Chapter 20
Something punched Jacob in the windpipe.
Hard.
Two hundred pounds of inertia carried him and slammed him down on his back. His helmet cracked against rock. He gasped, eyes
watering, choking on his own larynx. His thoughts raced—she tricked me, she set a trap, she used the rope to set a goddamn trap. The resourceful woman had held her climbing rope up at neck height, five feet off the ground, and let him charge straight
into it. He’d clotheslined himself.
Now she tackled him.
But Jacob still had the gun in his hand. He rolled over, twisted the Colt 1911’s barrel into her face—but now the rope was
tangled under his armpit, and she pinned his wrist like a gooseneck. He couldn’t point the gun. His finger jerked the trigger
anyway—a tooth-rattling blast into the ceiling—and stalactite chips showered them.
Her other hand, his mind screamed. Knife.
Knife-knife-knife—
Coming straight at his face—but he caught her wrist.
His eyelashes fluttered against a pinpoint of steel. The blade had stopped millimeters from the soft jelly of his eyeball.
He felt her hot breath on his face. She was already on to her next move, fighting with an untrained but instinctual intelligence,
almost feral, repositioning and bracing every pound of her body weight onto that knife. Trying to drive the blade just a little
deeper, straight down into his eye socket.
She tried. She used all her muscle, all her leverage.
It wasn’t enough.
Jacob was stronger. Fights always end up on the ground, and he was in his element here. He felt her adrenalized strength melt
against his.
“Good try,” he huffed in her face. “Hell of a good try.”
He was back in control and it felt good. He punched the knife out of her hand, sent it skittering into the dark. He elbowed
her in the teeth. Then he dug his boots in and rolled his shoulders and threw her off-balance, his own weight catapulting
hers. The woman spilled toward the cliff and kept falling, right over the edge—but she caught herself.
Her fingernails slipped on the smooth stone, her legs dangling freely. Gasping, disarmed. She could barely hold on. Her surprise
attack had almost worked.
Almost.
But now Jacob was in full command of his body. He coughed, spat, pushed himself upright with the pistol in his fist—still
at least a shot or two left—and aimed at her face. Too close to miss now. She was helpless, hanging from the edge.
Her eyes widened with fear.
Jacob covered his ears and pulled the trigger—another concussive blast and searing flash—but the bullet skipped off rock.
She was gone.
“I pushed off the edge,” Tess whispers, “and dropped.”
Jacob’s ears rang. He blinked away grit.
She let go?
He almost laughed with disbelief—facing a bullet to the forehead, she’d chosen a blind drop.
He sure as hell hadn’t expected that. But there was no time to react.
Something snarled on the ground beside him like an uncoiling snake, and he realized: as they’d wrestled together, her rope had looped around his chest, around his wrist, around the gun in his hand, and not by accident. She tangled me in her rope—
It snapped taut with bone-shattering force.