by Megan Hart
“I don’t get it, how can you not be pinpointing him? Isn’t that the point of the chip?” Ewan threw out both hands, then faced the wall comm. As it turned out, the long string of letters and numbers that Katrinka had given him in order to track Jordie had needed to go through an additional set of decoding before it could even begin to be tracked. The delay had him on edge. Pacing. “C’mon, guys, you have to give me something I can use.”
“It’s harder than we expected. The system wasn’t so hard to crack into, but the information in it hasn’t been updated in years. We can only get locations when the chip connects to the system, and since most of the receiving centers were shut down and even destroyed, well . . . we only get a piece of the picture. We’re working on some triangulations now.” Barney had been part of Ewan’s sec team for the past five years and had never let him down; he looked devastated to be doing so, now. “We’re going to get you a location, Mr. Donahue. I promise.”
“Thanks, Barney. Ping me the second you have something.” Ewan disconnected and turned to find Al staring at him with narrowed eyes. “What?”
“They’ll figure it out. We should have a plan for when they do.”
“Yeah. Of course. The plan is, we go there together, and you kick all their asses and we get her back,” Ewan said.
“What about the kid?”
Ewan shook his head. “I don’t care about Jordie Dev. If we get Nina back, he can be left behind to deal with whoever he made his deals with.”
“You don’t want to see him arrested? He’ll go to prison for sure.”
“Katrinka Dev has enough money to keep her son out of prison.” Ewan rolled his neck on his shoulders with a wince at the strain in his muscles. It had been little more than a day since Nina had walked out of here on her way to see her sister, but it seemed like years. All this wasted time was driving him insane.
“You really do love her, huh?”
He turned to face Al. “Yeah. I do.”
“Not trying to rustle your jimmies, Mr. Billions,” Al said quickly, holding up her hands in gesture of surrender. “I think it’s hyper icy to see you two crazy kids cooing over each other. But it makes you stupid, and I don’t aim to get in the way of stupid. Shiny fine? We need to actually discuss what’s going to happen when you get that kid’s location and we go there. You’ve clearly decided not to bother with the regular authorities—”
“I hired you,” Ewan bit out, “because I thought you’d be the best option.”
Again, Al held up her hands. “I get it. The police would be too slow, and there’d be the legal ramifications of involving them. Whatever. You got me, instead. So let’s make sure we are on the same page. I’m gonna need an understanding between us.”
“Shiny fine. What?” Ewan’s comm hadn’t pinged, but he looked at it anyway. Blank screen. With a muttered curse, he kept himself from throwing it at a wall.
“What I say, goes,” Al said as though she hadn’t heard him calling the comm an evil name. “If we go into a situation where I need to protect you, you have to be sure you’re listening to me. You listening?”
She was waiting for him to answer her, Ewan realized. When he looked up, Al’s pale green eyes blazed in a hard expression. “Yeah. I’m listening.”
“Good. Because if I’m taking you on, that means you’re my responsibility. I’ll do my best for you, but if there’s any signs at all that it’s going bad and you’re going to get hurt, I’ll haul you out of there so fast you’ll think you got sent back in time.”
“Do they give you guys a class in this, or what?” Ewan said with a frown, reminded too strongly of Nina’s When you’re mine, you’re mine all the way.
“They do, actually,” Al said solemnly. “ProtectCorps is really strict about training. We all had to pass a test. Leona says she has a reputation for a reason, and it ain’t because her people let clients get killed. Will you promise to listen to me?”
Ewan nodded after a hesitation, setting aside his anger and worry for a few seconds as he gave Al his attention. “Yes. Of course I will.”
“Because it seems likely that whoever this Jordie kid’s working for will have some security, probably a lot of security. It’s not going to be easy to get to her, even when you do find him. And what are you going to do if she’s not where he is?”
“I will leave it up to you to make sure he tells you where she is.”
Al grinned. “Maybe I’ll get to pop him one, huh?”
“Yeah. I’m guessing you will.”
Ewan’s comm pinged. He swiped to look at the message and the coordinates. He looked up at Al with a grim smile.
“They got him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“You’ll be all right. Let me take care of that pain for you. Relax. I will make you feel better.”
The voice, soothing and somehow metallic, spoke like a person, but Nina knew it belonged to a medtech unit designed to provide solace to patients so injured they weren’t supposed to know they were almost dead. She’d been in this place before, however, and so she blinked away the haze from the drugs that were meant to ease her agony.
She couldn’t figure out the source of her pain, but dull aches ran up and down her limbs, and a sharper pain twisted itself at the base of her spine. The left side of her head had been shaved bare, but there didn’t seem to be any wounds there. She wasn’t bound by bandages, didn’t feel any stitches, and could see no bruises. Even so, she hurt in more places than she did not, but she didn’t mind.
She preferred the pain.
It kept her grounded. Focused. It kept her aware of not only where she was, but who.
She didn’t struggle against the needle in her arm or the medicine coursing into her, even as a cold heat ran along her veins and churned her stomach. She simply settled her body into the effort of keeping the drugs from working. It was harder than she remembered it being, an actual conscious effort rather than an automatic response.
Not impossible, though. She concentrated. She pushed away the haze every time it came back. Several times, red tinged the edges of her vision and threatened to become black, but Nina breathed slowly, deeply, steadily. She focused and concentrated, and every time, her vision cleared. She’d have laughed in triumph, if she hadn’t needed that energy to keep defeating the drugs’ efforts at sending her back to unconsciousness.
The medtech unit beeped in dismay, perhaps because it had dispersed all of the contents it had been determined to inject into her. Nina waited for someone to come and refill it, but she remained alone. She got out of bed and used the bathroom. Desperate for a drink, she put her mouth to the faucet but nothing came out but a slow hiss of air.
Back in the bedroom, Nina looked out the window at the gray sky. Had there been a window there before? She couldn’t recall. It didn’t seem like there had been. This one didn’t have bars or wire mesh on it. Why would it? she asked herself, wondering why she’d be surprised. The rain coursing down the glass reminded her of something, but she couldn’t think of what. There were lots of little holes like that. Pinpricks in the fabric of her recollections. She would never get used to that feeling, like a tongue probing a sore tooth over and over, only to discover an empty spot in her jaw.
Nina knew what had happened to her, even if she couldn’t remember the details. She’d taken a job. It had been sensitive; she’d been exposed to information she wasn’t supposed to retain. At the end of it, the client had reset her, wiping her short-term memories using the tech embedded in her skull. Maybe something bad had happened along the way—her injuries certainly made that clear. She would never know, probably, the extent of what had occurred.
She didn’t really want to.
For now, it was enough to allow herself to feel the pain in her wounds and go through the lists she kept in her head of all the things she did remember. Her name. Where she’d grown up. Her sisters, her parents, the name of her first pet. When she reached a blank place, Nina didn’t try to fill it. She moved on. In a fe
w days she would be fine.
“C’mon then,” said a new voice. Human. It belonged to a young bro in white who’d appeared by the side of Nina’s bed. “I’m going to take you out of here.”
She let him help her sit up. She didn’t feel weak or dizzy, but she was having a difficult time coordinating her movements. “Where am I going?”
“Someplace better than here.”
Nina looked around the hospital room. “Better than a hospital?”
The idea that something was very wrong with this occurred to her, but she didn’t know how to stop it from happening. Anxiety twisted inside her. She struggled.
“Stop fighting me.” The bro pinched his fingers deep into her upper arms.
Nina wanted to keep struggling, but found herself paralyzed at his command. Her body stiffened. She started to fall out of the bed, and he held her up, cursing. Calling for someone to come help him.
She was losing consciousness.
Voices spoke.
“Not supposed to be like this.”
“They were just supposed to take it out of her, not totally mess her up!”
“She’s seizing. Get some anti-seizure meds in her, stat.”
“You could just let her—”
“Not before they get it out of her.”
“So get it out of her then! The kid said it was—”
“Screw the kid, he’s useless. Worse than that, he’s been compromised. We need to get it out of her and get her out of here before they come for her, too.”
Darkness.
* * *
Ewan had never dreamed he would ever even come close to murdering someone, but he wanted nothing more than to put both hands around Jordie’s neck and throttle the life out of him. He stepped away from the blubbering kid and clenched his fists to keep himself from doing it. He punched the wall behind him instead, not caring about the pain or that he’d probably broken a few fingers.
“Where is she?” Al leaned over the kid cringing away from her. She’d already socked him a good one in the eye. She had her fingers curled into the front of his shirt so she could shake him hard enough to rattle his teeth.
“I don’t know! I haven’t seen her! I’ve been working on how to get the tech upgrades out of her, but they kept her. They were keeping her until I could figure out a way to access the codes, but it wasn’t working! Every time we tried, she’d get locked down. Something to do with the nanotech they gave her for compliance . . . you know the stuff, Betts was working on it. For the birds.”
“They gave that to Nina?” Ewan had to force himself to step back and away. “It’s not cleared for use on people!”
“I made some adjustments, it was supposed to be shiny fine. I did all the calculations and fixed the things Betts got wrong. It should have just made Ms. Bronson do what she was told. But she’s been fighting it. Maybe the enhancement tech fends it off, I don’t know, Mr. Donahue, but you have to believe me, I didn’t know what it would do to her. They keep . . . they keep resetting her every time she locks up, but I told them not to. I had nothing to do with that. I swear!” Jordie held up his hands. “Please, Mr. Donahue, you have to believe me!”
“I don’t have to believe a word out of your lying, betraying mouth. Everything you’ve ever said to me has been based on lies. All of it.” Ewan spat to the side and whirled on the kid.
They’d found him in an abandoned warehouse that had been converted to a lab and something more, something worse. Rooms had been blocked off and decorated like a hospital room. From the inside, it would appear the occupant was a patient in a high-end recovery facility, or as the tablet on the night table claimed, a client at the Limone Luxury Health Spa.
They’d kept Nina in that room. Ewan knew it, even though there was no evidence of it other than an unmade bed and a knocked-over chair. He didn’t know what they’d done to her in it, but she wasn’t there now.
The crack of Al’s hand on Jordie’s cheek had him striding back to the kid. “Where did they take her?”
“I don’t know! They promised me they’d give me whatever I wanted to work on the tech upgrades. I just had to make sure we got the stuff out of her head that she put inside it!” Jordie cowered but not fast enough.
Al cracked him across the face again. She was only slapping him, but you’d have thought she was breaking every bone in the kid’s body by the way he wriggled and wept. Ewan had no sympathy. The only reason he wasn’t also taking his fists to the kid was because he couldn’t be counted on to control himself, something Al had pointed out to him before they even got into the facility. She wouldn’t end up killing Jordie, but Ewan might get close.
“What stuff? Who put it in there?” Ewan shouted. Had Nina, frustrated by the lack of progress, done something to her own tech in an attempt at upgrading? Worse, had she gone to one of those butchers who claimed they could fix the tech?
Jordie yelped, eyes wild. “Crosson! Wanda Crosson! She used to work with you, Mr. Donahue, and she helped you invent the tech, and she worked on upgrades and she put them inside Ms. Bronson so they’d be safe, but she told me about them so I could get in touch with people who’d pay me to get them working and help her get out of prison . . .”
“What are you talking about? Wanda Crosson’s in prison.” Ewan stayed out of the way so Al could shake the kid until his teeth chattered. When she stopped, he leaned in menacingly. The sweet stink of candy breath tried to force him back, but he didn’t let it.
Jordie blinked rapidly. Snot ran out of his nostrils and foam had curdled in the corners of his mouth. “She put it in Nina’s head. It was encrypted, attached to the existing tech!”
Everything inside Ewan went first cold, then became an inferno. “What do you mean, she put it in Nina’s head? She’s in prison.”
“Before that. When she found you guys in the cabin!”
“She couldn’t have.” Ewan fell back a step or two, trying to wrap his mind around it. “How?”
“I don’t know how, exactly.” Jordie shuddered away from Al, who moved menacingly toward him again. “It was supposed to be easy to get out, but every time they tried, she started to seize or go into cardiac arrest . . .”
A fresh cold fury overtook Ewan, and there was no more holding himself back. He became aware of Al’s arm around his throat, hauling him off the kid, but he fought her, too. She dropped him with a single blow after a half-minute of struggle.
“I pulled that punch,” she said matter-of-factly when Ewan went to his knees, both hands holding his nose. “It’s not broken, but you really need to back off this kid or you’re going to end up in prison right alongside Wanda what’s-her-name. And I can’t watch you do that, it’s against my religion. So you either fire me, or back up.”
Ewan staggered to his feet and went for the kid again. “Seizures? Cardiac arrest? Did you let them kill her, you excremental—”
“She’s alive! She’s alive, Mr. Donahue, I swear to the Onegod, to any god you want!” Jordie screamed, his breath stinking.
The acrid reek of his fear sent Ewan recoiling with a choked mutter. He stood up, looking down at the kid. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know!”
Al nudged Ewan out of the way. “I’ll take care of this. You go walk this off. I’ll get him to tell us where they took her.”
Jordie started screaming as soon as Ewan stepped back. He did what Al had told him to do, though, knowing she’d be better at getting the information out of Jordie than he would, and she’d do it without killing the kid in the process. Ewan took himself away from all of it, altogether. He left the lab, the fake hospital room, and the sound of Jordie’s screams behind him, and he went outside to wait for Al.
It took only a few minutes before Al was at his side. “Got some information out of that little piece of excrement, but to be honest, I’m not sure how much he really knew. It’s safe to say that when I broke his fingers, whatever came out of his pustulant little mouth was probably the truth as he knew it. It’s better than
nothing. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The morning sun streaming through the attic’s small windows tells Nina it’s later in the morning than she’d expected. She stretches. Yawns. She’d been dreaming of something that has left her faintly disturbed, but she cannot now recall what the nightmare had been.
Beside her, the bed is empty, the sheets cool. She runs a hand over the smooth fabric. Ewan must be downstairs. When she concentrates, she smells the delicious scent of coffee, the real stuff, wafting up from downstairs.
When she pulls off the comforter, her naked body reminds Nina of the night before. They’d made love for hours. Remembering that pleasure now, she shivers. Grins. She arches and writhes on the bed, overcome with joy.
She is in love, utterly and completely. She’s never been so happy, not ever once in her life. She is going to be in love with this man forever and ever, until they are both wrinkled little apples sitting in rocking chairs on a front porch, watching their great-grandchildren gambol like lambs on a front lawn kept green with all of his money.
She finds Ewan in the kitchen, standing by the stove. He turns, a cloth flung over one shoulder. A smudge of flour streaks across his cheek. His dark hair, delightfully tousled, prompts Nina to run her fingers through it. She kisses him, savoring his flavor. He is delicious. She wants to eat him up. Nibble. Lick. Devour.
She loves him, she is in love, they are going to be happy forever. A fairy tale. A dream.
Loving Ewan is a dream.
“You’re making me pancakes?” Nina asks him.
“I’ve had a craving for them since we got home,” Ewan says. “They’re what my mother always made for me when I was a kid and stayed home sick from school. Middle of the night, it didn’t matter. She’d make me these pancakes, and no matter how bad I felt, I’d feel better.”
“Do you feel bad about something, Ewan?” The words come out of her mouth but sound as though another person has spoken them.
She is in love. Isn’t she? Forever. Children gamboling. Rockers rocking. Lambs screaming, people dreaming.
