Page 42 of Diamond in the Rough (The Diamond Trilogy 1)
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Holly
I thought I knew what tiredness felt like. Thirty-six hours of flights with no sleep. A hike in the Grand Canyon. A particularly evil spin class at my local gym. I’ve known exhaustion, but nothing has ever come close to this. My entire body throbs. There’s an invisible knife stabbing my head. My heart seems to thump at double its normal rate. Every step sends nails into the soles of my feet.
The world goes dark.
I wake up on the ground, with my face wet. Elijah is holding me, shaking me gently, using his shirt to wipe something red from my cheek. “There you are,” he says, and though his voice sounds calm, almost dry, I sense the urgency underneath.
The sun beats down on me, relentless. “Can’t.”
Something soft brushes my forehead. Maybe a kiss. “We need to move, sweetheart.”
I force my eyes open. “Go without me. Please.”
Green eyes flash with anger—and maybe fear. “Absolutely not.”
“Come back,” I mumble, hoping he’ll understand what I mean. He can leave me here in the sun and get help. That’s the only way I see out of this. My feet won’t take another step. My body won’t move another inch. My mind feels full of damp cotton.
A strong arm shoves underneath me. Then I’m lifted into the air, held suspended against his hard chest. My arms move automatically to wrap around his neck.
“No,” I whisper.
“Don’t complain, sweetheart.” His lips murmur against my ear. “I’m not leaving you behind. Ask me to do anything, anything else. I’d lie down and die with you before I’d walk away.”
Tears squeeze from my eyes and slide down my cheeks. “Please.”
I don’t want him to die. That might happen if he carries me. He could survive on his own. Can he carry another human’s weight? I’m only going to slow him down. There’s no answer to my plea. He’s implacable about this. It’s not up for discussion.
There is no help I can offer him—so I give him the only form of strength I have left. My stories. My words. “Wonderland,” I say, the word faintly slurred. “Do you want to hear more?”
“Yes,” he says, his arms secure beneath me. “Tell me your story.”
There’s no story, not really. Nothing already written or formed in my mind. When I’m half-dead from exhaustion isn’t really the time to be my most creative, but here we are. “She goes in strong, using her knife and her cunning to defeat the creatures she meets, but then…”
“But then,” he prompts when I fall silent.
“But then she hears about the evil queen, the Queen of Hearts. Everyone talks about her, everyone is afraid of her, and Alice thinks…” Tears stream harder. “She thinks she can run away, but she can’t. She can’t run anymore.”
“Hell.” He rubs the scruff of his jaw across my forehead, a scrape that jolts me back to awareness. “You don’t have to tell this story.”
“She runs and runs anyway, until there’s nothing left. And then the Queen of Hearts finds her. The queen knows she’s weak, and she chooses that moment to strike.”
“No one’s going to strike you. Not ever again.”
Consciousness hovers in front of me. It’s like I’m deep underwater, and I can’t find my way out. The words sound like they’re far away, but they’re spoken in my voice. “She can’t fight back, because it’s her sister. Her sister is the Queen of Hearts.”
A gruff voice quiets me. “Easy. Easy now.”
I’m not sure how much time passes. An hour. Two. Three. We stop again, and Elijah lays me down in a field while he picks figs and wild cress for us to eat. Then he lifts me again, and I close my eyes, gently jostled by the motion of walking, drifting in and out of sleep.
The nightmare comes for me again, even in broad daylight, brazen now.
The monster gnaws at my side, and I struggle to get away, but my arms won’t move, I’m trapped in his jaws as he chews and chews. A man stands to the side, holding the leash of the monster. “Why do men usually take beautiful women?” he asks.
Something brings me back to alertness.
“Thank God,” the same man says.
We’re walking through a field, the stalks of something gold high enough to brush my feet as we pass. There’s a small house up ahead. The front door opens, and a man steps onto the dirt. He’s holding a shotgun. “Qui es-tu il demande?” he asks.
“My wife,” Elijah says. “Ma femme. She’s sick. Help.”
The man does not look convinced. He holds the shotgun like a man well versed in shooting it. Weather and years have drawn deep lines into his face.
Then Elijah says, his voice more succinct, “L’aube arrive plus tôt chaque jour.”
My drowsy mind struggles to interpret something about the dawn and its early arrival each day. Why is he telling that to a stranger?
