Children of Destiny Books 1-3 (Texas: Children of Destiny Book 9) Read online

  If there was even a chance Dawn Hayden really was Julia Jackson, he had to go after her.

  Damn! He didn’t want to go. He must be getting soft. Lately life had almost been pleasant, now that Megan had settled down into a happy marriage with Jeb, now that he had his nephew Jared to be interested in. Kirk had had enough of the Middle East and its brutality to last him forever.

  Images and impressions bombarded him. Latticed windows, goats, camel’s thorn, women swathed in black, sandstorms, winding crowded streets, bazaars, thick black coffee, perfect blue skies above the golden petrified geometry of the desert. Always there was the dry scorching heat, the grit of sand in his mouth, his eyes, his nose. And the danger.

  And camels. He hated those foul-natured, humpbacked miscreants.

  Ali Naid! He hated the country as well. It was a country simmering on the verge of revolution, a nation filled with different factions of medieval-minded fanatics, all of whom hated each other with warlike ferocity, although they hated Westerners even more fiercely. It would be suicide to go in there alone.

  Suicide to go up against a band of armed terrorists.

  Two

  A man’s high-pitched wail rent the silence. It was followed by rifle bursts hitting something soft, then ricocheting against stone. Afterward silence filled the well-dark blackness with suffocating nothingness.

  The stench of death and decay rose from the mattress and made Dawn’s empty stomach give a dry heave. Terrified, she jumped off her filthy pallet and listened to the silence. Dear Lord! Let this be a nightmare! Let me wake up in my tiny Manhattan apartment!

  But as her torn nails dug into the mud wall, and she swallowed queasily and felt her tongue rub against the grit in her mouth, she knew this grim reality was no nightmare. Her injured right ankle was twice the size of her other one, and the pain every time she limped was excruciating. How many times had she awakened with the same fervent prayer on her parched lips? Always there was only this dank, putrid cell with its filthy pallet and windowless walls.

  She licked her chapped lips. Her hand went to her throat, and she touched her medallion. She longed for water. In her sleep she dreamed of it, but her jailer never brought water. Instead he brought the most awful coffee she had ever tasted. It was so strong, it tore her insides apart, but she drank it anyway because it was liquid and she was dying of thirst. Once he had brought her a hot, sweet bottled drink, and she had guzzled it greedily until every drop was gone.

  “Water no good here,” he’d said once when she’d begged for water.

  She stared into the utter blackness and imagined that it must be the middle of the night. She had lost count of the days and nights. All she knew was that it wasn’t as hot now as it was sometimes, especially during the day when the cell was most like an oven and a grayish brightness seeped in through the cracks in the door.

  Everyone but Dawn was sleeping on the roof to escape the heat, but she had been locked in a cellar that was hot and still, and so dark that she sometimes felt the darkness lying like a heavy crushing weight on her chest.

  Outside she heard a sound. As she listened she could distinguish the shuffling of heavy footsteps coming down the stairs, moving down the hall, the fumbling for the right key. She knew all the familiar sounds of him by heart.

  The handsome Arab with the daggerlike nose and cold black eyes was coming. A scream bubbled up her dry throat.

  The door opened. He set his flickering oil lamp down beside her food, locked the door, and seized her. She was blinded momentarily by the light. Black shadows danced eerily against the squat walls.

  “Shut up, pretty American girl, or my men will come and do what men do to women who dance for other men.”

  Her scream froze in her throat as the odd menace in his low tone sank in. Aslam always came. Only him. Suddenly she knew why.

  When she quieted he let her go, shrugged and turned to leave.

  “Let me out. Let me walk outside at least. I can’t stand it in here.”

  He ignored her and unlocked the door again to go.

  “Don’t leave me in the dark. Please. No...” Dawn cried. He continued to ignore her, but in desperation, she pounced on him, grabbing his back.

  He whirled around, his face distorted and savage. “I think you stupid, pretty American girl.” His rough hands bit bruisingly into her forearms. He pulled out a pistol and shoved it against her head. She heard the trigger click.

  His hands were shaking. Her face went as white as paste. In the flickering light, her eyes were as immense and dark as glimmering, hand-blown English marbles. Against her ear he murmured something in Arabic and began to laugh. As he reached to extinguish the lamp her fear mushroomed. All her life she had been terrified of two things—the dark and horses.

  Now in the darkness he was laughing at her. “Tomorrow, you will die...like the others.”

  For years she had run from the real world. She had danced, the beauty she created on stage the only reality she wanted. In one shattering moment, her world had become too real.

  So, this brute was not so different from his men. He was going to kill her. Tomorrow. Strangely, just knowing what her fate was to be made her fear lessen. A desolate, numbing peace settled upon her.

  He towered between her and the open door, her only avenue to freedom. She considered her chances of getting past him, and they seemed infinitesimal.

  But he was going to kill her, anyway.

  As a dancer, she knew all about human bodies, their strengths, their frailties. In a single leap she jammed her good foot hard onto his instep. He pitched sideways. Her nails found his eyes, her knee his crotch.

  He doubled over with a groan, and she picked up the lamp and banged him over the head. Then she broke free and hobbled down the hall on her injured ankle.

  She was running up the stairs when a tall shadowy figure loomed out of a corner. A hand coiled from the darkness, and she was caught and knocked breathless against the tallest, hardest male body she’d ever felt. Her breasts were pressed against corded chest muscle; her thighs ground against his.

  Her first captor had been big, but he seemed as nothing compared to this man. A rough, callused hand covered her soft mouth and strangled her scream.

  As he pushed her deeper into the darkness, she felt the terror tugging at her, making her markedly conscious of how slight and fragile her body was compared to his. He jammed her against the wall with his powerful torso and twisted her face so that a single bar of moonlight from a high, narrow window slanted across it.

  Though he brought his face close to hers, she couldn’t see him. His features were shrouded in darkness, but she could feel his gaze burning across her face, studying her, no doubt assessing her charms. Was he going to take her for himself? Or share her with the rest of his friends on the roof? Suddenly the four walls of her cell seemed a paradise when she thought of being used by this brutal stranger and his cohorts.

  Rough fingers trailed the length of her throat. He lifted the medallion and held it for a long moment. Then he sifted through her hair, holding it to the light as well. During this intense inspection of her face and necklace and hair, she could feel her heart pounding, her breasts pushing against his chest. He was holding her so intimately that it was impossible not to know the exact moment when his maleness reacted to the feminine nearness of her helpless body. Panicking, she twisted, and her body rubbed itself even more tightly against him in that most intimate of places. She felt the warmth of him, the size of him. Too late, she froze.

  She could feel his lips curl in mockery at her modesty. Some taunting guttural sound arose from his throat. He let her hair fall like a veil over her shoulder.

  There was no way she could stop him from doing whatever he intended, but she held herself rigid, raising her chin in helpless defiance, and stared hard at him, her black eyes crying her fear and hatred of him.

  To her amazement, when she stilled he relaxed his grip on her mouth, and the minute he did she bit his hand so hard, she tasted
the bitter metallic flavor of his blood.

  “Bitch!”

  She was so caught up in struggling to free herself from him that she didn’t notice he had spoken in English, and that his perfect pronunciation of the insult was American. She lurched past him, stumbled down the stairs, limped the length of the hall and fell full force against Aslam.

  “You see there is no escape, pretty American girl,” Aslam said grimly, grabbing her by the throat.

  She thought he knew of the stranger on the stairs. “Why don’t you bullies just shoot me, and get it over with?” she whispered.

  “That would be too quick. Too easy.” He touched her cheek briefly once, almost gently. “You should not have danced for Prince Ali, pretty American girl. It was big mistake. I have never killed a woman before. I do not like to kill you. You are brave—for a woman. But foolish, as all women are.” He threw her roughly toward her prison.

  He did not want to kill her, he said, but he would.

  In the darkness of her cell, after he was gone, she closed her eyes, and the blackness seemed to suck her deeper and deeper. There was a blinding white flash and a stabbing pain in the back of her head. Only this time there were even more images that made no sense to her.

  She was a child running lightly toward a boy who had a Native-American-dark face, green eyes and straight black hair. He was holding out his arms, and she was filled with an inexplicable joy. From behind her, without warning, she heard the sound of thunder, only it wasn’t thunder. It was a man on a demon-horse, the pounding of its hooves shaking the earth as man and horse bore down on her. Frightened, she turned back to the boy with the green eyes, but he had disappeared. Just as she was fainting with terror beneath the flying hooves, a hand clamped around her waist, pulling her up, slinging her belly down across the saddle. The last thing she saw was the mad gallop of horse’s hooves, the careening ground, flying rocks.

  Slowly Dawn came back to the present, but her courage had melted before this vision. Every nerve ending in her body was vibrating with fear. Was she losing her mind? Was it the perpetual darkness? Was that why she was having these terrifying white flashes? She’d never been able to stand the darkness.

  She collapsed on her filthy pallet. Whether it was hours or minutes later, she would never know. Something heavy thudded against the wall outside, arousing her from her terrified lethargy. She sat up and strained to hear. Someone or something fell hard again. There was a muffled cry of pain as fist slammed into bone. A boot heel into gut. A desperate battle was going on out in the hall. She heard a single shriek of agony and recognized that it belonged to Aslam.

  He had come back.

  Why?

  Was it time for her to die?

  There was an ominous quiet, but she knew someone was outside the door.

  Quickly she shoveled everything, her food, the lamp, her scanty belongings under the ragged quilt and ran to hide behind the door.

  A key turned in the lock, and she shrank against the wall as the door opened a crack. In the gray-black light she made out the glint of a gun barrel. Then she saw the immense outline of a masculine body.

  It was the menacing stranger from the hall.

  He was death’s angel, and in an instant flash, she knew she was not ready to die.

  He stepped into the room and approached the bed, speaking softly, almost beguilingly. He had come to kill her. She knew it.

  He pointed his gun at the lump and kicked it. When it remained motionless he snatched the quilt aside.

  She bolted outside, only to stumble over a slumped figure in the doorway and fall flat on her face on the dirt floor. Behind her she heard the merciless clamor of footsteps as the giant tracked her. She struggled to get up, but she was weakened from her imprisonment and impaired by her injured ankle. As she crawled along the floor, the man lunged and dragged her back by the hair, falling on top of her, rolling with her. When they were still, he pinioned both her wrists above her head, with one hand. Straddling her waist with his thighs, he held her down. All she could do was kick and flail the air helplessly with her legs. Still she fought him, twisting in his hold, her soft body like a sweet devouring flame wherever any part of him touched her.

  In breathless English, he whispered, “Honey, don’t make me hurt you.”

  Through the haze of her terror, his words made no impression. Aslam had spoken English, too. She kept struggling, so he tightened his grip. Her arms went numb.

  She felt the warm grizzle of the man’s unshaven cheek against her face. She heard his ragged whisper, “Julia, honey, it’s Kirk. Don’t fight me.”

  Julia? Kirk? Names from the past? Or were they?

  Memories and images assailed her and were gone, vanishing into a mist of whiteness and terror. What did they mean? Julia…Kirk? Who did they belong to, these names? The flashes of light? They had to do with nightmares. Her head throbbed dully.

  All she knew was that this monster who held her down was some living figment from a long-forgotten nightmare that had been more horrible than even her present terror. He had said he would come back, and he had.

  She struggled more fiercely than before.

  “Damn,” he muttered. “I didn’t want to do this.”

  He wrapped a cord around her hands and bound them behind her back. Then he stuffed a wad of clothing into her dry mouth and gagged her. Her eyes flared with new hatred as he yanked her unceremoniously to her feet and pushed her forward. When she stumbled on her bad foot, he leaned over, examined it and uttered a low curse. When she cringed from his rough probing, he slung her over his shoulders like a sack of wheat as if her weight was nothing and stalked down the hall.

  As he bore her up the stairs to a fate too horrible to contemplate, her tortured mind went mercifully black.

  Three

  Fiery waves of pain, radiating from Dawn’s ankle, brought her whimpering back to consciousness. Her mouth was dry and sore from some hideous cloth that seemed to work like a dirty sponge, soaking up what little moisture had remained in her parched tissues. Thin cords cut into her wrists like knives.

  The narrow room was hotter than the cell where she’d been imprisoned before, and it stank with some gagging smell from a dark smoke sifting through a glassless window. But at least the brilliant moonlight cast her surroundings in a silver half-light, and she was no longer in the dark.

  Then she saw him, the cause of all these new miseries, the malevolent giant who’d accosted her on the stairs. He was dressed in his long black robes with a black kaffiyeh draped rakishly over his head, its folds concealing his face. He was leaning his great male body nonchalantly against a wall as he shoved a cartridge into a long-barreled gun. He set the gun down for a second and took a lengthy swig from a goatskin jug.

  She could hear the liquid sloshing in the jug as he drank from it carelessly, and her dry tongue flailed against the wad of cotton stuffed in her mouth.

  He set the jug down and licked his lips. Even in the dim light, she could see a pearly droplet glisten on his mouth before he smeared it away with the back of a long-fingered brown hand. The lip of the jug glimmered with the same wetness.

  Her thirst was like a dry ache in her sore mouth. She could feel it burning in every parched crack of her lips.

  The swilling, thoughtless pig! She shivered with hatred.

  He gave not a thought to her comfort, not a thought to the possibility of her thirst. She could be dead for all he cared. Instead, he turned his attention to his weapon. She didn’t know anything about guns, but as she watched his deft movements, his nimble expertise, she knew he must surely be a professional killer.

  Dawn felt a premonitory quiver at the base of her spine as she considered what he’d probably do to her. Then she fought to stifle the chill of fear. Son of the Devil, he might be, but he hadn’t shot her yet. He hadn’t even touched her. And he had something to drink.

  She writhed and twisted, straining against her bonds until she hurt all over in an effort to attract his attention.
/>   He was totally absorbed with his gun, rubbing it lovingly, loading it. She watched those long tapered fingers move up and down his weapon as gently as though he were caressing a woman.

  When he did look up it was never at her. He kept a sharp eye on what was going on outside the window. There was a predatory silence about him, the careful, patient waiting silence of the hunter, the silence of a man in total control of his body and his emotions.

  She was going to have to scoot herself across the dirt floor to get his attention. Very slowly, because of her ankle and her bound hands, she inched toward him, moving her feet forward, placing her hands on the ground, and then lifting her hips, repeating this slow, painful process over and over again.

  Suddenly, in reflex to the unexpected motion in the dark room, he whirled. His gun clicked, and she was staring down the shiny black length of it into the steel slits of his narrowed eyes.

  She squeezed her lids shut and gulped a deep breath.

  He lowered his gun. Carefully he clicked the safety on and set it down. Swaggering toward her, he bent down to her level.

  “So you’re awake at last, sleeping princess?” His voice was smooth and soft, faintly mocking and so sensually pleasant that it made her shiver. “It’s about time.”

  She nodded, furious that she could find any part of him attractive, even his voice. Then she bounced her trussed body up and down on the ground. A torrent of abuse welled in her soul and blazed from her eyes.

  He pushed the folds of his kaffiyeh aside, and a sliver of dazzling desert moonlight cut across his harshly chiseled features. She found herself staring into the most beautiful pair of green eyes she had ever seen. They were densely shadowed by the longest, straightest black lashes that no man, let alone this brute, deserved. Every dancer she knew would have gladly sold her soul for such exquisite eyes and lashes. Yet there was nothing feminine about their hot male appraisal as they swept insolently from her face downward, lingering on her small breasts budding against her scanty pink costume.