What's Done in the Dark by Layla Nash

Author:Layla Nash [Nash, Layla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ravenheart Publishing

Chapter 37

Except Archer stayed relaxed and nonchalant as he sipped his soda and checked his phone.

I wanted to walk away. I did. But with the threat of my legs giving out on me, I didn’t budge. Maybe when I got home I could have a sip of Dragomir’s blood for energy. Just a little tiny drop. I could consider it an experiment to determine the smallest possible dose required to create the near-manic drive. If one didn’t work, I could make it two, maybe three.

Archer scratched his beard and studied me with a shrew gaze. “Don’t you remember what we talked about last night?”

“Mostly.” I took a deep breath, running my finger through the condensation on the side of my glass. “But I know I expected you to not share whatever it was I said with the rest of the world. I didn’t think any of that was on the record.”

The corner of his mouth without scars tightened. “I said upfront it was for background and to plan ahead what the story would look like. This is all background. Besides, I didn’t share that much.”

“It was enough. Now your crew thinks I’m lying or crazy. Well, crazier than they first thought me.”

“They don’t think you’re crazy,” he said slowly. His blue eyes flickered up at me and then down to where I drew shapes on the side of my water glass. “But I think we all know you’re hiding something.”

My chest tightened and heat flushed through me. God help me, I didn’t think I could survive another interrogation, not from him. Even knowing he’d been disingenuous, that husky voice gave me shivers and knocked away my good sense. “I’m not.”

“You are,” he said. And he sounded regretful, like he hated to tell me the Earth was flat and I’d been fundamentally wrong about the world my entire life. “Ada, your story doesn’t match up. The details don’t, I mean. You were hiking, you changed course for some reason, you felt like you were being stalked or chased, and a man attacked you. At first he just made noise, then he yelled, then he possibly said something. Maybe he bit you, maybe he didn’t. He tried to steal your rifle or just knocked it aside or used it to throw you off the trail. Or you fell off the trail. Maybe jumped?”

“This isn’t…”

He went on, implacable. “You ended up at the bottom of a ravine – I’ve seen the pictures the rangers took of where they think it happened – with broken bones, a punctured lung, and none of your gear. There is no way at all that you could have pulled yourself out of there. At all, Ada.”

His gaze hardened. My heart pounded against my ribs. I should have stood up and walked out, maybe torn the contract up right in his face. But I couldn’t move, caught in the spell he wove with words and a relentless voice.

“But somehow you got back onto a trail. Somehow. Then you managed

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