Untouchable. Stephanie Doyle

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СКАЧАТЬ deference to her sex, she sought out the three-sided partition that the brothers had constructed for her. It allowed her privacy during her bath as well as prevented the monks from being tempted by her femininity should they stumble upon her. Once behind it she felt free to unwrap the bindings that encased her.

      Tarak winced. He felt the pinch in his thigh with every step he took and figured he was overdoing it, but he wouldn’t let himself stop. In a sick way, he was happy to feel the pain. It reminded him that he had a leg. His fault, he told himself. When he’d arrived at the monastery’s doorstep he hadn’t been paying attention to the nagging pain in his thigh. Only the one in his soul.

      Eventually the fever had overtaken him to the point where he’d known he was in trouble. Spending more time in the jungle than most, he’d seen what fever unchecked by medicine could do to a man. A merciless thief, it could rob a man of his strength, then his sanity, until finally it took his life.

      Lucky him, he’d been spared both his life and his sanity. Or had he?

      Images still haunted him from that night when the monks had come to his room. It seemed otherworldly. Surely a sign that he’d lost his mind. There had been two women with Punab. A plain-faced one, simple and forthright. She’d wiped his brow and told him to hold on—that someone was coming to take away the pain. He’d felt the fire in his body. The heat was focused most intensely where the bullet had ripped through the flesh of his upper thigh.

      He remembered lying in his sweat thinking that the heat was good. The pain was good. He deserved it. He’d earned it. Everyone else had died. But he had lived and for that he needed to suffer.

      He wanted to tell the woman in the rumpled white habit that he craved the pain. Because not only was it punishment, it was proof. Proof that he was alive. That he’d been smarter than the enemy who had betrayed him. There was satisfaction in that even though his men were dead.

      Where had it gone wrong?

      Tarak stopped in his wanderings. He reached down to massage the muscles around the wound, working his fingers deep into his leg to ease the cramps. When he looked up, the colors of the garden exploded before his eyes and he realized he’d made it from his room to the center-court orchid garden.

      He wanted to appreciate the beauty in front of him, but instead his mind kept working back to the question that had stayed with him every day since the incident.

      How had he failed?

      He could ignore the lingering questions. Accept what happened and move on. Tell himself that it was the job. The risk they all took. But he knew himself well enough to know he never would.

      Instead he let himself think back to the specifics of the mission.

      He took himself back to the compound outside of Monteria, Colombia. It wasn’t hard. The sweet scent of the orchids reminded him of another jungle on the other side of the ocean.

      Back there it had been darker and the stench almost rancid. The rain hadn’t just fallen on their heads, it had cascaded. But they all knew the job, and rain wasn’t something they let get in the way. Six soldiers. All contracted by the CIA. Tarak had been chosen to lead.

      Mistake number one, he thought grimly. He’d allowed the CIA to pick some of the team rather than do it himself. The soldier-of-fortune community was a relatively small one. In the years since he’d left MI-6 to work on his own as a freelance agent, he’d come to know most of the regular players. Those who did it for the money. Those who did it for the thrill. Those who wanted to serve but had been disenchanted by bureaucratic bullshit getting in the way of action. Like him.

      But that night there were two people the CIA told him to use. One he knew and considered a friend. The other a stranger, but not new to the game, he’d been told. Those two people were responsible for providing intelligence information. The rest of the unit was to engage the compound where it was suspected that a DEA agent was being held. Their mission had been to confirm that the hostage was alive and to extract him if possible.

      A task like that relied more on intel than it did on men with guns. That was why two had been chosen to gather and provide the information that the team would need.

      Tarak knew one of the two was a traitor.

      Unfortunately his first clue that the mission had gone to shit was when he heard shots being fired ahead of schedule. He hadn’t given the command to move forward but the explosives were suddenly triggered. A shower of gunfire over their heads had them all running for cover. The guerillas working for the drug lord were behind them in the jungle instead of at their posts inside the compound where they were supposed to be.

      Tarak had immediately called for a retreat but their communication had been compromised and all he’d heard was static.

      He’d found the bodies of Sheppard, O’Neill and Grace on his way out. All of them his men. It had been Grace, clinging to his last breath, that had cost Tarak the wound to his leg. He’d been lifting him when he got hit from behind. By the time he fell to his knees Grace was already dead.

      His only recourse had been to run.

      Once more Tarak kneaded the muscles in his leg, harder this time so he could feel the pain and remind himself that he was alive.

      Why had fate saved him? Was he a better man? He doubted it.

      Sheppard had been a money-hungry bastard but good at his work. O’Neill had been a marvel with explosives, and he had taken an unnatural thrill in blowing things up. But Grace was neither. Grace had been a friend. A loner. A good soldier. He’d had Tarak’s back more than once. He’d been trustworthy and in the soldier-for-hire business that kind of reputation was gold.

      And now his body was rotting someplace in a South American jungle. Food for the native inhabitants.

      Grace didn’t deserve that. None of them did. On the way out of that mess what consumed Tarak was why he had survived. He could see no reason why fate had been so kind to him. The dark thoughts had forced him to seek answers, and the only place he could think to begin such a journey was here. Among his mother’s people.

      He’d been right. After a few weeks at the monastery with help from his mother’s uncle, Punab, he’d started to realize it was time to let go of the guilt. Time to move on with this life.

      Which ultimately led him to the question…what next? He’d been thinking about his future when the fever had grabbed hold of him. It had occurred to him, even as he felt his fever spiking, that the wound in his leg should have been healing. Only it hadn’t been.

      The next thing he knew he was waking up in a dark room with a nun wearing a sweat-stained wimple leaning over him.

      And there was the other nun. With the strange habit and the skin that seemed to glow.

      Tarak shook his head. It had been the fever. It must have been. It had grabbed control of his mind and had shown him ridiculous images. A woman who glowed with gray eyes that did not fit her face.

      Had she even been real?

      The answer to his question had him gasping. He moved around one of the orchid bunches in his path and froze. His breath caught as he tried to process what he was seeing.

      He watched a waif—for surely she was not human—carefully sponge water over her arm, her breasts, her belly and her hips. Letting the СКАЧАТЬ