Fuse

by Angel Payne

I curl my finger tighter against the trigger.

  Tighter.

  One instant. One snick. She’ll be gone. Angelique will be free. Wade will be free.

  Reece will be free.

  But I can’t squeeze any more. No matter how hard I clench my muscles or how thoroughly I focus my resolve, my finger’s frozen where it is. If I let go of the gun at this very moment, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing simply hung from my immovable digit.

  “Oh, my God.”

  But my rasp isn’t quiet enough. The bitch has heard me and unfurls a smooth laugh to match her satiny rise—and then the slick curl of her hand, right before the adroit snap of her fingers.

  Spearing pain into everything from my ribs down.

  No. It’s more than a spear. It’s a gash of agony and then a twist of evisceration, followed by an infusion of ice so dire, the torture feels more like a burn than a freeze. Yet when I lower my head, hating yet needing to behold the damage, there’s not one rip in my dress or drop of blood marring my middle. With my free hand, I grab the area over my navel. Everything is intact to my touch, though the movement brings worse torment. It feels like I’ve just grabbed my intestines and yanked them out of my body.

  “Well.” Faline sweeps around and then cocks out a hip, appraising me as if she’s eyeing a horse for auction. “Aren’t you so special too, chiquita? But of course, we already know that, do we not?”

  She steps over to jerk on my chin, pivoting my head from side to side and smiling softly while taking in my wobbling jaw and tear-streaked face. “Pain is quite an alluring look for you, I think. Hmmm.” Her dark gaze narrows. “I should have considered that angle before—though in New York, I hardly had the resources that are available here. And sí, I must also admit, back then, I never thought that you would last.”

  I blink hard. Pledge not to reveal that the new pain she delivers is so intense, I’m now seeing two of her—though there’s a damn good chance she’s already figuring it out. “Th-That I would l-l-last…h-h-how?”

  “Oh, come now.” Her smile returns, borne on a pair of saucy clucks. “We selected Reece for the program for very special reasons, you know. His virility made him infamous. Even when he escaped, we considered that aspect of his enhancement an interesting experiment. What kind of impact would his seed bear when sown among a variety of females?” Her cluck deepens into a sound of assessment. “We anticipated most would not survive, of course—but science comes at a price, you know.”

  “No,” I spit. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, obviously.” When she punctuates herself with a long velvet laugh, only to see I’m not sharing the joke, she explicates, “What we did not anticipate, darling, was you.”

  Deep frown. “Me? How?”

  “You and your…stamina, Emmalina.” She rakes me from head to toe with a stare that has me sympathizing with a pinned butterfly. “Do you not see? You are still here, chiquita. Not only still alive, after clearly letting the man fuck you repeatedly and with such force and passion. After all this time…”

  Her gaze gains a weird gleam, tempting me to let out a full scream—though I already feel as if I’m being strangled by barbed wire. But even if I really were, she wouldn’t get the satisfaction from me. I swear it to myself, even when she releases her hold on Angie and Wade and motions for a couple of her henchmen to drag them away. As they go, she calls out, “Muchos gracias for the gift, my Angelique. Oh, yes, yes.” Her voice returns to its assessing murmur as she impales me with a more clinical air. “This is going to be such fun, little rabbit!”

  “Go…fuck yourself,” I spit past teeth that taste like chalk, from a throat as dry as that chalk dust.

  “Thank you, darling. Perhaps later, if no better offers come along. But right now, I am having so much fun fucking with you.”

  And nausea was just what my gut needed right now.

  Everything hurts. It hurts so much.

  The only consolation I cling to in the middle of this madness is that Reece is still lost to the darkness of his coma and doesn’t have any consciousness to attach to any thoughts of me. No shred of our electric connection. No sixth sense to reach out to me or comprehend any part of this surreal sadism the woman is inflicting on me…

  How?

  How the hell is she really altering my will, controlling my actions?

  At last she releases my chin with a sharp push and then backs off by a few elegant steps. “Do you know, little rabbit pellet, how pathetically easy it is to dither with you?” She rocks her head back. Releases an airy scoff while waving a hand with equally frothy laxity. “I do not even need a remote control for most of your kind. What do you basic humans find so fascinating about each other?”

  I battle to think around the pain, attempting to get in as much air while keeping my glower fixed on the damn harpy. “And yet…I share Reece Richards’s bed…every night.”

  The incensed glare she returns to my stammer isn’t surprising. Who’s the predictable one now, Faline the Magnificent? I hang on to the gloat while watching more turbulence enter her eyes, and then there’s an incensed flare of her nostrils. If she can read the snark across my mind, I certainly haven’t helped my cause—but something tells me I could have been meditating about a Bob Ross painting framed in 3-D puppies and earned myself the same vitriol from the bitch.

  So why not let it all fly now?

  But by the time I unstick my pasty tongue from the back of my chalk-tastic teeth and think of a moment alluding to the night Reece and I spent on the Seine reenacting the Kama Sutra for about five hours, I’ve regained consciousness in another room. Hardly comprehending what landed me here—for a second or two. But then it starts to return in petrifying, torturing flashes.

  Another flick of Faline’s wrist.

  The henchmen lunging over, resembling flying monkeys in their speed and impact.

  Their disconnected murmurs in my ears—sí, our queen—before Faline gives them more quiet orders and they’re grabbing me. Restraining me. Carrying me.

  A hall. Another.

  Around a curve. Through a locked door that buzzes and startles me—but not as much as new hands on me that belong to a trio of females in medical scrubs and face masks. I’m free again—but not. I’m unable to move anything now, even my mouth to protest how they efficiently strip me naked and then carry me again, laboratory Oompa-Loompa style, and roll me onto a steel table.

  A steel table.

  Where I am now.

  Where I try to scream now.

  And I do.

  As loud as I can. As long as I can. An hour? Two? Three? What’s time in a world of nothing but white walls, steel equipment, and blaring lights? What are sounds if I’m the only one left to hear them?

  What’s going on? What’s going on? What’s going on?

  I trade the scream for a grateful sob when there’s suddenly another voice in the room. When there’s a shift on the air, probably belonging to the voice. I don’t even try to swivel my head, already having discovered that the Oompa Loompas secured me from the neck up in a steel collar contraption, rendering it impossible to shift anything other than my eyes.

  A woman, also in scrubs and a mask—but with nearly black eyes I’ll never forget and will always be able to identify—steps into my view.

  Her.

  It’s her.

  And I cry harder—because it doesn’t matter.

  Because the white, endless solitude was worse.

  Because even the hatred I have for her is like a miracle. A reminder that I’m still here. I’m still me. I’m still existing.

  Oh, God.

  I flinch, shocked to hear the words tumble intelligibly out of me. But I jolt even harder, filled with twice as much dread, as she dips closer to me, her black gaze spreading like ravens’ wings, annihilating everything I see.

  “Ahhhh, no, chiquita. Just me.” She strokes her knuckles over my cheek. “How are you feeling?”

  Fuck you.

  If she picks up
the thought from my head this time, she doesn’t show it. “The pain is better, sí?” she murmurs. “Almost gone?”

  “Yes.”

  Though I force civility into it, Faline pulls down her mask to give me a full view of her pinched scowl. “The proper address is, ‘Yes, my queen.’”

  I tighten my glare. “Now you can really go fuck yourself.” And at once am rewarded with the pain of fifty drills in my belly, churning my internal organs until I’m amazed the bright-white lights aren’t shattering from my screams. “Yes, my queen!” I shriek. “Yes, my queen!”

  Faline waves a finger.

  The torment instantly halts.

  “So much better.” She puts her mask back into place and then gently pats the side of my face. “I do regret this crash course in obedience training, little pellet,” she murmurs, rising up. “It was considerably more fun to break in your fiancé, such as it was. Men can be so…stimulating…when they’re pushed to the limit, over and over and over again.” She’s no longer visible to me, but my skin prickles as I gauge her presence around me by the calm taps of her shoes. “But alas, we have such a limited amount of time and so much work to get done.”

  Yes.

  Shivering.

  But not terrified.

  What’s the next stage of fear beyond that? The phase where a query has to be stuttered out, no matter how hideous the answer is surely going to be?

  “Wh-What k-k-kind of w-w-work?”

  The bitch makes me wait for it. Through a bunch of awful minutes, filled with yet more of her tapping those heels, she twists knobs and adjusts a bunch of other equipment—including, I now discern, the tubing connected to at least three IV lines secured to both my arms.

  “Upgrading you, of course, chiquita. Expanding you. Empowering you. Improving your pathetic existence.”

  I shiver harder.

  So hard, my shudders become a wild, jerking fight of their own.

  Until I can’t shiver anymore. Because everything in my body is fire.

  No.

  Not fire.

  Heat.

  Scorching me. Razing me. Taking over me.

  Every shade of blue and then every spectrum of silver.

  Then every level of pain.

  Until I know. I know.

  I’ll never be the same again.

  If I survive this hell at all.

  REECE

  “It’s quiet.”

  Though Alex issues the observation in an equally subdued tone, his voice is loud, clear, and completely understandable through the radio comm in my ear—probably because what he’s saying is true.

  Freakishly true.

  “Yeah,” Foley returns, his hands tense on the Range Rover’s steering wheel as we roll past the Lunada Pointe mansion for the third time. “Too fucking quiet.”

  I turn my head toward the mansion, which is just as sprawling as the others on this exclusive strip of oceanfront real estate, with its lush landscaping and Italianate architectural lines. But it’s almost nine o’clock, and the rest of the homes have at least exterior lights on by now. The mansion in front of us is a collection of darkness and shadows, despite the fact that the air around it pulses with the energy one can only experience from another human being. That’s not my magical Bolt-ometer talking, either. That’s common sense, honed after tracking more than my fair share of bad guys in too many “quiet” Los Angeles alleys—and it’s confirmed by Foley’s driving too. He feels it too. He knows it too.

  “You picking up anything on the infrared, Trestle?”

  “Nada,” Alex answers. “Not even a goddamned lizard in the bushes.”

  His reply contains a dial-back on the stealthy and a boost on the fury. He and Fershan closed in on my level of freaked—but not surprised—upon realizing their teammate had insta-volunteered for mission duty with Emmalina and Angie and then pushed themselves into overdrive so Foley and I could have as many high-tech gadgets as possible once we rolled. Watching their frenzy was racking but reassuring. Nothing conveys stress faster or more wildly than a tech team scramble, but the fact that it was a scramble had been the right encouragement at the right moment. I’m not the only one who’s ready to put everything on the line to bring the three of them home.

  “Roger that,” I mutter back over the comm. “Not a creature is stirring, not even a lizard.”

  “Under normal circumstances, that might even be a good thing.”

  Brief snort. “Should I be the first to point out the obvious here?”

  Fersh is our resident optimist, not usually the one growling.

  “Fuck.” It tumbles out of Foley with so much grit, I glance over and expect him to be foaming at the mouth.

  “You guys have to go in.” The decree belongs to Lydia, her scythe of a tone clarifying that the dictate isn’t open for discussion. Fine by me. There’s no time for a debate right now. Not a goddamned second to waste in pursuing our singular goal.

  Finding Emma.

  Then kissing the oxygen out of every cell in her body.

  Christ in heaven. Why did I fall in love with a woman who even thinks it’s okay to do shit like this, anyway? Who, after the first time I told her my secret identity was Bolt, tackled me, kissed me, and then called me the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen? Who hasn’t once whined that my “extracurricular fun” is training ninja murder techniques with Foley or reading a hundred pages of blood sample analyses?

  Who, after just one year of becoming the completion of my life and the center of my soul, has been assaulted, uprooted, kidnapped, deceived, horrified, scrutinized, and paparazzied—on top of being bombarded with sights, concepts, and an alternate reality that no woman should ever be forced to believe, let alone accept as her life?

  All right, so maybe it’s hardly a wonder that she’s sneaked off with Angelique and Wade. Further, that she thoroughly believes it’s possible to save me from Faline armed with a simple Glock and a few motivational mantras.

  Impetuous, impervious Tinkerbell.

  Stupid, intrepid Bunny.

  Noble, unshakable woman.

  The sole person I can’t live without.

  “Damn it,” I rasp after we’ve parked the Rover down the block and start toward the mansion, sticking to the shadows of the miniature rainforests that double as front lawns around here. Goddamnit, Emmalina, if you’ve gone and gotten yourself into a shitstorm of trouble…or worse…

  I refuse to think about the worse.

  But I do.

  And because of it, endure a flood of neurotoxins called panic, which suddenly stops me in place.

  Thank fuck for Foley. “Yo.” Who gets it already and doubles back with a look of tight concern. “You all right, AC/DC?”

  And succeeds in shaking me back to the moment with his latest contribution to the team’s nicknames pond. Raw bewilderment will do that to a guy, and I concede to a slam of the stuff while contemplating the reference to a band I never imagined as Foley’s jam. With every fiber of my heart, I plead to heaven that after Em and Angie got here, they found nothing and dropped Angie’s phone on their way to an impromptu stroll on the beach. That they stopped somewhere for drinks and lost track of the time. That Roman Engrid just wants to use this place for giant cod bite parties.

  Now that my brain’s filled with scenarios only bleach will erase, I refocus on Foley. “I’m fine. I’m fine.” I nod toward the house. “I just need to know she is too.”

  Foley returns the nod as we crouch behind a giant elephant ear plant, eyeballing the mansion more fully from our vantage point. “She’s got a sharp head on her shoulders, Richards.”

  “Not saying she doesn’t,” I retort.

  “Then what’s with the bee in your lovely bonnet?”

  I toss a stiff side-eye. Copy his huff, only with a lot more emphasis on the irritation, while fighting mental images of Emma inside the house, tied up and gagged and—

  Enough.

  “She just doesn’t know everything Faline is capable of.”
>
  “The fuck she doesn’t.” Foley’s comeback is immediate. At the same time, he frees his SIG from his body holster, steadying his grip with one hand around his carrying wrist. “She just loves your sorry ass more than she hates and fears that bitch.” A fast glance, just to prove he’s as serious as a sommelier calling out cheese pairings. “You really don’t get that yet, do you?”

  “Of course I do.”

  The guy grunts. “Great.” Then elbows me in the gut. “So let’s get this show on the road before you trip over your nose, Pinocchio.”

  “Fuck you,” I mumble, with Alex and Fersh’s snickers as my backdrop.

  “Sorry, broheim,” Lydia cuts in. “That’s my job, remember?”

  “And on that piece of TMI…” Sawyer snorts. “That’s going to earn a certain brat a visit from my spanking hand.”

  I copy his elbow jab. “And that piece of TMI, none of us should have heard…”

  He snort-laughs before leading the way out of the bushes and onto the mansion’s property line. We stick to the shadows along the far perimeter until spotting the power breaker box that Alex located on the satellite overview of the place. Not that his task was easy, since the thing is shrouded by an eight-foot-high Bird of Paradise, but the guy didn’t quit enhancing shots even after we took off in the Rover, and he finally found this intel when we were ten minutes out from the house.

  It’s our critical key to moving faster now.

  After buzzing the flowers down with some effortless lightning blades, I have to zap a little more effort into slicing the padlock from the breaker box itself. But a few seconds after that, Foley has the backyard lights and security system completely shut off.

  And then, we brace.

  Through twenty seconds.

  Thirty.

  Forty.

  At just over fifty, we’re rewarded for the patience—“reward” being relative, since it’s in the form of at least fifteen of Faline’s minions who scurry like chickens in the path of a hurricane, clearly attempting to troubleshoot the security system breakdown before their mistress on high takes over to do it. Because with Faline, “troubleshooting” usually carries a much different meaning.

  “Uh-oh.” Foley’s comment is no more than a snarky vibration on the air, though even if he’d gone full volume, nobody would’ve noticed. It’s pandemonium inside the house, for which we have a full ringside seat thanks to the towering glass windows along the ocean side of the structure. “Looks like Mom won’t be letting the kids have dessert tonight, dear.”