Now he looks confused. “You want me to sleep in the bed and you on the couch?”
“No,” I yelp out quickly, thinking. If he’s in the bed, he’s in the other room. “I . . . uh, I want to be in the same room as you. Not the bedroom,” I add, “ . . . here. Where it’s safe.”
Where I can see you.
He digests this and then nods. “Sure. Get your blanket. I’m going to be up for a while anyhow.”
I race back to his room, snatch the blanket out of the bed so I don’t have to spend longer than a moment with him out of sight, and then wrap it around me, heading back to the living room. Daniel watches me as I return, his face impassive, but soon returns to cleaning his guns.
I relax a bit more now. We’re not in the bedroom, and as I lay down on the couch, I face the table so I can watch him work. So I can keep an eye on him. I pull the blanket tight around me and curl up. It’s soft. It’s the softest thing I’ve felt since I was taken, and I immediately feel like weeping again at the small luxury.
Tomorrow I will figure out some way to make Daniel keep me at his side. I can’t go to the embassy. I can’t chance it. I’ll have to figure out some other way to get home.
I watch Daniel work until I fall asleep, exhausted.
Six
Daniel
SHE LOOKS FRAGILE. FOR THE first time since I’ve taken her out of the whorehouse, she looks like I can break her. I prefer the feisty, sarcastic girl. This teary-eyed victim scares the hell out of me. None of my past dealings have prepared me for her. What the hell were you going to do with your sister? a little voice mocks. I had hoped to find my sister, take her home, and let the land, the horses, and our mom heal her. But as I look at Regan’s sleeping form, tense and protective when most people are completely lax, I realize what a dumbass idea that was. It’s going to take more than sitting on the porch and drinking sweet tea for a few weeks to recover, and Regan is only a few hours out of her imprisonment and torture. Even trained soldiers need time to recover, and Regan didn’t have any training. When I was part of Special Ops we all went through training on surviving capture and torture, which basically meant being captured and tortured.
A group of older soldiers would kidnap you and take you to a solitary cell. They’d place a wet towel on your face and leave you there. At first, you feel like the towel is nothing. You can survive a towel. But an hour or so of being immobilized, sucking in the wet fabric with every breath and then having more water poured over your mouth and nose and into your ears while you vomit into your mouth and then swallow it back—all the while choking on the fabric, puke and water—is hell. Then when you are about to pass out or you think you’ll die, the towel is ripped away and you’re stuck in room where fluorescent lights flicker off and on while random noises are piped in, sometimes for what seems for hours at a time and others randomly. After that you listen to your friends call out from the next room while they seem to be tortured or raped and they are calling out your name, begging you to help them, save them, rescue them. But you can’t do anything.
Oftentimes the soldiers trying to get into the Special Forces fail these mental tests, not the physical ones. Lots of people can swim, run, and carry a rucksack weighing a hundred and fifty pounds for twenty-six miles. Not many can survive mental torture and not come out of it a deadweight victim.
I don’t know what Regan has endured and I don’t like envisioning it. But I’m guessing that Regan’s suffered more than any Special Forces soldier ever has, and she’s not catatonic. So what if she broke down? That shit’s normal. I couldn’t barely say more than two words when I finished my psychological training. Unlike Regan though, I was alone in the shower of my apartment when I had my mental vacation, and the next day I could pretend that it was nothing when everyone was patting me on the back for graduating and buying me drinks. A few of the old timers, though, passed me a drink and gave me a knowing look that said my bravado was a thin front. So yeah, Regan’s little torrential outburst was nothing but normal. I hope she knew that. Getting her back to the consulate and on her way to the good U.S. of A. would make a helluva difference.
The first thing we need to get her up and on her feet are real clothes and shoes. It is tempting to leave right now. Rio is like Vegas—open all hours of the night. But if she were to wake up and find I wasn’t there? That seems like a bad idea. I’d deal with the clothes thing in the morning. I kick off my boots, pull off my t-shirt, and settle into the hard-backed chair for some much needed shut-eye. My last thought is there’s a damned good bed not getting used tonight.
“YOU CAN’T LEAVE.” REGAN’S VOICE is tinged with desperation that she is valiantly trying to swallow back. I pretend like I don’t notice that she’s huddled onto the edge of the sofa, as far away from me as she can get while still maintaining two eyes on me at all times. It’s like she wants to see me there and feels safer that I’m around but can’t really be sure I’m not going to hurt her like she’s been hurt the last six weeks.
I inject as much gentleness as I can into my voice and hold out a hand—not for her to touch, but to show her I mean her no harm. It’s worked with horses in the past and it’s not like I have any better ideas. “I can’t take you downstairs. You stand out too much, and we need to keep a low profile until we can take you back to the consulate."
She nods, but I’m not sure if I’m getting through to her. I swipe a hand down my face. Hating to leave her but having no choice, I look around. How can I make her feel safe? My eyes fall on one of the guns I have disassembled on the table. A weapon. She’d been feeling me up yesterday after her storm of tears, searching for a weapon. For a quick moment, I’d thought she was caressing me and I had to fight back a completely inappropriate boner brought on by her soft body and her need for comfort, not to mention her slim fingers running up and down my abdomen and around the waistband of my pants. “Have you ever shot a gun before?”