by Julie Miller
Dimitri Mostek’s lust made her feel dirty and small. Bryce Martin’s attentions empowered her with confidence and strength.
It was well past midnight now, but Tasiya felt renewed as she passed by the locked iron doors of the interrogation room, the communication center, and who knew what other secret places a man like Boone Fowler might hide. She was too keyed up to sleep, and more inspired than ever to, in some small way, put a crimp in the militia’s plans.
She would work for a while on the basket she’d started that afternoon—the one that would allow her to creep about the prison wing and visit Bryce without being detected. She’d also start planning exactly what she wanted to say to Dimitri Mostek when she called him that evening.
Relating the argument over money she’d heard between Fowler and his mysterious partner should clue in Dimitri that the Americans he and his superior were funding were not so loyal as he would hope. They expected the militia to stop Prince Nikolai’s speeches and stop the UN from invading Lukinburg and taking away their power.
Instead, the militia was murdering soldiers, torturing men who weren’t even in the military, and demanding money from another source. Perhaps that would be enough to convince Dimitri that Boone Fowler was a much bigger liability than her father could ever be, and would shift his attention to the American traitor and let the petty embezzler who’d only wanted to feed his daughter go free.
She wasn’t holding her breath that Dimitri would agree to such a thing. But it couldn’t hurt to ask. According to Bryce, women in America could ask for anything they wanted—and she was in America, wasn’t she?
A serene smile of satisfaction curled her lips as she closed the iron door that shut off the prison wing behind her. The dreadful weight of it creaked into place, and her smile quickly faded. She was no better than Fowler or Dimitri each night she locked this door behind her.
Her silent rebellion and pushy American questions meant little as she closed off Bryce and the other prisoners in their dismal time warp of eighteenth-century barbarism. But what could she do, short of setting them free and sentencing her father and most likely herself to certain death?
Tasiya’s entire sense of hope seemed to be closed up on the other side of that door, as well. On this side of the iron barrier, there was no Bryce. She had no friend. There were only watchful eyes and suspicion and loneliness.
For two seconds she considered leaving the door unlocked, to give Bryce and his comrades some chance at escape, to give her an imaginary connection to the men inside. But, ultimately, Tasiya was a practical woman. Nurturing her own kinship to Bryce and the prisoners would only put them at greater risk. If Marcus Smith and his security team found the door open, there would no doubt be a price to pay. And after witnessing the price literally extracted from Bryce’s hide for her defiance in the interrogation room, she would not put them at risk again.
Tasiya reached for her keys to open the padlock so she could slip it through the hasp and secure the dead bolt in place before the guard’s inspection at dawn. She frowned. Her wrist was empty. “Where…?”
She quickly checked the other arm, refusing to acknowledge the panic that lit a fuse inside her. “What have I done?”
She set the pitcher and cup on the floor and shoved the sleeves up past her elbows. Nothing. She slid her sweater back into place the same way Bryce had done after… A funny little glitch of a memory tried to tell her something.
The fuse shifted direction inside her and raced straight toward her heart.
“He wouldn’t.” She checked her pockets, the pitcher, the cup. She pushed open the door and retraced her steps across the floor. But she would have heard the keys hitting the stones, wouldn’t she?
“He didn’t take them,” she whispered out loud, needing to hear the reassurance herself.
Her breath came in quick, nervous gasps. She peered into the shadows, beyond the glare from the harsh bulbs, desperately looking for the shiny glint of her missing keys. “I dropped them somewhere, that’s all.”
One of the men might notice the jingling at her wrist had fallen silent. They’d see the locked padlock on the open door and come looking for her. Without her keys, she couldn’t get into the pantry to prepare any meals. By their 7 a.m. breakfast call, the militia would certainly notice that.
The fuse inside her hit its mark and caught fire. Finding those keys was her only option for survival.
After tucking the pitcher and cup into a hidden corner, she raced back through the corridor. She spared a glance for the sleeping soldiers and curious stare of the handsome, green-eyed bounty hunter who rose to his feet as she checked the floor outside his cell.
“You’re out kind of late, aren’t you?” he asked in a croaky voice that might have something to do with the ligature marks around his neck. “Something goin’ on? You understand me, don’t you? You okay?”
For the briefest of moments, Tasiya wanted to ask him if he’d seen his friend, Bryce Martin. But she had a horrible feeling his answer might be yes. She clamped her mouth shut around the question, shook her head and ran down the next corridor.
“Hey, I appreciate the extra rations.” But the compliment fell into an empty hallway as she continued her frenzied search.
There were no keys. No hint of anything modern along her path. She didn’t want to think that Bryce had used…
But the last place she’d had them was to enter his cell and free him from his manacles and leg irons. Then she’d slipped them onto her wrist. They’d talked and… “No.”
Anger hastened her steps, warring with the panic inside her. She whipped around the last corner. The light behind her cast a shadow, blocking what little moonlight streamed into the corridor.
“Bryce Martin?” she called in a heated whisper. She stumbled up to the bars. No. No, no. She grasped the steel in her fists and stared into the empty cell.
“No!” She pounded one of the bars with the heel of her palm, then turned and peered into the passageway. “How could you?”
The one man she’d cared about in this place—the one man she’d thought cared about her—had stolen her keys and escaped.
“Where would you go?” she muttered aloud, already moving back toward the solitary light she’d brought him so that he wouldn’t be alone in the dark. Ha! He was a beast. He didn’t give a damn about her consideration for him. She was a stupid, lonely woman who’d been easy prey for his kind words and abundant strength. He saw that she felt something for him, that she wanted to trust him—and he’d taken advantage.
Tasiya sulked around the corner as resentment gave way to disgust at her own naiveté. She intended to find Bryce and get her keys back, then let him suffer the consequences for leaving his cell. She peered into every shadow. Peeked under doors for any sign of movement.
But consequences was a dangerous word on Devil’s Fork Island. Memories of a man being beaten until he fell unconscious, a man having his long hair shaved with a rough blade to purposely leave cuts and scars—a young soldier buried in an unmarked grave in the middle of nowhere—clarified every emotion into stark, wary fear.
It hurt that Bryce had used her. But she could understand. Freedom, as he’d taught her, was a precious thing. She’d never known it was worth fighting for. But Bryce had never forgotten.
“Where are you?” Her words bounced along the stone walls and were swallowed up by the breezy mist.
If Bryce made it all the way outside, the sentries would catch him. Even if he was stealthy enough to avoid capture, he’d eventually hit the perimeter fence. The electric shock would set off the alarm and incapacitate him. Every man would be awake and armed. And he’d be paralyzed while they hunted him down.
Suddenly Tasiya was every bit as afraid for Bryce’s safety as she’d been upset with him for using her. She quickened her pace, sharpened her ears to any sound, and doubled her efforts to find him. She still wanted to throttle him, but she’d do it once he was safely back inside his cell, out of harm’s way, beyond Boone Fowl
er’s reach.
She heard a thump and turned toward it. “Bryce Martin?”
Tasiya hurried down the corridor, drawn to the sound. “Bryce Mart—!”
Rough hands grabbed her from behind and dragged her into a darkened room.
TASIYA’S SCREAM RANG in her ears, muted by the large hand that covered her mouth. She twisted and kicked, but the hands wouldn’t let go. A steel band cinched around her waist, trapping her arms and lifting her clear off the floor before a force, like a large truck, flattened her against the wall.
“Hush.” A nearly inaudible warning brushed against her ear, and Tasiya went completely still, save for the shallow, sucking gasps that thrust her chest and stomach against a now-familiar immovable object.
Tasiya recognized Bryce by size, smell and the sound of his voice just as Ike waddled past the open door, oblivious to the statuelike couple in the shadows mere inches away. Over the bulk of Bryce’s shoulder she saw that Ike carried a crumpled sheet of paper in his fist and muttered to himself between yawns. Because he had his headphones on, he thankfully hadn’t heard her calling out. But she would have run right into him if she’d continued on her frantic path.
Eons seemed to pass before she felt Bryce’s deep breath push against her chest. The prison had fallen silent now, except for the endless drone of hidden machinery that she normally tuned out as background noise.
He removed the muzzle of his hand and let her slide down onto her feet. “I thought you said there were no sentries inside.”
His voice, barely a whisper, was as sharply articulate as she’d ever heard it. She matched his volume, if not his tone. “Ike is in charge of communications. Normally, once I lock the door at night, no one comes into this wing until morning. I do not know why he is here.”
“He must be sendin’ a message. Somethin’s goin’ down.”
She didn’t know what direction down would be in a one-story building. Only the crumbling lookout tower that housed Boone Fowler’s office and bedroom had a set of stairs. But as naive as she’d been about Bryce’s intentions with her earlier, she didn’t presume to understand him now.
“You must return to your cell,” she pleaded. “If anyone finds you, you will be punished.”
His fingers hovered close to her temple, as if he wanted to touch her. Instead he clamped his fingers into a fist and released her with a sharp, heated curse. “Not yet. I gotta get the layout of this place. I need to know my options.”
Tasiya shivered as he crossed to the door and peeked into the corridor. She hugged her arms across her stomach, unsure whether the sudden chill was part of the close call they’d had, or the fact that she missed Bryce’s abundant heat. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could see a screwdriver poking up from Bryce’s hip pocket. He’d stolen that instead of a knife or gun?
But a look around the room revealed there were no weapons to be had. It appeared to be little more than a storage facility, with scattered maintenance supplies and crates of spare parts she couldn’t identify. “What is this place?”
Bryce spun around and slipped into the shadows. She could hear him quietly moving things. “Where’s the communications room?” he asked. “You know what kind of setup they have?”
Setup she didn’t understand. But going to the room where they knew at least one of the militiamen would be waiting for them was clear enough.
“Please. Give me my keys and go back to your cell.” She followed the sound of him working across the room. “I will not tell anyone you got out or that you have stolen anything. I promise.”
“I’m guessin’ all this stuff’s stolen. Or bought off the black market. But they’d need a lot of money to do that. Most of it’s military issue.”
Military? Tasiya picked up something that looked suspiciously like a microchip. It certainly wasn’t native to the prison’s antique decor. She scanned the room. While she couldn’t identify most of the items, their markings—like the radio set Ike had carried into Fowler’s office—were all painted in camouflage patterns or labeled with military codes. “Are they planning an invasion?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Bryce answered anyway. “They call themselves a militia. A group of citizens who train to be soldiers. Believe me, Boone Fowler’s lookin’ for a battle to fight.”
“Against you?”
“He made Big Sky Bounty Hunters his enemy when he broke out of prison and started killin’ people. He may call it patriotism, but he’s just a murderin’ thug. Whatever ideals he once had have been perverted into a lust for power.”
Like Dimitri Mostek and his superior. Men who used glory of the homeland as an excuse to wield their corrupt authority over Lukinburg citizens. Very dangerous men. Not the sort that one man—even Bryce Martin—could take on, on their own.
“Please.” Tasiya circled the crates and touched Bryce’s arm. She knew how to put her feelings aside in order to keep someone safe. “You must go back to your cell. I do not want you to be found here.”
He stopped his search for a moment and looked over the jut of his shoulder at her. His eyes glittered in the darkness. “You know what a son of a bitch is?”
She’d heard the phrase more than once since she’d been here, and only knew it to be a curse. “No.”
“You’re lookin’ at one.” He shrugged his arm away from her and went back to work. “You shouldn’t be worryin’ about me. I don’t deserve it.”
“Why? Because you made me think I was special when, in reality, I was merely a tool for your escape?”
He froze for an instant, and even through the dim light from the hall she could see the sadness on his face. But then he shrugged it off and reached for another crate. “Yeah. Somethin’ like that.”
She could scarcely overpower him, so she had to rely on reasoning with him—or guilting him back to safety. “So you will go to your cell now?”
He didn’t answer.
His big fingers moved with surprising agility as he sorted through items and filled his pockets—small metal disks that looked like bottle caps, needle-nosed pliers and a spool of white cord that reminded her of the island grass. “You know if this Ike uses radio waves or a satellite connection? Is he hooked up to a computer? Use a cell phone?”
She was quite certain she didn’t know any of those things. When it became clear that Bryce was going to finish the task he’d started before he made any attempt to do as she asked, Tasiya decided that providing some kind of information might speed the process. “I think they monitor military or law enforcement channels. They knew that someone had tried to kidnap Princess Veronika in Montana, even before it was on the news from the networks.”
Bryce’s hands stopped. She felt his wintry gaze on her in the darkness. “Veronika Petrov? She all right?”
“A man saved her. Now the two of them have disappeared.”
“The militia have anythin’ to do with it?” He set aside one crate and rifled through the contents of the next one.
“I do not believe so. Mr. Fowler seemed quite angry that the attempt had been made.” She didn’t mention the knife he’d pressed to her chin as though he’d blamed her for the incident. “He said it did not fit with his plan and would bring more scrutiny to him. He wants publicity, but I do not think he is ready for it. Not until the videotapes are made.”
Bryce stopped. “What do you know about videotapes?”
“Only that he will start filming them tomorrow.”
The outline of Bryce’s shoulders sagged. “Damn. I thought I’d have more time.”
“More time for what?” Tasiya reached across the crate and laid her fingers across the back of his hand. A shiver of goose bumps rose across his skin and she wondered if this might finally be the way to persuade him. “Please, you need your rest. I do not think your body will withstand any more punishment. And if you are caught, they will surely—”
He jerked his hand away. “I need to get to that communication room. See if I can get a message out.”
; “Not while Ike is there.” She clutched at his sleeve and tried to keep him from doing such a crazy thing. “He wears a gun. They all do. He will shoot you.”
But stopping Bryce was like standing in front of a moving train. He easily slipped from her grip and headed to the door.
“Bryce, no!” Tasiya dashed around the crates and hurried after him. But he stopped unexpectedly in the doorway, and she plowed right into the middle of his back.
He didn’t cry out, but she could see the flinch in his posture, she could hear his fingernails grating across the stones as he squeezed his fists around the door frame.
She pressed her fingers to her lips to stifle her own gasp, but couldn’t stop the sting of tears burning her eyes. Lord, how she must have hurt him. His skin would still be raw, his nerves on fire. She backed away, not fearing his wrath but aware of her own ineptitude at causing him such pain. “I am so sorry.”
His shoulders heaved in slow, deep breaths. He dropped his chin against his chest, but he didn’t seem to be able to move. Tasiya slipped beneath his arm and gently pushed at his stomach, nudging him back into the storage room, out of sight from Ike or anyone else who might walk past while he was in such a vulnerable state.
He released the frame, leaned his weight on her shoulder and let her guide him back into the shadows. “You’re right. Maybe I’m not up to this yet.”
With her hands still at his waist, offering what support she could, she looked up into the taut lines of his face. “Please. I will get medicine. Ice. A blanket. Whatever it takes to make you feel better. But you must stop this madness and go back to your cell.”
“All right.” He nodded, but she knew it was too soon to breathe a sigh of relief. “On one condition.”
“What? Anything.”
He took her hands and pulled her into the darkest corner where she could only imagine the expression on his face. But his voice was deep and strong with his husky request. “Forgive me for kissin’ you.”