As Cold As Ice

by Mandy Rosko

  What had given him away? The fact that they'd gone down to the arena without needing to? Had there been cameras watching them after all?

  Soren hadn't brought his scrambler with them into that room, and even if he had, she hadn't seen him activate it before he'd told her the image she'd seen on Markus' screen wasn't real.

  Markus had to have known. Regardless of how it had happened, he'd found out, and Soren was gone.

  Jessica's throat closed. She bit her lips together when she felt a tremble there, and then she started cracking her knuckles as she paced around the tiny white changing room, waiting for someone to come back and retrieve her.

  There was nothing in the room she could smash or destroy, other than the little three-legged stool in the corner. She doubted she could get away with breaking that thing without having someone rush through the curtains to demand what the hell she'd been doing, anyway.

  Cracking her knuckles was another nice way of relieving stress when there was nothing else for her to take her aggression out on. Right then, she wanted to cry. Actually cry, like some little girl who’d dropped the one scoop of ice cream that had been placed on her cone. She also wanted to kill everyone in this building then light them on fire. Why couldn't her powers be fire? Why did Cindy have to get something cool like that?

  She wanted the fucking shackles removed from her wrists.

  Someone finally came back for her, the same woman who'd handed her the pajamas. She held out her arm, and Jessica walked to her. She allowed the older woman to put her hand on Jessica's shoulder as she led her out of the white room where she'd been tested, poked and prodded.

  How was she supposed to get out of there without knowing what happened to Soren? How was she supposed to cut the tracker out of her arm then leave him behind? She didn't even know if he was dead or not. He could be dead. These people didn't exactly care about anything other than themselves. Markus might've decided it was too humiliating to have three employees in a matter of weeks revealed to him as either paranormals or traitors, and just killed him for the fun of it.

  Jessica clenched her fists tight and followed the female doctor, along with at least three other guards, down to one of the coded elevators.

  She kept her face as neutral as possible, though she felt the twitch of a coming frown when the button for the basement floor was pressed.

  Was she expected to sit in her cell again for a while amongst the other paranormals before they were let out?

  She didn't even know the details of how that was going to happen. Stupid Charles and his stupid asshole need-to-know bullshit.

  No one in the elevator with her would offer any answers either, so she didn't ask, just waited until they were on the basement floor.

  When they made it, she was greeted with more guards, a couple of handlers, and even the asshole handler who’d felt her up when she was in bed.

  The guy smiled at her. She winked at him, and made a gentle kissing motion with her lips, but no sounds. She didn’t exactly smile at him, but she knew how to give off that come hither look that let guys know she was in the mood for sex.

  The kid actually blushed, and if she was lucky, was also troubled with an immediate erection as he was surrounded by his peers.

  God, she really hoped she’d done that to him. Jessica was a woman, but she knew how much guys, especially young guys, were embarrassed whenever they had public erections. If Jessica was lucky, then one of his friends would notice the awkward way he started to shift from foot to foot, and then later rub it in his face when he got to the locker room.

  “You shouldn’t do things like that,” said the female doctor walking with her. Apparently, Jessica’s teasing wasn’t going unnoticed. The guards and handlers walking with her probably saw it, as well. Good. That meant the kid was definitely going to hear about it later.

  “Why not?”

  The older woman’s lips thinned. “I don’t necessarily agree with a lot of the things some of the handlers and guards do around here, but they do like sneaking into the rooms of pretty paranormals from time to time. If you tease him like that, he’ll want to get back at you. No one would help you if that happened.”

  Jessica rolled her eyes.

  “I’m being serious. Don’t give him a reason to think he needs to retaliate.”

  “Sex is sex. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t matter? You don’t care if that young man tried to rape you because you teased him?”

  To this woman’s credit, she sounded genuinely concerned. Jessica couldn’t decide if it was a woman thing, or if she was maybe a halfway decent person who got sucked into doing something she didn’t want to. Anyone could be anything in this building.

  “The entire point of rape is to prove control over the victim, to break a person, and to get off. If that kid wants to hold me down and stick his dick inside of me, he’ll get to do only one out of those three.”

  The woman looked away from her, keeping her eyes back on where they were going. “I’m shocked you feel that way. Most other people have a different view on sexual assault. Has someone in this building already hurt you?”

  Again, she sounded sympathetic.

  “No, but if they did, it wouldn’t matter.”

  “Because sex is sex?”

  “It only means something if I let it. As far as I’m concerned, that kid is nothing, and he’ll continue to be nothing even after he and his friends have fucked me.”

  The woman beside her said nothing. Maybe it was because Jessica had shocked her.

  She’d kind of shocked herself, actually. She believed those things she said, and not just because she’d been telling herself those exact words ever since she’d been shackled and thrown into a hole. The fact that no one had made a serious attempt to have sex with her yet was a shocker in itself, but Jessica had known that was the sort of thing that went on with prisoners ever since she’d become a hunter.

  She’d conditioned herself to never care, to look at sex for what it really was. People who attributed sex with some sort of emotional importance were missing the entire point and setting themselves up for disaster. It was why people were always so devastated when a loved one cheated, or why many people walked around with a haze of misery and distrust surrounding them even years after being assaulted themselves.

  Jessica had promised herself to never let that happen. Every sexual experience she’d had was always practical as a result. The purpose was to get off, relieve some pent-up stress and frustration, and that was it. Nothing more, and nothing less. If her current boyfriend wanted to wake her up in the middle of the night for sex, then she’d give it to him, even if she wasn’t in the mood. She understood that need to get off, and it didn’t seem fair to her to deny her lover just because she was too tired to make an effort on herself.

  Not that she was ever silent and cold about it, either. Jessica knew how to enjoy herself, even when she knew she wasn’t about to get off.

  But this, hearing the words of her belief system spoken out loud for probably the first time in her entire life, was stunning to the point that she was uncomfortable. Not necessarily because what she’d said wasn’t true. It was. It had to be.

  It was because without realizing it until that moment, she’d gone outside of the rules she’d laid out for herself, had convinced herself she needed to be true for her and everyone else.

  She’d attached some sort of emotional feeling to sex when Soren had her against the wall, and down on that steel table with his hands on her.

  And she didn’t know where he was anymore. Was he caught? Had he been found out and locked away? That was the only explanation that made sense, and Jessica’s heart pounded faster and faster inside of her chest, like it was trying to destroy her ribs and leave them in splinters.

  They were just nearing the double doors that would lead to the arena when they burst open and a figure flew out. It looked that way anyway, considering how the bodies all soared through the air before landing hard on the ground
.

  It was several guards in white tackling a man with red-brown hair, wearing a paranormal jumpsuit.

  Jessica’s breath hitched. It was the hair that made her think of Soren, made her actually see his face screwed up and angry as he tried to escape from the guards that were pushing him down, yanking his arms roughly behind his back, and then pulling him kicking and screaming back to his feet.

  It wasn’t Soren. She knew it, but she had to blink a few times before she could see it, and only then could she breathe again. It was probably all the thrashing around that made it difficult to see the man’s face, made it easy for things to blur inside of her mind and make her see someone who wasn’t even there. The man’s hair was all wrong, anyway. It was too short, and it was only the fluorescent lighting that made her think there was more red in there than there actually was. The man’s hair was actually dark brown, like the color of soil, and not at all like the color that could be found whenever she’d stripped the bark off a paper birch.

  The man was dragged back into the room, screaming all the way. The guards who took him away didn’t even seem to notice or care that Jessica was even there, and the guards surrounding her certainly hadn’t bothered to help the others. The most they’d done was stop their own walk for a couple of seconds to give the other guards room to work and take away their prisoner.

  For the first time since she’d thought about it, the worst kind of icy chill, the kind she couldn’t control and didn’t want, made everything inside of her chest freeze up and hold in place. For a second, her chest constricted and she couldn’t breathe. That hadn’t been Soren, but he was being held somewhere. She didn’t need to be able to read minds, see into the future, or have the power to look through walls to know something like that.

  “All right, let’s go,” said the doctor.

  Jessica’s feet moved on autopilot. There wasn’t any time to get her breathing back under control, or stop the light trembling in her limbs. She was just going to have to hope no one else noticed it.

  When she walked into the room with the female doctor and more than a dozen guards circling behind her, she half-expected to see Markus, but not in person, which made the sight of him sitting in one of those obnoxiously huge leather chairs a surprise.

  She also hadn’t expected to see the other recruits she’d been training with over the last couple of days. They all stared at her while several frowned, as though not yet getting why she would be dressed in the same pajamas that the other paranormals wore. Then the whispering started. Several of them sneered at her. She wasn’t wearing any black gloves. There was no hiding the shackles on her wrists.

  The other person she hadn’t expected to see was Soren himself.

  Jessica was caught off-guard. If she’d known he would be there, she would’ve had time to school her features, to prepare for it. Instead, she caught herself as her mouth tugged up at the sides. She’d stopped herself before letting it go full-out, but it was too late. When she turned her eyes to Markus, he was clearly looking at her, and he knew who she’d been staring at. Who she’d been about to smile at.

  Even that wasn’t enough to fully lessen the impact of just seeing the other man was all right. Though Jessica had never experienced a death of someone she’d loved, she had been disowned and sent away by her family. That was as close to having people close to her die as the actual thing. How she felt for Soren right then, as though she’d already thought he was dead, and then could see him alive and well, everything felt like it was going to be all right.

  In her happiness, the stupid emotion that clouded out reality, she didn’t notice right away how the bags under his eyes were a little more pronounced than they usually were. His hair was all over the place, and though he looked clean enough, and his lab coat was only as rumpled as it usually was whenever he slept in it, something looked decidedly off.

  He was holding another clipboard in his hands, and with his elbows bent, it pulled back at his white sleeves just enough to show off the shackle on his wrist.

  Oh, no. No.

  Markus called attention to himself with a resounding clap of his hands. Everyone in the room stopped murmuring, stopped shifting around, and they all gave their attention to the man, even the paranormals who were huddled in the middle of the arena, which thankfully, hadn’t been lowered yet.

  “Everyone, thank you for answering my summons and taking the time to come down here. Usually, this is only for VIPs, but since the recruits will all be graduating soon and receiving their licenses, I figured something of a treat was in order.”

  Jessica didn’t like the sound of that. She looked to Soren, trying to see for herself if he was hurt. He shook his head at her, so softly she barely noticed it.

  “It seems there was an effort, right under my very nose, to help certain individuals escape from the building.”

  Markus looked right at her, a smarmy little smirk on his face, right before he rose from his chair and walked over to Soren.

  Soren kept his eyes down on his clipboard—what in the hell could he be looking at?—so he either didn’t see it coming or decided not to react when Markus slammed his fist into his gut.

  Soren’s blue eyes popped so wide that even from a distance, Jessica could see the whites all around them.

  “Stop that!” Jessica roared. She marched forward maybe two steps before two guards stepped in her path, grabbing her shoulders.

  Soren dropped his clipboard and fell to his knees. One hand was flat on the concrete floor while the other clutched at his gut. He coughed and wheezed. Jessica’s insides ached for him. She knew his strength, and knew the shackles on his wrists had to really be sucking him dry for Markus’ one punch to have had an effect like that.

  “I do not appreciate insubordination among my employees!” Markus lifted his foot up and stomped it down hard on Soren’s hand. Soren screamed with what little breath he had in his lungs. A lot of that pained noise sounded like wheezing air as he grabbed his wrist.

  Markus seemed to take great pleasure in moving his heel, as if he was stomping out a cigarette butt.

  Jessica groaned with her inability to do anything, to help Soren when he needed it the most.

  No. No, no, no.

  Markus sighed, finally lifting his foot off Soren’s bleeding hand. He walked back over to his fancy leather chair. It had a cup holder on the arm, because of course it did. That was the sort of thing a man sat in when he was about to get some entertainment. There was a bottle of Coke in the cup holder that was perspiring. It released a fizzing noise when Markus turned the cap, and then tilted his head back to get a drink.

  He made the same noise every actor did in a Pepsi or Coke commercial, as if the act of hitting and torturing Soren had been so back-breaking that he needed a carbonated drink to replenish his energy. What Jessica saw could’ve been a commercial right there, especially when he smiled at her. “You can’t trust anyone these days. If I want shit done right, I have to oversee everything myself.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “It’s my fault. I seduced him. I made him…I made him…I…” Jessica couldn’t think of what to say. She was stuck. It literally felt like her brain and tongue were stuck, and no matter how much she tried to calm down, tried to get back in control of herself so she could just think and figure out what to say to fix this, nothing came.

  Markus seemed to notice this in her. He put his bottle back down in the cup holder of his leather chair. “Not so confident with yourself now, are you?” he asked.

  “It was my fault. He didn’t mean to,” Jessica pleaded, although she knew it wasn’t helping. He would just be aware that she was full of shit that he was going to see through her stupid, thin, weak little lie and call her out on it, but she couldn’t even do herself the favor of keeping her damned mouth shut.

  Like every villain in every book, movie, and comic, Markus took great pleasure in pointing that out to her.

  “The fact that you’re doing your best, if it can be called that, to dra
w attention away from him, and to place blame on yourself, means you didn’t just seduce him. Also, being a dragon shifter is enough of a reason to put him in shackles. I should've done it sooner.”

  Jessica sucked in a breath as the vertebrae in her spine locked stiffly into place. “How did you know about that?”

  The words were a soft whisper from her throat, but they carried. He not only knew, but from what he'd said, he'd known for a while about what Soren was.

  Markus shrugged. As Soren grabbed the clipboard off the floor and attempted to wobbly get back to his feet, Markus rushed over to him and launched is knee into Soren’s face.

  Drops of blood glistened in the air as Soren flew backwards and landed hard. A shocked scream sounded in the air. It came from Jessica, she felt it leaving her throat, but it didn’t seem like a noise she would normally make.

  Markus pointed at her. “That is the kind of noise that comes from a person emotionally invested in someone. The same as how someone with an emotional attachment for another person—say, like my employee, Soren Birgir, has for you—would cause him to do something incredibly fucking dangerous. You’re good-looking and everything, but not that good-looking. This guy wanted to get you out because he’s in love with you. This isn’t some lust thing like what happens with my handlers on occasion.” He said it with a wave of his hand, as if he was used to this, almost as if he’d expected it.

  Jessica couldn’t take her eyes away from him, and she couldn’t believe the stupid asshole was being as calm as he was about the entire thing. “I was really hoping my friend Soren wouldn’t go behind my back like this. Do you have any idea how rare it is to find someone who can change into a dragon? I would’ve preferred it if he could breathe fire, or spit acid, or even turn himself into rock, like other dragons claim to be able to do, but I’m a man who firmly believes that you just can’t have everything you want in life.”

  “Says the billionaire.”