Swimming was suicide, but she would risk it anyway before she let herself be dragged back to her cage and what was waiting for her.

A root or vine reached out to trip her, and she went down on all fours, unable to suppress a muffled yelp of pain. Her bruised, aching body protested the jolt, and now her palms were skinned, her knees raw, a small but nagging pain radiating from her ankle, where a splinter or a thorn had pierced her flesh.

It wasn't the first time she had fallen since she fled her captors, and she had a feeling that it wouldn't be the last. Each time she fell, she hesitated, braced on hands and knees or sprawled on the forest floor, listening for sounds of pursuit, anything that would tell her the men were behind her, drawing closer, perhaps homing in on the sound of her fall.

Perhaps there was a way that she could make them kill her, if they cornered her and she resisted to the point that taking her alive was too much effort. That was a hope she could cling to, as a last resort, but she preferred to think of the slim chance of escape that remained.

At the moment she was taken, she had logically assumed that ransom was the goal of her abductors. Why they had not spared her husband was a mystery that haunted her, the image of his violent ending branded on her soul, but she supposed men were more difficult to manage. And they offered less amusement to their captors while they waited for the final payoff.

Scrambling to her feet, the woman started moving once again, following what seemed to be the ghost of an old game trail, barely visible now, overgrown completely in spots.

IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO SAY when she first smelled the ocean. When she stopped, she could hear the first faint sound of breakers crashing onto sand.

Armed with a new, improved sense of direction, the woman veered left, leaving the vestigial trail as it wound away through the trees--curving, she now saw, away from the sound of the ocean. If she had not paused then and there, at that precise moment, she might well have missed her goal entirely and continued on through the jungle until she was cornered or simply collapsed from exhaustion.