Page 34 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
“Wait,” Jack interrupted, understanding dawning over her face. “You don’t think you’re going to carry me up this tree, do you?”
His brows arched. He pointed to the branches far above. “How else did you think you’d get up there?”
She looked affronted. “The same as you. Climb.”
Hawk knew her well enough by now to realize an argument was imminent. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared down at her, but she wasn’t backing down.
“I know. You think you’re better than me because you have a dick and I don’t. But I’m perfectly capable of climbing this stupid tree, and I’ll prove it to you.” She tried to brush past him, but he stopped her with a hand on her arm.
“Can’t let you do that, Red. I’m responsible for your safety. If you fall and break your neck, it’s my head on the chopping block.”
Hawk knew he’d made a big mistake when her eyes narrowed and her gaze, sharp as an eagle’s, honed in on his face.
“Forget it.” Then he reconsidered, and smiled. “Unless you’d like to negotiate.”
She chewed the inside of her lip and scowled at him, wondering, no doubt, how she was going to bash in the side of his head. “A question for a question,” she pronounced, correctly guessing his terms. He nodded, his smile growing wider.
Jack studied his expression. Then, in a stunning display of honesty that left him reeling, she solemnly said, “I have a lot of experience climbing trees. I did it all the time when I was a kid because I had a lot of things I needed to hide from, and those things were afraid of heights. I know you’re bigger than I am, and you’re stronger than I am, and no doubt you could force me to go up this tree on your back.” She swallowed, hesitating for the briefest of moments before continuing, quieter than before. “But if you do that, I will feel weak, useless, and totally dependent, all of which are things that make me crazy.
“You were right about me hating to not be in control. Feeling in control is the only thing that keeps me sane, because there was a time in my life when I was completely out of control, completely helpless, and that’s something I can never be again. So, please. Just let me try to climb this fucking tree. If you think I can’t handle it, if it looks like I’m about to fall, you have my permission to throw me over your shoulder or drag me up by my goddamn hair if you want. Just . . . please let me try. Before you decide for me.”
She stood staring up at him with eyes wide and shining, and Hawk felt as if a giant, invisible fist was squeezing his heart.
He said, “I don’t think I’m better than you because I have a dick. And I don’t think you do it on purpose, but that mouth of yours makes me crazy. Can we agree that if I let you try to climb this tree, you’ll try to cut out the cursing?”
She pulled her lower lip between her teeth and chewed it. “Why does that bother you so much?”
A million different memories flooded Hawk’s mind, all of them bad. “Because the things I needed to hide from when I was a kid just loved to scream curses.” His voice hardened. “Right before they beat the hell out of me.”
The expression that crossed Jacqueline’s face then was indescribable. She looked as if she might throw her arms around him, or burst into tears. But she did neither of those things. She only nodded, then waited, standing perfectly still.
Hawk exhaled a hard breath. “All right, Red. You first. Don’t make me regret this.”
Still serious, she nodded again, then moved past him. Finding notches in the rough bark of the trunk, she pulled herself up. She paused just before climbing, and turned to look at him.
“Thank you, Lucas.” Her voice was quiet in the gathering gloom. Their gazes held just longer than was comfortable, until he jerked his chin, indicating she should climb.
So she did. He watched her with more than a little trepidation and a burgeoning premonition of doom as she quickly and confidently began to scale the trunk of the mammoth tree.
Jacqueline Dolan, he thought, unable to tear his gaze from her as she climbed, you are trouble with a capital T.
Hawk shook his head, ran a hand through his hair, then leapt onto the trunk beneath her.
The three men who sat around the oval conference table in silence inside the soundproof office at the elegant townhouse on Sutton Place in Manhattan were so different from each other that an observer might have a difficult time determining why they were meeting at all.
The Secretary-General of the United Nations was a slight, bespectacled man named Min Ji-hoon, formerly the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Korea. His air of humble geniality belied a razor-sharp intelligence, and a fierce competitive streak that drove him like a merciless slave master. To the press he was known as “the slippery eel,” due to his ability to deftly avoid questions, a particularly valuable skill for a diplomat.
Directly across from him sat another bespectacled man, this one white-haired and missing one hand and an eye. The hole in his skull was covered by a black patch, giving him the look of a pirate, but the look in the other blue eye that stared out from behind his glasses was anything but piratical. It held the flat, killer gaze of a jihadist, of one who had seen and done things no man ought to have seen and done. He sat perfectly still and straight in his chair, clad in a tailored black suit that hid the unfortunate fact that one of his legs was aluminum from the upper thigh down.
The man was known by several names, including the Doctor and, like all the others in the multinational organization to which he belonged, John Doe. To the gathered group, and the businessman he represented, he was known simply as Thirteen.
The third man at the end of the table was the largest, most imposing, and most arresting of the three. Clad in a simple cloth robe the color of blackest night, with a cowl and hood hiding the pale dome of his bald head, the albino named Jahad sat with his large hands folded peacefully in his lap, gazing at Thirteen with a look in his gray-lavender eyes that could only be described as chilling. There was no love lost between the two men, and though they’d worked together once before to catch the beasts they still pursued, the operation had ended disastrously for both of them, and each bore the scars of their failure.
Jahad’s were internal, however. Though unseen, his claustrophobia was nearly crippling.
He had scars aplenty from earlier exploits, including those from the fire that had almost killed him as a boy, leaving him with hideous pocked and puckered flesh on the right side of his face and body, and a hand that was curled to a claw. All in all, he was a most unusual sight. Most people couldn’t bear to look at him for more than a few seconds at a time.
The Secretary-General was currently experiencing exactly that problem.
