisy metal cart and worrying that she was waking every militiaman and shouting her presence everywhere she went. With a basket, she could move quietly through the passageways and worry less about paying a late-night visit to her friend in the last cell.