Dark Escape (DARC Ops Book 10) by Jamie Garrett

Author:Jamie Garrett [Garrett, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wild Owl Press
Published: 2018-01-13T18:30:00+00:00

15

Sophia

She woke to a confused and blurry sight. Darkness all around. Quiet, so still she wondered for a second if she were dead. Then she turned her head and caught the faint outline of the darkening hillside below them. It all came back to her in a rush. Their escape from their captors. Again. The mad dash through the mine shafts until they’d found the air shaft. Up and out. Then more running, until her legs protested and she tripped more often than she didn’t. Hours later, dropping to the ground numerous times and hugging the desert sand surrounded by low-growing shrubs, hiding from their captors, who were searching endlessly for them. Relentlessly.

She didn’t think she’d ever get the smell of the sand and dirt from her nose. It was permanently imprinted on her mind. So were the peculiar scents of the broom grass and buck thorn, which she had stuck her hands into numerous times, their stalks thorny. In the occasional breeze, she smelled the sweet tang of figs. She didn’t recognize any additional species of shrubs dotting the desert soil, riddled with rocks and boulders with no apparent source. Had they rolled down from the nearby mountains during rare rainstorms, or had they been here for millennia?

It was such thoughts, smells, and sensations that she recalled as she lay still, recalling. Sophia turned her head again, saw Declan close by, back leaning against the side of a shallow cave high up on a slope.

She had slept away the memory of hiking up and hiding in one of the cave mouths. She had forgotten, for a split second, why Declan was right with her.

She was so tired.

After the journey, her body sore from it and from the various beatings and escapes she’d had to endure, Sophia could barely keep her head up and steady. Half groggy still, she nevertheless felt the need for human contact. She slowly shuffled closer to Declan, bit back a groan as she sat up and like him, leaned against the side of the cave, close to him, allowing her head to settle on the side of his upper arm. He grunted and mumbled for her to rest. To sleep. She did, slumping against him. He leaned against her, supporting her head. He had taken on so much of the weight in the last several hours, so much of her burden. She dimly recalled him bodily lifting her at one point, throwing her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, stumbling beneath her weight but pressing forward. Her heart skipped a beat at the memory. He had—and continued—to sacrifice so much for her. She hoped someday she could repay the favor.

Sleep was coming on again . . . It was probably best that she get it now rather than later.

She heard the voices in her dreams, too, increasingly foreign, increasingly deep and close and menacing. When she awoke, there was nothing but silence. And then the faint wisp of wind kicking up across the entrance to the cave.

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