Nineteen
O verall, Adam figured the day was going pretty well.
His conversation with Ellie the night before had grabbed his heart and wrung it out like an old dishcloth… but there’d been something almost like relief in that. He’d actually slept after he went back up to his room—more soundly than he had in a long time, even though he’d woke up halfway through the night with thoughts of patio tables and Ellie’s flushed cheeks in his head.
Adam had dealt with that in another way his father wouldn’t have approved of, then crashed like a fallen tree.
He still had no idea how he and Ellie were going to find their way through the muddled morass of his morals and her principles, but he simply felt less scared of it now than he had before. It wasn’t just George Bates’s voice he was hearing in his brain. Now Ellie’s was right there with it. And where George Bates’s voice made Adam feel like an irredeemable ass, Ellie’s made him feel as big as one of those statues they’d passed on the way here.
I don’t need to see that other Adam Bates—that one your father would’ve made you into—to know that I would never have chosen him over this one that’s standing right in front of me.
The memory warmed Adam up from the inside like a torch. Maybe he’d even keep feeling that way—so long as he kept from screwing things up.
He was mostly trailing behind Constance and Sayyid as they searched the temple for Ellie’s sun disk. Sayyid knew the layout of the place and took the lead. Adam had heard him mention that he’d been here before with his dad, who sounded like he’d been as much of an archaeologist as any of the guys who’d taught Adam’s classes back at Cambridge.
Adam just kept his eyes peeled for big orange circles. He actually spotted a good few of them—sun disks with falcon wings sprouting out from the sides of them and sun disks on gods’ heads—but they were carved onto columns or faces of solid rock, not something with a behind where someone might’ve hidden a clue.
They had reached the second level of the temple, where a big plaza was framed by tumbled columns. They’d surveyed the open square of ground pretty quickly, and Sayyid led them to a small enclosed chapel hidden on the north side.
As Adam stepped into it, his nose was filled with the scent of dry stone and dust. Then his eyes adjusted, and he reeled at the beautifully preserved paintings that completely covered the walls and ceiling.
“Hell,” he commented eloquently.
“Now this is intriguing!” Sayyid’s tone quickened with excitement. “These hieroglyphs here are part of the King as Sun Priest text, which celebrates the pharaoh’s role as the heir and servant of the sun god—which perhaps demonstrates an early movement toward the conception of the Aten as a sole creator of the universe.”
“I don’t see any suns.” Constance frowned.
“Oh—that’s this fellow, right here.” Sayyid looked a little embarrassed. “In this depiction, the sun is being represented by the form of the god Ra.”
As Sayyid rattled on, something tickled at the back of Adam’s awareness. It was just a whisper of warning instinct… but he’d had that instinct before, and doing what it told him had saved his hide more times than he could count.
By the time he actually heard the soft scrape of a boot on stone, he was already turning.
He met the first intruder with a fist, taking the guy in the ribs.
With a twist and a grunt, he tossed him into the chapel, where he rolled to collapse at Constance's feet.
Adam had only enough time to register that the groaning villain was Scarface, one of the Al-Saboor cousins from the tomb at Saqqara, before a guy who looked almost identical to him, save for the scar, barreled into the room with a cudgel in his hand.
Adam welcomed the newer Al-Saboor with a friendly kick to the shin. He went down too, yelping out a string of Masri imprecations as he clutched his leg.
“Oh no, you don’t!” Adam heard Constance reprimand behind him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ellie’s petite friend catch Scarface as he tried to scramble to his feet. With a tidy maneuver, she twisted his arm behind his back at a painful angle and forced him to the floor. She pinned him there with a fashionable kid boot between his shoulder blades as Sayyid gaped at her.
Two more Al-Saboors burst into the chapel.
Adam treated the guy he’d just kicked to a further punch in the gut, leaving him wheezing.
The next one came at Adam with a right hook. Adam caught it in an echo of Constance’s pivot a moment before with Scarface. With a powerful twist, he wrenched the thug’s arm behind his back—and felt his shoulder pop.
The man collapsed against the wall, holding his limp arm and railing at Adam. He spoke in Masri, but that hardly mattered. Adam knew what it sounded like when he was being cursed out.
He still hadn’t taken out his machete. It was close-quarters fighting in the chapel, with Constance and Sayyid right behind him—Sayyid pressed back against the walls like he was trying to disappear through them, and Constance still pinning Scarface to the floor, even as she eyed Adam’s attackers with a dangerous determination.
The knife would make quicker work of the Al-Saboors—but some of them would probably end up dead.
Adam didn’t much like killing if he didn’t have to.
The next fool to come running into the tomb sported the Al-Saboor pointed chin and prominent nose with the added charm of a missing front tooth. He held a sword in his hands and screamed out a battle cry.
Adam whirled to the man whose right arm he had just dislocated. He grabbed him by the front of his galabeya and threw him at his gap-toothed cousin.
Lefty went down, tangling up with the guy Adam had hobbled earlier, who was just staggering to his feet. Hobbles toppled like a bowling pin, and Gaps fell over the pair of them, the sword clattering from his hand.
All in all, things were going swell—until the next two Al-Saboors burst into the chapel with rifles in their hands.
They leveled both of the guns at Adam, who recognized bad odds when he saw them. He raised his hands over his head.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Constance’s face firm into lines of furious determination as she reached for something under her skirt.
Knives, Adam recalled dimly, remembering how she had threatened Neil back in the tomb.
“Don’t,” he ordered sharply.
Constance didn’t look happy about it—but she listened.
The thugs with the rifles parted to make way for someone else who shared the family features but on a frankly enormous scale. His thick shoulders pulled at the seams of his robe, hands like ham hocks clenched at his sides.
Adam tilted his head back to look up at him as the big man took in the tangled pile of his groaning cousins at Adam’s feet.
“I think I’ll call you Muscles,” Adam commented.
Muscles replied with a fist to Adam’s face.
?
Adam ended up with about four Al-Saboors piled on top of him. He scored a few more blows to his jaw and ribs before someone who sounded like they were in charge barreled into the chapel and hollered. Adam was hauled up off the floor, and his hands were roughly tied behind his back as the senior Al-Saboor—distinguished by the threads of gray in his dark hair—grimaced with unhappy exasperation at the scene.
With an irritated wave of his hand, Al-Saboor the First ordered them out of the chapel. Adam followed Constance and Sayyid in a grim procession as they were led through the shadows of the colonnade to where a spill of rubble formed a precarious track up to the top level of the temple.
His face hurt. So did his ribs. The cut on his still-healing hand was sore—and his brain was working furiously. This was no chance robbery. The men who surrounded him were hired thugs—which meant the guy who had hired them couldn’t be far away.
There was still no sign of Ellie and Neil. Adam dared to hope that the two of them might have escaped… until he was shoved down a crumbling half-flight of stairs and heard their voices from around the corner ahead of him.
“I’m terribly sorry, but we are professional archaeologists in the middle of a survey and this chapel is meant to be closed.”
That was Neil—and he sounded nervous as hell.
He heard Ellie next, and her words sent a frisson of fear through his blood.
“I had wondered where you were in Saqqara.”
Adam closed his eyes, already knowing whose tones he would hear in response.
“An unfortunate but necessary detour,” came the familiar, implacable reply.
Jacobs.
Constance and Sayyid were herded around the turn ahead of him. Muscles planted a hand between Adam’s shoulder blades, shoving him into stumbling down the last steps, off-balance thanks to his bound hands.
Sun glared down over a limestone courtyard framed by thick stone walls. Ellie crouched on a square platform that dominated the center of the space, with Neil hovering uneasily beside her.
Jacobs stood before them, looking for all the world as though he hadn’t nearly been buried alive in the catastrophic collapse of a legendary city a couple weeks before.
Muscles propelled Adam the rest of the way into the courtyard, then shoved him to his knees.
Neil’s jaw dropped with shock and dismay. Ellie’s gaze danced over him worriedly, cataloging the bruises Adam could feel forming on his jaw and cheek before stopping to linger on the blood dripping from his split lip.
He flashed her a determined smile before his view was cut off by a pair of black trousers.
Adam looked up to meet Jacobs’ cold stare. “I was wondering when you’d turn up.”
“Mr. Bates,” Jacobs returned smoothly. His gaze dropped to Adam’s belt, and Adam let out a groan.
“Come on!” he protested. “It’s not like I can even…”
His voice trailed off as Jacobs plucked the machete from Adam’s belt.
“…Use it,” Adam finished mournfully.
Jacobs really was a bastard.
“Excuse me! Pardon! Coming through!” Dawson’s voice immediately grated on Adam’s nerves. The professor awkwardly pushed his way through the crowd of Al-Saboors, stumbling to a halt at Adam’s side.
He put his hands on his knees, panting slightly. He was already sweating.
The professor turned his head—and noticed Adam kneeling beside him. He stumbled back with alarm, reaching up to catch his pith helmet before it fell off his head.
“You…! He…!” he stammered, pointing at Adam wildly until he noticed the ropes around his wrists.
Dawson visibly relaxed, though he still took a careful step back from where Adam knelt on the paving stones.
Jacobs turned away from Adam to focus his implacable attention on Ellie and Neil.
“Why don’t you show me what your little excavation turned up?” Jacobs prompted silkily, nodding to something Neil held in his hand. “And then we can all have a nice little chat with your employer.”
Neil clutched the object to his chest. It looked like a small slab of clay. He stared at Jacobs nervously.
At least he had the instinct to recognize the man was a threat.
“Don’t give it to him,” Ellie ordered, her eyes still locked on Jacobs. “And don’t go anywhere with him, either.”
Jacobs flashed her a thin smile. “Neither of you has anywhere else to go, Miss Mallory.”
Ellie’s fists clenched at her sides. “Then I’ll take my chances with a fight.”
Adam’s heart twisted with a burst of mingled fear and admiration.
That’s my girl , he thought warmly… and then hoped desperately she wasn’t about to get herself killed.
She wouldn’t, Adam determined grimly. Because he’d take out the whole Al-Saboor family and Jacobs with them if they touched so much as a hair on her head, rifles be damned.
No matter what it cost him.
He made a silent assessment of where things stood. Lefty and Hobbles had split off from them outside the chapel, clearly not much use after what Adam had done to them in the brawl. The two Al-Saboors with the rifles had become Ears and Ralph in Adam’s head—one because he looked like a horse-toothed guy Adam had known back in San Francisco, and the other because… well, ears . Beardy had his cudgel. Gaps had retrieved his sword. Scarface pulled a pair of daggers from his sleeves, and Muscles had… well, himself, which seemed like more than enough.
Sayyid and Constance hung back by the wall of the courtyard, half hidden from his view by Scarface and Beardy. Adam hadn’t pegged Sayyid as a fighting type. Constance had her knives, but the notion of her having to use them made Adam feel a little queasy.
And then there was Jacobs.
Adam didn’t love the way it all added up.
Jacobs was studying Ellie, his look coldly thoughtful. Quick as a snake, his hand flashed out—and set the blade of Adam’s machete against his neck.
Adam swallowed, and the steel rasped against the stubble of his throat. The knife was damned sharp. Adam always made sure of that.
Ellie’s gaze flashed with fear—and then she grabbed Neil’s wrist, forcing both it and the clay artifact up over their heads.
“Hurt him, and I’ll smash it,” she snarled. “And you know that’s not an idle threat.”
“Nobody needs to hurt anybody!” Neil protested, pulling against Ellie’s grip. “We don’t even know what it is yet!”
Ellie’s eyes met Adam’s from across the courtyard. She flinched with worry.
Adam looked back at her steadily, willing her not to break.
We’ll get through this, he thought at her. Trust me.
Not that he had any idea how just yet.
“Out of the way. Coming through.”
The supercilious tones of Julian Forster-Mowbray sounded from behind Adam as The Mustache pushed his way through the clustered Al-Saboors. He was dressed in a pristine suit of pale linen with a stylish flat-brimmed hat in a matching hue.
“Well! I see we’re all here,” he declared brightly—until his blue eyes fell to the knife Jacobs held at Adam’s throat.
Julian startled, then hedged his way around Adam’s bound figure as he made a nervous adjustment to the line of his blond mustache. “Fairfax, old bean. This is quite the merry chase you’ve led us on—though I did appreciate your note.”
Adam’s ears began to buzz. Across the courtyard, Neil’s face fell into lines of guilty dismay.
Ellie’s grip on his arm slackened. Her eyes widened as if the ground were opening up at her feet.
“Note?” she echoed, shock dulling her voice.
Adam groaned, already sensing where things were going.
“I…” Neil stammered, looking pale and uneasy. “I was trying to tell you. I just… It all happened so quickly! And you weren’t making any sense! So it seemed the reasonable thing to do was to… to write an explanation for what had happened. That the incident in the tomb was just a… a slight…” He swallowed thickly. “And that I would be taking a brief leave of absence…”
“And you told them where you were going,” Adam filled in.
He could feel the scrape of the machete blade against his skin as he spoke.
“I… I wanted him to know it was all in good faith!” Neil protested, clutching the tablet to his chest.
“Hold on,” Constance cut in sharply, stepping out from behind the substantial bulk of Muscles. “Are you saying you wrote the baddies an apology letter ?”
Mr. Forster-Mowbray whirled around. “ Connie?! What on earth are you doing here?”
Adam cocked a surprised eyebrow—but then, Constance had been inside the tunnel by the time Julian entered Mutnedjmet’s tomb. He’d had no reason to suspect she was involved—until now.
The Mustache looked like he’d just got caught with his hand in a cookie jar. Adam couldn’t help but feel a certain sort of satisfaction at the expression.
“I’m with them, obviously!” Constance waved a hand that took in Ellie, Neil, Adam, and Sayyid.
Julian’s jaw dropped.
Ellie barely noticed the exchange. She was staring at her brother with a look of hurt and disappointment. It twisted Adam’s heart to see it.
“Why?” she said softly.
“I’d been employed by the fellow for two years!” Neil burst out. “As the representative of a respected scholarly organization! I thought all of you must be getting yourselves worked up over a big misunderstanding!”
“Big misunderstanding, huh?” Adam commented flatly.
Sunlight glinted off the blade of the machete at the corner of his eye.
Neil’s color drained even further. His face fell into lines of obvious dismay. He stumbled a half step back, nearly falling off the raised platform of the altar. “I didn’t mean…” His gaze whirled from Ellie to Adam, then landed helplessly on Sayyid. “I… I’m…”
At Neil’s look, Sayyid’s eyes blazed with an uncharacteristic, angry heat. His lips thinned as though he were biting back whatever wanted to spill from his mouth.
Neil winced, then pivoted, stalking to the front of the altar and holding the tablet out to Julian and Jacobs. “Take the bloody thing. It doesn’t matter.” He half shouted the rest back at Ellie. “ It doesn’t matter! Whatever this is, it can’t possibly be worth dying over!”
“Don’t do it, Fairfax,” Adam warned lowly.
“He has a knife at your throat! Those fellows have guns!” Neil burst out, waving frantically at Ears and Ralph. “I’m sorry! I buggered everything up. I just don’t want anybody to get hurt.”
“Of course not, Fairfax, old bean,” Julian assured him soothingly. “I’m sure we can all settle this like reasonable people.” He waved a dismissive hand at Jacobs. “Do stop threatening that fellow quite so menacingly. It’s not like he can do anything with his hands tied.”
Jacobs’ jaw tightened. Dark emotion flickered through his eyes before it was reined in behind his usual placid expression.
Now that was interesting, Adam noted silently.
There was no way Jacobs would’ve deferred to an idiot like Julian Forster-Mowbray by choice, which meant that The Mustache was actually the guy in charge of all this… maybe because Jacobs had failed to bring back the artifact his mysterious bosses had wanted so badly in British Honduras.
Adam wondered uneasily if Jacobs blamed him and Ellie for that. More than likely, he did. After all, they’d been the ones to blow the whole place up.
The notion didn’t bode particularly well for their current prospects.
Sayyid had used the distraction of Neil’s outburst to inch out from behind the cluster of Al-Saboors. Nobody seemed to notice. The thugs had clearly decided the scholarly Egyptian wasn’t a threat. He took another careful step along the wall toward Ellie as Neil climbed down from the platform of the altar and held the tablet out to Julian.
Julian took it, gave it a disinterested glance, and thrust it blindly back behind him. “Sort that out, will you, Mr. Dawson?”
Dawson scampered forward to catch the block of clay, fumblingly clutching it to his chest. He cleared his throat. “Actually, it’s ‘professor.’ Professor Da—”
Julian turned to Constance. “I’m dreadfully sorry about this, Connie! I don’t know what these people told you to get you mixed up in this, but we’ll sort it out in a jiffy.”
Constance blinked with surprise and quick comprehension, and then her expression shifted to one of benign confusion.
“I should certainly hope so!” she exclaimed charmingly. “Really, Julian—waving knives and guns about? What would my Aai say to that, do you think?”
Julian blanched a bit at the mention of Constance’s grandmother. Adam couldn’t entirely blame him. The woman was mildly terrifying.
“I’m sure we don’t need to worry her about it.” Julian flashed Constance a nervous smile. “Well! Now that we have all that sorted… Fairfax, I’m afraid we’ll have to delay your return to Saqqara for just a tick. I’ll need you along for this next bit, if you don’t mind.”
“Next bit?” Neil echoed uncomfortably.
Sayyid was still moving. He had reached the wall of the sun court and picked his way along it, closer to where Ellie still stood on top of the far side of the altar.
Jacobs’ head swiveled, and Sayyid froze like a bug on a windowpane. Jacobs gave him a look of bland consideration—and then turned away again, clearly dismissing the foreman as beneath his consideration.
Adam slightly adjusted his mental calculations. Not that they amounted to anything remotely approaching a plan at this point.
“What do you need him for?” Dawson protested, still clutching the tablet possessively. “This is in Akkadian, and my Akkadian is excellent! Well—with just a little consultation of some of the books I brought along, of course,” he hedged.
“I… We ,” Neil corrected himself with a pleading look back at Ellie, “really ought to be getting back to the dig at Saqqara. We left things in an awful muddle, and there’s a great deal of very urgent… er, conservation work…”
He trailed off in the face of Jacobs’ amused gaze and Julian’s cross frown.
“I’m afraid I must insist,” Julian countered. “And I do hope we can keep this all civilized.” He caught himself with a nervous glance back at Constance. “I mean, of course we’ll all be civilized. We are all civilized people here, aren’t we? Mr. Al-Saboor, why don’t you have your cousins… er, very politely escort Dr. Fairfax back to our conveyance.”
Constance looked as though she could barely contain the urge to roll her eyes. Adam was right there with her.
Jacobs had let the machete fall to his side—but his hand was still tense and ready on the hilt.
Mr. Al-Saboor jerked his head at Scarface and Gaps, who took hold of Neil’s arms. They propelled him forward through the crowd of their cousins as he bleated out protests.
“But I really must… You can’t just… This is outrageous! Peanut!” he called out, his expression tight with worry as he twisted to look back at his sister.
Ellie watched him go, her mouth drawn into a grim line.
Constance’s gaze followed Neil as well, sharp as one of the knives she had strapped to her body. Adam could practically see the wheels turning in her head.
They clicked into place—and she looked to Adam.
He could read the question in her eyes. He answered it with a subtle nod.
Determination flashed through Constance’s expression—and then a blindingly bright smile lit up her face as she hooked her hand possessively around Julian’s arm.
“Well, now all that nonsense is out of the way,” she cut in as Julian startled. “How long will you be staying in Luxor?”
“I’m… er, afraid we must be moving right along, darling,” Julian returned awkwardly.
“Splendid, then,” Constance replied. “I’ll join you.”
“W-what?!” Dawson jumped with surprise, nearly dropping the tablet.
Constance looked from the obviously horrified professor to Julian. “Unless you would rather not have me?” She widened her eyes with every appearance of dismayed surprise.
Clever girl , Adam thought, admiration mingling with worry.
Constance had recognized her unique opportunity to force herself into Julian’s party—and get a shot at foiling his plans and saving Neil’s hide.
Adam just hoped she stayed clever enough not to get herself killed.
Sayyid used the distraction to dart the rest of the way to the altar, stopping just below the place where Ellie stood. He gripped the surface as though readying himself to dive behind it.
“Er… of course, we should like nothing better! Isn’t that right?” Julian added with a challenging look at the rest of his crew.
Dawson snapped his gaping jaw shut. Ears and Ralph exchanged a confused glance over their rifles.
Another flash of irritation twisted through Jacobs’ expression. It slid away a moment later, replaced by his usual mask.
“Whatever you say, ya Amir,” Mr. Al-Saboor commented tiredly.
“Marvelous!” Constance snuggled into Julian’s side.
“Right, then!” Julian turned for the stairs.
Dawson startled. “What about… But where do you want me to…”
Julian didn’t look back. Dawson scurried after him like a rat, still clutching the tablet.
The courtyard was silent as the sound of their footsteps faded.
“What do we do with these ones?” Mr. Al-Saboor asked, looking at Jacobs. “Should we… let them go?”
The senior Al-Saboor sounded a little hopeful about the prospect. Adam felt hopeful about it too—at least until he saw a snarl twist Jacobs’ lip.
“Absolutely not,” Jacobs bit out sharply.
Adam couldn’t really blame Jacobs for that. After all, the last time he and Ellie had turned up in the man’s life, they’d spoiled every one of his plans—and dropped a city on top of the magical artifact that he’d been tasked to find.
Jacobs had once told Adam that he got his job by being a guy who does whatever needs to be done.
Somebody who prided himself on competence likely didn’t appreciate being made to look like a screw-up. Nor was he likely to make the same mistake twice—by letting the people who’d mucked everything up for him last time go free to do it all over again.
Which meant that things were probably about to get unpleasantly messy.
Adam waited for Jacobs to give the order he knew had to be coming… and waited.
Jacobs was silent.
Adam finally took a moment to really look at the man. He was… seething . His gaze shifted to Ellie and Adam as though he was vividly imagining how good it would feel to take the pair of them out with two tidy gunshots—which he might easily have done.
And yet, he didn’t. Instead, his expression twisted with frustration. The look was uncharacteristically raw for the usually calm and uncannily collected Jacobs.
Something was holding him back from executing the violence he obviously wanted, and which Adam knew must have looked entirely justified from Jacobs’ point of view. But what could it possibly be? It sure as hell wasn’t moral conviction—a man who would’ve unflinchingly cut Ellie to pieces to ensure Adam’s obedience back in British Honduras was hardly going to shrink from a run-of-the-mill execution. Had Julian given him some sort of blanket order not to kill?
Or was something else going on?
Ellie had caught on to Jacobs’ tension and hesitation as well. She shot Adam a puzzled glance, even as she looked ready to dive behind the sun altar with Sayyid.
“Ya Reis?” Al-Saboor the First prompted with an uneasy look at his boss.
Before Jacobs could answer, the shadows in the antechamber came to life.
Black-cloaked forms spilled from behind piles of ruined stone. Others leapt down from the lower portions of the sun chapel walls. One of the first to appear spun from behind a column to grab a handful of Jacobs’ hair and press a small, thin silver blade to his jugular.
Adam realized that all of them were women—and not just any women. It was the ladies from the souvenir stand at the base of the temple, cloaked from head to toe in Egypt’s ubiquitous black abayas. Their faces were veiled, but the one holding a scalpel to Jacobs’ throat sported a pair of angry green eyes that struck Adam as oddly… familiar.
She muttered something at Jacobs’ ear, her voice too low for Adam to make out—but whatever she said must’ve been damned threatening, because it made Jacobs drop Adam’s machete.
The other black-cloaked women were armed with what looked mostly like an assortment of kitchen knives—damned sharp kitchen knives.
Faced with three blades leveled at various parts of his body, Beardy dropped his cudgel. Ears let a tall, slender woman pull his rifle from his hands, prompted by another who stood at his back, prodding her knife into his spine. The taller one immediately leveled the gun at Muscles, cocking it with clear expertise.
Though Adam couldn’t see her face behind her black half-veil, he was oddly certain that she was smiling.
Muscles slowly raised his hands over his head.
Ralph had already thrown his own arms up, flashing his veiled ambushers a nervous smile as he held his rifle over his head.
Adam counted nine ladies all together. They held themselves with a silent, determined readiness.
A short, stout woman stepped out from behind the others. Based on the deep lines around her near-black eyes, she was probably someone’s grandma. She spoke a line of quick Masri that had the air of an order.
“She says to go stand against the wall,” Al-Saboor the First called out in translation.
He had somehow scrambled into the antechamber, where he crouched behind a jumble of rock like someone expecting an explosion.
Jacobs was stiff with seething, dangerous frustration—but the scalpel at his jugular didn’t waver. “Do it,” he barked flatly.
The rest of the Al-Saboors shuffled morosely over to the wall of the courtyard, where the women engaged in a quick, huddled conversation that resulted in the sudden appearance of a small pile of scarves and belts from under their black cloaks.
The Al-Saboors were rapidly bound. All the while, the green-eyed woman kept her blade at Jacobs’ throat, her body as poised and ready as a cat.
At another murmured prompt from her, Jacobs held out his wrists. The gesture was calm—but Adam could see the wicked tension that seethed through his figure.
The grandma tied Jacobs with a fisherman’s expertise, and then the willowy girl with the rifle was there, directing him to stand by the Al-Saboors with a casual wiggle of the muzzle.
Jacobs joined his thugs, black eyes flashing with rage—and Adam found himself swept up in a sea of quick-moving women. They hurried Sayyid and Ellie along as well, carrying them to the stairs like a flood of black water.