by Ana Calin
Damian’s chest inflated, filling the space between car seat and dashboard. I must’ve turned red to the tip of my ears. I feared he could read in my face how intense my feelings for him were, how obsessively I’d always wanted him. I had to change the subject, thwart his focus.
“You said something about core talents last night, Damian. That you were concerned about what I was becoming. What were you talking about?” My voice was barely more than a whisper, and my heart beat so hard, I was afraid he might hear it.
Chapter Two
Damian turned his eyes ahead and started the car on the route back to Mom’s.
“I’m not sure yet,” he said in a contemplative tone, as if he were soul-searching. “What happened in the mountains kick-started the upgrading process in you, but I’m afraid there’s more to it than that.”
“Afraid there’s more to it?”
He frowned, apparently looking for the right words. His hands tightened on the wheel, the leather jacket straining on his muscular arms. “I think BioDhrome knew they hit rich soil with you, and found a way to build on that afterwards.”
“But that’s impossible. How could they have?” It hit me, and I straightened brusquely in my seat. The seatbelt blocked me before I bumped my head against the window at a sharp turn. I grabbed the handle above my head to steady myself. “The hospital? The catheters?”
“Upgrading doesn’t require catheters or needles, Alice,” Damian said matter-of-factly. “The process isn’t technological. It’s psychological.”
Lightning flashed through my temples. “Say what?”
Damian kept his eyes ahead. He didn’t reply.
“Are you saying people can be talked into becoming superhuman?” I pressed.
“Not exactly.”
“Then what are you saying?” I demanded almost hysterically.
“This isn’t the time or place.”
“Then take me to the right place. Let’s go to Café d’Art. Or Montana, it’s quieter.”
“No.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You don’t want to give me the details, do you?”
He stopped the car in front of the house, and pulled the hand break hard. He turned to me, arm around my headrest. He was so big, I felt trapped under a huge, heavy shadow.
“Things are complex,” he said. “They cannot be explained. They must be shown. But right now we have more pressing business.” His eyes pierced mine. “Why did you help BioDhrome, Alice? Why did you choose their side?”
“I didn’t choose their side, Damian,” I jumped to defend myself. “Agent Varlam told me you’d planned a massacre, and – hell, I told you why I did it! I didn’t know I was aiding BioDhrome!”
“Well, they’ll try and use you against me again, given how effective their last try was,” he sneered.
I opened my mouth to speak, but he put a finger on my lips to shut me up. “Don’t even say it, Alice. Don’t say you won’t fall into the same trap again. Next time they do it, they’ll have an even smarter plan.”
“Is that why you want to keep sleeping with me?” I whispered. “Punishment and insurance at the same time?” I regretted that the second it left my mouth.
“Punishment? That’s what it was to you?” He looked hurt. I wanted to contradict immediately, but he redirected his eyes away from me and out the windshield. The pale wintry light made his irises glow like an animal’s. “Last night, I would’ve stopped if you wouldn’t have found pleasure in my touch. I wouldn’t have forced myself on you, Alice.”
“How could you be sure I enjoyed your touch?” I whispered.
He smiled a bitter smile. “I was never a squire of dames, but I know what a wet response and that particular kind of panting means. Plus – you never asked me to stop.”
“Not a squire, but a magnet.” My tone was now sour. “A man as desired as you must have more experience with ladies’ signals than one who slept with a hundred whores, wouldn’t he?”
His beastly eyes flashed at me. “You have a noble heart and a vertical character, Alice Preda, but your body betrays you. I first felt you were attracted to me as you lay in my arms at the cabin in the woods. Later, I felt your struggle against your attraction to me. I even feared you managed to kill it. Until our first kiss. You responded to it. And yesterday you lost it in my arms. You wanted sex with the brute.”
I just couldn’t let him think that. “It wasn’t sex with the brute.”
“No? What was it then?”
What was it then? How could I tell him I was crazily in love with him without making a complete fool out of myself? But I didn’t want to play the free spirit either, and make it look like last night hadn’t meant anything. I wasn’t a free spirit, and last night had meant the world. I decided to choose my words carefully.
“You’re a spectacular specimen, Damian, I can’t deny that. You’re irresistible. Plus, you protected me from BioDhrome and Giant. So yes, last night was – it had meaning.”
“So you have feelings for me,” he concluded. I couldn’t tell if it pleased or bothered him. It sounded detached, as if he simply took note.
I blushed and sank my head, staring at my own fingers as I played with them nervously in my lap. “I don’t believe in empty sex. Intimacy is always meaningful. I feel…I do have feelings for you.” I shook my head, scrambling my wits back into place. “Which I shouldn’t. There’s so much darkness within you, sometimes I think you’re downright evil.”
Damian cupped my face with his huge hands, forcing me to look at him. His eyes were hard, opaque, impossible to read. “You’re disgusted with me.”
“I’m not—” I began, but he didn’t let me finish.
“Yes, you are, and I understand that, Alice. I am despicable in many ways. But I’m also powerful, and there are no limits to what I can lay at your feet. I’ll make this worth it for you.”
Make this worth it for me? “Why would you want to lay anything at my feet?”
“Because I want to do the right thing, the right way, from start to finish for once. Because a creature like me can only wash his sins by offering the world to someone like you. Someone vertical, capable of self-sacrifice. Someone truly selfless.”
“I’m sure there are other people who fit that description.”
“Maybe, but I don’t know anyone else who gave up their family’s wealth in order to wash the honor of a loser.”
I scoffed. “And you think that was a smart move?”
“It was a selfless move.”
“You misinterpret. Provided that my dad makes it out of this mess with BioDhrome alive, he’ll live for many years, so I didn’t actually give up anything. His wealth will be exclusively in his hands for decades to come – so help him God – until I’m too old to do anything with it.”
“Of course you’d find arguments to make yourself small. Yet another trait that shows your worth.”
“No, don’t praise me for what I’m not! That sacrifice was not hard to make. By the time I’ll inherit anything from Dad, I’ll be a decrepit hag anyway.”
Damian’s smile caught a sly nuance. “But did you have to move in with Leona in that cockroach infested suburb?”
“It’s cozier than it looks.”
“You even gave up the expensive car you got from your father.”
“Gas is expensive, too. But I kept the laptop.”
“All right.” He lifted his chin, looking triumphant as he prepared the last blow that would settle him for the winner. “Back in the mountains, why did you take Svetlana’s side when I seemed not to be moved by the attempted rape? You resented her already. Why did you nurse her after she broke down? Why did you expose yourself to broken bottles and fists before you stormed out of the cottage, trying to get everybody to chase you? Why didn’t you just run for your own life?”
I opened my mouth several times to speak, not knowing where to begin. He bent to me over the console, crystal eyes pinning me in my seat, his voice a dangerous ripple. “Why won’t you let m
e crush Anton Anghel for what he did to you?”
Looking for too many answers at once only led to blockage. I shook my head and grabbed on to the first thing that came to mind – a string of questions of my own.
“How do you even know so much about me? I understand that Dad infiltrated you on campus to protect me, but the story with Tony, that happened way back.”
“I’ve been monitoring you since you were a teenager.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Excuse me?”
He took in a deep breath, as if making a difficult decision. He rested his wrist on the steering wheel, the leather stretching on his arm and hinting at its strength. His fingers curled over the dashboard like a powerful claw.
“As Tiberius and I grew closer over the years, he began telling me about you,” he said. “His only child. He even told me about Judy the Monkey. But since he made it clear that, being so young, you knew nothing about Upgrades, BioDhrome or the Order of Lords, and you’d never have anything to do with his work anyway since you had a mind for poetry and not dissecting frogs, I never gave you another thought. Still, I had you monitored. It’s the procedure.”
I looked down at my fingers, playing with them nervously.
Damian continued, “Then, this November, when the situation with BioDhrome got ugly, and Tiberius infiltrated me on campus to protect you, things changed.”
My heart skipped a beat in anticipation of his perspective on how we met. I looked up at him from under my eyebrows. He killed the engine. The roar of the wind against the car matched the blood thumping in my ears until he began talking again.
“I recognized you from afar, of course. You seemed a nice, modest girl, and I felt a strange kind of warmth every time you came around. I ascribed it to Tiberius’s stories, thinking they must’ve created a connection even though I hadn’t been aware of it, and maybe they had to a certain extent, but then, when you stumbled into my arms with a glass of red wine….”
He gazed at me with dark intensity. The gaze of lust, or the gaze of death. Good God, he was mesmerizing! “Sweet locks and a few freckles, ostentatious red lipstick on a girlish mouth. A teenage wanton, stirring me in forbidden ways.”
He stroked my cheek with his index finger, eyes burning. My heart raced like a cornered rabbit’s, and the need to swear overwhelmed me. I pressed my lips together to keep it in, hungry for what Damian would say next. I didn’t even pretend to feel offended by him calling me a wanton.
“Your innocent face,” he slurred darkly. “Eight years older than you were in the picture on Tiberius’s desk, and it still mirrored you perfectly. I wanted to defile that smeared purity, and I wanted it badly.”
The blood rose to my head, and I wished the floor of the car would split and suck me in. I tried to cast my eyes down, but Damian held my chin between his thumb and forefinger, forcing me to keep my face up.
“I hungered to bite into the red smudge on your lips, I craved to lift your skirt and pierce you hard.” His eyes penetrated mine.
Want pulsed between my legs, making me fidget in my seat. The air between us grew unbearably hot.
“I needed to know more about you than Tiberius had told me,” he continued, tracing my jaw with his finger, electrifying me. “So I started digging. You didn’t tell me anything new on that porch, not even about having given up Tiberius’s inheritance, but that firsthand glimpse into your motives, your feelings, it put things into a whole new perspective. Later I regretted having gotten so close. I should have kept my distance. My interest made you a special target for BioDhrome. It instigated them.”
His hand dropped off my chin. He ripped his gaze away from me, and stared out through the windshield. His features frosted, again unreadable and hard.
“That’s why you insisted with Dad to protect me after what happened in the mountains?” I whispered. “Because you felt guilty?”
“Not only that. I insisted on protecting you because I’m the only one who can.”
I paused, taking in the sight of this breathtakingly handsome creature. I spoke the next words carefully. “What are you, Damian?”
He closed his eyes. “Please, don’t insist with that.”
“I deserve to know.” I jutted out my chin with a sense of entitlement.
“And you do. Still, I can’t answer.”
“Then answer me this—Is it true that you used to kill innocent people? Varlam’s squad all those years ago?”
His eyes flashed steel at me. “You can’t trust Varlam. If he told you I killed his squad, he lied.”
This didn’t surprise me. Ever since the mountains, I’d had trouble trusting the man, but still. Damian wrapped an arm around me, his other hand cupping my cheek, the smell of leather seeping into my brain.
“Alice, I swear, ever since my last night as a human I never killed another human, not even soldiers on a mission. All that Hector and his squad got that night was a good beating.”
“Are you saying you never sliced people into ribbons of flesh? Because that’s what he told me.”
Damian searched my face, as if searching for signs of forgiveness. “He did find his inspiration in true facts. But it was Upgrades, always Upgrades.”
“True facts? What true facts?”
“They’re too many and too ugly to talk about now. What you need to know is that the one time BioDhrome sent me for a human’s life was when they sent me for your father. He had the protection of a particularly strong Upgrade at the time. That’s why they assigned me his case. But Tiberius got me to switch sides, and recruited me for the Order of Lords.”
“The good counterpart of BioDhrome.” It was more a question than a statement.
Damian narrowed his eyes, careful with his words. “It’s hard to say whether we’re the good counterpart of anything. We’re not entirely clean ourselves, it’s true. We have connections high in state structures such as the Intelligence Service – the R.I.S. – and even the Military, and we manipulate to get our own. But we like to think we do it for the greater good.”
“Connections to the Military? Is that why you met in secret with the Minister of Defense?”
Damian’s lips drew in a hard line. “Some things are better left alone, Alice,” he said, his voice a velvety ripple. “Trust me when I tell you, you don’t need to know this.”
His reply only fired up my curiosity. I grabbed his hand. “Sure as hell I need to know. I’m too deep in this to afford staying ignorant.”
“You’re right. You’re in too deep. And you shouldn’t be sucked in any deeper.”
He opened the door, the signal that he wouldn’t continue this conversation, and I swear the moment he pulled his hand away it hurt.
He walked over and helped me out of the car. His closeness as he led me to the house, his huge arm around my back, the squeak of his leather jacket as he moved, it all went to my head like shots of tequila. My crush on him was as throat knotting as always, rendering me speechless and love-stoned, which shouldn’t be happening.
Crushes were supposed to lessen after intimacy, not skyrocket, and the intensity of my feelings began to scare me. What if I never stopped feeling like this? What if I ended up an emotional slave begging Damian Novac to make love to me, while he looked down at me like at a dirty wanton?
We reached the front door, and I wished we hadn’t.
“I have to go,” Damian muttered in his deep voice that gave me goose bumps. “But I’ll have people in place to guard you tonight.”
“Where will you be?” I whispered, eyes locked on his lips.
He smiled. “Why, eager to spend another night with me?”
“I don’t know if I’m eager,” I muttered. “But I guess I’d feel safer.” Lame, but it was the best thing I could think of that would help me save face. Damian’s smile turned a shade wicked.
He pressed his sin of a mouth on mine, taking over my lips in a demanding, bruising kiss that left me dizzy. Yet before I got a grip, he was already at the gate. I braced myself, feeling cold, empty
, and needy. Damian turned to look at me for only a moment, his features once again frosted and impossible to read, and my heart twisted painfully in my chest.
I stared after his car until exhaustion and the cold took over my body, numbing the emotional turmoil. I was in love with a cold-blooded killer, reformed or not.
Warmth enwrapped me as I walked inside the house, and I soon went limp all over. I hoped for some rest, but when I dragged myself to my room, I found a pale Leona holding a black-and-white picture right up in my face.
“What do you make of this?” she shrieked.
The content was a bit blurry, like a snapshot of a scene filmed with candid camera. I frowned and leaned my head back to bring it into focus. And when I did, sweat shot down my spine.
Chapter Three
Leona hurled more black-and-white photographs at me like a magician with his cards.
“Where did you get these?” I blabbered as I gathered them.
“Tony. That’s what was dead serious this morning,” she spat. “After you left with Novac, I went out to feed the dogs. Tony was waiting behind the house. He took these out of his backpack and said that, after what happened last night at the club, he had to make sure you found out who Damian Novac truly was.”
“Tony is a traitor,” I surged. “He’s been working for BioDhrome, and he would’ve sold me to them in pieces. He’s a deceiving bastard.”
Leona’s mien darkened, her chocolate eyes shaded under furrowed brows. “You can’t ignore these pictures. Novac is a….” She left the sentence unfinished, grimacing as if no word could fit what she wanted to name him.
And the pictures confirmed. There were no words. My knees weak, I dropped on the bed with the pictures in my hands.
The first photograph she’d held up must’ve been shot with a camera positioned in a ceiling corner, not far from the scene – an adolescent Damian biting a man’s wrist as the latter fought to strangle him with his forearm. Damian’s face was distorted, his body so skinny that his flesh seemed pruned on his ribs, visible between the sides of an open dirty shirt. My heart clenched. He looked as if he’d barely escaped the gas chamber.
