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I could feel Javier’s eyes on me as I walked across the tarp and sat down, Camden’s knees on either side of me. He wrapped his arm around my chest and pulled me close to him, the small of my back pressed against his crotch, the back of my head against his chest, hot, sweaty, breathing steadily. All man, all this very protective man. The warmth and strength of his arms encasing made me feel like I was being wrapped in a cocoon, a security blanket for the night.
“Good night,” he whispered softly into my ear, his lips brushing against my lobe.
I squeezed his forearm in response, so grateful for him, so damn grateful.
“Sleep well, lovebirds,” Javier said, his cynical voice echoing into the night.
I woke up to my arm being tickled.
I opened my eyes and in the grey dimness of the morning light, saw a giant black spider crawling slowly up my arm. I immediately cried out and jumped back, brushing the spider off of me, feeling waves of revulsion and a million little spider legs cover me from head to toe, my body turning it into something more than it was. Like a panic attack, the feeling was impossible to stop and I shook my body vigorously, swatting at nothing.
It was only then that I realized I was completely alone.
The tarps were all gone. Everyone was gone.
Even Camden.
Holy fuck.
The jungle started spinning around me and I saw nothing but madness in the never-ending trees, faces made out of foliage, darkness in the limbs.
What the hell happened?
“Camden?” I cried out. “Camden!”
No, no, no. He couldn’t have left me alone.
I started running around where we had slept until I found my backpack, the contents strewn across the leaf-covered forest floor. Sweat poured down my face, stinging my eyes, as I knelt down and frantically sorted through everything. My other gun was still there, my fake IDs, my passports, everything I didn’t want to leave behind in the Escalade. Whoever raided my stuff had left me everything. Why?
I needed to think. I screamed for Camden again and again, then tried everyone else’s names. I screamed until my throat was sore and I realized that I needed to shut up. If something had happened to everyone, if I was let go or missed for some reason, I was only making things worse, only calling attention to myself.
I branched out in a small radius from our sleeping area, going around the trees and then around the next ring of trees, always keeping my backpack, which I had placed in the middle of the trees, in my sight. Eventually, a yard or two out, I found the tarp. Shredded into bits. Blood on it.
Shit, oh fucking shit.
I dropped to my knees, feeling absolutely powerless. I was alone in the middle of the Honduran jungle, halfway between nowhere and Travis’s compound. I had nobody. Something had happened to them and more than that, Camden, my beautiful Camden, was gone. The last thing I remembered was his arms around me as I fell asleep. How could I have gone from that to this?
I wanted to cry. I wanted to crawl up against the hollow of a tree and close my eyes and let the animals take me away into the night. After so much, after so long, I wanted to give up.
But Gus was still out there. My mother too. There were people facing a much worse fate than this. I was able. I was willing. I would get them.
I took in a deep breath and dropped the bloody tarp from my hands and walked over to my backpack. I took a swig of water from the Camelback that was inside, shoved a tasteless portion of an energy bar in my mouth, then put the pack on my shoulders. I brought out the compass that Este had given everyone and started walking in the direction that we were originally headed. I wasn’t the best at reading trails but I would do the best I could, to find out where they went and if they were going to the place I both hoped and feared they were.
I made it about three minutes before I heard a bunch of macaw parrots squawk above me and fly across the canopy. Then the jungle went eerily silent.
Soon, I was running before I even knew what was happening.
I kept going, leaping over tree roots, maneuvering around rocks, keeping my legs and arms pumping as fast as I could. Breathe in, breathe out, keep going.
I ran until I collided into what I thought was a tree.
It wasn’t.
Hands dug into my upper arms.
I screamed.
“Ellie!” Camden exclaimed.
I stopped trying to fight him, to get away and looked up at the man who held me there, in the middle of the forest floor. It was Camden. His head was bleeding from a gash in the middle of his forehead, running red into his eyes, but it was him.
“Oh thank god!” I cried out and immediately wrapped my arms around his middle, holding him to me. “Camden, Camden, what happened?”
“I don’t know,” he said. I could feel him shake his head against me. He held me for a minute, our breath slowing down together until we were breathing as one. Then he pulled away, holding me at arm’s length and peered at me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine!” I cried out. “Except for waking up alone and thinking you were dead! I found the tarp, it’s all ripped and there’s blood, Camden, oh what the fuck happened? Why was I left behind?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his forehead scrunching, which then brought out a wince of pain from him. “I don’t know what … they came in the morning. Maybe an hour ago? It wasn’t light out yet but birds, birds were singing. I heard someone yell something. You were sleeping … I got up and I could see these men walking around but without my glasses and in the dark I couldn’t make them out. Next thing I know I was hit over the head with something and dragged into the jungle. I wasn’t unconscious but I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t move. I don’t know if I was drugged or what. Then, they started yelling at each other. ”
“Did you recognize the voices?”
“I think so. I thought I heard Derek. He was pleading something, arguing. In Spanish. Like he was begging for his life. Or my life. I don’t know. Then they dropped me and I guess I passed out until I heard your voice. ” He put his hand to my cheek and rubbed his thumb along my cheekbone.
“What do we do now?”
“What else can we do?”
“We don’t even know where Gus is. ”
He stepped back and lightly touched his fingers to the gash on his forehead, wincing at the touch. He pulled his hand away and admired the shiny smear of blood. “We have the compasses that Este gave us. Last night, as we were falling asleep, as I pretended to be asleep, I heard Esteban tell Javier that it was less than a day’s walk from where we camped. That it was roughly northeast where we needed to go and that we would know it once we started seeing signs warning about poachers. Apparently Travis’s compound is in the middle of a reserve. Course you wouldn’t know it because I assume he bribes the hell out of the government. Fucking fingers in every fucking pie. ”
“So we just go for it then?” I asked.
He nodded sharply. “I think we have to. I don’t know which way we came in but I know which way we’re going. ”
“And if Javier …”
“Is dead?”
I shook my head. “Worse. If he’s out there. If this is a set up. ”
“You wouldn’t put it past him, would you?”
“No,” I said though it hurt to say it. “I wouldn’t. ”
His lips twitched up into a smile. “Good. ” He brought his compass out. “I don’t have any guns. They took them. ”
I took mine out of my boot and then brought the extra one out of the backpack and handed it to him, placing its solid and deadly weight in his palm. “Now we both have one. ”
His fingers curled over it and he slid back the clip to check it like an old pro. I had to admit, as wrong as it was, there was something so god damn sexy about seeing Camden handle a gun, the shiny metal against his big arms and wide chest, muscle against muscle. With the blood smeared on his face, dripping down onto the tats that teased
at his neck, he was 100% man. I just wished he was 100% mine.
“Ready?” he asked.
I adjusted my pack, brought out my compass and said, “let’s go. ”
CHAPTER TEN
Roughly northeast wasn’t exactly the most detailed directions to go by. Our compasses worked fine but as Camden and I traversed the depths of the jungle, sticking to a straight line wasn’t as easy as we had hoped. The elevation was proving to be more difficult the further along we went, mother nature putting rocky outcrops, fallen trees and ravines in our path. We were both tired, sweaty and irritable and I was letting my fear get the better of me. The fear of who might be lying out there in the dense foliage, watching me, springing a trap. The fear that Gus and my mother were already dead and that this was all for nothing. The fear that the man who was walking in front of me might keep walking one day and never look back.
“Seen anything yet?” he asked, glancing at me over his broad shoulders.
“No, nothing,” I told him. The whole time I’d been looking for some sort of sign that the men had come through here but my tracking skills weren’t up to snuff in a place like this. It was too wild and unpredictable, much like the men we were looking for.
At that, thunder rumbled ominously. We both paused and looked up. Through the tall tops of the overgrown trees dark clouds had moved in, blocking the sun. It felt like we were being closed in. The air around us shifted and changed and when we started walking again it wasn’t long until I was completely coated in a new layer of sweat.
“Do you think this whole thing was a set up?” Camden asked me after a few moments. He was breathing heavier now, the rising elevation and intense humidity breaking him down as well.
“I don’t know how it could be,” I said honestly. My lungs were burning, my feet aching in my boots. I stopped wiping the sweat off my face a long time ago. “What would be the point of bringing us out here?”
“Maybe we’re supposed to be a diversion. Maybe Javier is setting you up to distract them while he swoops in and takes over. Maybe that’s why you were left behind. ”
I shook my head, droplets of sweat flying. “I don’t think so. Why were you left?”
“I’m a diversion too. ”
“But if we’re a diversion, then it means we are being set up to fail. They’d want Travis to take us … worse, kill us. Javier wouldn’t do that. ”
He stopped and turned to look at me. “You just said that you wouldn’t put it past him to set you up. ” His voice was ragged and unmistakable anger burned deep in his eyes.
I threw up my hands and sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. I …” I remembered what Violetta had said about Javier throwing me under a bus if he had to. I swallowed hard. “I think he’d use me, use us, to get what he wants. But I don’t think he’d ever put my life in danger. ”
He raised his brows then laughed wickedly, looking up at the sky. “Wow. You have got to be kidding me. ”
“What?” I asked, my heart began to thud loudly in my ears.
“What? Ellie, from the start he has been pulling all the puppet strings and you’ve been pulled willingly. You say he wouldn’t put you in any danger but he sent you to Travis’s house to kill him. He made you cozy up to the sick bastard. If that’s not putting you at risk, I don’t know what is. I would never do that to you. ”