Angelica fought to break free. She screamed, begging anyone to come help. She struggled to get back to Taylor, but they showed no mercy. She was half carried/half dragged through the jungle for what seemed like forever. Eventually they contented themselves with prodding her with the barrel of the gun, letting her know in no uncertain terms that lagging behind meant death.

Not that going with them was going to end any better.

They would kill her. Here or later. It was going to happen.

She’d known that back at the compound, hence her escape. Except, why they hadn’t just shot her and left her body alongside Taylor’s? It was beyond comprehension. They should have. To force her to march like this was only holding them back. Surely they had better things to do with their time.

She shuddered to think what use they had for her.

It’d be better to make a run for it. Go back to Taylor. Die there. Go down fighting. Do anything but this.

It suddenly became too late. The trail they were following opened abruptly into a clearing. The helicopter waited. A moment later they were airborne. As the clearing fell away beneath them, Angelica leaned toward the window, trying to find the ridge they’d so desperately climbed together. Trying to guess where Taylor’s body lay. All she could see were trees, until she even lost view of that through her tears.

The journey felt short. What it had taken her and Taylor two days to traverse was a flight of no consequence at all. It seemed like only minutes before they were landing.

They exited the helicopter in a place she recognized. In the center lay rippling water, sparkling bright in the sunlight. A handful of waterfalls surrounded the water on three sides. Behind one of them was the space the panther had fled when Taylor had fought it to save her life. She wondered if it could still be hiding. She hoped it’d come out and attack the men with guns.

In the grassy space in front of the water, the helicopter landed. How long would it stay, waiting for them to return?

Her stomach turned. Would she be with them when it left?

They shoved her forward. If Angelica hadn’t been still so numb with shock she liked to think she would have, at the very least, made a stand here. Even the panther would have been preferable to this.

Outside the helicopter they tied her hands behind her back.

She realized suddenly that they’d brought her back to the river where the plane had gone down. There had to be at least a dozen men there now, a few watching the water and the shore with rifles nestled in their arms. She wondered how many were making trips under the water to pull out cocaine from the downed plane. As she watched, first one, then two men rose up from the water, wearing air masks and hoses, depositing bundles on the shore before heading back under.

The plastic had proven to keep out the water for the most part, though a few of the bricks were beyond salvage. Once the water had gotten in them, the drugs just melted into the river. She wondered vaguely what effect that would have on the local ecology, imagining briefly the idea of fish that could make people high just by eating.

She giggled, and stopped quickly when one of the men glared at her.

Yeah, she was losing it.

She was brought to their leader, a man she’d seen briefly at the compound, a figure higher-ranked than a salvage operation should merit, to her way of thinking. Though she supposed that much cocaine would bring out the higher-ups. Or was it she who had merited so much attention?

He certainly had plenty of questions for her now, a litany of them shot at her in rapid-fire Spanish.

Angelica refused to answer any questions, despite the fact that she understood each one. That had perhaps been a mistake she’d made from the start. She’d spoken Spanish from birth, it being the language of her mother, and made her work at the clinic easier despite the local dialects that frequently lost even her. Maybe, if they’d thought she spoke only English, they would have felt that anything she heard would have meant nothing to her. They might have let her live. But that bridge had long since been burned. She’d responded to their language the day they’d kidnapped her and so had immediately become a liability, something to be disposed of when her usefulness had come to an end.

At this point she saw little benefit in answering. She furthermore refused to respond to the slap he gave her for ignoring his questions. She then stumbled along when she was shoved to the place she’d wept at a couple of days ago, when she’d found Taylor’s pants. She stood and thought how she’d come full circle and that she might as well have never left the riverbank. All the effort of the last two days had been completely wasted.

No, not completely. They’d had each other in ways she could never regret, even as she stood here knowing she’d never see Taylor again, at least not on this side of heaven.

Suddenly, being an agnostic didn’t seem anywhere near practical as it used to.

Angelica sank down on the riverbank, suddenly tired. There was little to do at this point other than nurse her stinging cheek and watch what they were doing. Maybe they’d discover something so interesting it would prove a distraction, give her a chance to get away. Waiting meekly here like a lamb to the slaughter went against everything she’d ever believed in, and right now going down fighting would be an instant massacre if she so much as moved an inch. She was finding out that she was not so romantic as she’d thought previously. While Romeo and Juliet was a pretty story, they’d both ended the story dead, which had never seemed remotely practical to her. What good was loving if no one was alive to do the actual loving? Taylor was dead, but how would it serve him if she was shot down before taking a step?

No, she would wait. Maybe show up at the gates of Valhalla with a few souls of her own in tow.

You’re a doctor. Do you seriously think you can take a life?

She stared at the workers, who were busy pulling all they could salvage from the river and stacking it up on a boat that was tied to the bank. Not them maybe, who only worked as they were ordered, doing probably the only job that a man could find to do in this forsaken place. No, not them. But the others? The one who had forced her from Taylor’s side? The ones who had fired the guns from the helicopter? Them? Yes. She thought right now she could.

As though reading her thoughts, someone barked an order. The next thing she knew she was forced to her feet, and brought stumbling to a tree where she was forced to sit in the thick mud so they could retie her hands, bringing them around the tree in a backward hug. It was painful and left her unquestioningly helpless. There would be no escape from here.

So, this is it? Leave me for the animals to eat?

Furious and helpless, there was little to do but find something to focus on. Right now, her mind was filled with images of Taylor’s lifeless face. Why did his empty eyes look so accusing? She blinked a few times, trying to erase the vision. Instead, she focused on a strange black shape nearby. She blinked and strained, and when she figured out that she was looking at the panther, with three deep slashes furrowed in its side, she couldn’t stifle the sob.

It had a bullet between the eyes, and it lay there, tongue lolled out, eyes glazed over. She’d seen more than her share of death, more than most Stateside doctors would see in a lifetime, but it never got easier. Human or animal. But this, this was like staring at Taylor. This panther could have been him in tiger form. An image of him lying in the dirt, not breathing, not moving, hurt her to the core. The image shifted to him writhing and trying not to scream while she dug her fingers into his flesh. She would do anything to comfort him now.

Dammit! Focusing elsewhere only brought her right back here. It felt impossible to be strong anymore. Revenge brought little comfort. It wouldn’t happen. She had no fight in her. Her mind filled with only one thought, one single despairing scream that filled her soul so thoroughly it was a wonder no one else could hear.

I can’t do this.

Angelica was beyond caring what they thought. If they tortured her, there was little she could do about it. She needed to weep. His hands were still on her body, his hardness was still inside of her, his mouth bruising hers, and she clamped down on the soreness, held it tightly in her skin like a great treasure and felt him with her.

Tears flowed freely, and she knew she was a mess. Without her hands, she couldn’t wipe her eyes, clear her nose, but it didn’t matter, nothing mattered. All she was doing now was waiting. Waiting until they killed her. Waiting until she was with Taylor again.

Three days ago, she’d never even known he even existed, never knew there was a Taylor Mann. Three days ago, she had been terrified to die. Who knew so much could change in such a short time?. So much could permanently redirect an entire life. She’d discovered something she’d never known before: not happiness, with the momentary ups and downs and the flighty capriciousness of a moment’s joy. Angelica had found something else in Taylor. Contentment.

Lying post-coital and talking of nothing, laughing at wild childhood illusions, and exploring each other’s bodies and minds. If there was a soul, she wished it well. But the image of him was burned into her eyes, and no matter what happened to her that image would never leave.

“Boss is coming here to see you,” said a man with an AK-47. He leaned in to talk to her, one hand on her chin, forcing her to look at him. His breath smelled of onions.

“So?”

“So? He wants to talk to you, but if he does it here then we can just leave you here, no messy disposal.” He apparently thought that was hilarious and laughed at his own joke.

Angelica didn’t care. Onion-breath peppered her with questions about what she’d heard and who Taylor was and other things, but she was well past the point of caring. Or trying to save herself.

Mercifully, he was ordered to go out into the jungle and find a clearing that would accommodate the boss’ helicopter. Idly, Angelica wondered how many they had. Taylor had sunk the plane, but there was one here. When she heard the rotors of the one on the cliff by the waterfall, she realized that they were taking that one back.

She tried to think of something, anything other than what was coming next. Her mind went to Taylor—how could it not?

She revisited his being shot, the operation, every step they had taken that had led to his death. The bullet in his side hadn’t lodged anywhere near a vital organ. He shouldn’t have died. She revisited the injury itself in her mind. Was his anatomy different? Was there something about the feline form that would create a vulnerability that he wouldn’t have as a man? She went back over the procedure again and again. There was a lot of blood, but he hadn’t bled enough to bleed out, had he? It was something she’d worried over, but it seemed to her like there wasn’t as much there ought to have been.

Until she cut him and dug around in his tissue. Even then, he’d bled out awfully fast.

He could still—

“HEY!” she cried to the men. One of them turned lazily to her while the rest continued to pile up the bricks of cocaine into a sizable little stockade. “Hey! Tay—the guy, the pilot. He might still be alive.”

He turned to the man who had found her and called him over. The second man turned to her and smiled. “It doesn’t matter,” he said in broken English, though she’d been talking in Spanish. “He’s dead by now, or he will be.” He smiled at her and looked at her bare midriff much too closely. He said something to the other man and made large open hands in front of his chest, mimicking a large pair of breasts. They both laughed, and Angelica closed her eyes and hoped beyond hope that she was right.

Taylor. Please. Be alive. Come help me. Please. She wanted to hope. Needed it. She bit her lip and looked around. It was the only one she had. The only one that mattered.

The helicopter took off over the trees and it looked like they were finishing up in the water. The men surfaced for the final time, and a count was made of intact bricks. Life was going on.

In between, the men watched her carefully, their eyes straying to her bare belly and the torn shirt that clung to her from the heat and moisture of the jungle. She recognized the look in their eyes and found that, yes, with the right provocation she could even justify killing these men.

When she heard the helicopter return, she swallowed her fear. The time to be a crying mess was over. The boss was coming, and for a moment she wondered which one it would be. Not that it mattered. They would kill her. She glanced around one final time. Taylor wouldn’t be coming. He was either dead or unable to heal himself, and in the rainforest that was the same thing.

He wasn’t coming.

Angelica hung her head and waited for the boss to come to gloat and pronounce her fate.