Mexico. Not Afghanistan. Not Afghanistan.
“Zach? Are you awake?” It was Natalie.
He didn’t bother trying to sit up, knowing it was beyond him. They’d put everything they had into breaking him, shocking him until he’d all but lost the ability to respond to pain. How his heart had held out, he wasn’t sure. But he knew that the next sunrise would mark his last day on this earth. The Zetas were through with him.
“Tomorrow, I will fry you until you die, even if it takes all day and all night,” his tormenter had hissed in his face just before they’d dragged him from the room.
All day and all night.
The leftover dread from his nightmare settled like lead in his belly.
“Zach, please wake up!”
He swallowed, his throat dry as sand. “I . . . I’m awake.”
“Oh, thank God! I thought you . . .” She didn’t finish the thought.
“No . . . I’m not dead.”Not yet.
Her relief sounded sincere, and some part of him was touched that she cared enough to worry about him, especially after what he’d done. He knew she didn’t understand what had happened in that room. He needed to explain. He could no more rape a woman than eat his own balls. But before he could tell her that, he was drifting again.
Her voice brought him back. “If I get us out of here, will you promise to help me get safely back to the States?”
“What?” What in the hell had she just said?
“If I can get us both out of here, will you promise to help me get safely home?”
It was then he noticed a scraping sound.
He opened his eyes. “Do you think you have a way out?”
“The mortar is really dry and soft. I’ve been digging at it all night, and I think I’m going to be able to open my cell door soon. My handcuffs broke, and the curved part is really good
for scraping this stuff out.”
“Your handcuffs broke?” Zach’s mind raced, his pulse like thunder in his ears.
The scraping sound stopped.
“I hit concrete where they reinforced the wall,” she answered, out of breath, “and it snapped the left one open.”
“Natalie, I think you’ve got yourself a weapon.”
CHAPTER 5
“IT’S NOT EASY to kill a man, but that’s what you have to be ready to do.” Zach leaned against the cool bricks, all of his senses focused on the young woman on the other side of the wall. Both of their lives now depended entirely on her. He’d been coaching her all night, talking her through this, his already battered voice worn to a hoarse whisper. “Once you start this, you have to finish it. If you don’t, these bastards will take you apart piece by piece. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Her answer didn’t reassure him. How could she understand?
Killing was a brutal business. She didn’t know what it was like to look into a man’s panicked eyes, to smell his breath, to feel him fighting desperately to live—and to end his life. She wasn’t trained to fight. She wasn’t trained to kill.
Zach was. He should be the one getting ready to take on the Zetas, not Natalie. But until these chains came off, he was useless.
When she’d finally worked that last brick free and broken out of her cell, they’d realized there wasn’t enough time for her to break him out, too. So he’d told her to focus instead on getting rid of any sign that the door to her cell had been tampered with. They didn’t want an open cell door or displaced bricks to tip the Zetas off the moment they stepped inside. While she’d been busy settling bricks back into place, he’d tried to come up with a plan of attack that wouldn’t get her killed, an unshakable sense of guilt gnawing at him.
He was supposed to protect the innocent, not the other way around.