Echoes at Dawn (KGI #5)(57)

Gradually the anxiety melted away and she found her focus. Calm descended. It was as if her mind was a knotted rope that was uncoiling and loosening and fs iwe1em">inding its way free.

Tentatively she reached for her sister, trying to find her way back to that familiar path she’d used for so many years. She was changed, though. Her mind was different. She was different. Nothing was as it was before, and she had to find her way again.

She brought the image of Shea’s face to the center of her focus and let everything else fall away. She brought to mind the sound of her sister’s voice. How it echoed in her memory. The way it sounded through the telepathic link.

Warmth spread over her, soothing and comforting. She could literally feel her sister’s smile. And then the faintest echo, so faint she thought she’d imagined it.

Grace.

Her name. Shea was calling to her.

She was about to respond when her door burst open and Browning flew inside, his expression grave.

“Let’s go. We have to meet Rio.”

Her heart pounding out of her chest, she scrambled off the bed, thrust her feet into the pair of shoes on the floor and hurried after Browning, who was already on his way down the hall.

“What is it? What’s happened?” she asked.

“I don’t have all the details. Rio said to get you out and that’s what I’m doing. He’ll meet us in the northwest corner.”

Grace frowned. That was away from the river. Had they come for her? Had she been found this quickly?

Browning led her through a tunnel she hadn’t been in. It came out in a small cave, really more of a carved-out hole a few feet up a cliff overgrown with vines and thick moss.

He dropped down first and then motioned for her to jump to him. He broke her fall and then took her hand, tugging her farther into the dense foliage.

Limbs and brush slapped at her face, chest and legs. Several times she got tangled up in the undergrowth and nearly fell. She stumbled into Browning, who seemed impatient with how slowly she was moving.

Several times he looked as though he would say something, but he clamped his lips shut and urged her on.

After what seemed like an hour of him all but dragging her through the jungle, they stepped into a clearing. Ahead, there was what looked like a village right on the banks of the river. Browning had said northwest, but northwest from the house wasn’t the river.

She struggled to catch up then pulled at his arm when several people stepped from the small huts that were erected a distance from the banks.

“Browning, what’s going on? What are we doing here?”

He grimaced and then caught hold of her wrist. He held it so firmly that it hurt, but when she tried to twist away, he only tightened his hold.

“I’m sorry, Grace,” he said in a low voice. “This is something I had to do. Rio’s going to be pissed that I gave him false information so he and the others would go out, but I had to do it because he would have never let you come otherwise.”

Fear burned through her stomach. “What the hell are you talking about?”

She tried to take a step back, but he wouldn’t release her hand. She started to struggle, but he pulled out his pistol. She went still, unbelieving what she was seeing. What was happening? Browning pointed the gun at her.

“Don’t, Grace. Please. I’m not going to hurt you unless you make it necessary. Just listen to me, okay? We don’t have a lot of time.”

Just then a young woman ran up to Browning, babbling a stream that Grace didn’t understand. Browning held up the hand holp tx20ding the pistol to silence the other woman but then pulled her into his side and held her, even as he gripped Grace’s wrist with his other hand.

Grace’s blood ran cold and panic gripped her throat. She hadn’t questioned Browning. Rio himself had told her to go with Browning if he told her to. She’d trusted Rio’s men because they were an extension of him. What was she supposed to have done, though, when Rio told her to do just as she’d done?

Browning had set Rio and the others up so he could get Grace out of the house. But why?

Browning said something to the woman and then gestured her away. He then turned his attention back to Grace. “I need your help.”

His tone was pleading but Grace was just pissed. “Lying to me, dragging me through a jungle and pointing a gun at me isn’t the way to go about asking for my help.” She looked pointedly down at her wrist. “You’re hurting me.”

He loosened his grip slightly but wouldn’t let her go. He kept looking in the direction that the woman had run, and a moment later, relief flooded his eyes. Grace followed the direction of his gaze to see the woman hurrying toward them with a baby in her arms.

Several of the villagers had formed a loose perimeter, and still more gathered, murmuring in low voices. Several shot the young woman holding the baby looks of sympathy. Others shook their heads and made gestures to suggest she was crazy.

The woman slowed as she approached Grace. Her expression was pleading and she spoke to Grace in broken English. “Please do not be angry with Mitch. I begged him to do this. It’s the only way. You’re our only hope.”

Grace looked at Browning in confusion.

“Mitch is my first name,” he muttered.

“What the hell is going on?” she asked for what seemed like the hundredth time. “Why am I here?”