“How can that be? Why would he do that?” Carrie's bewilderment didn't stop her from continuing to chafe his hands and her consistent stroking woke fire in his nerves. Oddly enough, the pain somehow calmed his fears as well. It was real, present. The monsters were not. “Why would your own brother try to kill you?”
The words sounded tinny in his ears as he sat up. He had to fight a wave of pain and wicked nausea. He held tight to the litany he'd developed. He wasn't alone. He wasn't nine. He wasn't stupid, as his father had always claimed. He was Davros Gianikopolis. He was his own man.
Determination flared within him. Somehow he would get out of this, get Carrie out too, and when he did, he was going to make sure Niko was dead. For this, Dav would kill him with his bare hands.
“I'm sorry, Carrie.” He forced the words out, forced his teeth to unclench, his painfully clenched jaw to relax.
Confusion still rang in Carrie's voice. “You've never mentioned your brother. Why would he do something like this? Why would he or your father put you in a hole?”
“Ah, darling,” Dav soothed, feeling more like himself with each exchange, with every moment his brain cleared, with every breath of damp earthy air. “Families are not always very nice. Mine would be the finest example of dysfunction you could imagine. I thought my lamentable brother was dead.” He paused to catch his breath and straighten further, letting the pain flow away as best he could. “This is, as you Americans would say, the terrible result of a family feud.”
She managed to laugh a little at his wry statement, and it lifted his heart. “There nowâ” He tried to inject humor into his voice, to soothe her as well. “Let's get untied. Where is that all-purpose tool? Did they search you? Take it?”
“No. They didn't touch me, other than to cut off some of my hair and shove me down here. And I still have my purse. It's under your coat, like you suggested,” she said, and he heard the susurration of fabric, the snick of a metal catch. “It's ... oh, wait, we put the tool in your pocket.”
Her hands roamed over his torso, distracting him further from his fears. He'd imagined her hands on him in just that way, but the circumstances had been much more attractive. Hard to believe that he could switch from fear to sex, but both were passionate drivers in the human animal. And truthfully, the lascivious thought was a welcome distraction from the fear tearing at him, tugging at his mind, trying to suck him back into the nightmare of their situation.
“Ah-ha!” Carrie's triumph came with the jangle of keys and a clank of metal. “Here, hold out your hands.”
It was agonizing to hold still as she clamped the tool's scissors down on the zip ties, a further agonizing pain when they finally gave way and the blood, pent up and pulsing, poured into his hands once more. He could feel the pounding of his heart, the beat of the blood as it flooded into his hands, making them ache and sting and throb as if he'd plunged them into a hive of stinging wasps.
Letting them lie heavily in his lap, he panted through the pain. “Oh, God. That hurts,” he muttered.
“Your hands? Should I rub them again?” Carrie asked. “What can I do to help?”
“Nothing yet,” he managed. “Let them be for a bit. Can you get your own hands free or do you need help?”
“I think I can do it,” she said. He heard the snap of the plastic, then the clinking of the keys and her sigh of relief as her bonds fell away.
“Can you find the bag, the one from my head? Keep the ties from our hands too. We need to keep anything that might help us get out of here. You never know what will help.”
“Really? The cut ties ...” She let the thought trail away and he heard her moving around at his side, felt the swish of her searching fingers. “Here's the bag,” she said. “I'll put the ties in it.”
Without warning, there was a flare of light up above them. A blindingly bright flashlight shone down into the cell, the grate rattled and the lock was opened. No one said a word, but a bag dropped down to the floor. The grate fell back into place, the lock snicked shut and the torch disappeared.
The transaction was over so quickly, it barely registered. Instead, all he could think about was what was in the bag.
“Be careful,” he said sharply as he felt Carrie move to investigate. “My brother, may he rot in hell, used to put rats and cockroaches in the room with me when we were children. I'm hoping that's food, but it might not be.”
“Shit, that's nasty,” she cursed, and it surprised a laugh out of him. He'd never heard her use any foul language.
“Carrie?”
“What?” she snapped with a testy tone. “Man, I have a headache. I think I broke the strap on my purse and I lost track of where the bag dropped, thinking about rats. Damn it, why'd you have to say that?” Now she was muttering. “God, I hate drugs, they make me feel like crap. And I hate rats. Dirty nasty things.”
He actually found himself chuckling at her indignant tone. “Sorry, but it's true. Food would be good, and they haven't harmed either of us yet, barring that slap to you on the plane”âhe recalled she'd been hit twice now and his gut burnedâ“and at the car. Those, however painful, weren't torture.”
“No, just showed disdain for women,” she replied, and he could tell by her voice that she was moving toward the middle of their cell, looking for the sack. “Fuckers.”
“Carrie!” Now he was shocked into laughing out loud.
“Sorry, but a spade's a spade, and none of them will ever be clients in my gallery so I don't have to mind my reputation or my language for them. Fuckers,” she repeated. “Pisses me off.”
He chuckled again. It felt good to laugh instead of shiver in fear. “I can tell. And it is better to be angry than despairing so, yes, they are indeed fuckers and should die.” He said it lightly, but meant it as well. To change the subject, he asked, “So, did you find the bag?”
“Yes,” she said, sounding more like herself. “There's nothing moving inside it, or at least not that I can tell.”
He thought about that and repressed a shudder. “Good. Smell it, if you can, and maybe that will tell us something.”
Warmth and movement alerted him that she was next to him. In the pitch black of their cell, that was the only warning he had and he fought down memories again, memories of sudden scratching and nibbling as a rat leapt on him in the darkness of his childhood captivity.
He should not have mentioned rats.
“So,” she said, oblivious to his mental struggle, “smells like dust, mold and fruit. Bleech.” She sneezed. “That'll teach me to stick my nose right up against it.”
“Sorry,” Dav managed around a shaky laugh, brought back to the moment by her grounded practicality. “But hard to tell what it might be without being able to see it.”
“They say blind people's other senses get very sharp,” she said conversationally. “I guess I can understand why.”
She sounded so calm that he had to ask, “Carrie, are you okay?”
“No, I'm not,” she replied, her voice sounding just as conversational and calm as it had a moment before. “I'm hanging on to my sanity with my teeth, trying not to focus on the fact that I'm cold and wet and exhausted. Oh, and I'm in a hole in some unknown jungle, far away from light and air and people.” He heard the hurried pace of her breathing. “Now can we talk about something else? Please?”
“The latest exhibit at Prometheus looked promising,” Dav quipped, thinking back to picking her up at the gallery. Was it just a day ago?
“It is,” she said, and he heard humor in her voice. “I'm going to make a killing on this one. New artist, brilliant. Not your style,” she added, and now his ears caught the underlying panic she was trying to talk herself out of. “Too busy for your taste, I think, but I've got some clients who are going to eat this guy up.”
“Not literally, I hope,” he said lightly, reaching out to see if he could help. Rising onto his knees, he found her hands, felt her fingers tugging at the ties of the bag. His own fingers were still swollen and painful, but together, they managed to get it open.
“Well, Augustine Shepherd might like to, literally, since he's her type of boy toy, but I think this kid's grounded enough not to go for her lures.”
“Ah, then he's smart too. Should I consider him a rival?” he said, half joking, half serious, since admiration was plain in her tone.
“Oh, no. He's far too young for me,” she said, taking his hand as they eased the bag to the ground together.
“You're quite young, my dear,” Dav said quickly, remembering her lithe body and elegant carriage, which he so admired. “And lovely.”
“Why thank you,” she said, and he heard pleasure in her voice. “But dating the artist would definitely put me in cougar country.”
He laughed at the thought. “I disagree, but I find myself glad that you think so.”
There was silence for a moment, and then Carrie changed the subject. “How do we figure out what's in the bag?”
He dismissed the thought of bugs and snakes. He had to if he wanted to keep his cool. “Reach in and feel around, I guess. I'll do it.”
“No, your handsâ” she began.
He cut her off. “Carrie, let me do this. I'm the reason you're in this mess. If there's something dangerous or questionable, let me do it. My goal is to get you out of this alive, and back to San Francisco.”
“Not without you,” she said immediately.
They sat in silence for several heartbeats. He didn't know how to respond. Her safety, her life, were paramount. He'd give his up to save her, in the blink of an eye, as would any man. “Thank you, my dear,” he said, “but you are innocent in all this.”
Her hands found his face in the darkness with unerring instinct. “Dav, I'm not your âdear' anything, in that avuncular way you say it. I'm not weak, I'm not stupid and I'm not helpless. We'll get out of this together or not, but don't you treat me like I'm helpless.”
The rush of anger behind her words was punctuated by the pressure of her fingers on his face. Following the line of her arms, he found her shoulders in the darkness, let his still throbbing hand slip upward to caress the softness of her cheek.
“Helpless? Never,” he said, picturing her lovely face, letting his fingers be his guide as he felt the fullness of her hair, the soft brush of it on his hands. “Strong, beautiful, competent, brilliant,” he murmured, losing himself in the feel of her, which did more to push back the dark and the fear than anything he could imagine. “But never helpless. Never that.”
There was something building in the dark now, something that was good. Something sensuous and compelling. He couldn't see her face, her features, but he could feel the yielding of her body, the angle of her form moving into him.
Without thought, without hesitation, he moved as well, finding her lips with amazing accuracy. The kiss was better, deeper and truer, than their frenzied passion on the plane. That moment had been motivated by the lack of inhibition brought on by drugs, this was honest attraction, stripped bare of social convention.
This was real. This was powerful.
Her hands moved into his hair and he wanted to growl with delight. Her fingers were cool, caressing his neck, soothing him and exciting him as she leaned further into the kiss.
It was a sound that broke them apart. A deep, roiling rumble.
“Oh, my gosh,” Carrie said, and he thought she snickered.
“Carrie?” Dav was having a hard time shifting from passion to humor.
“It's my stomach. It's growling.” He could feel the tremor of laughter where he still held her.
He grinned. Then laughed out loud. “Then, by all means, let's explore our dining options,” he said, smiling. The darkâboth bad and goodâreceded as her amusement replaced any residual fear.
Together they delved into the bag, finding a mango, some bananas, and peculiarly, two wax paperâwrapped, thick-sliced ham sandwiches with mayonnaise and cheese on white bread.
“A picnic,” Carrie said. “Too bad they didn't think to add some champagne or something fun to drink.”
“Ah, but they did,” Dav corrected, pulling the last items free of the bag. Two bottles with old-fashioned caps rattled together. “No idea what's in them, but the caps seem to be secure, so we can hope they've not been tampered with.”
Dav tried to twist off the cap, but his hands were still too swollen. “You'll have to do the honors, my ... Carrie.” He corrected the “my dear” he'd been about to say. Evidently she didn't like the way he said it, or what it implied, so he'd stop.
They held hands as they ate the scant meal and drank the grape soda. Dav drained every drop of the drink and wished for more. He felt as if he could drink a gallon of water and not be totally satisfied.