She got up on wobbly legs and quickly tuned her senses to the surrounding night. Silently, she moved to where the horses were secured and retrieved her sword, slinging it cross-wise over her back.
Just as silently, she tiptoed to where Wolfe rested, to check on him as well. When she rounded his tree and saw him, all caution flew from her mind.
He was caught in some sort of nightmare, his limbs flung wide, his chest heaving. He made no sound, but his face was contorted in a mask of rage and pain. There was no fear, however. Only vengeance.
It was in the tight clench of his jaw. The set of his heavy brows. The snarl of his lips as he bared his teeth. The cords of his neck as he strained and arched, as if his body was stretched on a torture rack.
“Wake up, Wolfe,” Rui whispered.
“It’s just a dream. Wake up.”
He didn’t.
He began to shake his head from side to side. His hands were clawed into white-knuckled fists. He didn’t seem to be breathing. His skin was coated in a sheen of cold sweat, making it glow in the pale moonlight that filtered through the canopy of leaves overhead.
Rui didn’t know what to do. He seemed to be in tremendous pain.
She had to wake him up!
With that in mind, she reached out and took hold of his shoulders.
But the moment she did, she found herself thrown on her back upon the hard ground, with the breath knocked out of her by a two-hundred-fifty-pound warrior male.
His hands went straight to her throat, wrapped around them and squeezed. As his hard body weighed her down, immobilizing her.
She clawed at his hands with her own ineffectually. Pinned like this, she had no advantage, no leverage. He was so much bigger and stronger.
And he was choking the life right out of her!
She couldn’t speak. She had no breath to, and probably no voice as well, with the way he was crushing her larynx. She tried to twist and turn, but he was too heavy, his lower body trapping hers, his hips between her thighs, his muscular legs tangled with hers.
She didn’t have the strength or angle to tap his pressure points and render him unconscious.
As if he sensed the direction of her thoughts, he freed one hand to take both of her wrists, as effortlessly as if she were a child, and trapped them above her head.
The other hand kept squeezing, the pressure no less intense.
Rui could feel herself losing consciousness. Tears of frustration trickled down her cheeks. She used all of her remaining strength to gasp out one word:
“Stop.”
And abruptly, he did.
Which was when Rui finally passed out.