Embracing Silence by N. J. Walters Page A

floor, no longer caring if he bled to death. His callous acts and accusations had driven her away. Hell, he’d almost killed her by keeping her in this deathtrap.
    It was ironic that he’d finally figured out that he loved her. Watching her disappear into thin air, thinking she was falling to her death was the worst thing he’d ever experienced in his life. Much worse than any torture the General could devise. He knew that if she’d gone through the hole, he would have gone after her, hoping to catch her and block her fall with his body.
    “Hold this.” Her brisk voice broke up his bleak thoughts. Yet her touch was gentle as she knelt beside him and held the pad he’d made of his shirt over the wound. As he covered it, their fingers touched.
    Silence jerked her hand away and began to wrap the strips around the pad to hold the bandage in place. “Thank you.” His voice was soft but she heard him. He could tell by the way she hesitated for a brief second before continuing.
    “I should be thanking you.” Her blue eyes were brimming with tears as she tied off the ends of the bandage and looked at him. Her skin was still far too pale for his liking.
    “It was my fault you almost died. I should never have brought you here.” Normally he didn’t look back. It made no sense to do so. What was done was done and you had to deal with it. But for the first time in his life, he found himself questioning his actions. He’d lost all his senses when it came to Silence.
    “Actually, it wasn’t your fault.” Adrian crouched by the hole, gun in one hand, while he traced the edge of the broken boards with his other. “Not unless you sawed most of the way through the floorboards.”
    “What?” Climbing to his feet, Tienan circled the hole, stepping carefully before putting his full weight on any spot. Hunkering down beside Adrian, he saw what the other man was talking about. The boards had been weakened. Any one of them could have fallen though. It was a miracle it hadn’t happened earlier. Silence had had the misfortune of being the one to step on that particular spot.
    “This isn’t possible.” He’d gone over this site himself several days ago. He would have noticed something like this. As impossible as it seemed, someone had breached his security. Which meant this place was no longer safe. “We need to leave. Now.”
    Standing, he went to his pack in the corner and yanked out a clean T-shirt. He pulled it on, ignoring the throbbing ache in his shoulder. “Someone else has been here.”
    “You seem to have enemies.” Adrian got to his feet, weapon in hand as he scanned the room and the shadows beyond.
    Tienan snorted. “I’ve got plenty of those. Get in line.”
    One corner of Adrian’s mouth kicked up. “I can see we have more than one thing in common.” He tilted his head toward Tienan’s shoulder. “We have a doctor who can take care of that for you.”
    Tienan slung his pack over his good shoulder and met the other man’s steady gaze. “Why?” It was tantamount to an invitation to the rebel compound. This from a man who was ready to kill him minutes before.
    Adrian shrugged, lowering the hand with the gun back to his side. “I may not like it, but Silence obviously cares about you.” He paused and glanced at the gaping hole. “And, contrary to some of your actions, it seems as though you care for her too.”
    Silence was busy gathering the bedding into a roll for transport, but he could tell from the way her body stiffened, she was listening to every word they were saying.
    “I would have died rather than let go of her.” He laid all his cards on the table in front of Adrian. It was dangerous to admit a weakness to a foe, went against thirty years of training, but Tienan no longer cared.
    Was he a man or a machine? He’d asked himself that question dozens of times, especially the past five years as he’d felt his humanity slowly being drained from him by the Corporation’s tests and the