Chapter 21
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Twenty-One
Six rifles leveled at Adam’s head with a series of rapid clicks. Adam froze on his knees, hands still raised, his heart thudding as the moment balanced on a wire.
Borthwick’s expression read of mild surprise and curiosity. Ellie and Adam hadn’t been the ones who invaded his suite back in Puri, nor had he seen them during the festival. Everything in his reaction now depended on the other man who stood before the line of soldiers.
Jacobs.
Borthwick opened his mouth to speak—and a muddy missile launched itself onto the bridge. Kalb skidded across the logs with an uncharacteristic grace, panting happily as he dripped muck and river water onto the logs.
“Aw hell,” Adam blurted out, knowing exactly what was coming next.
The dog went into an exceptionally vigorous shake, spraying everyone within a twelve-foot radius.
Standing at the front of the line of soldiers, Borthwick took the worst of it. Muddy water splashed across the front of his uniform.
The colonel flinched back, his eyes flashing with quick fury. He wiped a hand over his khaki jacket—just above the stock whip coiled at his belt.
None of this was good.
“Do you know these people?” Borthwick demanded.
He was speaking to Jacobs, the question prompted by the pale man’s involuntary response to Ellie and Adam’s unorthodox entrance.
Not that Jacobs was laughing anymore. The shock of their bizarre appearance on the bridge had faded. In its place, a frustrated and angry calculation shifted across his angular features.
Time crawled as Adam waited for his answer.
“As it happens,” Jacobs evenly replied.
Adam scrambled furiously for an escape. He could grab Ellie and roll them off the bridge. Keep her under the river for as long as he could and hope the current carried them out of range.
Except that the rifles pointed at his head were Martini-Henry MK IVs. They had a firing range of four hundred yards.
He and Ellie weren’t going to make it four hundred yards—assuming they weren’t shot before they hit the water.
“This is Mr. Adam Bates,” Jacobs announced. “And his wife.”
Adam stilled at the unexpected word. Wife? Why the hell was Jacobs calling Ellie his wife?
Borthwick eyed Adam with closer interest. “Not one of the San Francisco Bateses?”
Adam’s chest tightened.
The San Francisco Bateses.
Was it possible that a high-ranking Indian colonial administrator had heard of his family?
A colonial administrator who was friendly with the likes of Lord Aldbury.
Yeah, Adam thought with a lurch of dismay. It was possible. After all, it wasn’t as though George Bates kept a low profile.
“He is indeed,” Jacobs replied—fixing Adam with a look that he could read as clearly as paint slapped onto a wall.
Play. Along.
Adam had never stopped to discuss his family history with Jacobs in between trying not to get killed by the man—but Jacobs wasn’t the kind of guy who left things to chance. Adam couldn’t really be surprised that his enemy might have taken the time to figure out exactly where he’d come from.
Not that any of that mattered right now. Jacobs was obviously setting him up, and Adam could think of only one reason for him to do that.
Because it would keep him and Ellie alive.
“Which of them do you belong to, then?” Borthwick pressed.
Knowing that it was probably the best way to keep himself free of bullet holes for the next ten minutes, Adam forced himself to answer—even though he hated every syllable.
“George Bates,” he ground out. “I’m George Bates’s son.”
Adam could feel Ellie’s astonished gaze on his back as Borthwick coldly assessed him. The colonel was weighing the plausibility of a son of George Bates turning up on a river in the backwoods of India, slaughtering oversized catfish with a machete.
To anyone who knew anything about Adam’s father, it would sound pretty damned far-fetched.
Borthwick’s gray study halted on Adam’s face. “You look like him,” he commented.
The words felt like a punch in Adam’s gut.
Borthwick hadn’t just heard of his family. He knew George Bates… because he was right.
Adam was taller than his father. His dad had a beard, his blond hair gone to silver. But they had the same sky-blue eyes… and more or less the same damned face.
Being reminded of the resemblance made Adam want to hit something.
He was kneeling on the ground with six rifles pointed at his head. The woman he loved was still bleeding.
Shock and helplessness coiled around him like a snake, tightening his breath.
A shout of protest went up from behind the sepoys, and a moment later, Vanika pushed to the front of the line. Her gaze shot to Adam and narrowed into a ferociously disapproving glare.
Adam could read her meaning clearly enough. Vanika was furious at his intervention.
To be fair, she probably had been slightly better off before Adam had thrown himself at Borthwick’s feet in a spray of fish blood.
A gratingly familiar voice sounded from down the bridge.
“Excuse me! Pardon me! I really must be…”
Dawson stumbled past the soldiers, who glared at the intrusion. At the sight of Ellie and Adam, his eyes widened with shocked recognition.
He opened his mouth to speak—and Jacobs snapped an elbow into his gut.
Dawson wheezed, doubling over.
Borthwick glanced back at the two men with a frown.
“The professor’s feeling a bit off,” Jacobs filled in.
That counted as the second time in the last five minutes that Jacobs had saved Adam’s neck. It probably wouldn’t be the last, based on how quickly all of this was going to hell.
Adam wondered when Jacobs would get tired of it.
Focus, he reminded himself fiercely. He couldn’t afford to let his thoughts scatter. Only one thing mattered right now—more than Dawson or the tangled threads of Adam’s past that had suddenly whipped up to ensnare him.
Stay alive. Save the kid.
He drew in a deep breath, keeping his eyes on Borthwick. He forced his voice to steady.
Adam had no reason to be afraid. He was George Bates’s son.
“Are your men carrying a medical kit?” he asked. “I need to see to my wife.”
Borthwick briefly assessed the wounds on Ellie’s leg. “Subedar Singh Rao!”
An officer stepped forward. The stars on his collar and shoulders called out his higher rank. In the Indian Army, a subedar was roughly equivalent to a lieutenant.
“Sir,” Singh Rao said, coming to attention. He cut a striking figure, tall and broad-shouldered with graceful features over a glossy black beard.
“Have two of the men carry Mrs. Bates across.” Borthwick waved a dismissive hand at Ellie’s prone figure.
Adam quickly stepped in front of her. “I’ll take care of it.”
The words came out sharper than he had intended. Singh Rao paused in the process of giving an order to two of the riflemen, flashing Adam a thoughtful look.
“Come on, Princess,” he said, levering Ellie to her feet and scooping her into his arms.
Her leg was slick with blood where he held it. Eyes bored into the back of his head—Borthwick’s quietly measuring. Vanika’s fierce with irritation.
Jacobs’ flat with warning.
With the weight of all of that bearing down on him, Adam crossed the bridge.
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Adam barely noticed that he had entered the Dandakaranya. As the forest loomed around him on the far bank of the river, blooming with strange flowers and softly whispering trees, all his attention was on Ellie’s leg.
They sat on a tarp spread near the quietly rushing water. Kalb lay nearby, still wet and panting blissfully.
The noble-looking subedar, Singh Rao, had given Adam back his machete, passing it to him with an air of unimpeachable professionalism. Adam had cleaned the blade off with a swish in the river.
He’d lost the Winchester. Borthwick had relieved him of the gun and passed it off to one of the sepoys, ostensibly to have it cleaned.
Adam doubted he’d be getting it back anytime soon. Borthwick didn’t seem to be treating him as an enemy, but he clearly wasn’t about to let an unknown quantity wander around his camp with a well-oiled repeater.
There had been another close call with Dawson once they’d crossed the bridge. The professor had stomped over, opening up his mouth to protest, only for Jacobs to clamp a hand down on his shoulder.
“Why don’t we take a little walk?” Jacobs had silkily suggested before steering Dawson aside.
Jacobs would find a way to keep Dawson quiet.
He was intimidating as hell even when he wasn’t trying all that hard—and Dawson had never had much of a spine.
Still, it was yet another move Jacobs had been forced to make to protect them.
Adam was under no illusions that the man was happy to be doing it.
He undoubtedly saw their arrival as a deliberate attempt to get in his way again, testing just how far he was willing to go to protect whatever precious justice was somehow tangled up with their fates.
Jacobs would have a limit. Adam had no desire to find out what it looked like.
“We’re on damned thin ice,” he noted under his breath.
“It’s certainly further than we’d planned to push him,” Ellie quietly agreed as she watched Jacobs walk away with the professor.
“Which is why we’d better make sure you’ve got two working legs.” Adam picked up Ellie’s ankle and set it on his knee.
“You’re going to bloody your trousers,” Ellie protested.
Adam glanced at the catfish guts that still stained his pants, then cocked a skeptical eyebrow.
“Oh, fine,” Ellie huffed.
He studied her injuries. The wounds didn’t quite circle her leg. The sides of her calf were fine. The punctures on the back were the worst, but thankfully her trousers were made of sturdy twill, which had helped blunt the impact of the bodh’s teeth.
Three of the holes were a bit larger than the others. “Those are going to need stitches,” Adam determined.
Ellie looked queasy at the idea. “I’m sure they’re not that bad…”
“This is gonna be easier if you roll over,” Adam replied unrelentingly.
“Blast it anyway,” Ellie muttered.