The Jackal (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #1)(88)

“We can do this together,” she said desperately.

“No, we can’t. If the Command finds you—”

“She could be dead.” Nyx winced as she remembered Kane reaching up behind his neck. “There’s a possibility she didn’t get out of the Hive’s collapse alive—”

“She doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care whether she lives or dies. But my young . . .” He shook his head. “I need to go. I can’t stay any longer. You can hear what’s going on where we were.”

“The cell. That’s whose cell it was—”

“I have to go.” Jack’s eyes watered. “I wish it didn’t have to end like this—”

“You’re choosing this.”

“We’ve been through that before. I haven’t chosen any of this.”

Don’t step away, she thought.

Just as he stepped away.

Nyx glanced into the passage at the soft glow of the light. In a low voice, she said, “You’re killing me right now. I might as well stay here because you are killing me.”

“Nyx, I’m sorry—”

“I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Stumbling into the tunnel, Nyx did not look back. She was in too much pain. If she saw Jack’s hollowed-out face, those blue eyes, that sorrow, she would turn around and start begging—or, worse, just follow him wherever he went.

She was about ten feet into the passageway when she heard the click of the panel shutting.

That was when the tears came. She cried as she continued forward, as she passed underneath the bald light bulb, as she started to limp. She wept so hard, it was as if she were running again, her lungs on fire, her throat raw.

Loud as her sorrow was, there was no reason to stifle the sounds. What the hell did she care at this point.

As the light faded, she found herself on an ascent, and as she adjusted her weight forward, a sensation of wetness inside her right boot barged to the forefront of her awareness. She wondered what puddle she had stepped in—but then she smelled the blood.

Looking down at her leg, things were too dim to really see where the injury was.

Nyx kept going, the limping becoming worse with every step. Nausea surged. Dizzying waves of weakness battered at her. She stopped thinking and knew only her breath.

In the end, she didn’t feel alive anymore, even as she kept going up the ever steeper incline. She just existed, and proof of this was that she came to the end of the passageway on a full-body bump: She walked right into the rock wall in front of her, knocking her forehead, scraping her bare arm, stubbing her boot—the good one, not the one with blood in it.

For a moment, she just stood there, her sluggish mind refusing to process what to do next. But then her hand, her right hand, the one she had killed with, reached out on its own accord in spite of the cuffs and patted at the wall. Three feet from the ground.

He had carved this, she thought as the uneven nature of the stone registered. Jack had somehow chipped away at the rock and made this exit.

She should wait here. To see if he and his young came—

The switch was hit just as that pitiful idea struck her, and the panel that rolled back seemed a condemnation on the fantasy.

Nyx weaved on her feet. And then she went forward. She wasn’t sure why, though. What was she doing here?

Her feet just started walking, taking her through a portal. When she got on the other side, she looked back just as the panel started to shut itself. Three seconds. Jack had told her, back a million years ago, that the delay was three seconds.

The weak light of that bulb, far in the distance, got cut off.

As everything went pitch black, Nyx’s balance shifted like gravity had forgotten about her and she was about to float off into space. She caught herself by throwing out her cuffed hands.

If she fucked around for much longer, the question of her getting out was going to be answered in the negative when she fainted from blood loss.

Blindly, she put one foot in front of the other in the pitch black. Both her arms were off to the side, touching the wall. It was the only orientation she had.

Underneath her, the ground rose some more—and then rose sharply.

Finally, she was on all fours, grabbing onto loose, damp dirt with her tight-knit pair of hands.

The fresh air was something that crept up on her awareness. But the higher she went, the stronger the clean, bright scent became. Rain. Grass. Flowers.

Nyx was still crying, tears running down her face, when she finally emerged from the earth like an animal, covered with dirt and blood.

As the gentle rain fell upon her and the wind swirled around, nature seemed to greet her as a long-lost relation. But there was no time to think about that. Without warning—maybe the whole trip out had been the warning—her legs went loose underneath her and she landed on her knees.

Lifting her face to the heavens, she tried to see the stars. Which was dumb. Where did she think the rain drops were coming from?

It wasn’t like the universe was weeping for all that she had lost.

Her sister. Her male. Her hope for anything good in the future.

For even if she made it home, she was a different person from when she’d left. She had killed. She had loved and lost. And she knew a family secret that she was going to keep from everyone else.

Sitting back on her heels, she tilted her head to the clouds above so that the rain coated her face, cool fingers tapping lightly on her flushed and overheated cheeks, and the open wound at her temple, and her hair, which she had braided and tied with one of Jack’s leather thongs.