Emerge: The Captive: (Book 3)(36)
“This is sadistic, even for you. Can’t you see she’s never going to fall for your stupid games? She will never agree to a life of slavery.”
"Slavery?" Lennox’s eyes widened in alarm. Who’s a slave? You guys?
Quinn glanced at the brand on her ankle and wished he could crawl into a hole and disappear. She doesn’t even know she’s a slave?
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Quinn.” Livia’s voice held an edge of warning for him to shut up.
“Well, I won’t sit here and watch you do this to her.” Quinn stood up to leave, not sure which “her” he was more incensed on behalf of—Santi or Lennox.
“You will sit here and have dinner with us and you will enjoy it,” Livia demanded. Her tone said Santi would pay the consequences for his outburst if he didn’t sit down immediately.
“It’s fine, Quinn. Please, just sit and eat,” Santi begged.
With a curt nod at his seat, Livia told him she would let it go if he obeyed. It was lenient for her in the extreme and it was the best outcome he could hope for at this point.
With a shaky breath, he sank back into his seat and nearly laughed. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lennox wrapping meatballs and pasta into her napkin and shoving it into the pockets of Santi’s cargo pants. He was pretty sure by the hint of a smile on Livia’s face that she knew exactly what Lennox was up to.
What? Starving’s no joke, man. Lennox passed him the parmesan cheese with a smirk.
~~~
CHAPTER
TWELVE
Sasha: Summer
The Chola Valley Temple
“This is it?” Sasha swept the narrow room with her eyes, looking for the rest of it.
“The student must focus on the lesson,” Brother Rabishan said. “You will find everything you need here.”
“Yes, thank you.” Sasha set her duffel bag on the edge of the small cot. She couldn’t call it a bed since she was pretty sure it had been made at a time when people were much shorter than her five-foot-ten-inch frame.
The cold stone floor was covered in brightly colored rugs, and the window would give her the early morning sun. A small cabinet housed the traditional clothes she would be expected to wear while in residence. All her size. Like they’d known months ago that she would be arriving today.
That’s exactly it, Sasha. In the real world they probably found out yesterday, but who knows how long that gave them to plan for her visit here.
It wasn’t a sleeping night for her, and she wasn’t sure she would have been able to settle down even if she was tired.
Sasha ultimately spent her first evening at the Chola temple, alone in her Spartan dormitory, reviewing every last detail of Quinn’s situation in her mind. She didn’t need her corkboard wall—she remembered everything. And thinking about Quinn kept her from thinking about tomorrow.
She missed him terribly. No matter how good her intentions were, Sasha just kept making Quinn’s situation worse. The kiss that she still wasn’t sure about had flustered Allie when she ran into them in the gardens that night. To avoid interrupting them, Allie had circled the building instead, and that sent her right into the hands of the waiting Coalition—who were there because they’d seen Sasha heal that dove just hours before. And now this. She’d waited one day too long to act, and now she was stuck in this time screw with her hands tied and no way to help Quinn at all for the foreseeable future.
“Midnight snack?” Imogen stuck her head into the room after a soft knock on Sasha’s door.
“I’m always down for snacks.” Sasha smiled.
Her sister brought in a tray of fruit, hot tea and some kind of nutty bread.
“Let’s get our plan in place for tomorrow.”
“We have a plan?”
“We need a plan, Sash. Jay’s going to take over your training. We will be separated, since the mother wishes to teach me something while I am here,” she said bitterly. “We need to decide the best ways for you to learn what you must, but not too quickly. Or too well.”
“I don’t like the idea of us being separated,” Sasha said, taking a bite of warm bread and butter, fresher than anything she’d ever tasted before.
“He’s made certain assumptions about you so I think we should play into his expectations. For now.”
“Act like a brat and only learn the lesson after I’ve driven him to the complete edge of his patience?” Sasha suggested.
“Exactly. You’re going to be stuck in the meithari phase for a while, so you two are going to have to find a way to be friends, which is going to make it difficult for you to keep up the necessary deceptions. You should be cautious of Jay, but you need to trust him as your teacher. He is a good man but he has … issues that have nothing to do with his ability to be a good instructor.”
“I don’t trust him,” Sasha said. “There’s something he isn’t telling us.”
“Let him have his secrets. It doesn’t matter. It’s in his best interest to teach you well. His attitude toward you now is his armor. It’s his way of keeping people from getting too close. He’s a career soldier. I’ve seen it before with others like him. He keeps everyone at a distance because his life belongs to those he works for. He doesn’t have anything else. Give him some time to learn how to talk to a seventeen-year-old girl.”