Caine's Reckoning (50 page)

“She was last time I saw her.”

She hardly dared breathe when she asked the question, certainly didn’t dare look away from his malevolent face. “When was that?”

“When I was coming in her.”

If she hadn’t dropped the knife, she would have gutted him on the spot, common sense be damned. And from the flare of amusement in his eyes, he knew it. “I think, little pretty, that you’re going to scream for me just like she did when I come.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.” She wasn’t known for giving anyone but Caine that satisfaction.

He didn’t remove his finger from under her chin. Something cold and metal slid up the inside of her calf beneath her skirts. “I think you will.”

The knife. He’d picked up the knife. It grazed the inside of her knee and moved down her thigh. Horror took her in a cold shudder as his meaning sank in.

From afar she heard a faint sound, almost a howling. It came again, sinking through the terror in her mind to form a recognizable pattern. A dog on a scent. She only knew one person who kept hounds. Caine. He was coming for her. “Shouldn’t you be escaping?”

The knife left her skin. She breathed a sigh of relief.

“Not yet.”

She mustered her courage. “Caine is going to kill you for taking me.”

“There’s something you’d better understand, pretty thing, or you’re not going to last long.”

She lifted her chin. “What?”

“Men don’t risk their lives for whores.”

The potential for truth in his words cut deep. She set her lips against the pain, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing he’d hit dead-on her insecurity. She was Hell’s Eight. Caine would come for her. “He’ll come. And when he does, he won’t be alone.”

The man let go of her chin and stood. His touch lingered like a bruise. “Actually, I’m counting on that pride of his dragging him after you. I’ve got a score to settle with that bunch.”

He dropped the knife into the dirt at her feet and motioned to the rabbit. “Finish skinning that and then slit the middle and take out the guts.”

Whoever was coming after her—Shadow and Tucker maybe?—was riding into a trap. She needed to think.

She picked up the knife and went back to work. “What’s your name?”

He reached for his rifle. “Jack. Why?” He raised his eyebrows. “Looking to get more friendly?”

“Just want to know what to put on your grave.”

The man laughed, actually laughed. “If it comes to that, there won’t be a grave to mark. Hell’s Eight aren’t known for their mercy.”

She shrugged, tugging at the knife where it stuck under the leg of the rabbit. “Probably.”

With a move so quick she never saw it coming, he took the knife, severed tendons and disemboweled the carcass. “That’s how you do it.”

She stared at the gore oozing at her feet, willing back her gorge and her terror. “Thank you.”

He didn’t give her back the knife, just stared at her, grunted and then picked up the carcass to skin it. The bay came at her again, fluctuating with the wind, faint but determined, bringing hope. Jack was wrong. Caine would come. He would come because it was his nature. Because she was his wife. She remembered that last night, his dominance, his need, his tenderness. He’d come because he cared.

She hugged the certainty to her, letting it grow as the next bay rose in volume. She just had to stay alive long enough to benefit. A sharpened stick landed in the dirt in front of her. The now skinned carcass was shoved into her hands. “Put this through the meat and then hold it over the fire to cook it up. I don’t like to fight without an offering.”

“You’re superstitious?”

“The spirits reward those who remember them.”

She didn’t want to know what gods he prayed to. She stabbed the point through the carcass and held the heavy mass over the small fire.

Jack leaned over and lashed her wrists together with a stretch of rawhide. The thin leather bit into her wrists. The rabbit wobbled and almost fell. She held on to it for dear life, sensing the need to hurt building inside him with the tension of the approaching battle.

Jack collected his rifle and stood. “Your sister had more spirit.”

He was a very tall man and everything about him was dark—his hair, his eyes, his personality. She remembered how he’d drawn the knife up her leg. Imagined her sister in the same situation, helpless at his mercy. She gripped the stick so tightly her nails bent. “As you said, I’m better trained.”

Seconds passed like minutes, minutes like hours. Desi hunched in the cave within the restraints Jack had fashioned from rawhide, her legs and back aching as she held the excruciatingly uncomfortable position in which Jack had left her and waited. She counted heartbeats and hope, holding on to the hound’s bay like a lifeline through the terror. The outlaw had left the cave ages ago, dressed to deadly perfection: bullets across his chest, knives strapped to his hips and thighs, guns riding his belt. After a token cooking and tossing an offering in the fire along with some sweetgrass and prayers, he’d stood, relieved himself on the half-cooked carcass and kicked it across the dirt to her with a “help yourself.”

Over the next hour the stench of urine had intensified, but if Jack thought it would demoralize her, he had another think coming. Some men were pigs. Being reminded of it with every breath kept her strong and she needed that, because when the opportunity presented itself, she was going to kill him. Preferably with the same knife with which he’d tormented her.

The hound’s bay was close now. Loud, echoing signals that would lead anyone following to the network of caves on this ridge. A rifle shot ricocheted through the canyons, the echo marking the cessation of the hound’s bay, reminding her of that moment when Boone had gone down. Boone. She closed her eyes. She was probably the only one who would mourn him. Everyone thought him worthless, but he’d been such a good friend to her. She imagined she could feel his silky smooth fur under her fingertips, hear his moan of doggie bliss as she scratched behind his heavy ears. And the inner rage grew.

She flexed her fingers, but couldn’t tell if she’d accomplished the move. She’d lost feeling in them thanks to the way Jack had tied the knots. Any movement on her part created tightening somewhere along the system. Soon she wouldn’t be able to move anything at all.

More gunfire exploded down the ridge, each repercussion making her heart jump because the fact that it didn’t stop meant Jack lived and each successive shot meant someone she knew and cared about was a target. She refused to let her worry focus on Caine. Doing so would devastate her ability to function, and she needed to function.

She tested her bonds. The knots were set up in an intricate system. Her hands were trapped down around her hips yet connected to the bonds on her feet and around her neck. Any attempt to stand resulted in the knot tightening around her neck. But it didn’t loosen when she bent back down. The knot was already uncomfortably tight. A hanging truss, Jack had smiled and called his system that marked him as the devil he was.

Before he’d left, he’d even suggested she might want to take that way out rather than waiting for when he got back. She got the impression he wouldn’t care either way, that whatever torturous death she accepted would please him in the same way most men reserved for sex.

He was sick and intelligent, but he wasn’t perfect, and she’d used the time since he’d left to find the holes in his system. She tugged on the ties, holding the strand that would tighten the knot. There was give, which was the hole in the trap that she’d need. If Jack hadn’t been so uncouth as to urinate on her dinner, she might have missed her one possibility of escape, but he had and now all she needed was the opportunity.

The gun battle raged fast and furious. Jack wouldn’t be coming back anytime soon, which meant it was time. Inch by inch, she worked up the material of her skirt. Twice she had to straighten a bit to get the excess material out of her way. Both times the tether around her neck tightened until her breathing became a hoarse strain.

She ignored the pain in her hands and the slow strangulation and kept going, her goal a clear picture in her mind. Three inches from her salvation, she came to a stop. She needed more room. She wasn’t going to get it without strangling. A cessation of gunshots made the decision for her. She tightened her neck muscles, took a deep breath and yanked the material up under her bonds.

The rawhide tether viciously bit into her throat, choking the air from her lungs. She coughed, a painfully aborted effort that only tightened the noose more. Warm liquid trickled down her neck. She forced herself not to fight, to suck thin trails of air in and out on a hoarse wheeze as she worked her hands between her legs. She couldn’t pull down her pantaloons, and for a heartbeat, she couldn’t do what she needed to do. It was just so intrinsically repugnant, so against everything she’d been taught. A bullet winged off the cave entrance, slicing though the interior with a high-pitched whine, and one thing became clear. If she didn’t do it, she was going to be dead.

She closed her eyes, took another careful breath and let her bladder go, wetting the rawhide, working her hands as she did, cringing and sobbing as the leather loosened but not enough. Not enough. Forcing a deep breath she held it and shoved her hands up against her body in an effort to soak the leather. The noose bit deep. She couldn’t let her breath out. Couldn’t get another in. The leather gave. She yanked at her hands, using the blood seeping from the cuts to grease the ties more. She ripped her hands free, her scream at the agony it caused trapped in her throat.

Spots danced before her eyes as she clawed at the leather severing her wind. It loosened slightly but she couldn’t get it free. Across the cave, beside the fire, there was a glint of metal. The eating knife. Jack hadn’t taken it with him.

She hobbled toward it, fighting the wave of black coming at her faster than she could move. She fell to her knees before it, grabbed it with both hands and brought the edge up against her throat. The flat side slipped between the leather and her skin, cutting a thin line of pain. More wetness spilled down her neck. With all her might, she pressed outward. The leather stretched, gouged her neck from behind as it held to its intent.

C’mon,
she prayed.
Give up already.

The leather held. More gunfire roared around the cave. Men’s voices peppered the silence in between, no distinguishable words, just staccato notes of anger that beat on her calm with merciless precision. And still she pushed and still the rawhide resisted. Her vision went to black. Her “No” welled silently within. She gave another soundless scream and one last thrust.

The knife flew out of her numb hands as the rawhide severed. She fell to her hands and knees, head hanging, dragging gasp after gasp into her tortured lungs as the knife clattered against stone. “Oh, God. Oh, God.”

She needed the knife. Another bullet whined through the cave. She crawled in the general direction of the weapon, sprawling twice along the way as her wet skirt wrapped around her legs. It hurt to breathe, to move. She kept on, whispering as she went, only realizing the name she was invoking with every breath was Caine’s. If he was here, she had to help him. She wouldn’t let Jack kill him. She blinked. The knife was right in front of her. She watched her fingers curl around the hilt, unable to feel it in her numb hand, so she just tightened her grip until her knuckles showed white. At some point, it would occur to Jack that he could use her to disarm the men of Hell’s Eight. She couldn’t let that happen. She had to think.

A glance at the section of the cave where she’d been hidden was dimly lit. That had possibilities. She cut the ties from her feet and waist, grimacing at the strong smell of urine wafting with her every move. Even though there wasn’t anyone around to know she’d wet herself, and even though she’d done it for a good reason, humiliation still flooded her soul.

She grabbed up the rabbit carcass, almost vomiting as she touched it. She also grabbed up a couple of rocks and the stick before limping back to the spot where Jack had tied her. She took off her dress and shawl. She laid the dress out as she would be if she’d fallen, making sure the head was up under the shadow of the rock. She stuffed the carcass down the sleeve and the rocks up under the torso. She broke the stick in half and then braced the pieces under the hip and shoulders, before carefully draping the shawl around the rest. She stepped back, rubbing her bruised throat. It wasn’t perfect, but anyone taking a quick glance and expecting her to be there might be fooled for a split second. Which meant she now had to decide what to do with her split second.

A volley of shots rent the air and then the sound of someone coming up the hill preceded a curse. The accent and foreign words identified the intruder. Jack was on the way back.

Everything faded as Desi’s sense of survival kicked in, fear amplifying every nuance of the world around her. She could hear the sound of feet scraping up the hill, metal striking on rock, dislodged pebbles skittering down the hillside. Jack was armed to the teeth and going to be here any second. She squelched panic and kicked her brain into a gallop. She only had seconds.

She ran to the mouth of the cave, her breath sounding unnaturally loud in her ears. Grabbing up a large rock, tears seeping from her eyes at the agonizing tingle from the returning circulation in her arms, she held it above her head as she pressed her back against the wall. Her breath sawed in and out of her lungs and a trembling began deep inside.