After Read Free Page B

around the circle. When all the tokens have been collected, he returns to the eagle, proffering the jar. The major puts in no token, but takes the jar from the man's hands. He shakes it hard a few times, stirring the metal tabs around inside.
    “Aaron Velden!” The major’s voice rings out like a sentence. Irrefutable. “That’s John’s tag.”
    A din rises as the men begin talking and shouting angrily, not daring to challenge the eagle, but bickering and complaining to the air.
    John—jaw clenched, chest heaving—locks eyes with Smith. They are gripped in a contest of wills while the rest of the room erupts in a frenetic swarm. The men are bickering and joking nervously as they rearrange tables and chairs and jostle the three handcuffed men into the center of a knot of soldiers. Eyes still locked on Smith, John stands, and the other seems to be daring him, with a look, to defy his will.
    Eva, clutched firmly between the two soldiers who walked her in, is trying to focus, now on Smith, now on John, now on Smith again. John turns and strides toward Eva or toward the exit, and for just a moment there's a crack in Smith's calm. His expression settles back into willed serenity, though, as John, his face gray and damp, his eyes red and wild, takes hold of Eva's arm and pulls her from between the two soldiers.
    “No!” she screams, trying to jerk her arm free of John's grip, trying to make eye contact with Smith.
    “No!” she screams again, swinging her fist at John's face, thrashing against his grip as she tries to kick him, to knee him, to wrench herself free. Somehow she slips out of his grip, slips past the soldiers, and flings herself against Smith, who rises and catches her in a tight embrace. The soldiers that delivered her to John leap at her, trying to pry her from Smith.
    “Stand down!” he barks, startling them with his uncharacteristic heat. “Ssshhh,”
    he coos in her ear, holding her, petting her, rocking her. “It'll only be John. Just John.
    After tonight, he'll be your...like a husband. This part will be over soon. Soon.”
    Smith's face is a stoic mask, but his eyes are wild and his voice wavers. “John.”
    John steps up and helps Smith peel Eva free. Like he dragged her through the orchard up to the gates of the compound John drags her now. Her desperate struggle hardly slows him. Soon he has her at the center of the room, beside two tables that have been pushed together, with a thin, narrow mattress thrown on top. And just as she'd suddenly panicked at the site of the fort, when she looks down and sees the mattress and the way the men are closing their circle around her, Eva's strength seems to triple. She convulses and lurches and even wrenches her arms free of John's hands once, twice. But he seizes her again, more and more brutally, and finally pushes her down onto the mattress and pins her wrists down by her shoulders.
    “Eva,” he pants against her cheek, his chest swelling against hers with every breath. “Stop. Stop fighting me. Us struggling, it's just getting them more riled up.”
    She squints her lids closed over her dilated eyes. The frenetic din of male voices booms and echoes throughout the hall, built to seat two or three hundred.
    “Not Nichols!” Smith's voice cannons into the throng. One of the handcuffed men is dragged from the fray, shoved aside at the edge of the room.
    “It'll go faster, easier, if you just let it happen.” Johns voice is cold. Matter-of-fact.
    But his eyes are sparking. He wrestles her the rest of the way onto the mattress and in one quick gesture flings the hem of her gown up. She is not wearing anything underneath.
    And as if he's severed some connection to her brain she goes soft. No more screams. Pathetic little whimpering noises squeak out of her now. As John mounts the makeshift bed and plants his knees between hers, unzipping his fly, getting out his stiff cock, Eva focuses her bleary gaze on him.
    “Please,” she sobs, to just him now,