CHAPTER 16
Grace shivered uncontrollably. Darkness had closed in. The temperature had plummeted. Wind, gusting through the gallery, magnified the chill. Five hours had passed and she was still propped against the column, trapped with Brenna while Nationalist soldiers roamed the square below.
She couldn’t believe what had happened. Slaughter. With her back to the shooting, she’d only seen it peripherally. But the gunfire and the screaming had told the story.
Today she had sensed a malevolent presence. A palpably evil force had brushed past her and sucked her soul out of her body.
She rested her head against the column, grimacing. Her skull felt like it was caught in a junkyard car crusher. She was parched, her muscles painfully-contracted. There wasn’t one part of her body that didn’t hurt. Every breath felt like a knife sliding between her ribs.
She rolled her head sideways and glanced at Brenna.
She was sitting with her back turned, a silent and immobile figure, her gaze fixed on the yard below, as it had been all day.
Seemingly incapable of averting her attention, she’d been held spellbound by the carnage.
Was she an excitement junkie, ever in search of the next high, unable to live life on a normal scale?
Grace shifted uncomfortably, stifling a hiss of pain.
Everything about Brenna was contradictory.
She’d been livid with her, but ensured her safety.
She acted tough, but her touch was gentle.
Her photographs were compassionate, but she knelt callously in men’s blood to get them.
She said she believed in survival, but she lived in Kav?ak.
Well? What did she expect from a woman who rushed to enter places that sensible people fled?
Today, Brenna hadn’t just looked the devil in the eye. She’d taken his picture.
The carnage took one minute of sustained gun fire, Brenna estimated—not counting the occasional later burst as some hapless survivor was discovered alive and dealt the coup de grace.
Those sixty seconds of bearing witness had taken every bit of courage she had, but she’d focused meticulously on the faces of men who shot unarmed civilians.
Recorded their deeds for posterity. Even if her pictures were destroyed, she had seen the murderers through her viewfinder, memorized their features.
Not once in a hundred and sixty-seven deaths had she looked away.
Not once could anyone claim she hadn’t seen precisely what occurred.
She could stand before any tribunal—before her father—and attest to what she had seen.
She had accounted for each of the lives lost below her. The dead were now part of her.
The General was long gone, of course. But it took time to clean up after a holocaust.
His troops had spent hours stripping the dead of their valuables, and loading their corpses onto flatbed trucks like so much cordwood.
The victims would be dumped, no doubt, in one of those mass graves everyone denied existed.
Now, only a handful of men remained in the courtyard, smoking cigarettes and joking as if they’d just finished their day at a desk job. She wondered if they’d stay and hold the market, or if they’d return to their unit.
She’d heard sporadic gunfire all day, and constant shelling, though none near the market after that 120-mil—the ironic bonus of being so close to the General’s troops.
There was no telling who controlled the sector surrounding the market now—Nationalists, Separatists, Fundamentalists, or some oddball-coalition.
The UN safety zone controlled by the Ukrainians had been pierced.
Which meant that even if she and Grace somehow escaped from the market, they might meet the Nationalists again at the next corner, anyway.
“Brenna?”
She jumped, startled by Grace’s whisper, and turned at once, alarmed by the distress she’d heard in that single word. Her eyes took a moment to adjust from moonlight to the dark gallery. When she saw her, fear rustled through her.
She was in agony. Grunting with each breath, silently fighting pain’s choke-hold. Anyone less stoic would be making a lot of noise.
The van crash, the explosion, the hours of immobility had caught up with her.
“You got any ibuprofen?”
She shook her head. Ibuprofen wouldn’t touch this.
Studying her more carefully, she made a decision. “Have you ever have a bad reaction to morphine?” she whispered. Not that she had alternatives to choose from.
“Morphine? You have morphine?”
She opened her jacket and pulled her turtleneck out of her pants. Reaching beneath her shirt, she fumbled with her traveler’s belt and extracted a small vial and a 3cc syringe.
“Mm-hmm,” she replied, holding the syringe cap between her teeth while she punctured the vial. “How much do you weigh?”
Grace told her and rested her head against the column again.
How much should she draw into the needle?
Her brother James had calculated a dose for her, and Grace, being shorter, was slighter.
Pulling back the plunger, she rounded downward to keep the dose light in case concussion and morphine didn’t mix.
She wasn’t sure. But if the pain took Grace over the edge and she cried out, they would be discovered, and both their deaths assured.
“Undo your pants. This goes in your hip.”
Grace, fingers clumsy from the cold, eased the zipper down, and leaned forward.
Feeling for the fleshy part of her hip, Brenna eased the needle into the firm muscle and smoothly discharged its contents. “It’ll take a few minutes.”
Half an hour later, Grace’s pain had eased. The last of the soldiers straggled toward the passageways, and left the yard silent.
This was Brenna’s chance to move Grace away from the railing. She was shivering and needed to be warmed up.
“We need to move to the back now.” She pointed toward a dark corner twenty feet away. “The soldiers might return at any moment. If I help—you think you can get there quietly?”
Teeth chattering, Grace nodded.
Taking a final glance over the railing, she knelt up, her legs stiff and prickly beneath her. She massaged her thighs trying to get her circulation going, while Grace did the same beside her.
“Let’s do it.” She slid a hand under her armpit, leveraging her off the floor. Grace wobbled to her feet. Steadying herself against the column, Brenna slid her arm around her waist. “Do you need to pee?” she asked.
Grace shook her head.
She was dehydrated. Unfortunately, there was no water. Brenna hadn’t gotten to the hotel yet to trade out the stateside supplies for the items she needed day-to-day.
Brenna guided her to a corner and helped Grace onto the floor. “Back in a sec—” she said. Staying close to the back wall, she returned for the camera. She’d left it at the column, the footage of the century still inside it.
Her fingers found the card slot, popped out the memory card, and tucked it into one of the hidden pockets in the back of her jacket. If they had to run—if they got a chance to run—she could abandon everything else.
On her return, camera and bags in tow, she scooped up a few old newspaper sheets gusting on the balcony.
She folded them over on themselves until she had two long rectangles and laid them on the floor, parallel to the back wall.
The Sunday Post would have made a better pad, but even these few sheets would help insulate Grace from the freezing floor.
Her eyes were fluttering at half mast, shudders convulsing her.
Brenna made a small flourish over the papers. “Lie on those,” she whispered. “We need to get you warm.”
Grace looked at the few sheets. “No feather comforter?” she asked, teeth chattering.
“I have a heat-generating device.” Brenna tapped her breastbone. She cupped Grace’s soft cheek. To ensure she lay squarely on the papers, Brenna helped her transition to the floor, then stretched out beside her on the hard tiles. “Head under my chin,” she whispered.
Shaking convulsively, Grace leaned in.
Brenna brought her closer, wrapping her arms around her.
With the wall behind her and Brenna in front, her body would shelter Grace from the wind.
Her breath would warm the top of her head, where so much body heat was lost.
Pulling her jacket open, she covered Grace as much as possible with the front panel.
Drawing Grace against herself, she tucked a hand beneath her collar and warmed the delicate nape with her palm.
Small groans escaping her, Grace shivered uncontrollably.
Holding her, so fragile in her arms, the memory of another place and time washed through Brenna.
Ari had once lain this vulnerably in her arms.
Not from war, but from love-making so intense it had left both of them shaking and exhausted, so laid open that they thought they would shatter.
Brenna’s eyes slid shut. Before Ari, all the men she’d bedded had been pretenders, men who fucked her fast before she changed her capricious mind.
She knew they didn’t care about her. She was a trophy—the Envoy’s daughter, one of America’s Royal Family.
She’d been nothing more than a sexual conquest, to be publicly crowed about after the fact.
She’d done it anyway.
After her mother’s death, she’d been isolated from affection. No one touched her—not even brushed a hand gently over her shoulder in passing, for the simple pleasure of human contact. So she took what she could get and kept her heart locked.
Of all those men, in all those years, only Ari noticed its inaccessibility.
And one night, frustrated by her distance, determined to break her habit of separation, he demanded her complete surrender, insisted she relinquish her heart and soul to him, that she stop guarding herself. Give yourself to me, Brenna. As God is my witness, I won’t let you down.
He took her on the most frightening journey of her life that night, moving deeper and deeper into her, past every barrier, making love with such tender ferocity that her defenses collapsed and on the wings of her voice she handed him her heart.
Now, three years and twelve-hundred miles away from that night, her arms enfolding someone else, the wound in her chest inexplicably fell open, bleeding again.
She sniffled, frightened. Her cheeks were wet.
Dashing at them with the back of her hand, she ordered herself not to cry.
If she let herself feel this, she would be lost. If she wept, it would never end.
Her chest seized, choking on a knot of grief that had slipped its chains.
Grace stirred. Her hand found its way over Brenna’s hip onto her back. “Shh,” she murmured, gently caressing her beneath the jacket.
Shh.
Brenna allowed the touch. To Grace, it meant nothing. It was the morphine, disorienting her. This was just the habitual kindness of a long-partnered woman who thought she was sleeping with her lover. When the meds wore off, she wouldn’t remember.