Free Chains of Fire by Christina Dodd Page A

would. The first time she touched him, she had tasted the anguish of his injury, and yet she took the pain voluntarily.
    He was a strong man, yet he knew he wouldn’t have had the courage to do what she did.
    She was the bravest person he’d ever met.
    He didn’t know how long she kept her hands on him, how long their hearts beat together, how long they breathed with the same lungs, how long their bones healed as one.
    But when he opened his eyes, he was whole once more—and she sat over him, swaying, face pale, eyes weary.
    “Come on.” He pulled her down on top of him, wrapped his arms around her. “Rest on me.”
    She was stiff, resistant.
    “I won’t grope you,” he assured her. “At least until you’ve recovered.”
    “Ass,” she whispered. With a sigh, she relaxed and turned her head into his neck.
    Her voluminous coat enveloped them, cocooning them in warmth. His body protected her from the chill of the floor. . . . He liked knowing he could protect her from something . He sure as hell hadn’t kept her safe tonight. Soon, he knew, they would be at odds again, but for this moment, they had escaped death, and they were joined.
    As her body grew warm and pliant, she asked, “How did you know?”
    “How did I know what?”
    “You knew about the tree across the road. You knew about the avalanche before they set the charges. You’re not a mind reader. So how did you know?”
    He grimaced. “I may not be a mind reader, but I was in that guy’s mind tonight. It was not a pleasant place. I forced him to give me the information about Mathis, where they were keeping him, how many men were guarding him. He was fighting me, which made overcoming him kind of fun because . . .”
    She tensed against him.
    He continued. “. . . Because I knew he’d almost killed a child.” He waited, curious to see whether she would chide him.
    But she remained still, neither approving nor disapproving.
    So he said, “At the same time . . . he was experiencing this sense of glee.”
    “So you made him tell you about it?” She had that tone in her voice, not quite accusatory, but not pleasant, either.
    “I didn’t bother. My mistake, but at the time, I was afraid the kid was going to die if we didn’t get there in a hurry.”
    “If he didn’t tell you, how did you know about the tree across the road? And the avalanche?”
    “I didn’t know. Not . . . really. But as I drove along, I started feeling that glee again. It was sick and it was mean, and I knew it was him. The farther I drove, the worse it got. It made me hurry—”
    “That’s why you were speeding.”
    “Yeah, I was on the run. Then . . . they must have been watching us with binoculars, because I got this huge burst of pure mean-ass pleasure, right before we went around that corner.”
    “You . . . read his mind?” She sounded politely incredulous.
    For good reason. He wasn’t a mind reader. Well, except for the weird connection with Dina, and he thought that was an anomaly, a meeting of their two talents. “This feeling was just an impression. I don’t know why it had happened, or how. Maybe it was a hangover from me being in his mind.”
    “That makes a weird kind of sense,” she conceded.
    “In a gross way.” Samuel didn’t want any of that bastard clinging to his mind. Sitting up, he crossed his legs, settled her in his lap, and picked through his memory for the pieces of the puzzle. “I was going to turn around and run the other direction, because I knew they had set a trap of some kind; I just couldn’t figure out what. If we’d hit that tree, the car would have been disabled and we would have been sitting ducks for whatever they had planned. Everybody up here knows that the wind blows the snow into the drifts that cause avalanches. I saw that tree cut across the road and the way the wind was blowing the snow, looked up at the mountain and that open stretch of pasture, and I knew. I knew. I figured if this castle was sturdy enough to