Seize me From Darkness (Pierced Hearts Book 4) (26 page)

My mind went off on a tangent. A good one. I could repay some of his kindness.

“Time to loosen the tourniquet?” It had to be done, regularly, his friend and fellow ex-soldier Jurgen had told me, or risk killing off the rest of the finger.

“Sure. Can you do it again?” Pieter rested his hand on my lap.

Carefully I untied the little knot and released the pressure for a few minutes. At least it wasn’t gushing blood anymore. The end of the finger was gruesome. A sliver of bone wriggled.
Ugh
.

I glanced at Pieter. The man was made of rock. His face might be tense, but apart from a twitch at his wrist, he barely moved as I reapplie
d the tourniquet then arranged the bandage.

“Want a
lollipop?” I grinned at him.

“For what
?” His tone was incredulous.

“For being good. All the kids get one.”

“Your jokes will never win awards.”

“
Mmm
.” I snuggled back in and resumed worrying.

A few minutes later
, he told me something that put ice back in my veins.

“We’re going to land at an airfield outside the main airport and drive into the city. Glass has a problem with trust.” He stroked my cheek with his finger. “You’re safe. I’m going to make sure a doctor examines you,
meisi
e, but he wants you to stay inside his house until we figure out how to get you back to Australia. Okay?”

They were locking me up again.
Okay
, he asks?

I didn’t look up from my lap.

“Why can’t I fly back?”

“Because, there’s legal problems. These friends of mine who rescued us, like Glass.
..” He pointed with one finger forward, at the pilot.

Despite the drone of the engine, Glass heard and waved back lazily, without turning.

“If you arrive and people find out how you got here, bells will ring. The law will find out you were back there. That people rescued you. There’s a cop involved who helped organize this and he has to stay totally unseen. You would get questioned. People who are friends of friends would be implicated in murder, extortion, bribery.”

I swallowed. “So how d
o I get back home?”

“To Australia?” Big pause – like he was wondering about asking me to stay here
? I could read him like a book. “The best way to avoid you being questioned, fingers being pointed, is for us to fly you back into Australia illegally. We have to smuggle you back in.”

Then what? Pretend I’d been wandering around Australia for weeks,
unable to find my way home? I guess that was their plan. I could imagine the questions that would stir up. I would’ve been a huge news item for ages after I vanished. Not easy to explain away. But maybe they never meant to free me?

Pieter wouldn’t allow that
, though, would he? I sent him a fleeting look. This man, I knew him like no other. How could I not, after all we’d been through? We’d survived the furnace together.

But I didn’
t know this about him, because I’d seen how ruthless he could be. I’d also seen what he was willing to do to me in the name of just plain...showing me what I liked. Just because he thought I needed to know. He didn’t always ask before he did. It seemed I needed to escape, again.

I had this big
Rottweiler of a man hugging me, like he’d turned puppy overnight. I wanted to soak this up, because it spoke to some new part of me that I never thought I had. And I wanted him far, far away. The correct answer always was the safe one, right?

I turned my face into his chest and inhaled. He smelled so good.

Tears arrived and I let them leak onto my face silently.

After the doctor left
, I took a minute to check out the neat bandage on my finger stump. Having him chewing away bits of the sticking-out bone while I watched had been a little too personal. He hadn’t been keen on doing his surgery here, in Glass’s dining room, but the young doctor had adapted, laid out instruments like the big bone crunchers he’d used, injected the base of my finger with local anesthetic, then he’d gone to town cleaning up the debris and stitching me. Even without the X-ray he’d muttered about needing, he’d done a great job.

So now I had nine
and a bit fingers and the woman upstairs I’d sacrificed it for was unhappy with us...with me, for keeping her locked in her room.

I went up the stairs
two at a time, knocked after yelling,
it’s me, Pieter
, then unlocked the door. No protests were sung at me so I walked in. She was standing at the tall window, breeze blowing the lace curtains around her, looking out at the distant sea, over the tops of the houses. At least Glass had taste and had put in antique-style bars on his house.

Her little
yellow-and-blue summer dress clung to her in all the right sexy places. I imagined one of Glass’s girlfriends was supposed to get it as a present. No shoes, but I liked her feet bare, and her calves too. I remembered running my hands up those while studying her body higher up, and her looking down at me, eyes bright, lips parted.

Damn.
My hard-on had appeared as if to say, get to it. I wished.

“Hi.” I
kicked shut the door.

There were six houses in this secured compound
, and all of them belonged to Glass and people working for him and Jurgen. I knew some of the ways they earned money but had never dug too deeply. It wasn’t legal, that part I knew. I’d done some jobs for him, but I had a feeling he shifted drugs into Australia, as well as people circumventing the immigration laws.

“How did it go?” Jaz grimaced as
she caught sight of the bandage then her brow furrowed as if she was wondering what lay underneath.

“He did a good job.” I shrugged. “It’s fine. I have antibiotics.
I thought you might like to ask me questions?”

I had ones for her. Though we were still waiting on the IT expert to decrypt the hard drive from Gregor’s computer, I needed to hear it from her. I needed to know, firsthan
d, she was being honest with me, or why she wasn’t.

“I do have some,
but I need the right answers.”

“The right answers? I
f you’re lucky, I might have those. Lie on the bed with me. After all the hacking at my flesh and the drugs he injected, I’m feeling a bit woozy.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” I half-climbed on the bed then flipped myself down on the mattress, full length. “Here.” I shifted over and patted beside myself.

When she looked dubious
, I grinned and patted the bed again. “I won’t bite. Promise I won’t touch you unless you say so.”

One eyebrow a
rched in skepticism but she sat on the edge of the bed.

“That’s it?” I was tempted to drag her down.

“Best you’ll get.”

I propped myself up on an elbow, hissin
g as the finger tangled in the quilt for a second. The anesthetic didn’t stop the pain that throbbed into my hand. “My head is on a level with your ass if you sit like that. Which...I’m okay with.”

He
r sigh was exasperated.

“I bet you are.
Fine! You win.” She slid down and ended up lying next to me, grumpy yet amused, while I was still up on my elbow. Her hair fell over my hand.

The view was even better
with the top of the dress askew but I pretended I didn’t see that.

“The doctor. What did he say?”
He’d checked her out first, when I insisted.

F
or a second, Jaz turned down her mouth. “Nothing. I have scratches, abrasions. He told me to get some blood tests done, as soon as I can, just to be certain of things like hepatitis and so on.”

“That’s it?” Her summary struck me as too fast.

“Yes.”

When
I studied her for a while, she only looked annoyed. I smiled. “Good. Next. Remember what I said about a lot of people potentially getting hurt if anyone finds out you’re in Papua New Guinea?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Some of these questions may be hard for you but you need to answer them.” At her nod, I continued. “Glass wants to know why that man wanted you tortured.”

She answered slowly but without a single tremor in her words. “I told you, I’m
only a librarian in Sydney.”

“
But the man? How does he connect to you?”

“
I know his son. He was a doctor, that’s all. I went to him about some plastic surgery but chickened out. I know he was arrested for fraud and was going to go to jail over it, as well as paying back millions to the government.”

Her shrug was dismissive.

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

Such wide eyes, and too steady, like she was afraid if she looked away I’d see it as a lie.

“His name?”

“The son was David Gavoche. That man said he was Andrew, the father. I had nothing to do with the son’s death.” She was shaking and her eyes shone. “
Nothing.
”

I went to rea
ch across to her but she glared, her eyes sharpening.

“You said you wouldn’t touch me.”

Silence.

Yes, I had,
but the vehemence in that was shocking. I searched her face. “I’m not your enemy, Jazmine. You know that.”

Her sniff
was followed by a deep breath, and she squirmed her nose about.

“If you want to cry, there’s no shame.”

Her answer came out through teeth. “I don’t want to fucking cry. I want to go home. I want out of here!”

How had we gotten to
this? Her yelling at me with hate? Her determined to go home without even passing go and talking about us?

Us.
I’d thought, hoped, there was a chance for something to happen. I’d really hoped. After all these years, I was tired of being alone, but all she wanted to do was leave. All I wanted to do was turn her over my knee and spank some sense into her.

Except I couldn’
t. Or was that
shouldn’t
?

Definitely shouldn’t. She’d been through enough to break anyone
, but at the back of my head all I could hear was,
if she leaves, you will never see her again
.

And wasn’t that a happy piece of news.

“Okay, so you don’t know why. Next question. We need to know if you are going to be okay with lying to the authorities in Australia about where you’ve been. It’s best if you just say you’ve been travelling with someone and you don’t want to get them in trouble, so you won’t identify them. Can you do that? Even if you’re pressured? If there’s been a lot of news coverage of your disappearance, and police investigation, the cops will be really interested in you.”

“Yes.
I can do it.”

I watched her, raised my eyebrows but she didn’t twitch at all. The girl was stonewalling me.

Last question and the one I’d thought she’d say no to. If she didn’t trust me. This one, I almost didn’t want to say because if she refused, I wasn’t sure where to go from here.

“We also need to know your full name and address so we can check it’s all valid.
So we know without doubt, that you exist as who you say you are.”

The
nothing
blank look on her face was quickly replaced by a puzzled one, with her shaking her head. “What? You’re joking. Your friends are the murdering criminals, not that I’m not abso-fucking-lutely grateful, but I seriously do not want them to know who I really am.”

“And me, what about me?” My heart sped up. This was like putting my soul out for her to knife.
Do you trust me?
“If you tell me only, I swear I won’t pass it on. I’ll do all the checking.”

Then she ran on
, blurting out something that I couldn’t understand, but from the rush and the little movements of her face, it upset her greatly.