Page 28 of Hot Zone

Unbidden, a vision of Athena Carswell and Beverly Ashton flashed through her head. Both were formidable women, and both were counting on her. They believed she could handle whatever came at her on this mission. It was why she’d been hand-selected and intensively trained for this.

So be it. She would confront these drunks and figure out a way to get away from them before she had to use the cuff.

Meanwhile, these ancient twerps wanted a fight? Then a fight they would get. More than they bargained for. Without warning, she sucker punched the nearest guy as hard as she could, right in the nose. Blood spouted, and he doubled over swearing.

“Bitch!” someone shouted.

And then they jumped her. It all turned into a flailing jumble of arms and legs and flying fists and painful yanks at her hair. Her gauzy blue dress ripped—frankly, she wouldn’t mind if they tore it off of her, as it kept wrapping inconveniently around her legs. Someone punched her solidly in the right eye, nearly knocking her down. Must stay on her feet. Once she went down, she would be lost.

A blow landed in her gut, momentarily doubling her over as the air whooshed out of her. She took a deep breath and came up swinging, continuing to throw kicks and punches and elbows. She didn’t actually have to aim. Everywhere she struck, there was flesh and bone to meet her blows. At one point, someone got a hand over her mouth. She bit the palm until she tasted blood, and somebody yelped.

And then inspiration struck her. She yelled, “Fire!” at the top of her lungs. Never mind that she was in an almost entirely stone structure with nary a stick of wood to fuel a fire. If she could cause a stampede out of the feasting hall, or at least get a bunch of people to come investigate—

“Shut her up!” someone hissed. The youths surged forward in a rugby-style scrum. They outweighed her by hundreds of pounds, and new urgency fueled their attack.

From her years of tactical training, she knew that in hand-to-hand combat, superior numbers will overwhelm superior skill every time. When all eight youths rushed her in a concerted attack, she was done. Time to leave.

Except as she reached for her pouch, she went down beneath them. Hands grabbed roughly at her then, shredding her dress and grasping her arms and legs with intent to pin them.

Desperation coursed through her as the reality of this attack began to sink in. It was one thing to understand intellectually what might happen. It was another entirely to experience it.

Must reach the cuff.Vague awareness of her stupidity in waiting this long to bail out crossed her mind. But she didn’t have time to berate herself for her mistake just now.

She fought with all her remaining strength to reach her pouch, to press the quartz crystal that would signal Athena to get her out of here—now!

But in short order, the gang sat on her arms and legs. Still, she struggled to free her hand. Escape was so close, and yet so far away. She continued to squirm and heave, throwing off the guy who appeared to be their leader as he tried to mount her.

“Hold her still or knock her out,” the enraged young man growled.

Something hard slammed into her left temple. Bright light exploded in her head, and she saw thousands of little pinpricks of light behind her eyelids, but fought grimly to hang on. Think. There had to be something she could do. But what?

As rough hands yanked her knees up and shoved them apart, she had just enough consciousness left to form a single thought.

Rustam! Help!

Fingers pushed and groped painfully between her legs, and she vaguely heard someone comment, “Hey, she’s blond down there, too!”

She felt as if she were separating from her body, drifting up and away from the person on whom this outrage was being perpetrated. She was starting to retreat to some other place, a calm space of white light and quiet, where no weights held her down and no hands grabbed or poked at her, where she was blessedly alone.

The nightmare swirled around that other person, too awful to be real. Leering faces grinned down at that woman like lustful demons in flickering torchlight, the sweet smoke of the braziers making somebody—her, but not her—violently nauseous.

So. This is what hell looks like.

Something blunt and smooth pushed at her inner thigh, and she gave one last, futile heave. Spittle sprayed on her face as a spate of swearing erupted over her. “Hold her still, dammit!”

A powerful hand closed around her throat and squeezed, cutting off all her air. In a matter of seconds, the scene began to go gray, tunneling down to a narrow field of vision. Damn. She’d been hoping none of them knew a move like that.

She closed her eyes, happy to sink into that other, peaceful oblivion and miss entirely what came next.

And then the weight between her knees abruptly disappeared and something heavy thudded nearby. The hand around her throat loosened. Despite her resolve to pass out, instinct took over and she gulped in air frantically, choking and coughing.

Suddenly, all the weights lifted off of her. Her vision began to return, and she gaped at the sight that greeted her blurry eyes.

Rustam, magnificent in his fury, stood before a half-dozen of the young men, his teeth bared in a snarl of towering rage. He sneered, “Why don’t you try picking on someone your own size, boys?”

The word boys was pitched just right to irritate the living crap out of her assailants. Sluggishly, the realization that he was drawing their attack intentionally broke across her brain. The youths yelled and rushed him.

As Tessa struggled to sit up, Rustam went into action. She was happy to see that he fared much better eight-on-one than she had. But then, he outweighed her by a good hundred pounds of solid muscle.

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