Page 7 of American Prince (New Camelot Trilogy 2)
And sight is gradually creeping back in. I’m next to a large building, I think, stumbling on a narrow drive. It’s evening time; I must have been unconscious for a very long time. And there’s a smell, a familiar smell, something other than the rain…
My legs are pumping hard and I veer away from the drive and cut across the wet lawn, but it’s not enough, my stiff legs can’t move fast enough, my dark-weakened eyes can’t steer me to safety. I’m taken down only a moment later. I’m flipped over onto my back and the robe gapes open. I struggle to pull it closed underneath my abductor, and to his credit, after an assessing flicker of his eyes across my breasts, he lets me. I recognize the man who attacked me in the hallway of the hotel. He’s still wearing his janitor’s uniform, the one that says Daryl.
“You are too much trouble,” he hisses, and I wrestle with him, jamming my knee into his balls. He loosens his hold and I slip almost out of his grip, but then he seizes and flattens me, leaving his hands free to pin mine above my head.
Funny that some of the best moments of my life have been lying like this underneath Ash, and yet now, I’m all fury and fear. If I ever wondered if my sexual programming is messed up, here I know the truth—I only want my pain and humiliation from one man.
I think of last night and despite everything, I smile. Maybe two men, I amend.
“You think this is time for smiling, bitch?” Not-Daryl unleashes a slap so fierce I see stars. And then he hits me again, flat enough not to leave a mark, hard enough to draw tears.
Two other men join him and haul me to my feet
, and as I’m struggling and crying out for help, I realize I know that familiar smell.
The sea.
4
Embry
before
Lieutenant Colchester turned out to be a real fucking thorn in my side.
First, there were the drills. Before Colchester, the platoons trained separately, simply because of the space limitations on the base. But after Colchester came, he convinced the captain to let the platoons drill together, which then meant that Colchester and I had to drill together. Which meant every morning, Monday through Saturday, I had to watch Colchester run faster than me, march longer, jump higher, squat deeper.
I mean, I didn’t mind the deep squats so much.
Then there were the patrols. The separatists were encroaching fast and converting many of the locals to their cause. So it was our job to walk through the five or six villages closest to the base, and shake hands and hand out bars of chocolate, or whatever bullshit the government had sent that month to try to buy local goodwill. And even though we each had our own platoon, our units were small enough that the captain had us go together, which meant that my afternoons were spent watching Colchester conversing with the villagers in fluent Ukrainian, helping them move boxes and jumping into impromptu soccer matches with the children, and overall just being so fucking helpful and likable as to be disgusting.
And even when we weren’t together, I felt his presence, as if I were magnetized and he were a slab of iron, and at night in my own room, my skin prickled with the awareness that he was just on the other side of the wall. I told myself it was because we’d fought—and I’d lost, no less—and I told myself it was because I didn’t want another fucking lecture about how to do my job. I told myself those things, even though it had been three weeks since that fight in the yard and Colchester hadn’t once tried to talk to me in all that time. But I caught him looking at me several times a day, those lake-green eyes unreadable and his expression both stern and a little amused.
Which pissed me off. Who was he to find me amusing? I was always the first to laugh at myself, to be the butt of the joke, if the joke was funny and the night full of liquor and life. But for some reason, the idea that Colchester didn’t take me seriously rubbed me the wrong way.
I was used to being rubbed the right way.
All of this irritation built and built, and I found myself growing unaccountably tense around him, around everybody. I drank more, smoked more, stayed up later at night, unable to shake the feeling that I’d outgrown my skin somehow, that there was something itchy and new inside my veins that I couldn’t escape. And sometimes, when I got very drunk and the base was silent and the cold stars winked outside the window, I wondered if I even wanted to escape it. It was an awful feeling, but it was addictive, like a cut on your lip you couldn’t stop licking just to feel the sting, just to taste the iron-salt taste of your own blood.
Maybe I could have stayed in that agitated, itchy place forever, but the universe had different plans. Merlin would have said it was destiny and Ash would have said it was God, and Greer would have agreed with both, but this wasn’t the well-ordered hand of a deity or a pre-ordained timeline. The next three months were fucking chaos.
And it began as most chaos did and still does: with my sister.
Morgan was set to arrive the day before we were going to Prague to spend my R&R week sightseeing. Well, she wanted to sightsee. I wanted to find some absinthe and fuck my way through New Town, and pretend that there wasn’t a condescending green-eyed asshole waiting for me back on base.
At any rate, she was coming to stay in the village near the base tonight and then we were taking the train to Prague together. But that day was also the day we were executing one of our worst drills—an eight-hour belly crawl through woods infested with mock hostiles, establishing a mock outpost. The mud was cold and wet, the soggy pine needles still sharp somehow, and by the six-mile mark, most of my men had bleeding fingers and runny noses. I called for a break so people could tape up their fingers and catch their breath, and that’s when it happened. Colchester’s group—our “hostiles” in the exercise—swarmed up over the lip of a nearby creek and lit into us.
The dirt around us exploded in a hail of simulated bullets—paint-filled rounds that we could shoot from our real weapons—and I screamed into my radio for the soldiers to take cover. I hadn’t been a total idiot—we’d picked a fortified place to rest, sent out a couple guys to watch the perimeter—and somehow we managed to form a coherent defense against Colchester’s men. But we couldn’t beat them back, soldier after soldier getting struck with paint and laying down to simulate death. Soon it was just me and Dag, my platoon sergeant, returning fire against six or seven of Colchester’s men. Then Dag got hit, grunting as the round hit his vest—the paint can pack a mean punch—and giving me an apologetic look as he stretched out on the ground.
I kept firing into the creek, swearing internally, fighting off that annoying magnet feeling that Colchester was here and close and probably wearing that stupid, pretty smile of his…
Something cool touched the back of my neck, and I jumped back, spinning around to see the end of Colchester’s Glock pointed right at me. He had his M4 slung over his shoulder, and with his other hand, he was holding his radio close to his mouth to tell his men that he had me.
“Goddamn fucking shit,” I said.
But you know what? I wasn’t going down without taking Colchester with me. I ducked, faster than he could move, aiming my M4 at his chest and firing. He twisted away in the nick of time, avoiding the paint and swinging his own gun around. My bicep exploded in pain as the fake bullet hit my arm. No body armor there, no sir.
I staggered back with a gasp, but not fast enough. A boot hooked around my ankle, and with one quick jerk, I was flat on my back, blinking up at the tired, threadbare pines.
