The Pleasure Project (Jax)

by JAX

  Not to mention getting out of this alive.

  God, what had she been thinking? She had purposely thrown herself to the wolves. Suddenly all of her bravery seemed to be evaporating.

  Just then the locks on the door squealed, indicating they were being triggered to open. She backed away from the corner with the camera in it in order to bravely face whatever came at her through that door. She curled her hands into fists, much in the way her lover had a habit of doing when he was under duress.

  It was funny how the look of Eric Paulson shocked her even though she had been fully expecting his appearance. She had met him him numerous times and, before and after learning what he was, she had seen quite a few pictures of him. The same pictures over and over again. There had been hints of a receding hairline, indications that he spent most of his time sitting in a lab. Certainly not working out or engaging in any kind of sport or athleticism.

  This was not that man. This man was bigger, stronger … that receding hairline had disappeared and been reimagined into something lush and healthy. Youthful.

  All questions about whether or not he was a Morphate slid away. There was no cosmetic surgery available that could create this kind of change. The man looked far too healthy and vibrant for the world’s most hunted man who was in exile.

  Which made her wonder where she was exactly.

  “Ah, Dr. DeBruehl.” He gave her serious and enthusiastic applause. “I knew you could do it. I had every faith in you.”

  “Did you have to pump me full of drugs?” she groused. “I would have come.”

  “Pardon my methods,” he breezed on. “It’s become a bit murky to me where your loyalties lie. I’d much rather be assured of things. I work better that way.”

  Of course he did. The man had used six different batches of humans and six different protocols to test his theories, before committing to use one of them on himself. She wondered which batch of Morphate he had deemed his best work. Canid? Feline? Insect? Did it even matter what this psychopath thought? All that mattered was that she stayed alive while Kincaid recovered enough to track her with that program. Or …

  “Where are my things?”

  Paulson gestured to one of the men behind him and they walked into the room, handing her the small purse she’d been carrying.

  “We’ve removed your phone for now. You understand.”

  She shouldered the small bag, resisting the urge to look into it.

  “So I suppose you want to know how I killed the Morphate,” she said wryly.

  “Of course. That is of paramount importance.”

  “Why? Do you want to know how to kill yourself? You never struck me as the suicidal type,” she said, working hard to keep the sneer of contempt out of her voice.

  “Hardly. But the Morphates have been dogging my steps most rabidly. It makes continuing my work quite difficult.”

  “They can’t kill you.”

  “They can now. Thanks to you. But my resources are far better than those of the Gregorys. I can advance your knowledge into handheld weaponry ten times faster than they can. Creating a significant advantage for myself and anyone who wishes to pay for the privilege. You see, continuing my work also takes money, Dr. DeBruehl. There is little of that since the government conveniently disavowed my practices.”

  The implication being that the government had known all along about the atrocities he’d been committing … until he’d been caught at it. The idea left her sick and cold inside.

  “They can’t be caught funding me twice. The ‘we didn’t know’ excuse only works once. But enough of the past. Let’s focus on the future. Your future.”

  “My future as a wealthy woman. That is what you promised, isn’t it? Sounds like you don’t have much to back that up with.”

  “Perhaps not yet. But if you work with me, Doctor, as brilliantly as you have in the past, we will rectify that together.”

  “I see. And I’m supposed to trust you until then?” There was no way she would act suddenly eager and believing. He’d see right through her.

  “Perhaps not, but we have time. Let’s get you to more comfortable quarters in the meantime.”

  The one thing she noticed as they escorted her through a lab twice the size of the one in Dark Philly was that all of the light, no matter the room, was entirely artificial. There were no windows. That led her to suspect they were underground. That made her a little more anxious, but not much more so than she already was.

  “Why Morphates?” she asked suddenly. There had been hundreds of speculations, but Paulson was the only one who knew the truth. “Were you looking for immortality?”

  “Not at all,” he chuckled. “That was entirely your doing. A happy side effect of your work. Your tags not only sought out the strongest cells, they fortified them … made them nigh indestructible, as you’ve since learned. And with a tweak here and there, they even reversed the imperfections of age.” His hand went to touch his hairline, but he corrected the movement. Not soon enough, though, to keep her from noticing. It made her sick to realize that all of this tragedy and pain might have come down to one man’s vanity and his fear of dying. It made sense, then, that he’d want control of her. She had, from his point of view, just destroyed all his excellent work. She was, she suddenly realized, the biggest threat to him on the planet. There was nothing he feared … except perhaps her. He was talking a big game about developing and selling technology, but what he wanted was control of it.

  Or better yet, control of the only source of it. He hadn’t really thought she could do it at all. That would mean he’d have to admit she was better than he was. Smarter than he was. After all, it had been her work he’d used to create the Morphates. Not his own. The only thing he’d added to it was the gene splicing virus. But what if that had come from another resource, too?

  What if Eric Paulson was a sham? What if he was nothing more than a sick man who had the power and brilliance to use others as the means to his ends?

  “I’ve always been curious as to how you created the Morphate mutations,” she said, trying to sound the eager scientist. “I know how you delivered it. But the mutations themselves …”

  “There’s plenty of time to talk shop later, Dr. DeBruehl. Here are your apartments. Make yourself comfortable. You’ll be working in the morning. Unfortunately, your previous lab has been destroyed … along with all of its data. So you’ll be starting over. However, a mind like yours should have no trouble reproducing its own efforts.”

  The lab destroyed? At least it had been after hours. But the labs were beneath the human living quarters. Had anyone else been hurt? It would be very like Paulson not to care.

  “So you want exclusivity to this thing, after all.” And his evasion of her earlier question told her a great deal. Any scientist worth his or her salt would have been eager to talk about their methods. At least in the broadest of terms. But he knew she was too bright to be shammed, so he was going to avoid the topic altogether.

  So whose work had it really been?

  They might never know. That scientist might not have ever made it out of the Phoenix Project. Perhaps Paulson had not ever intended for her to make it out of the Phoenix Project. Only the precipitousness of his escape had spared her life.

  When the door closed to her new apartment with the snick of a strong lock closing her in, she ignored the ominousness of the sound. She tried to take relief in being left alone. But she knew that Paulson would have her private areas covered by cameras just as Kincaid had done. She tested the strength of the lock needlessly. Then she made a show of checking the place out before making her way to the bathroom. She’d read too many accounts of Paulson’s labs not to know the bathroom would be covered as well. But it was easy to figure the camera was behind the mirror. There weren’t any other ways of hiding it that she could think of. So she dropped her purse on the floor and checked her teeth, hair, and anything else she could think of while she surreptitiously kicked the small bag into the shower well, behind
the curtain. Then, unable to help herself, she began to strip down. She was naked and yanking the curtain closed within minutes, turning the water on as soon as she had retrieved her bag from the floor. She rummaged in the purse, protecting it from the water, and pulled out the pocket scientific calculator. Okay, so maybe it was ridiculous and stereotypical to think a scientist would carry a calculator even on a date, but it had worked. They hadn’t thought twice about it. She popped the cover of false buttons and revealed the small screen. The GPS inside of it might not work underground, but the sophisticated locator in it still would. She turned it on and watched the screen. A red dot immediately appeared at its base. That was her. What she didn’t want to see was the second dot beeping not too much farther away.

  That was Kincaid.

  And unless he had taken the laptop out of her office before Paulson had destroyed it and already managed to mount a rescue effort, then that meant he’d been captured as well.

  Because she had coaxed him into drinking her blood, knowing full well he’d be taking in the nanobytes she’d injected herself with.

  Because she had wanted a way to track him the same way she had wanted him to be able to track her.

  * * *

  9

  It took several days for Jenesis to gain enough trust so that Paulson let her move more freely through the lab. What she couldn’t plan was what she was going to do once she found Kincaid. She had discovered she had access to the lab with the key card she’d been given, but her access ended at the dormitory level of her apartment. They would have to work that out later.

  It was hard for her to be patient. Even harder for her to overcome the queasy fear she found welling up inside of herself over and over again. Not to mention she hadn’t been feeling well physically since the drugging she’d suffered. She had this incredible itching sensation underneath her skin. It made it impossible to focus. So far she’d been able to forestall showing Paulson a technique that didn’t actually exist using excuses like getting used to the lab and not feeling well, combined with more savvy resistance like wanting assurances that he wouldn’t dispose of her as soon as she showed him what she knew. He was, luckily, willing to wait until she could be lulled into a false sense of complacency or security.

  Whatever. All she wanted was to find Kincaid. This whole plan had blown up in their faces. Yes, they had found Paulson, but at the worst of prices. And every day that ticked by was a day that Kincaid was trapped like a lab rat once again, under Paulson’s power. And Jena knew that was the worst thing imaginable for him. She had to find him, and regardless of what happened to her, she had to free him.

  Following the tracker, she turned a corner and came up against two guards protecting a hallway. She pulled her pad out of her pocket and began to jot down the most complex-looking formula she could think of and, keeping her head down, tried to brush past them.

  “Excuse us, Doctor, this area is off-limits.”

  She stopped and glared at them, tapping her pen to her pad in irritation.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” she snapped at him. “You see this?” She thrust the formula under his nose. “This is what I’m going to be injecting into that Morphate you have down the hall. Only I can’t do it until I run a specialized panel and do an exam. The phlebotomist will be here directly. Send her down and try not to give her a hassle.”

  She pushed past them, leaving them looking after her and trading shrugs. She couldn’t even cheer herself in her brain. She just wanted to get to Kincaid. Everything in her was screaming the urgency of it. The need was crawling under her skin in the most uncomfortable way. A way that was making her more than a little reckless, she acknowledged.

  There was only one door at the end of the hall and it was coded for a passkey. She pulled hers from her lanyard and hoped to hell it gave her access. She didn’t know what she would do if it didn’t. She’d been doing all of this by the seat of her pants. She was frankly amazed she’d made it so far.

  The lock opened and she pushed into the room.

  Kincaid turned with a snarl for the intruder, but realizing it was she, he slammed his whole essence forward against the titanium bars of the cage they had him in. Not even a bed this time. No such illusions. He was a rat in a cage. Four walls of bars, a toilet, and a sink, all centrally located in a room full of lab equipment and, usually, technicians.

  Jenesis saw him and her eyes ran over him in stark, rapid appraisal. He was covered in raw, freshly healing scars, the nature of which she could easily imagine.

  They had been killing him. Over and over again. Every mortal injury they could come up with. She saw evidence of it all over his body. He hadn’t had enough time to fully heal, so the scars were bright and pink. Tears jumped into her eyes as she threw herself against the bars, reaching to take his face in her hands and pulling his mouth to hers.

  “I’m so sorry,” she wept.

  But his hands felt so good, incredibly good as they caught her by the backs of her shoulders and held her up to him as well as he could with the cold gray impediment between them.

  “There are cameras everywhere,” he rasped as he checked her over for changes. “We don’t have time.”

  But even as she fumbled with her key card she felt him growling softly into her mouth. She responded in kind, the sound coming out of nowhere.

  The cage lock beeped open as they both pulled back in surprise and stared at each other. Kincaid swung around the door threshold, his hands never leaving her. He bent quickly to sniff beneath her left ear.

  “What?” She knew something was wrong. And she was too smart not to know what was happening. But anxiety was blocking her comprehension. She broke away from him except for his hand, pulling him toward the door. “You have to go! There’re two guards at the end of the hall, and my card will take you up to the top dormitory level. But …”

  “Jena.”

  He stopped her, pulling her back toward him. He lifted her hand, the fingers that gripped his with painful fear, and touched his lips to them.

  She shook her head, tears leaping into her eyes, her voice suddenly gone.

  “What’d he do to you, babe?”

  She shook her head again. “Nothing more than what I deserved,” she croaked. How ironic this was, she thought. But it made sense, didn’t it? Paulson found her to be the most precious of commodities. He wouldn’t want anything to happen to his golden goose. And there was only one way he could guarantee that.

  She realized all of the itching under her skin had stopped the minute she’d come into contact with Kin. It had changed into something else. A hunger. A wild, unbelievable hunger. A hunger so extreme that her mouth began to ache. It made her realize she’d hardly eaten a thing these past few days. It made her realize a lot of things.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said hastily, trying to push all that aside, trying again to pull him toward the door. “You have to go!”

  “I have to go? And what about you?” he demanded.

  “I don’t have the strength to keep up with you. I’ll stay behind as a distraction. If I go he’ll just tear up the world hunting me down again. It’s more important that you get free.”

  “And you think I’ll do that? You think I’ll leave you here to suffer a lifetime of Paulson’s retributions? To suffer his tactics as he tries to force you to give up a technique you don’t have?”

  “Actually, I already suspected she didn’t have it.”

  They both jolted around to see Paulson standing in the doorway, and Jenesis felt her entire world bottom out. Of course. Of course, she thought numbly. Paulson was too thorough for it to make any sense that she would be able to get past guards and locks so easily. But she hadn’t thought of that. She’d had a single-minded focus. She’d needed to get to Kincaid. She needed him. Even as she stood there, she felt her whole body burning with that need. As he pulled her protectively against himself, she felt her body wriggling of its own accord to burrow against him. Heat burned through her as she came into snug contact wi
th him. A heat like nothing she’d ever felt. She forgot all about Paulson. Forgot all about their chances for escape evaporating into thin air.

  “I knew that she couldn’t be trusted. I figured the best way of testing her loyalties and of finding out the truth was to change her. We injected her when she was first taken. My spies in your lab suspected you had a sexual connection. It stood to reason she’d be even more driven to you if I used your protocol on her. Whether she was aware of it or not, she would be impatiently driven to you. The mating drive often impedes all logic. And as brilliant as she is, I needed something quite powerful to impede her logic.” Paulson turned to the two guards at his back. “Lock them both in the cage. Maybe a few days of watching her mate suffer up close will make her more tractable. You see, she may not have found out the solution I want, but I know she is fully capable of it. Just as you knew it, Gregory.”

  “You just decided you weren’t willing to wait for her to come to it on her own?” Kincaid snapped and snarled when the guard came forward, reaching for Jenesis. He jerked her behind him, even when she instinctively rumbled a threat of her own, gnashing her teeth at the guard. She recoiled suddenly, her hand jerking up to her mouth. He knew the pain she was in immediately. It beat through him instinctively as well as with memory. Her jaw would be hurting incredibly as her teeth made room for the fangs that wanted to explode free for the first time.

  But he couldn’t spare her the attention and affection, the comforting he would have given to her under other circumstances. Whatever else happened, he could not let them be locked up in that cage again. As strong as a Morphate was, titanium was stronger. Kincaid lurched toward the guards, growling fiercely at them. Both guards responded in kind.

  All right. Three Morphates to two, and one of his two had no idea how to be a Morphate. Still, he’d fought worse odds.

  “Big mistake,” Kincaid hissed through his fangs. “I’m not an Alpha for nothing. And being a Morphate doesn’t make you Alpha, Paulson.”

  Jenesis felt Kincaid spring away from her and into the trio of men. Her theory about the savagery an Alpha male must be capable of was nothing compared to what she was seeing. Kin went for the guard on the right first, savagely ripping his head half from his shoulders. The opposite guard pulled his weapon and began shooting wildly at Kincaid, forcing Paulson, who was in the way, to hit the deck or suffer being shot. The first guard hit the floor in a bloody, twitching mess as Kincaid turned on the second man standing.