to another person. To Tariq, she realized with considerable relief when she turned her head, the events of the previous night coming back to her. Sun poured in the cave’s opening, and the men around them were going about their business. Nobody paid any attention to the prisoners.
She’d been captured. She had failed. Frustration and disappointment rose like bile in the back of her throat as she recalled her easy defeat hours before. She’d gotten knocked out briefly, and after she’d come to, she’d been too upset that they had caught her. It had taken her forever to calm down enough to fall asleep. She was tired still.
“Are you okay?” Tariq asked her, his voice low and gentle. His gaze burned into hers.
His strength and warmth comforted her. She nodded and wiggled her limbs to get some circulation back into places where the ropes cut off the flow of blood. Although she had managed to grab a few hours of sleep, she still felt exhausted and sore all over. “Where are we going?”
They hadn’t been allowed to talk earlier, had earned some pretty hard kicks for every whispered word. But currently, nobody seemed to be paying attention to her.
“En route to some bandit camp.”
“Still in Beharrain?” She remembered reading that the border between Beharrain and Yemen was fairly flexible in this corner of the desert, moving as the individual tribes moved with their animals from watering hole to watering hole.
He nodded.
She thought of the satellite phone, then remembered that the bandits had taken it after they’d knocked her out, along with the tire iron she’d been growing attached to. “What happened back at the oasis?”
“I slashed three tires before they discovered me. They had spares. And you?”
“Hid upstairs, caught the camel, then followed as fast as I could.”
“You should have saved yourself.”
“Right. I’m sure that’s exactly what you would have done.” She flashed him a skeptical look.
His split lips stretched into a pained smile. “Definitely a lioness.” His gaze darkened and held her spellbound. “I’ve never met anyone quite like you,” he said.
She grew embarrassed at the open admiration in his voice, not sure she really deserved it, and looked away. The uneven stone floor of the cave dug into her back, but she didn’t dare sit up for fear of drawing attention to herself, to Tariq. They were lucky that for the moment they were forgotten. The bandits around them were finishing breakfast, some carrying their sleeping gear out of the cave, probably loading it back onto the truck.
“I think we’ll be moving on.” She scanned them one by one, mainly young men in their twenties. She could see only two or three who seemed older than that. They were all armed, an AK-47 hanging from each man’s shoulder.
One of them yelled something in Arabic as he strode their way.
“What does he want?”
“They are ready to load us onto one of the trucks.” Tariq sat up and helped her do the same. “Can you stand?”
She wobbled, but gave it her best shot. As soon as the bandit reached them, she understood why Tariq wanted to do as much as they could on their own. The man was rough, gripping her much harder than was necessary, his stubby fingers digging into her flesh as he yanked her around.
Tariq said something to him in Arabic, a brief sentence in a deep, harsh voice.
The man’s eyes narrowed as he leveled his gun at Tariq and shoved them forward. But he let go of her arm.
They were at the cave’s entrance, blinded by the sunlight, barely able to see the beat-up Jeep that pulled up to the level area on the hillside before them. It came to a halt between the two trucks, which had their engines idling.
A man in full tribal wear, including a soiled headdress, got out. A moment passed before she recognized him.
“Husam.” The name slipped from her mouth, and a cold shiver ran down her spine as the smugglers nodded to him respectfully.
Although he was too far away to have heard her, the man’s eyes zeroed in on her in the next second.
His face twisted into a frightful smile as he strode toward them. “You are alive,” he said to her with a wide smile. “I had to come and see.”
Tariq spoke rapidly and forcefully in Arabic, lurching forward, but the man behind him held him back. Husam sneered at him and pointed at her, switching to Arabic. One of the older men with the bandits came over, listened to Husam for a while. Tariq was still speaking, as well. She couldn’t understand a word, but from the tone of his voice it sounded like he was alternately threatening and protesting.
The bandit leader shrugged and pulled a curved knife from the sheath on his belt. She shrunk back as he aimed it at her, but he ended up slicing the ropes that tied her to Tariq, instead of slicing into her, as she’d half expected.
Then Husam grabbed her arm, and the gleam in his beady dark eyes left little doubt about his intentions toward her. “I never wanted to do you harm. I meant to save your life. From the moment I saw you, I knew you were a gift.” The look he gave her made it clear that he expected her gratitude.
“Let me go!” She struggled against him.
He seemed confused. “I’m offering you life.” The smile was fading from his face at her resistance.
“You knew that the cars would be attacked.”
“I knew our people would be in the same place that afternoon. I joined you to make sure you were spared.” He sounded angry now at her lack of gratitude.
“Let me go.”
“You will appreciate the honor of being chosen by me. You will respect me,” he warned.
She tried to elbow him in his chest, but underestimated the strength of his grip. He slowed his stride enough to backhand her, hard, across the face. She tasted blood and heard Tariq roar behind her.
Then so many things happened at once that she couldn’t untangle the sequence of events, not even later, when she had time to think about it.
There came a number of shouts, then a sickening thud, and Husam let go, falling face-first into the sand next to her, a dagger protruding from his back. Where had Tariq gotten that? At the same time, gunfire sounded, bullets slamming into the ground all around them. She sprinted forward on reflex, threw herself onto her stomach and slid under the Jeep for cover.
As soon as she was out of sight, she was out of mind, as well. Nobody came after her. Obviously, nobody considered her a threat. She watched with horror as the bandits focused on Tariq, who had drawn back into the cover of the cave, having somehow laid his hands on an AK-47.
The bandit leader and the young guy who’d brought them from the cave lay crumpled on the sand, and more bandits were falling by the second, Tariq’s aim proving to be exceedingly accurate.
The rest of the bandits were lying flat on their stomachs among the rocks, some backing away toward the trucks. Then one appeared in the back of one of the vehicles,
