Darkness

by Karen Robards

  “Okay.” As she accepted the plastic box their fingers brushed, and instantly electricity shot through her. Her fingers withdrew noticeably too fast, their eyes collided, and something in the depths of his woke butterflies in her stomach. The desire in them was unmistakable, but there was more than that, and it was the more that scared her. Neither of them said a word, but contained in that exchange of looks was a silent acknowledgment that things had changed between them: they had forged a connection, a bond, that hadn’t existed before.

  Unnerved, Gina hastily broke eye contact, opening up the first aid kit and delving inside it for a packet of Tylenol. When she came up with one he was no longer looking at her, but instead was pulling more items from the backpack.

  “Tylenol,” she announced, waving the packet.

  “Thanks.” Taking it from her, he ripped the little package open, popped the pills in his mouth, and swallowed.

  “You don’t need water?” Gina asked, scandalized.

  “Nah.” He went back to searching through the backpack and she set the first aid kit on the table.

  “I forgot a can opener.” Chagrined, Gina followed his movements as he pulled out cans of tuna, soup, and beef stew, followed by a rolled bundle of clothing. From what she could see of it, the clothes were the generic white tee and black sweatpants that came in the backpacks, which was good because that meant she couldn’t identify whose backpack it was from the clothing in it. Which didn’t prevent her from suffering a fresh pang of horror and grief over the fate of her friends. The thought of which she immediately did her best to banish: right now her emotions were too close to the surface for her to do anything but keep resolutely moving forward. There would be time later to mourn—if she survived.

  Cal reclaimed her attention by tossing the bundle of clothes in her lap.

  “I’ll see about the food,” he said, and nodded in the direction of an arched opening in the stone wall opposite the door. “If you want to wash up, there’s hot water in there. I think they used that area as a bathroom. Here, take the flashlight.”

  “Hot water?” Instantly dazzled, Gina reached for the flashlight even as she glanced wide-eyed in the direction he’d indicated.

  Cal nodded. “Why do you think this room is so warm?”

  “How is that even possible?” Gina was already on her feet, clothes tucked under her arm, flashlight beam leading the way as she headed off to check it out.

  “Looked like a natural spring to me,” he called after her.

  Turned out it was indeed a natural spring, a hot spring, bubbling up through the rock into a time-worn depression about the size of a kitchen sink that nature had carved into the floor. As the flashlight illuminated it, Gina eyed it with delight. At some point in the past, someone had put up pipes connected to an overhead can contraption that appeared to be designed to work as a shower, but the pipes were rusted and she had a healthy mistrust of what might lurk in the can, so she decided not to test it. There was also a crude toilet in a corner, the workings of which she refused to think about even as she used it. Afterward, kneeling on the smooth stone beside the hot spring, she cautiously checked the water: hot but not dangerously so, fresh, with only the slightest tang of minerals.

  At that point, a spa tub at the Ritz-Carlton couldn’t have looked better to her.

  When she unrolled the bundle of clothes, a ziplock bag with a hotel-size bar of soap, a folded washcloth, a mini toothpaste, and a new travel toothbrush fell out.

  Her cup runneth over.

  “You stay out of here,” she called to Cal, whose answering grunt at least told her that he’d heard.

  That was all she needed: she stripped, and bathed, and rinsed out her undies and hung them up to dry on a pipe, which, given that both her bra and underpants were flimsy nylon, she expected they would do in a few hours. She hadn’t realized how grungy she’d been feeling until she was clean and dressed again in the tee, which was of the Hanes underwear variety, and sweats. Both were a man’s medium, which meant they were too big for her, but even though the elastic waistband hung loosely from her hip bones, it was enough to keep them up. Underneath she went commando, because the included boxers were impossibly large.

  Combing out her hair, she twisted it into a loose knot at her nape, shrugged into her coat, which she left unzipped, pulled her boots on over fresh white half socks, and, carrying her discarded clothes, headed back toward the main room.

  Cal was down on one knee in a corner and gave her only a cursory glance as she entered. Tucking her bundled clothes and the flashlight into the emptier of the two backpacks, she headed toward him. He’d kindled a fire in a small iron camp stove that clearly he’d found somewhere in the room. She eyed the stove with some misgivings as she approached, but an upward glance following the wisp of smoke it put out told her that there was ventilation: the smoke drifted off through a crack in the ceiling and she suspected that he had chosen the location for exactly that purpose. And one of the great things about a room carved out of stone was that it was not conducive to a spreading fire.

  The tantalizing aroma of cooking food made her stomach growl. She was starving.

  “How was it?” he greeted her as she stopped beside him to look down past his black head and broad shoulders to what was heating on the cooktop: two opened, individual-size cans of beef stew. She had no idea how he’d managed to get them open without a can opener, but she wasn’t surprised that he had managed. The man, as she had already learned, was efficient.

  “Heavenly,” she replied, and he smiled. It was a crooked, charming smile that warmed his eyes and caused her heart to unexpectedly skip a beat, but before she could react in any other way he stood up, which brought him so close to her that she nearly took a step back. Tilting her head back to look up at him, she—barely—managed to stand her ground. It wasn’t fear of him that made it feel dangerous for her to stand so close; it was that the sexual charge between them was too strong.

  “Keep an eye on this. I won’t be long.”

  That prosaic remark was about the food. Repressing her misgivings—the fire was small and encased in an iron stove, for heaven’s sake; what could go wrong?—she nodded and watched as he headed for their primitive bathroom, then glanced around. He’d dusted off the table: as she looked at it, her eyes widened. Besides the lantern, maybe a half dozen rifles now rested on it, presumably found in the same search that had turned up the stove. From the look of them, they were leftovers from World War II.

  While the thought of having more firepower was appealing, the sight of them gave Gina the willies: it looked like he was preparing to take on an army. Besides, she was skeptical that after all this time they would even still work.

  Looking past them with effort, she discovered that he’d spread out their sleeping bag bed on two pallets that he’d dragged flush against the wall just behind the door. Two things struck her about that: first, her automatic assumption that it was their bed, which meant that they would be sharing it, and second, that behind the door was an interesting choice of placement for it. Anyone coming through the door would be blocked from seeing the bed and the people in it until the intruders were all the way inside the room. Did that mean that he was expecting somebody to come through the door? Or was it simply a precaution?

  Either way, even considering the possibility was enough to send a cold chill snaking down her spine.

  Once again, she was reminded that the name of the game here was survival.

  As he’d promised, Cal was only gone briefly, and when he came back the stew was bubbling. The smell alone was making Gina salivate, but the sight of Cal all washed and clean and dressed in a snug white tee along with his own suit pants was enough to get her mind off her stomach and take her thoughts in a whole different and entirely unwelcome direction.

  “Rifles, huh? Where’d you find them?” she asked as he dropped his coat and snow pants on top of the backpacks and then stopped by the table to gather the rifles up, partly because she wanted to know the
answer and partly to redirect her thoughts again.

  “Trash cans,” he said, nodding toward the row of them as he leaned the rifles carefully against the wall. “Ammo, too, and other things, all carefully stored. Everything looks mint.”

  “Think we’ll need them?”

  “Can’t have too many weapons.”

  With that surprisingly cheerful-sounding observation, he joined her by the stove.

  The fire in the stove was already burning itself out, but she noticed with approval that he took the time to smother it completely before carrying the cans over to the table, using his gloves as pot holders. He’d found a collection of measuring spoons and a single knife, which she’d carefully washed, and they each dug into the stew with a spoon while sharing the knife to cut the bigger pieces of meat. She’d gotten so warm as she stirred the stew and stayed by the stove waiting for his return that she’d shed her coat: it hung over the back of one of the chairs.

  Except for the flickering circle of light cast by the lantern, the cavern was dark and full of shadows. The short-sleeved tee she wore was way big on her, and her braless breasts were on the small size and firm, so she didn’t feel self-conscious about revealing too much as she sat down across the table from him.

  She was, she discovered as they ate, soon self-conscious about something else entirely. She had trouble keeping her eyes off him. Sitting there eating by lantern light, he looked disturbingly handsome and vaguely piratical with more than a day’s growth of stubble darkening his chin. His teeth were even and white and his brows were straight black slashes above dark brown eyes that had acquired gold glints from the reflected light. The same type of ordinary white tee that she was wearing took on an entirely different appearance on him: in it his shoulders looked about a mile wide and the truly impressive muscles of his chest and arms visibly rippled and flexed against the clingy cotton whenever he moved. She found her pulse quickening just from watching him eat, from admiring the play of the lamplight on the bronzed bulge of his biceps and the hair-darkened length of his powerful forearm every time he lifted the spoon to his mouth, from observing the deft movements of his square-palmed, long-fingered hands. She caught herself wondering what it would feel like to be crushed against that muscular chest without the inches-thick layers of their winter clothes between them—and then she realized to her embarrassment that she was staring at him, and he’d noticed.

  To that point, they’d been busy eating and hadn’t been talking, or at least nothing more substantive than “This is good” and “Shame we don’t have bread,” that sort of thing. But at the look in his eyes as she accidentally encountered them, after she’d watched with close attention for what was probably the two dozenth time as he raised his arm to take another bite of stew, she felt a rush of flustered consternation and hurried to think of something to say that would send his thoughts in another direction.

  “You know, if we could locate Keith, that would give us one more person on our side,” she said. “If those rifles work, he would even be armed. There would be three of us. Can’t have too many people shooting those weapons.”

  Having turned his words back around on him, she watched his eyes narrow at her: distraction completed.

  “Another civilian would be a liability, not a help.” His gaze slid over her face. When he continued, it was in a tone of careful patience. “Gina, look: trying to warn your friend is out. If we start running all over the island like chickens with our heads cut off, we’re way more likely to run into the guys who want to kill us than we are into him. You know that.”

  She did know it. She just hated to face it—and what it meant for Keith. “If we don’t warn him, he’ll be killed.” The thought made her feel sick. She put down her spoon abruptly, wishing she’d waited to bring the subject up. She’d never meant to let the matter go, but if she hadn’t been so intent on refocusing his attention on something other than the way she had been looking at him, she would have held off until morning.

  “We’ll be killed if we try. For all you know, somebody else in your group managed to warn him. Got a call out to him over the radio or something. Before—”

  He broke off, but she knew what he meant: before the person doing the warning, Mary or Jorge, say, or one of the others, was killed.

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “I don’t know one way or the other. And you don’t, either.” Something in her face made his mouth twist. “Once we get off this damned island, we can send help back, okay? Anyway—”

  He broke off again. Gina frowned at him. His expression had suddenly become closed off, unreadable.

  “Anyway what?” she demanded.

  He shook his head. Clearly he didn’t mean to elaborate.

  “Either we’re in this together, or we’re not,” she said, looking at him hard. “It’s not going to be just you running the show. It’s you and me, partners, or else it’s nothing.” He’d put down his spoon, too, which would have been a more impressive indication of the effect of her speech on him if he hadn’t eaten all his stew by that time. Observing that, her eyes narrowed at him. “So you want to finish what you started to say? Anyway . . . ?”

  His eyes were dark and intent as they met hers. His mouth was suddenly grim. “If you’re so eager to share everything, why don’t you start by telling me about the plane crash that killed your husband?”

  Pain twisted through her. She’d known he was going to want to talk about that. And she couldn’t. Just could not.

  So she strong-armed past the pain, gave him a level look, and said, “I asked you first. Anyway what?”

  His eyes slid over her face. His jaw tightened. “Okay, partner, here it is: my plane didn’t just crash. It was shot out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile. Given our altitude and location when we were hit, someone here on Attu or in the waters right around it had to have done it. It’s possible that one of this group who’s coming after us now was already on the island at that point, but I don’t think so, because storm or no storm, if they had been on the island, it wouldn’t have taken them until the next morning to show up. I think they got called in after my plane was shot down. As far as I know, your people were the only ones on the island at the time, and if that’s the case, then one of you had to have fired that missile.”

  It took a moment for what he was saying to click into place.

  “You think Keith shot your plane down?”

  “I don’t know. If you and he are the only ones left—and we don’t know that; without eyeballing the bodies there’s no way to be sure—then I’d say he’s at the top of the suspect list.”

  Staring at him, Gina mentally reviewed all she knew about Keith. He was a scientist, and a physician, and—

  “He was the last person added to the team,” she said slowly. “That was about a week before we left. I thought at the time that he was going to have to scramble to get everything he needed together in order to do the project he meant to do here.”

  “Tell me about him. Everything you know.”

  Gina did. It wasn’t a lot.

  “So you’d never met him before he joined your group on Attu?” Cal asked, and Gina shook her head no. “Did any of the others know him?”

  Gina thought back. “I’m pretty sure Arvid didn’t.” The thought of Arvid made her wince, but she determinedly kept her focus on where it needed to be: the present, in which she was remembering everything she could about Keith. “I don’t know about anyone else. He didn’t seem to have any particular friends among the group.” She frowned at Cal. “It’s difficult to get permission to conduct research on Attu, you know. We all had to go through this unbelievable application and screening process. If there was anything wrong with Keith’s credentials—with any of our credentials—the screening process almost certainly would have caught it.”

  Cal sat back in his chair. “Ah, but what you’ve got to ask yourself is, who conducted the screening process?”

  “We had to go through a ton of government agencies .
. .” Her words faltered at the look on his face. “Are you saying our government is involved?”

  “I’m not saying anything at all. I’m still trying to work out who’s involved.”

  She refused to let him off the hook that easily. “Ivanov and the men who shot Arvid were speaking Russian. How could they be from our government?”

  “The international situation tends to get complicated sometimes.” His tone told her that as far as he was concerned the conversation was over, even before he cast a meaningful look at the stew remaining in her can. She had only eaten about half. It was good, and it was still warm, but she couldn’t take another bite. He said, “You should eat the rest of that.”

  Shaking her head, she shoved the can across the table toward him. “I can’t. You eat it. You’re way bigger than me, and you need more food. And while you’re eating it you can tell me—”

  She broke off as his fingers encircled her wrist, trapping her with her arm stretched out across the table.

  “What?” She looked at him in bewilderment, only to find that he was staring down at her arm.

  Following his gaze, she saw to her dismay that the lamplight had caught the fine tracery of scars that covered her forearm like a spiderweb and turned them silver.

  They were why the extra set of clothes in her backpack had included a white turtleneck instead of a tee and why she almost never wore short-sleeved or sleeveless shirts anymore.

  With the help of skin grafts, the scars had shrunk and faded until they were no longer disfiguring, until they were no more than pale, hair-thin lines crisscrossing her right arm, but they were there: a permanent reminder.

  Like she needed one. Like she would ever, could ever, forget.

  “Those are burns,” Cal said, and ran a gentle forefinger over her scars. Her eyes flew to his. She would have been sucking in air except that what felt like the weight of the whole world had just dropped on her chest, making it impossible for her to breathe at all. “How’d you get them, honey?”