Page 65 of Dangerous Mission
Scout stands up from his crouched position, looking down at me from his full height. As my heart races, hehovers over me with an intensity of which I’ve never seen, and definitely never felt.
Then, his expression slams closed. In the blink of an eye, the stone warrior facade is back.
He looks beyond my shoulder and goes rigid from heat to toe. “Oh hell, what is that?”
Chapter Thirty-One
Aria scrambles to her feet, “What’s wrong?”
I swing my flashlight across the wall at the top of the chamber. A massive swath of the cave is covered in ancient art.
Reeling from the double impact of kissing Aria when I should stay arms length away and the situation in the tunnel, it’s hard to get my head around what I’m seeing.
She laughs softly. “That’s amazing. I’ve never seen any cave art in person.”
“No one mentioned it to me, but we were all focused on the fact that the caves were flooding and the only sign of the missing woman was by the entrance.”
I shine my spotlight across the northwest corner of the chamber. “Very impressive art at that.”
I move along the wall, pointing my light into a darkerrecess. “This is a first for me too. Not that I’ve spent a lot of time in caves.”
Behind me Aria makes a sound of appreciation that makes my skin tingle. “Well, I have and I’ve still never seen art in person.”
We stand for a few seconds in silence as we use our lights to look around.
Animals, human handprints, and elaborate geometric shapes in red and black cover the smooth surfaces. Thousands of years old, protected by the mountain.
The darkness cocoons around us. Almost intimate.
My lips are still stinging, my pulse still erratic behind my sternum. Kissing Aria was a mistake. Good as all fuck, but a mistake that’s going to lead to all kinds of problems.
“Scout, there’s more there.”
Her sweet, soft voice pierces my growing angst.
When I swing the light to the right, I stiffen and narrow my eyes. This time, it’s not the art that has my attention. It’s another clue. A piece of blue webbing and a green rope.
For a few seconds, scenarios play out in my head. Very few of them are good.
“I’m glad we spotted the art, because there’s a clue that could be related to the case. You see the climbing harness?”
Aria moves across the rock ledge to stand next to me. “Where?”
I swing the light, circling the area. “Right there. Blue harness. There’s a line draped over a projection of rock.”
She cranes her neck and looks at the ceiling where the hole opens to the sky, an opening the size of a tractor-trailer tire, revealing clouds above it.
Looking around again, she asks, “Do you think someone came down through the opening?”
“That’s my guess. Which means they could have come or gone after the flooding. Given that the harness and rope are just carelessly discarded, I’m guessing that it fell through the hole or someone threw it in.”
Or someone fell out of the rigging.
A morbid, but real possibility. Especially if they didn’t know what they were doing or didn’t have the right gear.
She looks at me suddenly. “You said they might have thrown their rope and harness in. As if they were hiding it…”
I force myself not to look at the beautiful, bright woman beside me. It’s too much.