Her Every Pleasure (30 page)

“Agreed,” they said grimly.

“Any questions?”

“What about Alexa?”

“Well, we’re not going to leave her to them,” Gabriel replied. “She’s not their main priority, or ours, frankly, after what she’s done. Just look out for her as best you can.”

They discussed a few more details, then Gabriel looked around grimly at them. “If any of us don’t come back tonight, it’s been, ah, interesting working with you all. It’s been an honor,” he added in a more sincere tone.

“And you, sir.”

The men returned his salute. Then with fierce looks they rose and took to their horses to find their princess and bring her safely home.

CHAPTER
         EIGHTEEN         

H
aving her wrists tied with hard, chafing ropes complicated the task of finding a comfortable sleeping position, Sophia was learning, especially when her bed was a meager blanket over cold stone.

With her fastened arms resting atop her bent knees, she had managed to doze off, sitting with her back against the clammy wall of the cave.

She hadn’t dared lie down. Merely resting her head against her arm felt vulnerable enough with all these hostile men around her.

They had not bothered her or Alexa again, thank God. But presently, their low-toned exchange from somewhere nearby summoned Sophia from her light slumber. In the eerie, dripping stillness of the cave, the taut echo of the foreign words escaped her comprehension, but the tone of agitation in their voices was universal enough to understand.

Something was afoot.

She did not even lift her head, only opening her eyes slowly, drawing no attention to herself. She went on listening as she scanned the cave with all of its strange, glittering dragon’s teeth of stone hanging down from the ceiling and jutting up from the floor. Her gaze came to a small cluster of men over by the cave’s mouth.

She saw that one of the sentries had come back. The man was pointing angrily toward the woods, and if she read his gesticulations correctly, he seemed to be trying to convince the others that he had seen something—or someone—out there in the darkness.

Gabriel…

At that moment, the harsh cry of a nightjar broke the windy silence of the autumn night beyond the large cave’s mouth. She held her breath, recognizing the familiar signal from her Greek bodyguards.

It meant they were coming. They were very near, but they had not yet managed to home in on her exact location.

It asked her to give them some sort of signal to lead them to her, if she was able.

Her heart began to pound. She glanced around in need of a signal her men could not miss. As soon as she made her position known to them, their attack was sure to follow.

There was only one direction for them to approach from: the cave’s mouth. Perhaps she could give them a signal that would not only confirm her whereabouts, but would also distract her captors from the direction of the attack.

She noticed the dimly glowing lantern that someone had set on the flattened top of a stalagmite. One of the men’s bedrolls was below it. That should burn well, she thought. Nudging Alexa awake, she silenced her questions with a warning look, and then inched her way toward the lantern.

The sentry was still trying to explain his worries to the others. The mood inside the cave was still quiet, but a couple more of the men who had not yet fallen asleep got up and went forward to join the others. Up by the wide, arched mouth of the cave, they conferred about what was going on and what action should be taken.

She knew she had to act before they all retrieved their guns. Moving toward the natural stone pedestal where the lantern sat, she swept the cave with another wary glance, making sure no one was watching her, then she suddenly batted the lantern off the rock with her bound hands. It flew, crashing down onto the empty bedroll; the glass around the flame broke on impact; the whale oil spilled; flame erupted; and the Arab’s bedroll, with its thin coating of human hair and body oils absorbed into the fabric, caught fire in the blink of an eye and became an instant torch.

Sophia let out a girlish shriek, feigning innocence as the blaze flared. “Fire! Help!”

But she climbed to her feet and got ready to run, for she knew the flash of orange light would be bright enough for her men to see exactly where the kidnappers were keeping her.

Pandemonium broke out. Amid yells and curses, some of the Janissaries rushed to put out the flames.

Others saw her trick for what it was and ran to grab their weapons.

But they were too late.

She knew her men were coming as two of the Janissaries rushed to beat out the flames.

“How did this happen?” one demanded angrily, coughing as the cave filled with smoke.

“I don’t know!” Sophia cried, backing up against the wall. “The wind must have blown it! We were sleeping!”

“Sit down! Nobody gave you leave to stand up!”

“Get us out of here!” she demanded. “We can’t even breathe!”

“Too bad,” he retorted.

“Highness, what’s going on?” Alexa whimpered, cowering beside her.

“Just…hold on,” she murmured barely audibly. “Steady…when I give you the word, be ready to run.”

“Run where?” she squeaked in terror as the smoke thickened, pouring toward the cave’s mouth.

“Wait…”

Then the attack was upon them.

Black-clad shapes in the smoke materialized into men. They rushed in with a roar, a full frontal assault at the mouth of the cave. Shots flew, bullets ricocheting off the rock face. When one sparked off the stone above Sophia, she crouched down and covered her head with her arms, holding her ears, but she pulled Alexa’s arm. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Alexa blanched at the prospect of having to face again all the men she had betrayed, but Sophia was not heartless enough to leave her behind, not after seeing how these filthy hypocrites would have used her. The girls began creeping slowly toward the cave’s mouth, Sophia praying all the while that they could get closer to her bodyguards before the Janissaries noticed their progress along the cave’s wall.

Blades flashed by firelight up ahead, near the cave’s mouth. She saw two of her captors die, and then gasped in horror as Demetrius was mowed down.

Alexa screamed, and of course, Kemal noticed them.

When the girls saw him coming with a look of death darkening his face, Alexa screamed again and bolted before Sophia could stop her.

“Alexa, no!”

The frenzied girl made a run for the exit, overtaken by her fear. Surely she would be killed in the cross fire, for the battle was raging all around the cave’s mouth. She knew Alexa had cause for terror; while the Janissaries seemed to need Sophia alive, they had no such concerns about her lady-in-waiting. They had only been keeping her alive so far for added leverage over Sophia—and their own sport.

Sophia held her breath, watching in disbelief as Alexa miraculously escaped the whirling blades and flying bullets, tearing out into the dark woods alone like a horse spooked by a thunderstorm.

With a scream trapped in her throat, she saw Niko, fighting with two swords, crisscross them through the innards of one of the Janissaries.

His opponent crumpled.

“Princess!” he called to her. “To us!”

“Behind you!” she shrieked in answer.

Niko whirled around and took on the next opponent as Kemal reached for her.

“You little fool. I will kill you myself before I’ll let them take you,” he said. Then he barked an unintelligible order at two of his brethren.

They immediately retreated from the battle at the cave’s mouth and came for Sophia.

With his sword, Kemal pointed deeper into the cave as he gave them some instructions. Listening to their swift exchange, Sophia fought back panic, wondering if her end was upon her.

While Kemal stalked forward to do battle with her guards, the other two swarthy Janissaries grabbed her by her arms and began dragging her back deeper into the cave.

“Let go! Where are you taking me?”

“Shut up! You’re more trouble than you’re worth, infidel witch.”

“If it was up to me, we’d cut your throat and be done with it,” the taller one muttered. She believed he was called Zacarias.

“Help! I’m here! Timo! Gabriel!”

“Not another word, or we cut your tongue out, understand?” the shorter man, bearded and thick-bodied, threatened her in French. She had heard the others call him Osman.

When Osman gave her a warning look and showed her his curved dagger, exactly like the one they had found at the scene of the ambush, Sophia clamped her mouth shut.

“Ali Pasha will probably like her better if we mute her, anyway,” Zacarias opined as they half dragged, half-carried her farther into the cave. “I know I would.”

With Kemal now having joined the fight at the mouth of the cave, her men were having a harder time of it. Still, she did not see Gabriel.

Had she been wrong all along? Had he not come? Had he washed his hands of her after she had dismissed him from this post?

Maybe she had misjudged him as completely as she had misjudged Alexa.

God, if she was so naïve that she could not tell her friends from her enemies, what business did she have ruling a country, anyway? Lord Griffith had been wise to doubt her.

In the din of battle, nobody seemed to notice that she was being smuggled away. The floor of the cave tilted downward into the mountain. The darkness deepened to the claustrophobic black of the tomb, and all three of them moved carefully.

“This way,” Zacarias muttered, feeling his way along a left-hand turn in the slope.

Inching through the lightless void, she realized after a time that she could feel a draft of air coming in, trailing against her face. After another twenty blind steps or so, they reached a fissure in the rocks where a little rivulet no more than three feet wide trickled out of the mountainside.

The water escaped by an opening in the rock just big enough for a person to slip through; this, Sophia and her captors now did, first treading carefully over a couple of big, flat stones above the water’s flow, and then climbing out silently into the thick pine woods.

As Sophia stepped out into the world again, free of the pitch-black cavern, new hope rushed into her. Now, if she could just get away from these two thugs, she could escape like Alexa had. She stole a quick glance around to get her bearings.

To her right, a steep, pebbled path led down the slope, hugging the rocky dome. Uphill, to her left, she saw they were not too distant from the cave’s mouth, where the battle still raged.

She had to let her men know that her captors were trying to move her again, or their attempt to rescue her would fail—and she doubted they would get another chance.

Nobody’s taking me to Ali Pasha.
Shrugging off their threats of cutting out her tongue, she rallied herself with a fresh surge of fight, and began thrashing, trying to pull free of them as soon as she had stepped down from the stony fissure in the rock. “Help! I’m here! Let go of me!” she shouted, but almost at once, Zacarias grabbed her and clapped his hand over her mouth, stilling her struggles with a violent jerk.

“Not another word from you!” Osman whispered in her face with a greasy sneer. “You walk properly, or we will cut your feet off and drag you.”

Her bound hands balled into fists, but the moment Zacarias let go of her mouth, she spat off the taste of his hand. “Is that all you know how to do, threaten people?” she asked fiercely.

“No,” Osman replied. “I also know how to kill them. Do you wish me to demonstrate, Princess?”

She subsided into mutinous silence and gave up on fighting them for now, lest she provoke them into carrying out one of their bloodthirsty threats.

“Come on,” Zacarias muttered. “Let’s get to the horses.”

As they started down the precarious angle of the rocky path in single file with Sophia between them, she was still bold enough to steal one last angry glance over her shoulder toward the cave.

And it was then that she caught a fleeting glimpse of a large, black silhouette outlined before the flames.

Watching her.

Gabriel.

Astonishment made her stumble over a rock as she continued their descent.

“Watch where you’re going!” Zacarias snapped when she knocked into his back before quickly catching her balance.

“Sorry,” she muttered.

“Hold onto her or she’ll send us all falling down the cliffside, clumsy wench.”

Osman did as he was told, clutching her arm with a grip that hurt.

“Ow,” she complained, but as she looked over her shoulder again, pretending that her only purpose was to scowl at him, she saw that the man-shaped shadow had vanished again, as if it had been no more than a trick of the smoke.
Was he truly here?
Had Gabriel come for her, or was her mind merely playing tricks on her now?