My thoughts hurdled to my own protectors. “Michio took me from Jesse and Roark. Why would he do that?”
Michio didn’t twitch at the sound of his name, his hands moving fluidly as he unlocked the chains.
I dropped my forehead against the side of the cage, promised myself Jesse and Roark were alive and coming for me, and gave Elaine firm eye-contact. “What happened to Michio?”
She lifted her chin, fire flaring in her brown eyes. “It’s for his own good.”
“What is for his own good?”
She rested her hand on her belly. “Us.”
“What does that even mean?” I gnashed my teeth, seething the words. “What happened to his mind, Elaine?”
Michio shifted toward the last tether, his movements emotionless, his body a wooden shell. She stepped into his path, halting him with her palms on his bare chest.
I tried to wrangle back my anger, but it powered through, trembling my body and poisoning my blood. “Get the fuck away from him.”
The western horizon cast shafts of orange hues across her complexion, her eyes glowing in the dim light. Tendrils of shiny, black hair fell from her headscarf and framed her face as she stared up at him with doe eyes.
She was all soft curves and slim lines, feminine and well-groomed, so much prettier and healthier than I was. She knew it, too, sliding her body closer to his as she swayed those goddamned hips.
Stretching on tiptoes, she cupped the back of his head, raked her fingers through his hair, and kissed him, long and hard. His mouth remained slack yet pliable as her tongue flicked over his lips, her belly rocking against his unmoving frame.
Rolling heat slammed through my gut, my neck and jaw stiffening with rage.
She was lucky I was caged, because I wanted to kill her. Right fucking now. And maybe him, too, even as I knew he wasn’t himself and wouldn’t have chosen this. But I was so insanely angry I couldn’t think clearly. Why wasn’t he fighting whatever was harnessing his mind?
He might not have kissed her back, but he didn’t turn away either. He didn’t punch her in the ribs. Didn’t shove her in a cage. He just stood there, hands at his sides, and let her slobber all over his mouth. What else had he let her do for the past four months?
I felt sick, abandoned, replaced. As irrational as those feelings were, they were very, very real. Jealousy surged from the dark, blood-thirsty corner of my soul. I tried to shove it back by reminding myself I’d shared my heart and my body with two other men.
But that was different. I hadn’t left Michio for Jesse and Roark. He left me. I didn’t rip him away from his protectors, lock him in a cage, beat the shit out of him, ignore his pleas, and force him to watch an ungrateful asshole lick and suck on my lips.
She stepped back, hand on her belly, rubbing it with a contented sigh.
I lowered to my butt, refusing to give her the screaming, jealous fit she was likely anticipating. “You’re fucked up. You know that, right? Pawing a man like that who clearly doesn’t have control of his own mind? Are you raping him, too?”
A muscle jumped in her jaw, her eyes flicking to Michio. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Michio grabbed the back of my cage, and with screech of metal on metal, he dragged it to the tailgate. The steel tray beneath me ground against my aching joints, and I adjusted my weight, balancing on both knees.
Elaine turned, sashaying back to the concrete structure and the elevator waiting within.
On the opposite side of the road, the calm water of the Colorado River stretched along the bluffs of the canyon and pressed against the dam. I didn’t know how the intake towers pumped the water and carried it to the other side, but the churn of the turbines rumbled somewhere beneath the elevator, generating hydroelectric power at the bottom of the canyon.
Michio and the blond driver lifted my cage, hefting it up their chests, and carried me toward the elevator shaft. The structure sat at the precipice of the dam, and from my lifted position, I could see around it and down the backside of the dam wall. We must’ve been a hundred stories in the air.
Vertigo hit me with a wave of light-headed, stomach-dropping dizziness, souring my insides and shivering my skin, and it was in that moment that I knew. This was the harbinger. The fated cliff.
Dread swelled in the back of my throat. My hands slicked with sweat.
I contemplated the long fall to termination, or freedom, depending on how I looked at it, and wondered when the omen would shove me over. I could see it coming, felt it thrashing through my veins. “I’m going to die here.”