Chapter 21 #2
She lay on her stomach on the tarp, resting her chin on her hands. Kalb immediately squirmed over to her, lapping at her ear.
“Absolutely not!” Ellie flailed awkwardly at the dog.
“She knows you care, buddy,” Adam translated.
Kalb settled for lying down at Ellie’s side, huffing an adoring breath that stirred the loose hair at her forehead.
Ellie glared back at him warningly.
Kalb hopefully wagged his tail.
Borthwick’s first aid kit filled a well-supplied trunk. Adam pulled out a bottle of rubbing alcohol and twisted it open.
Ellie winced.
“I haven’t done anything yet.” Adam’s mouth twitched with amusement. “I’m cleaning my hands.”
“Just get on with it,” Ellie ordered with grim impatience. “Turnabout is fair play, after all.”
Adam fought back a smile at the not-so-distant memory of how Ellie had stitched up his hand with a flask of cask strength hooch and a scavenged needle. At least this stuff was all sterile—and he was actually capable of stitching in a straight line.
He flexed his hand, smiling at the crooked scar on his palm. “Good point,” he agreed and doused her leg with alcohol.
Ellie hissed between her teeth.
Threading his needle, Adam gave the first wound a careful study. He set the point against her flesh.
A low, angry voice snapped from behind him. “You’re messing everything up!”
Adam glanced over his shoulder. Vanika leaned against one of the trees behind him, her skinny arms crossed over her chest.
“Look away!” she hissed.
Adam turned back to meet Ellie’s surprised stare.
Borthwick’s soldiers were clustered several yards away, taking a tea break. None of them paid Adam any mind. Jacobs and Dawson were still gone.
Borthwick was nowhere to be seen.
Vanika’s voice was tight with irritation. “I have a plan. I am going to lead the colonel into the forest and leave him where it will take him at least a week to find his way out again.”
“You’re in over your head, kid.” It took effort for Adam not to turn around and punctuate the remark with a stern glare.
“This is my forest!” Vanika snapped back. “You are the one who is in over your head. You nearly got yourself eaten by a bodh!”
Adam had to give her that one.
“I have the situation under control,” Vanika asserted.
“Jacobs knows you’re lying,” Adam warned her tightly.
“How can you be sure of that?”
Adam put all the certainty into his words that he could muster. “I know.”
Vanika went quiet. He hated that he couldn’t look at her—but the kid was right. The sepoys were bound to notice if their unexpected guest suddenly started chatting with the twelve-year-old villager who had attached herself to their party.
“I don’t need to be rescued,” Vanika spat out. “Stay out of my way.”
Footsteps crunched as she stalked away.
Adam’s grip on the needle tensed with worry and frustration.
She was just a kid.
“That could have gone better,” Ellie commented in a low voice.
“Yeah,” Adam agreed through gritted teeth.
Her leg still bled sluggishly. He needed to focus on taking care of her—but he also had to warn her about another pit looming before them, one that made his stomach tie into knots.
“Borthwick knows my father.”
Ellie’s brow furrowed with mild confusion. “I think that’s what’s keeping us alive at the moment.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Desperation roughened Adam’s voice. He fought for the words that would make her understand what that entailed—what he would need to do in order to keep them all alive.
The notion left him feeling queasier than a ride in a hot air balloon.
“My father never wanted me.”
Ellie’s face softened with sympathy. “Adam…”
“No,” he cut in sharply. “Listen to me. Things are going to be different. I have to be—”
Kalb jumped to his feet with a bark.
Borthwick walked up to them, his gray eyes placid in a face weathered by years in the sun. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like my medic to see to that?”
“I’ve got it,” Adam managed.
“Don’t let me interrupt.” Borthwick punctuated the remark with a permissive wave of his hand.
He wanted Adam to keep going… while he watched.
Ellie’s calf tensed at the colonel’s words. She didn’t like the idea either.
Adam was pretty sure their opinions didn’t matter.
“Try to relax your leg,” he pleaded.
Ellie drew in a breath, and the muscle under his hand softened.
Adam drove the needle through her skin, smooth and precise. He knew what he was doing. He’d set stitches before.
Mostly on himself.
Ellie pressed her face into her arms, muffling a curse. She should have been shouting them at Adam, but she wouldn’t want the enemy looming over them to see it as a weakness.
Nothing about Ellie was weak. Adam bit back the urge to say as much, sliding the catgut through her calf.
“I’m curious what George Bates’s son is doing in the wilds of Odisha,” Borthwick mused.
“Chhattisgarh,” Adam bit back automatically.
Borthwick’s silence had weight. Adam refused to cow to it, keeping his attention on Ellie’s leg.
“The river marks the border,” he elaborated shortly. “We’re in Chhattisgarh now. And I came to survey a mining operation my father is thinking of investing in.”
Adam had known Borthwick’s question must be coming. He had started working up an answer as soon as they’d crossed the bridge.
“Your father does engage in some… unusual investments.”
“My father,” Adam retorted tightly, “knows how to make his money work for him.”
Nothing about that was a lie. Adam just left out all the pain the man caused in the process.
Not that George Bates cared much about any of that.
He pulled the catgut taut. He had to keep going.
It wasn’t fair to Ellie to leave her waiting for the rest of the pain while Borthwick talked…
which was likely intentional, Adam realized with a burst of helpless fury.
The colonel had chosen this moment, when Ellie was vulnerable and Adam clearly needed to focus, to strike with his interrogation.
Borthwick probably knew quite a lot about interrogations—including the value of pressing your subject while they were distracted.
He could feel the cold weight of the man’s attention and knew Borthwick was studying every nuance of Adam’s responses.
“How do you know him?” Adam asked.
The question had been burning through his mind ever since Borthwick had made his casual comment about Adam’s appearance.
“We met through a conference on security issues for Asian trade routes,” Borthwick replied.
The explanation made sense. Adam’s father had built his empire on insuring trans-Pacific shipping.
It had substantially expanded from there.
“Odd line for a man of your background—surveying,” Borthwick observed.
“Never said it was my line,” Adam returned bluntly.
Ellie lifted her head to glance back at him with a flash of confusion.
Stay quiet, Adam willed at her. Please, Princess.
“You knew we were in Chhattisgarh,” Borthwick pointed out.
“I can read a map,” Adam snapped back—dread slipping out in the form of a flash of temper. “And I know how to find what I’m looking for.”
“Useful skills.” Borthwick’s steel eyes were unrelentingly focused. “Though I must say I find it odd that a man would bring his wife on such an excursion.”
Adam’s jaw tensed with instinctive rage. Borthwick talked over Ellie like she wasn’t even there.
But then, wasn’t he doing the same thing?
Not that he had a choice.
He grasped for a response, even though he knew it was a weak one. “We’re newlyweds. It’s kind of a… honeymoon.”
“In India,” Borthwick clarified skeptically.
You’re George Bates’s son, Adam told himself desperately.
His father’s voice echoed through his mind, clear and harsh.
A Bates doesn’t apologize to anyone.
Adam fixed Borthwick with a glare. “She likes history.”
The words came out as a threat.
Borthwick’s response took longer to come than it should have. Adam couldn’t help feeling the pause was deliberate.
“Well, there’s plenty of that about the place, I suppose,” the colonel finally replied, his posture easing.
Adam reeled from the change. Did it mean that he had just passed Borthwick’s test?
No, he thought with a tight thrill of fear. Every instinct told him that Borthwick’s tests were never really over.
He realized that he was tying off the last stitch. He’d finished the job without even knowing, Ellie’s three deeper wounds now sporting tidy, even rows of catgut.
Borthwick dismissively assessed Ellie’s calf. “You won’t want your wife walking on that leg. We can put her on one of our animals, but I don’t have men to spare to escort you back to civilization.”
“I don’t need an escort,” Adam ground out.
“Nonsense. This area is crawling with violent tribal thugs. I couldn’t conscience sending you off with a wounded woman hobbling you.
You’ll join us on our route until she’s capable.
There’s plenty of territory to explore out here.
I’m sure you’ll find something useful. Was it silver that you were after? ”
The question was casual. Adam smelled another test in it.
They weren’t going to stop, he thought grimly. Borthwick didn’t trust him. Adam wasn’t sure a man like Borthwick ever trusted anybody.
“Tin,” he retorted shortly. “There’s no silver in Chhattisgarh.”
Adam didn’t know if that was true—but he had plenty of experience calling a bluff.
“Indeed.” A note of approval flashed behind Borthwick’s expression before his tone shifted to one of impatient command. “Jacobs!”
Adam startled. He had never heard anyone use Jacobs’ name like that before—the way you would summon a servant. It seemed like a risky way to call a man who oozed competence and menace.
Jacobs had returned to the clearing a moment before, steering Dawson with him. At Borthwick’s call, the professor skittered away like a beetle from an overturned rock.
A flicker of irritation briefly tightened Jacobs’ jaw. “Colonel?”
“Clear one of the mules for Mrs. Bates,” Borthwick ordered, frowning down at his pocket watch. “Take on whatever you can of the displaced gear. Sort out the rest among the other men.”
“Certainly,” Jacobs replied with unimpeachable smoothness.
He turned to go.
Borthwick snapped shut the watch. “Mind your place.”
The words were sharpened by an unmistakable thread of steel. Jacobs’ back stiffened as though someone had just struck him.
Adam found himself distantly wondering if Borthwick was about to get a knife thrown into his throat.
He knew firsthand that Jacobs had an immense degree of self-control. The fact that Adam was sitting here and not lying on top of a cliff in Egypt riddled with bullets was ample evidence of that—but Adam was also damned certain that Jacobs was not a man who tolerated being disrespected.
Rage flickered through Jacobs’ eyes like a passing ghost, but his hand didn’t go to his pocket, or his sleeve… or the myriad other places where he probably had some weapons stashed.
“Certainly, sir,” Jacobs corrected instead, coldly emphasizing the word.
Borthwick dismissed him with a wave of his hand, turning to Adam with a note of weary endurance. “One does have to stay on top of these things with the lower orders.”
Adam’s temper flared. He recognized the irony of feeling compelled to defend Jacobs, of all people.
Not that he could do it.
Borthwick’s remark required a response… but it wasn’t Adam who had to give it. It was someone else—someone he had given up everything not to become.
Feeling as though he took a step over the edge of a brutal precipice, Adam gave Borthwick the answer he was waiting for.
“Tell me about it.”
He felt Ellie still with surprise as he wrapped a bandage around her leg. Kalb lifted his head as though confused.
“Join me at the front of the line,” Borthwick said.
The words were phrased like an invitation—but Adam knew better. Panic pushed a response from his lips before he could think better of it.
“I should stay close to my wife.”
Borthwick frowned with an air of mild disapproval. “Nonsense. My subedar will see that she has everything she requires. Singh Rao!”
The officer from the bridge stepped away from the other men at Borthwick’s summons. “Sir.”
“Assign Mrs. Bates an escort, would you?”
“Yes, sir,” Singh Rao replied with clipped professionalism.
Adam reached down for Ellie’s hand, gently levering her upright. He held her for a moment longer than he should, achingly conscious that Borthwick was still measuring him.
He hadn’t been able to warn her.
Ellie searched his face, looking for some hint of reassurance.
Adam couldn’t give it to her. Things were already bad—and they were only going to get worse.
Borthwick hovered in front of him with an air of mild impatience. “Shall we?”
Every instinct in Adam’s body raged against what he was about to do.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he said, the words distant and lightly patronizing. “You’ll be just fine.”
Shock and confusion swept through Ellie’s features—but nothing more. Because after that, Adam turned and walked away from her without looking back.