Jade Star (Star Quartet 4)

“Would you have? Really? After she’d been raped and abused? And what would you have done with her, Wilkes? Raped and abused her more?”

“Shut up, damn you! You know nothing about it, nothing!”

“I know that you are not . . . thinking straight.” His eyes look odd. His flesh is gray. The flesh around his eyes and mouth is scored with pain. “Let her go, Wilkes. If you kill me, she will kill you. Perhaps not today, but tomorrow or the next day.”

“She is mine!”

“Like hell she is.”

Jules could bear it no longer. “Michael, I’ll go with him, please, just leave. I don’t want you hurt . . . please leave.”

He merely smiled at her, shaking his head. “He wouldn’t let me leave even if he trusted your promise, sweetheart.”

“No,” Wilkes said, the pain so bad now that he spoke through gritted teeth. “No, Doctor, you aren’t leaving.”

Jules felt him jerk behind her.

It was then Saint saw the spasm of pain on Wilkes’s face. It was fearful, his mouth working like a death rictus. “Has she already tried to kill you?” he said.

“No, damn you! Oh, my God! My belly . . .”

Jules felt him ease his hold on her as his body bent forward with pain. She didn’t think, merely acted. She sent her elbow into his stomach, and he yowled with agony. Jules grabbed at the gun. In the next instant, Saint jerked away her hand, pulled the gun from Wilkes’s unresisting fingers. He met Wilkes’s glazed eyes. He felt a spasm of pity.

“You’re dying, aren’t you?” he said very softly, knowing that only Wilkes could hear him.

“I didn’t need you to tell me, damn you!” Wilkes was panting, his breathing an agony. He staggered backward.

“No,” Saint said, “no, you didn’t. How long have you lived on opium? How long have you had none to ease the pain?”

But Jameson Wilkes couldn’t answer. His mind was clouded with agony, with strange broken images of the ravaged face of his wife, long dead.

Then Saint knew. He was on opium, to his limit.

“Michael!”

Saint whirled about at Jules’s shout, saw Hawkins looming in the mouth of the cave. He fired. There was another shot, and Jules saw a bullet slam into the wall of the cave. She watched, frozen, as Hawkins, a bewildered look on his face, stumbled forward, then fell on his face.

There was a loud shout from outside the cave. Then a rapid staccato, at lea

st six more shots.

Suddenly Saint felt Wilkes’s hands clutching at his wrist, bearing downward. Again he looked into Wilkes’s eyes, and saw madness and more pain than a human being should have to suffer. Stomach cancer, he thought, a slow, agonizing death. He saw something else in his eyes, something he couldn’t yet understand. Then he did. He realized, deep in his soul, that Wilkes could have shot him in the confusion. He saw another pistol lying in the dust very close to Wilkes and knew Wilkes could easily have grabbed it. He knew that Wilkes had made a decision. For a split second Saint wavered. He closed his eyes, knowing what was to happen, what the dying man wanted to happen. He let him bring the gun between them.

Jules was weeping softly. “No, please, no.”

There was a muffled shot.

Jules screamed.

Neither man moved. Then Saint very gently eased Wilkes’s limp body down to the cave floor.

Jules backed away, turning her head, unable to bear the fixed gaze in Jameson Wilkes’s eyes.

Brent burst into the cave, drew up short, and slowly slipped his gun back into its holster. “He’s dead?” He nodded toward Wilkes’s body.

“Yes,” Saint said. Just as he wanted to be. Thank God, he didn’t linger, even for a moment. Jules couldn’t have borne that.

“Josh shot the other man. I see you got this scum,” he added, nodding toward Hawkins’ body.