Empire of Shadows by Jacquelyn Benson

Author:Jacquelyn Benson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Crimson Fox Publishing
Published: 2023-10-10T16:16:40+00:00

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Twenty-Four

Adam watched Mendez drag Ellie from the tent. An unnamable tumult of emotions roiled in his chest at the desperate, scared look she threw back at him.

He gritted his teeth with the effort of not allowing any of it to show on his face—not here. Not in front of the men who’d just captured them.

They already held all the cards. They hardly needed any extra advantages.

“Report the results to me when you are finished, professor,” Jacobs ordered as he moved to leave the tent.

Dawson spluttered a protest.

“Are you just going to leave me here with this… him?” he said, waving an uncomfortable hand in Adam’s direction.

“Mr. Staines will stay with you,” Jacobs replied dismissively.

“I should think we would need more than that!” Dawson retorted. “What if he runs off or… or attacks me!”

Jacobs swung his gaze to Adam. It locked there with quiet confidence.

“I don’t believe we’ll need to worry about that,” he concluded.

Then he left.

Adam forced himself to unclench his fists and breathe. Pounding the nearest person into a puddle wasn’t going to solve any of his problems. He needed to be smart about this.

Setting aside his very real need to hit something, Adam took a better look at his situation.

Dawson’s gaze moved nervously from Adam to the remaining guard. Staines was eyeing the neatly made cot like he very much wanted to plop down onto it and do his guarding from a more comfortable position. After a glance at the red-faced Dawson, Staines obviously determined that the more prudent course was to stay on his feet. He adjusted his grip on the rifle, looking bored and uncomfortable.

The guard wasn’t the only uncomfortable one. The professor was clearly furious.

Adam hadn’t met the guy back at the capital, like Ellie clearly had. Still, he could easily deduce that Dawson must’ve been involved in whatever had got her tied up and jumping over balconies into Adam’s lap.

The man’s tent was ridiculously over-furnished. There were actual carpets on the floor, and a tin dinner service sat on the table where a plantain leaf or coconut shell would’ve done perfectly fine.

A trunk of books was open on the floor by the desk. Dawson had apparently brought a library into the bush with him so that it could get infested by termites or turned to a pulp by the damp. From where Adam was standing, he could just make out some of the labels on the spines. They were mostly bound journals and historical tomes on Mesoamerican civilizations, but he also spotted what looked like a novel alongside a well-thumbed volume of the poetry of Robert Burns.

Pleasure reading, Adam deduced.

Every ounce of it would have to be packed up each time they stopped for the night, and then carefully loaded onto the mules in a way that ensured an even distribution of weight… only to be unpacked and set back up again at the end of a long day’s march.

It was crazy.

The disdain Adam felt was clearly mutual. The professor was eyeing him like something foul he’d just realized he had stepped on.

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