She’d wake soon, and then he’d deal with what he’d done and what had been done to her. But until then…
He allowed his gaze to roam over her features. Even with the black-and-blue marks covering her face, she was hands down the most beautiful woman Jude had ever seen. He knew that under the bruising, her ivory skin was tinted with freckles across the bridge of her aquiline nose. Her almond-shaped eyes were closed, and he missed the cold frost of her gray eyes. Eyes that could turn to molten silver when she was in the throes of passion. Long, black lashes lay like fans on her pale cheeks, and her dark-brown eyebrows were gently curved over her eyes.
His gaze traveled south, over her thinner upper lip and deliciously full lower lip. Those lips could flatten in anger, lift in a soul-destroying smile, or open in ecstasy. He stopped when he came to the dent in her chin and licked his lips. She would always tempt him. Jude wondered if he’d ever be able to purge her. The need that had simmered under his skin from the moment he’d seen her almost two years ago continued to beat at him, heating him from the inside out, making him fist his hands.
Then his gaze traveled over the scar at her temple, and rage lit him. He pulled on a single thread of his control, finding other threads and winding them together until he could breathe without the fury.
Still he stood there and watched her breathe, ironically realizing that’s all he’d wanted for over a year—nothing more than to be able to watch her breathe.
Of course, that had been when he’d thought her dead. And she wasn’t dead. Not physically anyway.
He pulled his gaze from her, assured she was resting easily, and walked to the chair beside the wide bank of windows facing the southeast ridges of Baldy Mountain. Snow blanketed the top of the mountain, and the trees swayed in the wind of the continuing storm overhead. A pale-gray sky taunted him. It would weep snow again soon.
Could he survive in her presence for as long as he knew it would take to force her to give him information? Could he save her from herself?
He ran a hand down his face and tensed. She shifted on the bed, and everything in Jude went on alert. He heard her rise to a sitting position before she stilled. How would she play it?
Her breathing didn’t change from slow and even. But Jude was a hunter by nature, and he recognized the fear she was giving off in waves. He turned and simply watched her. He stood beside the window in the shadows of the intentionally darkened room, and unless she turned her head, she wouldn’t see him.
Could she feel him?
He wanted to know, but he waited.
“You have to let me go,” she said, her voice rough and low.
Jude didn’t respond.
She turned her head, finding him unerringly, her gaze narrowed and dark. “You don’t know what you’re doing here, Dagan.”
Anger rose again. Always, it was the anger now. He stepped from the shadows and turned the chair around, sitting down and crossing one leg over the opposite knee. “Why don’t you tell me then, Ella?”
“Let me go,” she demanded, her voice rising, the notes of the fear she was obviously feeling ringing strident in her tone.
“I’ve tried.” He answered her demand with the truth. He had. Once he’d found out she was alive, he’d gotten rip-roaring drunk and tried to drown his pain. Then he’d woken up with a bitch of a headache and a resolution. He would find her and force her to make him understand why she’d done what she’d done.
“Try harder,” she whispered. “For both of us, try harder.”
He rubbed his chest before he could check the action. She was scared. And not of Jude. What did she know? What the hell was she doing for the Piper? “Do you need some water?”
She shook her head, the nearly black strands of her hair falling to curtain her face from his view. “I need you to let me go, Dagan.”
“My name,” he said in a gruff voice.
“I can’t,” she returned, voice breaking at the end.
He sat up, both feet on the floor, fisted hands on his knees. “Use. My. Name.”
“Please…” If it was possible, her head hung lower.
This was the beginning. If he was going to break her, he’d have to start now. “Please…who?” He kept his voice low, almost a whisper.
She straightened then, giving another half-hearted tug on the soft leather cuffs attached to her wrists. “I won’t beg. Never again.”
He stood at that. He’d never made her. “Who made you beg, El?”
Jude winced as he automatically switched to the shortened version of her name. It was intimate and something he’d fallen back into far too easily.
She turned away from him, staring at the opposite wall and refusing to answer.
The fury that had been his best friend since the night she’d died rose again, swift and supernova hot. “Who made you beg, Ella?”
She took a deep breath and met his gaze. “Let me go.”
He shook his head and stood, walking to stand right beside the bed. She shrank from him, and that also enraged him. “When you tell me what’s going on, then I’ll let you go…maybe.”
He turned and walked to the door.
“I can’t give you what you want. Not anymore,” she said softly.
Bullshit. He didn’t turn around when he spoke. “You’ll give me everything you’ve got, intel, spec ops. You’ll give it all to me, and then I’ll decide what to do with you.”
Then he left, hearing her breath break and a strangled sob escape her. He almost, almost, turned around and went back to her.
Instead, he put one foot in front of the other, descending the stairs quickly lest he do what his heart demanded.
* * *
Ella lay back down gingerly on the bed. She was in so much shit. Once the
