Page 112 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
Then she turned and walked away.
The blade sliced deeply and cleanly through the pilot’s neck, severing his internal, anterior, and external jugular veins, exposing the muscles of his throat straight down to his spinal cord in the process.
Caesar laughed in glee at the spectacular arc of blood that sprayed across the instrument panel, dripping down the windshield and rounded walls of the cockpit. The pilot, choking on his own blood, coughed—a strangled, animal sound—and thrashed in his seat. Still strapped in, he struggled but it didn’t yield much result.
“Shh,” Caesar whispered into his ear, holding tight to the man’s head as his struggles grew weaker, the blood arcing lower and lower with each pulse of his heart. In mere moments it was over. The pilot slumped to one side, dead, and Caesar was left with nothing but a slippery red cockpit and a raging hard-on throbbing against the zipper of his trousers.
Too fast. It’s always over too fast. What he wouldn’t give for a woman right now. A chained and screaming one, preferably.
Marcell popped his head into the cockpit, surveyed the scene without batting an eye, then said, “All clear, Sire.” Just as quickly, he was gone.
With a sigh of regret, Caesar released the limp pilot and stepped back, adjusting his crotch. “Paenitet, amicus.” Sorry friend. He spoke in Latin, the language of his youth, a dead language that perfectly matched the landscape of his heart. “But I do appreciate the flight.”
He turned and exited the cockpit. He had to crouch a bit as he made his way through the cabin to the open door because the plane was a smallish one, but it suited their purposes. It was fast, and there had been no pesky security checks or identification required on the way out of Morocco. Cash was still king in certain parts of the world.
Which reminded him.
Caesar returned to the cockpit, removed the wad of cash from the pilot’s flight bag, stuffed it into the small backpack he carried, then left the plane for good. Once outside on the tarmac, he showed Marcell’s tracker friend the GPS coordinates logged from Weymouth’s call on his satellite phone.
The tracker, a hunter and mercenary named Badr who Marcell had met in the souks of Marrakech, had a face like a slab of meat, adorned with a filthy black beard. Inspecting the blood on Caesar’s hands, he grinned. In a faux British accent he said, “Easy peasy, guv’nuh,” then turned and ambled away, whistling.
Caesar sent Marcell a sidelong glance. Marcell pursed his lips. “Perhaps wait until after he leads us back out of the jungle, Sire,” he suggested, and Caesar sighed, knowing it was good advice.
In the meantime, he, Marcell, and the silent, twitchy male known only as the Firestarter followed the tracker in a line, straight off the tarmac of the Manaus airport and into the warm Brazilian night.
Jack awoke in warm darkness to the sound of gently falling rain.
She bolted upright. She was in a room, open and spacious, in a b
ed . . . Oh yes. This was the same room she’d woken up in earlier. But something was different . . .
Someone was standing across the room, leaning against the wood railing, his broad back facing her, his gaze trained far off into the night.
Hawk.
She realized she’d spoken his name aloud when he turned, pushing off the railing to stare at her. In the darkness, his eyes glinted silver like a cat’s.
“You’re awake.” His voice sounded different. Flat, somehow. Empty.
“What happened? I remember you, fighting. I remember . . .” she hesitated to say it aloud, it sounded so insane. “A dragon?”
He looked at her for a long, silent moment, then turned back to the railing. “You leave in the morning. Try to get some sleep.”
Leave? Her heart leapt into her throat. When he began to move away, Jack said, “Did I faint? Did . . . did you win?”
“Yes. And no. At least, I don’t know for sure. It remains to be seen if I won.” He paused, and there was something unsettling in his short silence. His voice grew deeper. Rougher. “Not that it matters either way.”
“Why? What do you mean?” Her mouth dry, Jack slipped from the bed and stood waiting for him to answer.
But he wouldn’t even look at her. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and now she saw the tension in the line of his shoulders, the hard, clenched edges of his jaw. “Just . . . try to rest. You’ll be back home in New York tomorrow, Jacqueline. This will all be over tomorrow.”
The way he said the word “this,” the swift, pained glance he sent in her direction as he spoke that one word, made her wonder again what exactly had occurred between them, what lurked unseen in the black holes in her memory.
She needed to know. If she really was leaving tomorrow, she needed to know what she was leaving behind.
She moved toward him slowly, then stopped just a few feet away, aware of how his breathing had changed as she’d stepped closer. Aware of how his body had stiffened. Her voice came low. “And is that . . . good? Is that what you want?”
He moistened his lips. “That’s what’s best.”
