by Katie Allen
It appeared to be a normal, medium-sized padlock, the type that secured high-school lockers. After turning it over in her hands a few times, she passed it to Darwin, who immediately passed it back to her.
“Try to break it,” he said.
Obediently, she clicked the lock closed and yanked at it, unsuccessfully trying to pull the curved metal free of the base. This time, when she handed the lock to him, Darwin accepted it. His hands closed around the lock and, after a twisting pull that appeared to cost him about as much effort as opening a mayonnaise jar, he extended his open palms to her. On one sat the round part of the lock containing the black dial, and on the other was the metal loop of the top, both ends mangled.
Running a tentative finger across the twisted, grooved metal where the loop had been attached to the body of the lock, she shook her head, trying to dislodge the growing belief that maybe, just maybe, the bent screwdriver and broken lock weren’t tricks. She looked at Darwin and then Cal, wondering if the science-fiction-like story she’d been told could possibly be the truth.
“C,” he said, bringing her out of her thoughts and making her jump. “Toss me something else. Gently.”
“No way, dickhead.” Calvin leaned back in his chair. “She fucking gets it. You just want to break shit now.”
With a grin and a shrug, Darwin nodded. “It’s kind of fun. I always had to be careful when I was working construction not to show how strong I actually was. It’s nice to be able to let go and just destroy.”
The door into the lodge slammed against the wall, and she hopped sideways, as if to hide behind Darwin. The two men just looked in that direction, as calm as if someone had knocked politely.
“You son of a bitch,” Ari growled, stalking into the workshop. Daphne took another step behind Darwin’s chair. “What are you doing in here? I should’ve known not to trust you to watch her.”
“Just trying to fix your fuck-up,” Darwin said, tossing the pieces of the broken lock into the air and catching them again one-handed. He seemed calm, unlike Daphne, whose heart was pounding like a jackhammer.
With an inarticulate snarl, Ari moved toward her, catching her arm before she had time to move out of reach. She squeaked, instantly embarrassed at her wimpy behavior. She should be standing up to him, refusing to move, demanding to be taken home. Once again, she was failing the kickass-kidnap-victim test. There was no ass-kicking on her end. For God’s sake, she couldn’t even catch a gently tossed padlock.
Darwin’s hand shot out, and he grabbed Ari’s wrist. “Easy there, A. I’m just letting her know what’s going on so she keeps our secret once she’s home. If she thinks we’re all felonious assholes like you,” he gave Ari a sharp look, “then she’s going to have the cops swarming this place as soon as she’s free of here.”
The three of them froze for several dragging seconds, locked together in a tense triangle, before Ari relaxed just enough that Darwin released his grip on the other man’s wrist. Ari kept his fingers wrapped around her arm as he gave a short nod.
“I’ll take the tour from here,” Ari said, practically spitting out the word “tour.”
Cal snorted. “I’m sure she’d just love to have the asshole who grabbed her show her around her fucking prison.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Daphne’s gaze bounced from one man to the other. She felt as if she were waist-deep in testosterone soup and so completely out of her comfort zone that it wasn’t even funny. The idea of spending time with Ari was freaking her out a little, but it beat the alternative—staying alone and bored in her loft. Curiosity burned to find out more about this odd group of people, especially after Darwin’s strength show-and-tell.
“Come on.” Ari hauled her toward the door he’d just slammed through a few minutes before.
She scrambled to keep up with his long strides. “Ow.”
Glancing down at his grip on Daphne’s arm, he looked surprised, as if he’d forgotten he’d been holding on to her. His fingers relaxed slightly but didn’t let her go. “Sorry.”
She opened her mouth to reply, but her attention was diverted by the room they’d entered. It appeared to be the main lodge room, with windows covering one wall, letting in sunlight and a view of pine trees and mountain peaks. A dining table stretched in front of a huge stone fireplace, running parallel to what appeared to be an unused reception counter.
“Did this place used to be a resort?” she asked as Ari towed her through the lofted room toward another door.
He gave an affirmative grunt. His tour-guide skills were a little lacking. As he reached for the doorknob, a loud bang from the other side of the door sent him reeling backward, his palms pressed against his ears.
Daphne flinched, taking several quick steps in reverse until her back pressed against the edge of the table. She stared at the closed door.
Apparently recovered, Ari gave his head a hard shake and stomped to the door. As he yanked it open, Daphne cringed, her hands coming up to protect her face from whatever missiles might come flying through the doorway.
“Claire!” Ari bellowed. “What the fuck?”
“What?” a female voice retorted, not sounding at all intimidated by Ari. “Working on the flash-bang grenade project kind of suited my mood today.”
“Why the hell are you setting off fucking bombs in here? Are you crazy?”
“It’s a flash-bang, dummy. There’s no shrapnel.”
Daphne finally recognized the female voice. It belonged to the second woman who’d been hovering around her bed when Daphne had woken that morning, the one who’d offered her the unopened bottle of water. Feeling reassured by the fact that no projectiles had thus far flown in her direction, she moved toward the doorway, peeking around the doorjamb into the room.
Although most of her view was blocked by Ari’s broad back, Daphne could see enough around his edges to tell that the room had been converted into an odd type of lab.
“You knew we were right outside when you set off that last one,” Ari growled. “That shit hurt.” He pressed a hand to his ear, as if it were still ringing.
“You know what else hurt?” Claire asked, not sounding at all guilty to Daphne’s ears. “Knowing that a sedative I helped develop was used in a crime. An immoral, unjustifiable, totally illegal crime!”
“It wasn’t unjustifiable,” Ari muttered, and Claire made a growling sound.
“You kidnapped her, A.”
“Well, you tried to deafen her. How is that any better?”
Daphne took a couple of steps into the room and slid to the side so she could see Claire and the rest of the lab. She’d half-expected a white lab coat, but Claire was dressed in jeans and a hoodie, with earmuff-style ear protection hooked around her neck. Her hands were fisted at her hips.
“I knew it wouldn’t hurt her ears with the door closed.” Claire smirked a little. “Just bionic ears like yours.”
Another door on the other side of the room swung open, and one of the guys stuck his head inside. “Okay, Mouse?”
Claire’s expression sweetened as she turned toward him. “Fine, Ed. Just teaching Ari a little lesson about what happens when he uses me to commit crimes.”
Ed glanced at the blackened area obviously used for detonation. “Success?”
She grinned at him. “The magnesium is much brighter than the aluminum. It really puts the ‘flash’ in ‘flash-bang.’”
With a nod and a small smile, the man retreated, closing the door behind him.
“Fine. I’m sorry I used your drug to commit a crime,” Ari grumbled.
“Humph.” Claire raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t sound like you’re all that sorry you committed the crime.”
Ari narrowed his eyes at her. “I’d do anything to help B.”
A flash of guilt crossed Claire’s face. “I know. I�
��m sorry I haven’t been more help with that.”
“Not your area of expertise,” he said, darting a look at Daphne.
“Kidnapping is still not the answer,” Claire said, following his glance.
He just shrugged, not even pretending to look guilty. He looked at Daphne and swung an arm out to the side, Vanna White—style. “Claire’s lab.”
Now his tour-guide skills were kicking in. “I see that,” Daphne said.
Claire walked over, holding out her hand to Daphne. “I’m Claire. I’m sorry you were dragged into all this by that moron,” she said, flicking her gaze at Ari, who muttered something rude under his breath.
“Thanks. I’m Daphne,” she responded, shaking the other woman’s hand. “It’s nice to meet you, despite...um, well, everything.”
Claire rolled her eyes. “I’m also sorry about my part in developing an effective knockout drug. I was thinking it’d be handy more for defensive uses, rather than for kidnapping innocent women. It did show me that the effects of the drug, when inhaled, last longer than when injected, although it could’ve been because you weigh about fifty pounds. I’m going to have to do some more research on that.”
Daphne wasn’t sure what the polite answer to that was, so she kept her mouth shut.
“I’m working on a bunch of different projects.” Claire gestured at the expansive lab. “I’m really having fun with less-than-lethal weapon development.”
“That’s...nice?”
“I was supposed to work on the guys’ memory retrieval but, as Ari mentioned, that turned out to be outside my area of expertise. See, long-term memories are stored in various locations in the cerebral cortex, so I doubt physical damage or removal caused this, since the guys remember nothing from before their time in the lab. If it was neurological amnesia, why don’t any of the guys remember anything, even a single memory from before? On the other hand, if it’s psychogenic, what are the chances all the guys reacted exactly the same way to the trauma of their lab experiences? Plus, memory loss from an emotional trauma is usually short-term.
“It could possibly be an issue with their hippocampus, which is used in memory retrieval, but that is also unlikely, since the hippocampus is also used in forming new memories, which the guys seem to have no problem doing. I don’t even know where to start figuring out the cause of their group amnesia. I keep trying to learn more, but so much isn’t known about the brain—and that’s normal people’s brains, not bionic brains that’ve been fried in an evil lab. No offense, A.”
He snorted while Daphne frowned in concentration, trying to absorb the monster load of information that had just been dumped on her.
“Plus,” Claire chattered on, ignoring the lack of verbal response from her audience, “all of my lab experience has been with rats and cancer, so I’m really out of my element here.”
She gestured toward a square container tucked on a sturdy shelf built into one wall. Perplexed, Daphne looked at the box and then back at Claire. Her expression must have given away her confusion, because Claire grinned and crossed to the shelf, removing the lid and reaching inside the container.
“Oh!” Daphne forced herself not to jump back as Claire’s hand reemerged, holding a small, white, suspiciously furry object. “A rat. How...um...nice.”
“This is Wilma. Ed...liberated her from the lab where I used to work.” She tucked the rodent into her front hoodie pocket. “I built this cage for her when Lauren was working in here with me and kept blowing up stuff. The cage muffles loud sounds, so Wilma isn’t deafened when things explode.”
“You’re the one who’s done rat-brain MRIs,” Daphne said, making the connection to the earlier conversation with Ari and Benjy.
“That’s me.” She frowned. “At least it was, until my asshole ex-boss tried to kill me for not going along with his plan to falsify research for grant money. But, hey, I got Ed out of the deal, so it was worth it.”
“Wait...what?”
With a casual flip of her hand, Claire waved off the word bomb she’d just dropped. “I’ll tell you the whole sordid story some other time when you have a few hours and I’ve had a few drinks. I still get really pissed off telling that story.”
“So...” Daphne tried to think of an inoffensive way of bringing up the question. Finally, she gave up and just asked. “You came here...voluntarily?”
“Yes,” Claire answered, shooting a glare at Ari. “Everyone else here has a moral compass that actually works.” She paused, making a face. “Well, that works most of the time. If the lab jerks get close, especially to any of us civilians, all bets are off.”
Ari was doing his crossed-arm, bodybuilder-model pose again, his eyes narrow as he glared back at Claire.
She ignored him and kept talking. “I wasn’t exactly thrilled to leave my home and job and friends, but I had to for my safety, thanks to my super-psycho ex-boss. Once the lab agents became aware of me and knew Ed was a little...attached—”
Ari’s amused grunt interrupted her. “Just a little.”
Claire looked as though she was holding back a smile. “Anyway, the fake charges against me went away, but the lab asses were still after us. After they figured out that they could use me to get to Ed, going home really wasn’t an option anymore, even if I’d wanted to leave Ed, which I didn’t. That’s why we came here—right now it’s the safest place to be. Plus, I wanted to help in the lab, although developing a drug to let A-is-for-Asshole here kidnap you wasn’t really the kind of help I had in mind.”
With a groan, Ari latched on to Daphne’s arm and tugged her back toward the reception turned dining room. “Enough. We’ll let you get back to blowing up shit. Maybe that’ll help your mood.”
“My mood?” Claire shouted as he hauled Daphne through the doorway. “Improve my mood? You mother—”
Ari slammed the door closed behind them, turning Claire’s torrent of abuse into faint, unintelligible mumblings. Daphne gave the door a curious glance.
“Soundproofed,” he explained. “Not completely, obviously, but enough so that flash-bang didn’t make my ears actually bleed. We wanted to cut down the explosion noise while still being able to hear if Claire was in trouble.”
“Oh.” She felt like so much information had been thrown at her that she just wasn’t able to absorb any more. Following Ari in a semi-zombie state, she was towed through the rest of the lodge. There was a commercial-style kitchen, lots of storage, a well-equipped fitness room, and a bunch of other rooms that started blurring together in her mind. At one point, they passed Lauren in the hall. She smiled at Daphne, gave Ari an annoyed glare and disappeared through the swinging door into the kitchen.
“Everyone’s pissed at me today,” he muttered.
“Wonder why.” She yawned. “What’s Lauren doing in the kitchen?”
“It’s her night to cook. We switch off making the meals.”
“Oh,” she said through another yawn.
After a sharp glance at her face, Ari must have realized that she was mentally done, since he backed out of the doorway he’d been about to enter. He backtracked to one of the storage areas that had been set up like a huge closet. Leaving her by the entrance, he wove through the racks of clothes, every so often pulling an item off its hanger and draping it over his arm.
By the time he returned to where she was propped against the wall, the pile in his arms was huge. She cocked a curious eyebrow.
“Clothes,” he non-explained. When her eyebrow didn’t lower, he elaborated—a little. “For you.”
“Me?” She eyed the mound of clothing. “That’s like a year’s worth of clothes.”
He shrugged. “So?”
“So,” she said slowly, as panic began to bubble inside her. “I’m not going to be here long enough to need even a quarter of those things. In fact, if you bring me back today, I won’t have
to wear any of those clothes, and you can just put them back unused inside this ginormous closet. You won’t even have to wash them first.”
His jaw tightened, but he didn’t say anything as he sifted through the clothes, finally pulling out a red down jacket and holding it out to her. She didn’t take it. It felt too much like she was agreeing to stay if she even touched any of the clothes he was offering.
“Take it,” he finally growled, giving the coat a shake.
With a sigh, she reluctantly accepted it and put it on. The jacket was wonderfully warm, and she wondered if she had a chance of surviving an escape hike down the mountain in this coat. As quickly as the idea occurred to her, she dismissed it. The added warmth might help in an escape attempt, but she still had the other problems—no transport, no map, no compass, and no clue how to use that compass even if she did have one.
“Here.” He didn’t wait for her to take anything from him this time, but just plopped a stocking hat on her head and tucked a glove in each pocket of her coat. Warm from tramping all over the lodge, she reached up to pull the hat off her head, but he caught her wrist.
“Leave it,” he said. “We’re headed back outside.”
With a sigh, she dropped her hand, leaving her hat sitting crookedly on her head. Ari guided her down a hallway to an exit. As they emerged into the sunny afternoon, the cold air hit her cheeks like a slap. Daphne tucked her bare hands into her pockets next to the gloves as she blinked, her eyes slowly adjusting to the brightness.
Now that she had a coat and hat, she didn’t need to run to warm herself. Instead, she walked leisurely, looking around as she followed the path back to the cabin. It was a really beautiful location, a perfect mountain retreat she’d have loved to experience—if she’d gotten a choice in whether to be on this little “vacation.”
