Free Secret Identity by Paula Graves

there were to rape a person that had nothing to do with sex.
After the first session with a man she’d known only as Raa Baber—The Tiger—she’d conjured up Rick’s soft voice, bathing her wounds in the remembered sound of his faint Southern drawl.
He’d told her, just yesterday, that living back in the South had reanimated her Mississippi accent. His was stronger now, too, richer and more fully formed, as if he’d rediscovered a missing piece of himself when he left MacLear behind.
“How long have you been back home in Alabama?” she asked.
There was a long pause, as if the question caught him by surprise. She had the strange sensation that he was staring right at her, even though there was no way he could see her in the dark.
“A little over a year,” he answered. She heard his body shift in the void beside her, as if he’d stretched back out on the hard cave floor. Tempted to curl up next to him and let his heat drive away her bone-deep chill, she dug her fingertips into her palm and turned her gaze in a different direction.
Though she expected to see no variation in the unrelenting gloom, she spotted a faint lightening a few feet away, diluting the dark. The cave entrance, she realized. Moonlight must be drifting in from outside. She felt the tug of that soft whisper of light as if it were a living thing.
“Maybe I should check to see if someone’s outside.” She sat up on her knees, preparing to stand.
“Where are you going?” He caught her arm, holding her in place. She bit back a soft gasp as his fingers tightened on a sore place on her arm. Had she injured herself during her mad dash through the woods?
His fingers loosened and fell away. “Did I hurt you?”
“No,” she said, but the burning in her arm hadn’t subsided. She lifted her fingers, pressing the sore area. She felt a rip in her jacket and a sticky wetness. “I think I cut myself—”
She heard a rustling noise, then a snick. Light cut through the gloom, making her squint.
“Let me see.” Rick pointed his flashlight at her arm.
Looking down, she saw a ragged furrow in the arm of her olive-drab jacket, just above the elbow. The edges were singed and damp with drying blood. She knew exactly what it was, even before Rick spoke.
“They shot you,” he said in a strangled voice.

Chapter Six
     
Amanda stared at the groove in her flesh, feeling a little queasy. She forced steel into her spine and lifted her chin to meet Rick’s worried gaze. “Must have grazed me—I don’t remember feeling anything.” Of course, she’d been hauling butt through the woods at the time—any number of branches and limbs had caught her clothing and skin as she ran, leaving plenty of scratches and bruises.
“I didn’t hear any gunshots from where I was,” Rick remarked.
She also didn’t remember hearing a gunshot, but she’d been running at full tilt, her pulse thundering in her ears. “Sound suppressors?” she suggested. She might not have heard the flat, muffled blat of suppressed gunfire in the chaos.
“If they’re former MacLear Special Services Unit agents, I wouldn’t be surprised,” he admitted, turning the flashlight to the ground, searching for something. “The SSU didn’t exactly want stories about what they were doing to get around.”
She watched the faint beam settle on her duffel bag. “What did they do, exactly?”
“Well, the rest of us didn’t know the SSU existed until everything blew up a little over a year ago.” Rick opened her duffel bag and withdrew the first-aid kit she’d packed inside. His first-aid kit, she thought with a touch of embarrassment. The arched-eyebrow look he gave her only exacerbated her sense of guilt. But he said nothing.
“What happened a year ago?” She pulled off her jacket and rolled up her sleeve to get a better look at the wound. Without the flashlight beam pointed directly at her arm, all she could make out in the shadows was a thin, dark furrow in the flesh above her elbow. At his