Colliding Hearts (Alpha Project Psychic Romance Book 1)

by Eva Chase

  After I’d cleared the floor of anything large enough to simply grab, I got out the broom and swept the smaller shards into a pile. I was just dumping the dustpan into the garbage bag when someone knocked on the door. My heart lurched two ways at once—with hope that it might somehow be Jeremy and fear that it might be the people who’d created this mess.

  I turned around. I’d left the inner door open so the warm spring breeze could pass through the house, which gave me a clear view to the porch. Malcolm Fitch was standing on the other side of the screen door.

  The second I saw him, my heart started full-out hammering. What was he doing here? He’d never asked where I lived. He had to know showing up like this would seem weird to me. So why would he act so brazenly creepy?

  Maybe he thought I was so worked up about this mystery man possibly stalking me, so grateful for Malcolm’s help, that I wouldn’t even care?

  He’d already seen me. He raised his hand with a brief wave. No pretending I wasn’t home.

  I walked into the front hall with a hesitant smile. “Hi,” I said, stopping a few feet from the door. “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, I thought I’d stop by and see exactly what happened with this break-in.” He cocked his head. “What are you doing here, Grace? I thought you were too scared to stay at home. Isn’t that why you got that room in the hotel?”

  There was a slight sneer in his voice that set my nerves even more on edge. He’d been so careful before to seem friendly, supportive. Kind. Now the vibe I got from him was weirdly cold.

  I resisted the urge to hug myself, settling for rubbing my hand up and down my arm. “Yeah,” I said. “But, you know, after I talked to you yesterday, I realized I can’t just hide away. I can’t let some creep change how I live. This is my home, and no one can change that.”

  Malcolm made a humming sound. He reached for the door handle, and I realized I hadn’t bothered to turn the lock. I’d never needed to lock the screen door while I was home, not here on this quiet street. Not before the creepy psychic hunters had arrived in the neighborhood.

  I moved to dash forward, to stop him, but he’d already tugged the door open. He had at least a few inches and thirty or forty pounds on me—and it wasn’t as if I knew how to fight. I backed up a step instead.

  “Look,” I said, trying to keep up the pretense. “I appreciate everything you’ve done to help, but I’m really not looking to have visitors right now. I’ve got a lot of cleaning up to do. If there’s something else you wanted to ask about, maybe we could meet up later?”

  “No,” Malcolm said smoothly. “I think there are a few things we need to talk about now.” He leaned against the wall, his pale blue eyes fixed on me. “Like why you’ve been lying to me.”

  A chill washed over me. I controlled my voice as well as I could. “What are you talking about? I haven’t—”

  “I understand you must feel some loyalty to the man who saved your life,” he went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “But there are some things that are more important than any one person’s life. I’m serving a higher purpose here, Grace. If you knew half of what we hope to achieve...”

  What the hell was he talking about? I couldn’t stop myself from shaking. If I’d had my phone, I could have tried to call the police—it was on the kitchen counter. I didn’t think I could get there fast enough.

  “Look,” I said, motioning to the door in the hopes that bravado would do the trick, “I don’t know what you mean, but I want you to leave. Now.”

  Malcolm pushed off the wall again, but not toward the door. His hand dug into his pocket. “It’s all right. You don’t need to cooperate to contribute to our cause. You, darling, are going to make the perfect bait.”

  My pulse scattered. I flung myself toward the kitchen, meaning to make a dash for the back door with my phone, but Malcolm’s hand closed around my wrist. He heaved me toward him. My feet stumbled over each other. I jabbed out with my elbow, and he darted out of the way. His free hand clapped a sickly smelling cloth over my nose and mouth.

  I was already dragging in a breath to scream. The cloying scent filled my lungs, and the world around me spiraled away into darkness.

  When I came to, my head was foggy. A tiny ache pinched the bridge of my nose. I had to blink several times before the room I was sitting in came into focus. And then I just stared at it dully for a long moment before my brain started to process what was in front of me.

  I was sitting, in a stiff wooden chair. My arms were starting to ache too where they were pulled around the back of the chair. A plastic cable cut into my wrists when I tried to move. Other ties secured both my ankles to the chair legs. Other than my head, I was completely immobilized.

  The chair stood in the center of a huge warehouse room. Pale light streaked through high, dust-coated windows. The cracked concrete floor was bare except for a few stacks of packing crates near the walls. Narrow metal beams crisscrossed the upper reaches beneath the vaulted ceiling. A thick, oily smell like mechanic’s grease filled my nose.

  Footsteps rasped against the floor behind me. My back stiffened. I yanked at my arms again and winced as the plastic cable bit deeper.

  Two figures strolled into view: Malcolm and the woman with the black, short-cropped hair I’d seen staked out by my house a couple nights ago.

  “What’s going on?” I burst out. “What are you doing to me?”

  Malcolm crossed his arms over his chest with an air of total calm. “I thought I explained that already, Grace. You’re our bait. The man who saved you, the man you’ve been seeing, whatever his real name is—he’ll come. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I told you, I haven’t seen him since then,” I said.

  The woman chuckled. “Oh, come on now. Did you really think we couldn’t look up who paid for that hotel room? Conveniently the exact same person who rented a car we found abandoned earlier today.”

  Shit. I hadn’t thought about that—that they could break right into the hotel’s records. I opened my mouth, scrambling for another excuse, but Malcolm shook his head.

  “Enough stories. I think we’ve had our fill of those. And we know exactly where you’ve been since then.” His lips curled into a mocking smile. “While you were spinning your sob stories yesterday, I slipped a tracking device into your purse.”

  Any words I might have said died in my throat. My mouth went dry. They knew then—where I’d gone this afternoon, where Jeremy was.

  Malcolm nodded. “You see now. We work for very powerful people. People you really shouldn’t have messed with. This all could have happened with a lot less discomfort for you, you know. It was stupid of you to think you could fool us.”

  I couldn’t see any point in pretending anymore. The jig was up. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell them anything they didn’t already know either. “I fooled you for a while,” I said.

  The woman’s eyes flashed. Good. Let them get angry with me. They’d be more likely to spill something they didn’t mean to then. Maybe there was still some way Jeremy could get out of this okay.

  Me... The strange thing was, I wasn’t even that worried about myself. It wasn’t me they wanted. This was all about Jeremy. He’d stayed ahead of them for decades before now, and then I’d fallen into his life. Well, fallen and then shoved myself further in. If he hadn’t been there when the truck had come at me—if I hadn’t insisted on seeing him again—

  I should have let him run. When he’d wanted to before, when he’d thought that was his best option, I should have told him to go. Keep himself safe. I’d been so fucking selfish trying to talk him into staying. Convincing myself it was for his benefit when mostly I just didn’t want to lose his presence in my life.

  At least if I’d lost him that way, I’d have known he was probably still okay.

  “I wouldn’t mouth off in the position you’re in,” the woman snapped.

  Malcolm rolled his eyes. “Now, Mauve. No need to torment the little mouse.”

  I
gritted my teeth at that remark. “If you know so much, what do you need ‘bait’ for anyway? Why haven’t you already grabbed him like you did with me?”

  Tell me: Where are you weak?

  “A confrontation on ground of our choosing is always preferable,” Malcolm said. Boots thudded against the floor behind me. More of his people, here to make sure they took Jeremy in. The other figures didn’t move into my view, but my back prickled with the sense of their presence.

  “Your ‘friend’ obviously has a lot of practice at keeping ahead of us,” Malcolm went on. “The one thing that slows him down is you.”

  He held up my phone. The screen was live, a text conversation showing. I couldn’t make out the words.

  “He’s already realized something’s afoot. He’s been texting and calling you for the last hour. So we gave him a tip to let him know where to find you. He didn’t reply, but I’d be very surprised if he isn’t on his way here right now.”

  My heart sank. He would be. I tensed my legs, but the bindings around my ankles held fast. If there was some way I could have gotten out of here... Some way I could have told him to just leave, to call their bluff...

  But there wasn’t. I was caught here like a rabbit in a snare. I swallowed hard and brought my gaze back to Malcolm. A question I wasn’t even sure I wanted the answer to fell from my mouth.

  “What are you going to do to him after you’ve caught him?”

  Malcolm smiled again, so triumphant this time that it made me want to puke. “Don’t you worry your pretty head about that, darling. Believe me, we’ll make good use of him.”

  23

  Jeremy

  The slow rumble of a passing car made me flinch. I stepped closer to the side of the old brick warehouse, eyeing the larger one at the other end of the block. The one someone had texted me the address to from Grace’s number, along with a warning: Come get her or she’s dead.

  I sure as hell wasn’t going to let it come to that. But I knew better than to rush in unprepared. Maybe there was a way I could get Grace out of there without having to engage the Alpha Project people at all. I’d accomplished an awful lot in the past through distraction and misdirection.

  I’d just never had the life of someone I cared about—let’s be real, someone I was coming to love—immediately on the line quite like this.

  But if I could rescue her without showing off my abilities directly, that would be better for both of us. Malcolm and his crew couldn’t know everything I was capable of yet. From what my parents had told me and my brothers, a psychic talent like each of us had was very rare. Their abilities were stronger than anyone else they’d met in the Alpha Project facility, and when they’d come together to make a family, we’d inherited power from both sides.

  All these lackeys had seen of my talent was me moving a car a foot away in a moment of panic. They probably assumed that was the most I was capable of. A good talent, still, but they’d be ten times as keen to track me down if they realized I could have lifted that car, spun it around, and thrown it across the street if I’d really wanted to.

  I edged a little closer, scanning the street and the building. Its brick walls were even more grayed and crumbly than those of the building I was standing next to. The whole street had a deserted smell, like stale ashes.

  A plain white delivery van was parked on the other side of the street by the far end of the warehouse. I caught a hint of movement through the window in the back door. Another figure shifted by one of the warehouse’s lower windows. Malcolm had his people keeping an eye out for me. I wasn’t going to be able to waltz right over and scope out the lay of the land.

  At least not from the ground. I drew back behind the neighboring building and grabbed hold of a drain pipe. I gripped it and heaved my feet off the sidewalk, adding a heft of mental power.

  Between my straining arms and the push of energy I called up, I clambered up to the roof in less than a minute. My breath turned rough, but a rush of exhilaration flowed through me at the same time. It always felt good, stretching my talent, like working any other muscle.

  I wiped the sweat from my brow and stalked across the slanted roof toward the other warehouse. No one was watching for me up here. There was a five foot gap between the buildings, but I could make that even without a psychic boost. I gave myself a small running start and leapt.

  At the last second I pushed a surge of energy between me and the building. It slowed me to a stop just inches from the roof. I eased my feet down the rest of the way to the angled surface, setting them silently in place.

  This warehouse had a couple of huge skylights in the middle of the roof. I slunk over to one and sank down on my hands and knees. The surface was mottled with grime, but when I edged up onto the glass past the worst of the dirt, I could make out the figures far below me. Four of them, standing around a fifth braced in a chair.

  My stomach clenched at the sight of Grace. Her shoulders were rigid, her face pale. I couldn’t see exactly how through the dirty window, but her arms and legs were obviously restrained. She looked terrified and determined at the same time. Her mouth moved, and the woman standing in front of her grimaced.

  A guy with reddish blond hair who I had to assume was Malcolm stood just a little to the side. And two guys in gray tees and slacks were poised behind Grace’s chair, one carrying a pistol, the other a rifle.

  Of course they’d have guns. They wouldn’t want to kill me, not before they’d had a chance to run their experiments, but I doubted they’d have any qualms about shooting Grace if she got in the way. Making sure that didn’t happen was my first priority, before anything else.

  I studied the rest of the room below. Any machinery that had once filled the space was long gone. All I had to work with were a couple dozen crates stacked near the walls.

  Was that enough? I needed all four of my enemies down there to be on the other side of the room—out of the building, preferably. Then... I could have lifted Grace up here to get her out, but this window didn’t open. I’d have to break it. The whole thing would require perfect timing if I was going to have any chance at all of—

  Grace must have said something really biting. The woman whipped back her hand and slapped Grace across the face. My whole body reacted before I could catch myself. I jerked closer to the window, and the heel of my hand tapped the glass.

  The heads below me snapped up. So did the one guard’s rifle. Before I could scramble back, he’d opened fire at the skylight.

  The sound of the shots boomed in my ears, and the glass shattered beneath me. I didn’t even have time to throw myself off the window. My body plummeted with the broken shards. Shouts were ringing out below. Someone gave a cry. The air whipped past me, yanking at my clothes.

  Every instinct screamed at me to catch the fall, to hold myself off the ground, but I couldn’t give away my talent now. It was too late for the plans I’d been making. And those guns were far too close to Grace for comfort. I had to play this right. Wait for a moment when I could use my talent to my full advantage.

  I gave in to the urge to save myself just a little. Just enough to push back against the ground and soften my fall. I still hit the ground with a smack of my hip and shoulder, but the impact hurt a lot less than it probably looked like it had.

  The shards of broken glass crunched under me. A splinter jabbed the back of my hand. I winced and let my head loll, producing a groan as if I were a lot more injured than I was.

  Injured and helpless. Just a wounded bird dropped out of its nest. Nothing to fear here. Go ahead and let down your defenses, assholes.

  Footsteps stalked closer. I scanned the room with half-open eyes. Malcolm kicked aside a few of the larger chunks of glass, coming to a stop five feet from where I was sprawled. Too far for me to have reached him without quite a lunge, but plenty close enough to grab him with my mental powers if I needed to.

  Behind him, Grace was staring at me, her face completely white now. Her breath was coming in panicked hitches. Her
distress made my heart squeeze, but I had to keep pretending I was hurt. I’d be able to comfort her soon enough. I hoped.

  “Leave him alone!” she said.

  “Shut up,” the woman who appeared to be Malcolm’s colleague snapped.

  The guard with the rifle was standing to the left of Grace’s chair, the muzzle of his weapon pointed at me. The other guard stood at her right, with his pistol just inches from her head. The threat was clear. One wrong move, and he’d shoot. My stomach flipped. I could do a lot with my powers, but I couldn’t move fast enough to stop a shot at point-blank range.

  “Well, now,” Malcolm said. “All this trouble you’ve put us through and look at you now. Not half as smart as you thought, are you? I’m almost disappointed.”

  He squatted down, peering at me. I tensed my arm as if trying to move it and then let it sag against the ground again. Malcolm’s lips twitched with amusement.

  Prick. I wasn’t the one overestimating myself here. Just give me one tiny opening. I couldn’t wait to see that satisfied smirk wiped off his face.

  “I can see the resemblance,” he said, tipping his head to one side. “More your father than your mom, but they’re both definitely there.”

  What? What the hell was he talking about? My gut twisted. Despite myself, my gaze jerked up to meet his. His smile grew.

  “Oh, yes. The people I work for have been looking for Jason Keane and Lisa Martin for a long time. I suppose now we know they stayed together at least long enough to produce a kid. You left your apartment in an awful hurry, didn’t you? It wasn’t hard to pick up a trace of DNA for testing.”

  Shit. I’d never even thought they might do that. Never thought anyone would even be looking for my DNA. But he wasn’t bluffing. He knew who my parents were. The resemblance—of course Alpha Project would have had photos of their old test subjects on file.