Making the Rules by Doranna Durgin

Author:Doranna Durgin [Durgin, Doranna]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: suspense
Publisher: Blue Hound Visions
Published: 2010-09-27T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Sensations swirled around her, sensual abandon gone straight through to fierce fighting wild child...

Dreaming? Was she—

She cried out, and the sound echoed inside her head, turning it to something twisted and mocking and wrong. Loss wrenched her, skirling up from her toes, tightening her into a claw of a fetal curl.

Rio! She threw his name away into the desolation as though it might physically snag him, bring him back. Rio!!

Dreaming?

Silence answered, taunting her. Her body, her very self, scattered into a kaleidoscope of screaming little pieces that thudded against invisible walls, ricocheting to—

What the hell?

Kimmer opened her eyes and found darkness. Not the darkness of nighttime with moon and starlight, but absolute blackness. Stuffy air, damp and earthy. Cool.

What the hell?

Where? How?

The hallucinatory dream still ached in her chest; body memory told her she had truly called Rio's name. But she didn't know why.

Then figure it out.

Start at the beginning.

She lay in a curled, careless slump. She rolled to her side and spread her fingers beside her—and found not floor, but ground. Rough, packed dirt. Suspicion wormed into her thoughts; she spread her exploration and found stone, chunky under her fingers and crudely shaped.

The cellar. And not just the cellar, but the little carved-out hollow that had held the Etxea—now empty.

Quickly now, ignoring a haze of dizziness and the throb of her head, she widened the sweep of her hands. True aches and sharp pains sprang into play, a counterpoint to the emotional tightness lingering in her chest. Rio, what the hell?

But memory still failed her, and what there was came murky—more like her half-remembered dreams than reality.

The last she remembered...she'd talked to Jurdan. She'd doctored Rio. She'd—

Dammit, she'd what?

Had her way with Rio, that's what. Her body told her as much, still flushed and sated in counterpoint to the confusion and pains.

That's not the same as memory.

Her sweeping hands followed the edge of the wall and found wood. The door. God, let it not be—

Locked. It was locked.

Kimmer slumped back against the wall and took a slow, steady breath. Another. Remember, goddammit!

But she didn't.

And so she sat for several long, dark moments, hugging herself and her aches and scowling fiercely at the same time.

It came to her that she wore Rio's jacket, the one with the zippers and pockets, way too big for her.

Didn't stop her from stealing it every chance she got.

The sleeve brushed her knuckles, and that stung; lightly exploring fingers found the skin rough and abraded. Her lip felt clumsy; her tongue discovered blood and a big puffy section. She absently licked the blood from one knuckle and the sleeve cuff brought with it a sweet smell. A smell not of Kimmer or Rio.

Chloroform.

Well, that explained the headache and dizziness. She'd damned well been chloroformed. And to judge by the rest of her, she hadn't gone down easily. "I hope I broke bones," she snarled into the darkness. "Lots of them."

And only then did it occur to her murky mind to ask; only then did she realize.

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