But Connor just shook his head. “She was a horrible woman. No condolences necessary.” He turned to me, his eyes sea-foam green in the winter light spilling through the window. There was no remorse in his expression. No emotion at all. And I realized that this, him now, was the real him. The charming, polished, poised Connor was a mask.
He’d been dulled by something in his past, until he felt nothing at all.
Sometimes I worried that’s who I would become. Maybe I already had.
“How old were you?” I asked.
“Eighteen.”
“How long ago was that?”
The mask slipped back on, and he cocked a grin. “If I told you that, you’d know how old I was, and if you knew how old I was, I’d lose some of this mystery between us.”
I shook my head. “Not true. I promise.”
“Come on,” he said, deflecting the question again. “My car is waiting.”
* * *
His car was a black Porsche with quilted leather seats that reminded me of snake skin. A screen in the dash glowed in the darkness as he started the car up. The engine didn’t rumble, it roared, and when Connor hit the gas, I felt the horsepower through my seat.
“Where are we going?” I asked when he stopped for a red light.
“You have questions about the program, and I told you to wait until you were ready. Now you’re ready.”
I angled my body toward him. “We couldn’t talk back there?” I hitched a thumb over my shoulder in the direction we’d come.
The light turned green, and he hit the gas, shifting through several gears. The force of the takeoff pressed me against my seat.
“There’s something you need to know about that place,” he said, not taking his attention off the road.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“There are eyes and ears everywhere.”
The smile faded from my lips. “Even in my room?”
“Even in your room.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“It’s not your house. Or your dorm room. Or an apartment. It’s a high-level research facility. There is no such thing as privacy.”
Now I understood why he was taking me out—so we could talk without limits. Was he really going to tell me whatever I wanted to know?
I doubted that, but maybe he’d be more honest than he would have been in the building.
“So, should I start asking now? Or are we stopping somewhere?”
“We’re going out for dinner. A proper dinner.”
I raised a brow. “Oh? I wish you’d told me. I would have put on something nicer.”
He glanced over at me briefly, and the corner of his mouth quirked. “I think you look beautiful.”
I wore a smile the whole way to our destination, a Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of town. The place was packed for a Wednesday night, and after reading the specials board—five dollar margaritas!—I knew why.
Connor ordered a beer and nothing else. I started to order an ice tea with a chicken salad, but he cut me off. “You don’t want to try one of their margaritas? Best in town.”
I looked up at the waiter, a slim young man, and smiled. “I would, but I’m not twenty-one.”
Connor said something in Spanish to the man, and he replied in kind. The waiter looked over his shoulder at a man up front of the restaurant. The manager maybe? The older man nodded, and our waiter replied, “Si, señor,” and hurried off.
“What did you say?” I asked Connor.
He leaned closer. “I told him you’d do the night’s dishes if he got you a margarita.”
“You did not.”
He chuckled to himself and leaned back into the booth. “No, I didn’t.”
Salsa music played across the sound system, but it was nearly drowned out by the laughter and conversation around us. Tequila would do that.
“Really, though,” I said, “what did you say to him?”
He started to reply, but was interrupted by said waiter, setting a large margarita in front of me.
I frowned. “Are you serious? How did you—?”
“Gracias,” Connor said as he received his ordered beer. The waiter left us again.
“Is this some kind of test?” I asked, and looked around, thinking perhaps I’d see Natalia, or Sam, or even OB.
But none of the faces were familiar.
“Not a test, and yes, I’m very serious,” Connor answered. “I cleared your day tomorrow. Drink. Have fun. You need it.”
I examined his face, searching for a lie.
All of my scrutiny found nothing.
“All right.” I stuck the straw between my thumb and index finger, and drew in. The tequila was smooth, the lime tangy, just like I liked it.
“So, can I start asking now?” I asked eagerly.
Connor took a drink of his beer. “Let me get at least one in me, huh?”
“Fine,” I grumbled, and spent the next ten minutes poking fun at him and his fancy Porsche. He took it all in stride, finishing his beer, and ordering another round for both of us.
“If not a Porsche, then what kind of car should I drive?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Something less pretentious, maybe?”
I totally screwed up pretentious and made it sound like pretennis, which made Connor laugh real hard.
“Name something less pretennis,” he said with a chuckle.
“A truck or something. Or, like, just an SUV.”
“Uh-huh.” He checked his cell phone before looking back up. “A truck wouldn’t go as fast as my Porsche.”
“So you drive it for the speed?”
He nodded. “Why else?”
“For the girls.”
Another laugh. The megawatt smile nearly blinded me. “I don’t need a car to get girls.”
I waggled my finger at him. “Of course you don’t. Look at that face.”
He left his side of the booth and slid in next to me, propping his arm up on the back of the seat. I got a deep breath of his cologne. Something sweet, and rich. I inhaled again.
“Tell me about my face,” he said.
His knee bumped into mine beneath the table. Instinctively, I pulled away and immediately wished I hadn’t. Heat spread from the touch, all the way up my thigh.
“Your face is pretty,” I said.
He scooted closer. “So is yours.”
Everything he said now made me laugh. Where was my food? I hadn’t eaten dinner. The two margaritas I’d had hit me hard. I could hardly see straight.
I shook my head back and forth, back and forth.
“You’re using those faces to distract me.”
He smirked. “Do I have more than one?”
Even through the drunken haze, it hit me how loaded that question was.
“You haven’t told me a thing about the research facility yet,” I pointed out.
“Ahh.” He reached across the table for his beer. “Yes. That’s right. Ask me anything you want.”
I pressed myself into the wall so I was sitting sideways in the booth. “Anything?”
He spread out his arms. “I am an open book.”
“What is the research facility researching?”
“No beating around the bush?” Connor asked. He didn’t want for a response. “Our facility is a branch of the Scion Corporation. They specialize in military weaponry but are expanding into bio-alteration.”
Bio-alteration. It sounded like a code word for something else.
I recalled the conversation I’d had with OB before I came here and remembered something important.
“Genetic alteration,” I said.
“Genetic alteration,” Connor echoed.
The tequila turned sour in my gut. I’d thought OB had been telling lies when he’d first talked about the program, as if to make it sound more important than it was. I’d been wrong.
“You aren’t kidding, are you?” I asked.
Connor shook his head slowly, pinning me with his eyes. The mask
was gone. Just like that. Here, surrounded by all of these people, the music, the laughter. It was unsettling, like I was being stalked by a rattlesnake right out in the open, and no one here would help me.
I pushed the margarita away. Which one was that? My second? My third? How come Connor didn’t seem drunk at all?
“Have I already been genetically altered?” I asked quietly.
“No.”
I wanted to ask if I would be, and if I would have a say in it, and when I could talk to OB, damn it, but the restaurant manager appeared at our booth and said something to Connor in Spanish.
Connor nodded and handed the guy a few bills before coaxing me out of the booth. “Time to go.”
“I didn’t get my chicken salad,” I said.
“I’ll pick you up something on the way.”
I had the unsettling feeling that he was rushing me out of here, and for a second I wondered if my underage drinking had caused the restaurant problems. I looked around quickly, but the waitstaff didn’t seem at all concerned with us.
It was only Connor who was hurrying.
He took my arm, held me close to his side as he led me out of the restaurant and into the cool night air. Wind rushed around the corner of the building, throwing my hair in my face.
Connor turned me so my back was against the restaurant’s exterior as he cleared the hair from my eyes and mouth.
“Better?” he asked.
I looked up at him, his lips wet in the pooling light of the restaurant windows.
“Lots.”
His fingers ran along my lower jaw, through my hair, until he cupped the back of my head.
“I meant what I said,” he whispered, “about you looking beautiful.”
“You probably say that to all the girls,” I whispered back, as goose bumps rose on my arms, “when you drive them around in your Porsche.”
“I don’t.”
I closed my eyes and felt him lean closer, his breath fanning across my face. “Dani,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t be scared.” And then he kissed me. Soft. Eager. Then hard, and hungry. His other hand trailed down my side to my hip, drawing me closer until I no longer felt the cold wind biting through my clothing.
And I wondered, absently, why his mouth didn’t have the bitter aftertaste of beer. Why he’d told me not to be scared. Didn’t he know I was Dani, that fearless girl? I was never scared of anything.
He pulled away just as someone stepped up behind him and whacked him on the back of the head with the butt of a gun.
I stood there frozen as Connor crumpled at my feet, my lips still swollen from the kiss, my knees still weak from too much tequila and too much Connor.
“Get in the car,” the man said, his face hidden in a motorcycle helmet.
I looked from him to the barrel of the gun pointed at my face. I had a hard time distinguishing between the real him and the duplicated him my drunken brain produced.
“What car?” I asked, and he grabbed me by the arm and dragged me to a black sedan idling in the parking lot. He opened the back door with one hand and pushed me inside with the other. Before the door was slammed shut, a black cotton bag was thrown over my head.
“Don’t make a sound,” someone said.
* * *
I woke in a dark, dank room, the floor covered in dirt and dust and grit.
Something shuffled nearby. “Hello?” I croaked, my throat raw.
“Dani?”
It was Sam.
“Thank God.” I scurried to him, locating him in the far corner of the room. I could barely make out his face in the darkness.
“I thought I was alone,” he whispered. “I didn’t even know you were there.”
I threaded my fingers with his and squeezed. “I’m here. Do you know what happened?”
“No. I was walking on the beach when someone grabbed me. Are you okay?”
No, I’m not. Not at all. I’m scared, I wanted to say. I’m so scared I feel like I might vomit.
My stomach churned from the leftover tequila, and the uncertainty of what might come next.
We sat there for a long time, whispering in the dark to each other about nothing in particular. Whatever we could think of to keep our minds off what was happening.
Eventually, we fell asleep huddling against each other and woke some time later to the sound of a door creaking open.
“Get up,” someone said.
We clumsily got to our feet.
We were led, blinking and disoriented, down a dark hallway and into another room, this one only a bit cleaner, with one overhead light flickering in the gloom.
The door was shut behind us. The man sat us in matching metal chairs near a window that looked out over darkness.
“Who do you work for?” the man asked.
Sam shook his head. “We don’t work for anyone. You’ve made a mistake.”
The man stood up and socked Sam in the face. I shrieked.
“Again, who do you work for?” The man looked at me next.
I stuttered for several painful seconds. “Millerton Corporation,” I lied.
The man scowled. “Never heard of it.”
“I swear.” My heart thumped against my ribcage. I looked him in the face as I went on. “We have no idea what’s happening. Or what this is. Please don’t hurt us.”
The scowl deepened, and the man stood up again and punched Sam in the stomach. He doubled over, all the air rushing out of his lungs.
“Stop!” I screamed.
“You keep doing that,” the man said, “and I’ll keep doing this.” He went in for another blow, but Sam leaped up and socked the guy.
The man fell over backward, and I just stood there and stared at him.
Sam hurried to the window and fought with the frozen frame for what felt like an hour until it finally gave way. Cold air rushed in, stealing the breath from my throat.
Sam carted a chair over to the window and climbed out. I went up next, but he’d already scrambled away from the building. “Wait for me!” I shouted into the gloom.
He came back, grabbed my hands and hauled me through. “Go! Go!” he said, shoving me aimlessly. I could hear the distant sound of crashing waves.
Lake Michigan.
If we just followed the shoreline, eventually we’d run into someone or something. A town maybe.
We ran and ran and ran until I felt like I’d used all of the oxygen in my lungs, and then we ran some more, continuing over the dunes, beach grass whipping us as we went.
Finally, we rounded a bend and lights winked on in the distance.
I could make it that far. I could do it and this would be over. I’d go home. And goddamn it, I was done with this. Whatever this was. I just want to go home.
The wind was so high, the waves were crashing so loudly, that I didn’t hear the footsteps pounding behind us until there was someone there, reaching for Sam.
Sam kicked back with a boot, hitting the person dead in the gut. The assailant went down, disappearing in a dune bush.
I kept running, and Sam caught up, easily overtaking me in the race up the next dune. He stopped at the top for the briefest of seconds and cocked his foot out. I saw it too late, tripped over his foot and slammed to the ground.
Sam took off in the opposite direction. I scrambled upright, and chased after his darkening figure. My lungs constricted, my throat felt raw, but the lights in the distance were getting bigger, brighter. We were almost there.
Only twenty feet spread between Sam and me. I called out his name, but the rushing of the wind swallowed my voice.
Down the next dune, I started for the beach, knowing the sand there would be wet and frozen and easier to run on. I motioned for Sam to follow me and, as I did, caught the movement of a second attacker behind him.
The person grabbed a fold of Sam’s shirt and hauled him back.
I caught the glint of a gun pointed at his head, the moonlight reflecting off the metal slide.
My clothing flapped around my frame. I couldn’t feel my fingers. I didn’t even have a coat.
The wind cut in off the lake, clearing the hair from my face. There was just enough moonlight to see the panic etched across Sam’s face before he mouthed, Don’t go.
And I couldn’t.
I couldn’t leave him.
I held my hands up. “Okay,” I yelled. “I’m coming back.”
I took two, then three, then four tentative steps.
When I was within ten feet of them, the man pushed Sam away, brought his gun up, and shot him in the head.
The spray of blood disappeared in the sand, and Sam fell over, whacking his head against a chunk of ice.
I brought my hands up to my mouth and screamed into them as the man marched toward me and I backpedaled.
I fell, scrambled in the sand, only to have him grab me by the foot and yank.
I kept screaming.
Was I hallucinating? Had I passed out from too much tequila?
Wake up! Wake up! I told myself, but I didn’t. And the cold air made the tears streaking down my face feel bitingly real.
I was going to die. And no one would know where I was. And Anna would be left alone forever.
I’d failed her.
The man crawled on top of me. His gun was gone. I flailed, but he caught my hands and held them back.
His face came into the moonlight and all the breath left my lungs.
It was the boy from the hallway, on level two. The handsome one. The one who was full of secrets.
“Lesson number one: Don’t ever go back for someone,” he said. “Especially when they leave you as bait.”
And then I screamed again as I felt the prick of a needle in my neck. My eyes slid shut.
* * *
When I came to, I was in a plain white room, covered in plain white blankets. The bed beneath me was paper-thin.
For a second, I thought I’d dreamed it all. The training. Natalia. Connor kissing me. Sam dying. But when I tried to sit up, every muscle in my body complained, and I recalled the dark room, cowering on the floor with Sam at my side. I remembered Sam getting shot in the head. I could still feel the weight of the other boy on top of me, telling me never to go back for someone. Lesson number one.
I looked around and saw Connor was in the room with me.
Forged: An Altered Series Prequel Page 4
