lifted away from them, leaving just the two of them, joined as one soul, one heart, one spirit.
A climax of such towering perfection, such unendurable sweetness that it made her weep for joy, broke over them. John’s eyes went clear and quiet, as serene now as they had been stormy moments before.
He felt it, too.
For just a moment, an unforgettable instant out of time, the two of them had touched heaven.
Tears rolled silently down her cheeks, unchecked. “Thank you,” she whispered.
A faint frown flitted across the stillness of his face and then was gone. “For what? I’m the one who should be thanking you.”
“For giving me that gift. I’ll never forget it.”
He didn’t ask what gift she was referring to, and she saw understanding in his eyes. It had been that special a moment for him, too. A perfect moment. Not a bad one to go out on, she supposed.
Too overwhelmed, frankly just too wiped out by it all to summon an ounce of anger, she accepted the inevitable. John was going to do what he was going to do, and it wasn’t her fault. She’d given him joy. She’d given him love. She’d given him acceptance. There was nothing more she could offer him. If those weren’t enough for him to live for, then he was truly not going to be swayed from his planned path.
And shockingly enough, she could live with that. She didn’t like it, but he wasn’t going to drag her down with him.
Reality came crashing back in on her with a thunderclap of realization in her head that made her reel. She was planning to do the same thing he was! By a different method, and for vastly different reasons, but she, too, was bent on throwing away her life-which at this late date had turned out to be a pretty wonderful and precious thing indeed, thanks to John.
“I get it now,” she breathed.
“Get what?”
“What you’ve been talking about when you accused me of throwing my life away thoughtlessly. You’re right. I didn’t realize it until just now. I was so blinded by my need to save my family that I didn’t look past Huayar’s demand that I sacrifice myself to him.”
John stared at her in open shock. “Are you backing out of this crazy scheme, then?” he asked hopefully.
She frowned up at him. “I can’t abandon my family. I won’t abandon them. But I am willing to listen to other options.”
“Finally,” he breathed in profound relief. He drew his sleeping bag over them both, and settled back to stare up at the tarp a foot over their heads in the dim, gray light of dawn. “Here are your choices.”
She settled against his shoulder, suddenly eager to hear his plan and desperate to find a way to save her family
“First, you can make the trade as Huayar has proposed. You walk into his camp, he releases your family, you stay with him and teach him how to make this new drug. Maybe you stick around long enough to help set up and even manage his lab for a while before he kills you. But at the end of the day, he kills you. And then he kills your family. He’ll never leave them hanging around in the long term, possibly knowing what he looks like. Bottom line, you’ll all die, and Huayar gets his drug formula.”
She winced at hearing her original plan and its inevitable conclusion laid out so baldly. She’d never really thought past getting her family released to what would happen next.
“Second choice, you and I mount some sort of covert rescue op to see if we can pull out your family and not hand you over to Huayar at all. I have to be honest with you. The odds of us succeeding are not high. Huayar’s men know what they’re doing, and their security is tight. Not airtight, mind you, but definitely tight.”
She nodded, wincing.
“Behind door number three, we have some sort of hybrid plan between these two.”
“Like what?”
He shrugged. “We maybe let you walk into Huayar’s camp and use your presence there as a distraction while I go in from the back and try to free your family. Then, once I’ve got them clear of the camp, I come back for you.”
“What are the odds on that scheme?”
He exhaled heavily. “Not that great. If your family gets away but you stay in Huayar’s custody, he’ll try to cut his losses and force you into giving him the drug formula at a minimum. Then, he’s likely to come after your family again and try to recapture them.”
She shuddered. “Does there happen to be another choice?”
John was silent for a long time. “Yeah. There’s another option.”
“Which is?” she demanded impatiently.
“I walk into Huayar’s camp and offer myself as a hostage in your family’s place. They get released, and he uses me as leverage to keep you in line and get you to cough up the formula.”
She frowned. “But isn’t the point not to give him the formula?”
He nodded grimly. “You won’t hand over the formula. You’ll let him do whatever he wants to me, and you won’t give him the formula. Huayar doesn’t know I’m prepared and, in fact,
“But John-” she started to exclaim.
He clapped a hand over her mouth. “Keep your voice down,” he snapped.
She nodded her understanding and he pulled his palm away from her face. “But John!” she exclaimed under her breath. “I can’t let you hand yourself over to him like that! He’ll do horrible things to you!”
John nodded, his chin lightly rubbing her hair.
“No way,” she declared forcefully, if quietly.
“It’s the best option. Your family gets away, Huayar doesn’t get the formula right away. It’ll give my buddies time to get there and rescue you. If you need to, you can buy more time by giving him fake formulas or claiming to need to perfect the formula you’ve got.”
“But I do need to perfect it-”
He cut her off gently. “I can probably hold out for two days. Maybe three. You’ll only need to buy a day or two more before my buddies get here in quantity and pull you out. Five days. If you can just stay alive for that long, you should walk out of this thing alive, along with your family. I get my fitting ending, and you all get your lives back.”
She didn’t stop to think about what she was doing. She balled up her fist and jammed it into his gut as hard as she could. He jerked up off the ground, grunting in surprise and pain.
“What’d you do that for?” he complained.
“I told you to quit making stupid remarks about deserving to die,” she groused back.
Unaccountably, he unfolded from around her fist, stretching back out beneath her. His body began to shake suspiciously. She frowned for a moment and then realized he was laughing. Whether it was out of despair or actual humor, she couldn’t tell. But either way, it was better than his calm, cool, controlled martyr act.
“I’m telling you, Mel, this is the best option. I’ll pop a big bottle of pain pills before I go. Even without the pills, I can take a world of pain. It’s part of my Special Forces training. I can buy your family days to get away from here before Huayar realizes he’s made a mistake. I’ll have the guys from Pirate Pete’s pick your family up. They have connections and can arrange for you and your family to go far, far away and get new identities, new lives.”
“You’re asking me to hand you over to a madman to let him do his worst to you.”
He shrugged. “Death is death. The means isn’t all that critical.”
She closed her eyes. How could a moment of such perfection degenerate into this so fast? Could she seriously allow John to throw himself upon his sword for her? Could she bear to let him be tortured and mutilated, undoubtedly before her eyes? No matter that he was volunteering for the job, could she let another human being die for her?
Chapter 13
John stared deep into Melina’s eyes, a little stunned himself that he was making the offer.
