Chapter Thirty-Four #2
There were legitimate reasons why he hadn’t tried. He couldn’t let Borthwick or Jacobs know that he had any interest in the girl. Staying away from her had been the pragmatic, reasonable thing to do.
But Adam knew that wasn’t the whole truth. A wretched part of him had embraced the excuse because he had wanted to avoid talking to Vanika—because he was ashamed of what he’d done to her in Borthwick’s tent.
He didn’t deserve her trust after all that… but Ellie was right.
“Hell,” he muttered under his breath. He cast a pointed look at Ellie. “I don’t know where this is gonna go. Be ready.”
Ellie cocked a playful eyebrow. “Aren’t I always?”
Adam grinned back at her. The gesture was warm and familiar—and he wondered just how long it had been since he’d done it. “With a broken pencil and a bottle of third-rate hooch?”
“A bit of third-rate hooch would be handy at the moment,” Ellie grumbled.
“There’s still plenty of ethanol in that medical kit.”
Ellie brightened with an air of wicked inspiration. “There is, isn’t there?”
Adam’s mad love for this woman glowed inside him like a sun. “Go get ‘em, Princess.”
?
Adam’s two guards trailed him as he crossed the camp. Most of the men were setting up. Borthwick leaned over his folding desk with Singh Rao as they developed a plan for surveying the cliff chambers.
The colonel barely spared Adam a glance. As far as Borthwick was concerned, whatever problem Adam might pose had been resolved when he’d been put under guard.
Singh Rao was more careful, but the subedar didn’t intervene as he watched Adam approach Vanika.
The girl stared at the ground, shoulders slumped and legs kicking listlessly. She looked like a lost, scared, twelve-year-old kid.
Because that’s exactly what she was.
Adam’s heart wrenched in his chest.
He risked everything by being here now, even though the steady rush of the waterfall at the end of the gorge would drown out their words to anyone who might actually understand them.
He decided he didn’t care. He should’ve done this sooner, and to hell with the consequences.
“Hey,” he said.
Vanika’s head jerked up. Her eyes flared with recognition—and a mingled twist of hurt and fury.
The hurt gutted Adam most.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked.
“Yes,” Vanika retorted.
Adam sat down next to her anyway.
Vanika scooted as far away as she could.
Adam let her. For the first time since he had come to this damned forest, he didn’t feel like he was second-guessing himself, wondering how he was going to get it wrong.
“I owe you an apology,” Adam confessed. “I thought if I pretended to be on Borthwick’s side, I’d be able to keep you safe. Pretty sure that was the wrong move.”
Vanika glared at him, cautious and defensive. “Pretending to be on his side was my idea.”
“It was a good one. Might’ve even worked. But there’s a guy here who can always tell when someone’s lying. I’m not gonna tell you who,” Adam warned as she opened her mouth to ask. “I don’t want to catch his attention at the moment.”
Vanika huffed with disapproval. “Why are you telling me all of this now?”
Adam studied the organized detachments of sepoys moving out to search the nearby caves. “Because I’m pretty sure things are about to go to hell around here, and I need to make sure you know we’re still on the same side.”
Vanika’s eyes shimmered with angry tears. “You were going to let him whip me.”
Adam forced himself not to flinch. “I wanted to take him down just for threatening it, but I thought it would be safer if I could find another way to stop him. I would not have let him hurt you.”
A tear carved a path over her cheek. Vanika dashed it away with a quick, defensive flick of her hand.
“I’m sorry for it—for all of it.” Adam made the words a plea. “But I’m going to get you out of here. Just as soon as I come up with a plan.”
“As soon as you come up with a plan?” Vanika countered tartly. “What makes you think that I don’t already have one?”
Adam cocked an eyebrow. “Do you?”
He watched a rapid calculation take place behind the girl’s sharp features as she studied the shape of the landscape and the relative positions of the soldiers.
Her gaze dropped to Adam’s belt, and Vanika lifted her chin defiantly. “I need your enormous knife—and a distraction.”
Adam’s hand reflexively dropped to the hilt of his machete. “My knife. And a distraction.”
“A good one,” Vanika pushed back.
He could read the challenge in her eyes. This was a test—his chance to prove that he meant what he had said. “If I do that, will you promise me you’ll get out of here?”
“No,” Vanika retorted. “I’m going to free the Adrija.”
“Absolutely not,” Adam replied flatly.
Vanika pinned him with a glare. “Are you saying you don’t think I can do it?”
“Borthwick left six armed men back there. How’re you gonna overcome those guys with one knife?”
“I don’t need to overcome the guards.” Vanika’s eyes glittered dangerously. “I just need to free my cousin.”
Adam considered his brief but potent impression of Subhas Kōnja and wavered.
But he’d be sending a twelve-year-old kid into danger on her own.
“You still need to get your friends out of the well,” Vanika pressed mercilessly.
“Yeah, but…”
“And you plan to try to stop that demon from getting Rama’s weapon,” she continued without waiting for him.
“Might’ve been considering it,” Adam mumbled.
“You are not the only one here who can do things.”
Hell, Adam thought ruefully. He couldn’t ask for Vanika’s trust without granting it to her in return.
The fierce, scrawny girl beside him waited for his response.
“Why do I feel like you’re scolding me?” Adam complained.
She rolled her eyes. “Because I am. Now take your knife out and drop it into the grass.”
Adam yanked the knife from his belt. He hesitated. “Will you at least promise me that you’ll back off if it looks dangerous?”
“Are you going to back off if it looks dangerous?” Vanika pushed back.
“Probably not,” Adam admitted.
Vanika waited.
Adam muttered a curse under his breath and let the knife go. The blade sank into the tall grass at the base of the boulder and disappeared.
He checked the camp to see if anyone had noticed.
After a few suspicious looks when he had first sat down, the soldiers had gone back to ignoring them.
Even Adam’s guards didn’t consider his conversation with a child to be much of a threat.
They were watching their colleagues as though wishing they had a more interesting assignment.
He glanced past them to the far side of the camp—where a pair of black eyes studied him with coal-hard intensity.
And like that, the rest of Adam’s plan snapped into place.
Not that it really qualified as a plan. It was more like a patently insane impulse—one that he’d likely reconsider if he stopped to think about it.
Good thing he didn’t plan to stop.
Jacobs strode toward them through the soldiers.
Adam rose to his feet. “Here comes your distraction, kid,” he muttered under his breath.
Vanika’s eyes went wide as she looked from him to Jacobs.
Adam wasn’t going to lie. As stupid as he knew this was… part of him was going to enjoy it.
Jacobs drew closer, and Adam stepped out to meet him.
Thick clouds roiled with silent threat above the valley of bones. Jacobs studied Vanika with cold interest where she sat on her boulder with a purposefully innocent expression.
“Not just here for the astra, are we?” he noted silkily. “That does simplify things.”
Adam beat him to the words. “You’re about to threaten to hurt the kid if Ellie and I don’t walk away. Only that’s not going to work out quite the way you think.”
Jacobs tilted his head mockingly. “Isn’t it?”
A handful of the nearby soldiers cast them curious glances, sensing tension.
That was a start. Adam needed more.
He pitched his voice to be heard across the camp. “Say that again to my face!”
Confusion flickered across Jacobs’ features.
For one final moment, Adam pulled that other persona back around himself, dredging up every tattered fragment of the self-righteous sense of privilege he’d once had mercilessly drilled into him.
He let it seethe through his voice as he stepped forward and drove his finger into Jacobs’ chest. “The problem with you is that you keep forgetting your place.”
The sepoys stopped what they were doing and stared.
Adam had been counting on that. Men on a long mission through the wilderness were bound to be starved for entertainment.
The nearest of the soldiers instinctively formed a loose circle, already sensing where this would go.
Jacobs stilled. “Whatever game you’re playing, Bates, I don’t think you’re going to like how it turns out.”
“Probably not,” Adam agreed.
He yanked loose his belt and tossed it aside—hopefully before anyone noticed that the sheath hanging from it was already empty.
“No guns. No knives,” Adam called out succinctly. “Just fists. Sound fair enough?”
It was Borthwick who answered, taking in the scene as he looked up from his map table. “I should say it does—even for a gutter rat like him.”
Jacobs stiffened, hands twitching into fists.
“Well?” Borthwick prompted with an air of arrogant impatience.
Jacobs’ fury was palpable. Adam could feel it through the air even from six feet away.
He’d made plenty of men mad before. Hell, he had something of a knack for it, even when he wasn’t really trying... but he wasn’t sure he’d ever made somebody quite this mad.
He had to give Borthwick credit for that.
Jacobs yanked a pistol from inside his jacket. For a moment, Adam wondered if his plan was about to go sideways in the form of a bullet to the head.
Jacobs threw the gun to the ground.
A switchblade from his pocket followed. Another knife fell from his sleeve.
He took out a third.
“How many of those things do you carry around?” Adam burst out in spite of himself.
Jacobs’ eyes flashed with recollection of all the times he and Adam had clashed in the past. “Not enough.”