to want anyone to thank him, or even recognize what he’d done for them in any way.
“I tried to escape in the middle of the night, right after Harlow left,” I said, finally answering his question. “Apparently, that’s a harsh punishment offense for the rebels. After they caught me, they took turns trying to beat me into submission. When one of the guards looked in for his late-night check to see if I was still alive, I’d already managed to get my legs free, so I just made a break for it. Unfortunately, my hands were still tied, literally, I was really weak, and I could barely walk, much less run, so I was pretty much screwed from the second I made a run for it. I had no way of taking a single one of them down once they caught up with me.” Actually, in hindsight, it probably wasn’t the greatest plan, but it was all I had at the time.
“No offense, but how would you take any of those guys down, even if you were healthy?” he asked, looking confused.
I rolled my eyes. It wasn’t the first time that someone scoffed at me when I said I could take a guy twice my size to the ground. “I’m a Tai Chi master. I’ve been studying the art since I was thirteen, and I started working as an instructor while I was working on my master’s at Stanford.”
I could see the wheels turning in his brain before he asked, “Tai Chi. Isn’t that kind of like meditation in motion? It looks like a slow dance.”
Okay, it wasn’t the first time somebody had said that, either. “It is, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s a martial arts form, and I wasn’t trained in the gentler type of Tai Chi. There’s a lot of that being used for relaxation and meditation lately, and it’s popular these days. My first teacher was a Chen master all the way, and he fought dirty. Anyway, I didn’t succeed in escaping. So I was beaten up, and tossed back into the lockdown hotel from hell after it was over. They tied my legs so tight that it probably impeded my circulation, not that I was exactly in any shape to try another self-rescue anyway. I think I used up most of the energy I had left during that failed attempt. After every rebel used me as their punching bag, my physical condition went downhill a lot during those last few days.”
He paused a moment, his expression broody as he answered, “I would have done the same damn thing, Taylor. I would have figured it was better to try than to lay there and die. You had no way of knowing whether anybody would try to rescue you, and the Lanian rebels aren’t known for letting their last hostages, or single hostage in your case, leave alive. That’s why we didn’t just pay your ransom when they demanded it. The only reason they let Harlow go free was to try to get more money for you. Historically, if the ransom is paid for those final captives, they’ll take it, kill the hostage or hostages, and then stall everyone on the release information, using that time to escape.”
My head started to spin as I tried to comprehend what he was saying. “So I was a dead woman, anyway? They would have killed me even if I was still alive when the ransom was paid?”
He nodded slowly, like he was reluctant to admit the truth. “That was our best guess, and since they’ve done it many times in the past, we didn’t want to take that risk. Jax and I figured we had a better chance of getting you out of there alive. If we’d had any reason to believe they would have released you, we would have paid the ransom in a heartbeat to get you back, but we didn’t want those actions to be your death sentence.”
My hand started to shake as I set my water bottle on the bedside table.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t known my chances were slim anyway, but knowing that, had Hudson paid my ransom, one of those bastards would have finished me off, was mindboggling and terrifying.
The enormity of just how bad my previous circumstances had been was just starting to hit me. Hard. I’d managed to compartmentalize everything so well when my fear factor had been high, but the walls of separation were obviously getting weaker. “I knew