No response.
Not about to give up, she grabbed a chair from the corner and took a seat beside the bed. Then she started talking about Felicity, about what they’d found so far. “This,” she said at the end, “what the bastard’s done to you, what he did to Felicity, it isn’t right and it needs to be stopped.”
Nothing.
Ashwini wasn’t even sure the victim had blinked the entire time she’d been talking. Accepting that perhaps the woman simply couldn’t reply, that she’d been broken on too deep a level, Ashwini rose to her feet and put the chair back where it had been. However, when she would’ve left the room, something made her turn back.
No change, not even a whisper, and yet . . .
She returned to the bed, stared at the hand that lay so fragile and emaciated inches from her. It hadn’t been visible when she’d replaced the sheet. “Speak to me,” Ashwini whispered, but the woman continued to stare up at the ceiling.
Yet her hand, it lay in front of Ashwini like an invitation.
Throat working and skin hot, she flexed and unflexed her own hand. Her instincts screamed that she had permission, that the woman trapped in that shell of a body was crying out to her on a frequency no one else could hear. Still, she hesitated. This wouldn’t be like with old and wise Keir, or with the young and teary-eyed teenager who’d discovered Felicity’s body.
Whoever this woman had once been, she’d carry horror in her veins now.
Ashwini had never told Honor, never would, but after Honor’s abduction, there’d been so many screams in her body that the noise had been deafening, a howling terror that swamped Ashwini. She’d thrown up from the pummeling force of it more than once, but she’d sat with Honor at the hospital night after night regardless, her hand locked tight with her best friend’s.
Honor had survived that vile darkness, had needed Ashwini to be strong enough to fight its echoes, be at her side.
As this woman did now.
“I’m here,” Ashwini said . . . and touched her fingertips to the back of the victim’s hand.
33
The contact was a bruising punch to the stomach delivered by a fist of cold iron, one that knocked the breath right out of her. Then came the nausea, tied to an overwhelming and dread-laced panic that made her want to curl up into a ball in the corner and rock herself to oblivion. Breaking the contact, she braced her hands on the bed and sucked in desperate gulps of air.
“Cher.”
She’d sensed Janvier walk inside, didn’t startle at his worried tone. “I don’t know how to do this.” It came out like broken glass, rough and jagged. “I don’t know how to get past her terror.”
Moving in so close that his body heat licked over her skin, Janvier picked up one of her hands and lifted it to his mouth in the way that had so quickly become familiar. The kiss was soft, a lazy seduction, and it had nothing to do with the ugliness that had consumed their victim. The gentle pleasure of it made the nausea retreat, her heart rate calm.
Lifting their clasped hands, she rubbed her cheek against the back of his hand.
“What if I stay?” he asked. “Will the touch anchor you?”
“I don’t know.” This was uncharted territory. “All my life, I’ve tried to minimize this, what I can do. Very rarely, I sense good things, but too many times, it’s cruelty and evil. So I don’t look, don’t want to look.”
“It is nothing to be ashamed of. No one can live life mired in horror.”
How did he do that? See her so easily? “Sometimes I think I became a hunter so that I could ease my shame,” she whispered. “That I choose to face physical danger because I can’t face this.”
“Yet,” Janvier said, “I’ve heard other hunters say you saved their lives by warning them to take extra weapons or backup when the intel suggested no need for either.”
“That’s different. I know things now and then.”
“And there are no nightmares? You pay no price for this knowledge?”
Ashwini couldn’t hold his gaze. Because there had been dreams before each of her warnings to fellow hunters, dreams that had left her soaked in sweat, her heart racing so hard and fast that it had caused physical pain. “Stay,” she said, her trust in him so deep, it was a part of her soul. “If . . . if it looks like I might start screaming, haul me away.” It was her secret horror, that the madness might suck her under before she even knew it was there.
“Have I ever left? Hmm?” A slow smile that made her heart ache. “Even when you wished me to perdition. Or was it to a bog infested with leeches?”
“No, I’m pretty sure it was a pit filled with fresh elephant dung.”
“Ah, we must be clear.” Another kiss to her knuckles.
Centered by the playful interaction, she clenched her fingers on his and then she reached out with her other hand and closed it with infinite care over the exposed part of the victim’s arm.
Again, the impact shoved into her like an ice pick to the brain. Every second of the terror and the pain the victim had endured, all of it concentrated into this agonizing and brutalizing force. Feeling her hand clamp down on Janvier’s while remaining gentle on the victim’s arm, Ashwini tried to see through the shriek of it but it was too viscous, too loud.
A bead of sweat formed on her temple, started to roll down. Her stomach threatened to revolt. Stifling the urge with sheer effort of will, she shuddered and thought of Janvier, of the hunt through the bayou that had left her sticky and bad tempered and bitten by what felt like a thousand mosquitoes, forget about the other bugs.