“What do you think I let Caine to do me, exactly?”
Connor opened his eyes and glared at me. I shouldn’t have baited him. Even as generally numb and forgetful as I was, you can only listen to someone tell you you’re trash so many times before you lose patience. And I was in that antsy pre-injection state of mind. Things felt too sharp, too clear, and that sense that there was just something I needed to remember, something just out of reach, was so strong it made me want to scream. It was like dying for just a sip of water, and someone was holding the last drop on Earth just out of your reach. You could see it, you could smell it, you could practically taste it, and that made it all the worse because no matter what you did, you never got any closer to it.
“I think you let him do whatever he wanted to,” Connor said in an icy voice.
“Was he my boyfriend or something?”
Connor snarled and turned away.
“You keep bringing him up, so he must have been important,” I said.
“I’ll tell you what Caine fucking is. Caine ruined my life. I had a good thing going, back in my days as Raider. Really fucking good. And he caught my scent and just wouldn’t stop coming after me. He got to my teammates. I always blamed my ex-wife for what happened with my old team, for them trying to kill me the way they did. It was him the whole time.”
“And you know this because?” I asked.
“Chance told me. He was in charge of that operation for StrikeForce, which would have been fine except that the asshole went rogue and started working with the goddamn Canadians. They broke my team. It was the only fucking thing they did right, back in the day. I had to fake my death and go underground until the heat died down. I came back as Killjoy, and I promised myself I’d pay him back for everything he took from me.” He laughed that unhinged laugh again. “And now I have. And I’m going to make sure he suffers. You’re going to help me. You already have.”
I looked at the flames in the fireplace. I doubted I’d been a whore for this Caine guy, but there was something there. Some weird tickle or itch at the back of my mind when Connor mentioned him, which he did a lot.
I glanced over at Connor. “So this is all about Caine? Really?”
Connor laughed again. “Sweetheart, you should know by now that it’s all about me. Caine’s just the one whose death I crave the most.”
“So you’re going to have me kill him.”
“I’m going to have you kill him. Yeah.”
I tilted my head, studying him. “Considering how much you hate him, wouldn’t it be more satisfying to do it yourself?”
He started laughing again, his body shaking. He stood up and walked toward the fireplace, still chortling. I sat watching him.
Nineteen more minutes.
He finally turned to me, still chuckling, and wiped tears from his eyes. “Oh, sweetheart. You have no idea how satisfying it will be to me to watch you kill him. It’s going to be perfect. Beautiful. I can’t wait to watch his face when he realizes what you’re doing.”
“Why? Does he care for me?”
Connor shrugged. “I don’t know. Chance seems to think so, but she’s a girl so she sees all kinds of emotional shit that probably isn’t there. I suspect he liked fucking you. But other than that, he liked you as a person and he respected you. Trusted you.”
Someone liked me as a person? This was news to me. I kept my mouth shut.
He was watching me. “You should spend the night with me.”
Ice slithered through my veins, and I had to restrain myself from getting sick right then and there at the thought of Connor touching me. I did not understand this reaction I had to him, but the longer this went on, the more I was coming to trust it.
He must have seen some indication of my thoughts on my face. “I could make you, you know. I had Lorne program a control phrase. If I say it, you’ll do whatever I tell you to and you won’t be able to stop yourself. Should we test it out, Jolene?”
I started to shake my head.
“I love you. Stand up.”
I was standing before I had a chance to think about it. Connor laughed again.
“I love you. Come here.”
My legs were moving, even as I fought as hard as I could to get them to stop. I walked until I stood right in front of him. Connor reached out and ran his fingers through my hair, smiling down at me.
“Yes, that works like a charm, sweetheart. I’ve been trying to be patient with you, Jolene. I’ve been trying to make you want me. I’ve been trying to earn your love.” He laughed. “Stupid. I don’t need to earn anything from you. You make me stupid sometimes, you know that? Nah. I’m me. I deserve to have what I want when I want it.”
He lowered his hand to my neck, then ran his fingers over my shoulder, down the side of my body, his fingers grazing the side of my breast.
“I love you. Don’t move,” he murmured. He cupped my breast. My mind was screaming the entire time, but I couldn’t make myself move. Couldn’t make myself slap him away. Couldn’t destroy him the way I wanted to.
He squeezed my breast again, and bile rose in my throat.
I couldn’t prevent what happened next. I didn’t want to. My stomach turned, twisted, bile rose, and I heaved.
And ended up puking all over Connor’s chest, which was inches from my face.
He jumped back, tripping over the ottoman behind him and falling down on the floor, a disgusted look on his face.
For my part, I was caught between continuing to heave and wanting to laugh.
There was murder in Connor’s eyes when he stood up and walked toward me.
“What he fuck was that?” he shouted. Since I was still heaving, I thought it was pretty obvious. “You think this is funny?”
I shook my head. No. It definitely wasn’t funny.
He could make me do whatever he wanted. And now he was pissed and he’d likely make me do something I’d hate.
At least he didn’t look like he wanted to touch me anymore.
He grabbed my arm and pulled me up. He drew his fist back.
“I love you. Stay still and let me teach you a lesson,” he shouted.
I couldn’t move.
“Boss. It’s time for her injection,” Lorne’s quiet voice said from across the room, and I prayed a thank you for small miracles, even as my body refused to move.
“Hold on, Lorne,” he snarled, fist still raised.
“Boss, you know how important these are. The timing —”
“Yeah, yeah,” Connor said, shoving me away from him. I hit the brick wall behind me, hard enough to knock my head against it and make my vision fuzzy, but all that mattered right that second is that he was moving away from me and I could move again.
“Come on, Jolene. Let’s get your injection. You have a mission planned for tomorrow morning, right boss?” Lorne asked Connor respectfully.
Connor nodded. “I do.” He took a deep breath, seeming to try to calm down, even as he looked at me with an icy, murderous look in his eyes. “When you’ve had your injection, come back here and clean up this mess. I’m going out.”
“Yes, sir,” I managed. He went to his room, then came out a couple of minutes later wearing clean clothes. He threw the dirty clothes he’d taken off at me, then stormed out, and Lorne exchanged a glance with me, then we headed to the elevator.
“You pissed him off good,” he said quietly.
I hugged myself, trying to stop the way my body was shaking. “I hate you,” I managed through chattering teeth.
“I don’t doubt it. Is there a specific reason you’re telling me this now?”
“The control phrase. I didn’t know about that before,” I said.
He stared at me. “He used it?”
I nodded, still shaking. “You should be proud. It w-w-worked really well.”
“Is he gone?” Lorne whispered. “Do you sense him?”
I focused for a second, then shook my head “He’s gone.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,
Jolene. You have to know that. I never, ever wanted to do any of the things he had me do to you, and especially not that. That was supposed to be a last resort. He thought he’d need it in case you ever became hesitant during a fight. It was never supposed to be used so he could… Jesus Christ,” he trailed off.
“You trusted him to use it the way he was supposed to?” I asked Lorne. “That guy’s seriously off his n-nut.”
We were in Lorne’s lab now, and he had the syringe in his hand. He looked at it.
“You’re sounding a lot more like the Jolene I think you were before,” he said softly, a note of sadness in his voice.
“I don’t understand why I’m here. How can I work for someone like that? How can you work for someone like that?” The shivers were starting to subside, but now all I could do was stare at the syringe in Lorne’s hand.
The clarity hurt. It physically hurt, and it took everything in me not to grab the syringe from Lorne and inject myself. I just wanted my warm numbness back. I wanted to forget how afraid I was right now, how sick I felt, how wrong.
Lorne looked up and met my eyes. “We’re stuck here. I didn’t have a choice.”
I kept watching him.
“He has a control phrase to make you do what he wants. He has something else to make me do what he wants,” he said, quickly disinfecting the spot on my arm. I wanted to smack the syringe out of his hand. I wanted to beg him to inject me already.
I watched the needle pierce my skin.
“What does he have?” I asked.
“My family,” Lorne said softly, and there was a brief moment of rage that tore through me, right before the perfect numbness settled over me, and I ceased caring about anything at all.
The numbness filled me, and it was perfect. I thanked Lorne and took the elevator back up to Connor’s suite. I was supposed to clean, I remembered.
I cleaned vomit, broken glass, set Connor’s room to rights. I picked up the messed up clothing he’d shucked before he’d left and placed them in the laundry, and the entire time, I felt nothing.
I couldn’t even remember what we’d been talking about. Why had I gotten sick? I remembered being sick. Maybe I ate something that disagreed with me.
I laughed. It didn’t matter.
None of it mattered, not when I felt nothing at all.
The television was on in Connor’s room, and I glanced at it. There was a press conference. I was about to turn away, but then I realized what I was looking at. The woman talking was the leader of StrikeForce, dressed in the typical dark gray and black. Portia, I remembered, the constant flashes of her face from my programming almost impossible to forget.
“Thank you all for coming,” she was saying as cameras flashed. “Undoubtedly, you know what this is about. We’ve all seen the videos.”
I sat down on the sofa, eyes on the screen.
“I’m here to tell you what we know. What we know is that to all of our horror, we now finally know where our friend and teammate Daystar is.” The camera flashes intensified as she paused. “Daystar went missing a little over three months ago, and we feared the worst. We feared we’d never see her again. What we never could have imagined was that we’d see her again, doing the things these videos show her doing.”
As she spoke, the screen split, and the other side showed me in the banks we’d raided. I watched it numbly.
“What I can tell you is that this is not Daystar acting under her own power. This is not the hero we all know. Whatever they’ve done to her… Daystar is not herself right now.” Voices spoke up, and Portia kept talking, louder, drowning them out. “I know Daystar. I trust Daystar with my life and the lives of everyone on this team. This… this brutal, cold person you’re seeing, is not Daystar. It has all of her power. It has her form. But it doesn’t have the thing that makes Daystar, Daystar. I’m asking you to remember the hero we know, the hero who has saved, literally, tens of thousands of lives, the hero who cares for those very few care about otherwise. I’m asking you to remember her and to root for her, because I have to believe we’re going to get her back. And I’m asking you to remember that none of this… none of this insanity you’ve seen in these videos, is her fault. She is the prisoner and the tool of an evil, psychotic, black-hearted piece of garbage. We can’t find her. We’ve been trying, and we will keep trying. I just want you to all remember who she is, so that, hopefully when she comes back to us someday, she’ll be reminded of how loved she is. Thank you.”
Portia walked away, and one side of the screen showed her retreating back, while the other went to a color still of Daystar… me, in my StrikeForce uniform.
I stared at it until they cut away to commercials, and then sat there for a long time afterward.
Daystar doesn’t sound so bad. And Portia doesn’t sound like somebody who considered Daystar a villain, I thought to myself.
I jumped up and started heading up to my room, simply so I could move. That weird unsettled feeling was happening again, and I didn’t like it.
When I got to my room, Lorne was waiting outside the door.
“Where did you go? I wanted to talk to you, but you took off.”
“I had a mess I needed to clean up,” I told him. “Did you need something?”
“Is he still out?”
I nodded and opened my door, and Lorne followed me into my room. He glanced around, but there was really nothing to see. It looked the same way it did on my first day here: stark, white, and empty.
“You’ve got to stop pissing him off like that,” he said. “What did you even do?”
I tried to remember. Had I pissed Connor off? After a while, all I could do was shake my head and shrug. “I dunno.”
“Shit,” he breathed, dropping onto the couch. “It happened not even an hour ago, Jolene.”
I thought for a while longer, and all I could do was shrug. “Sorry.”
“Do you remember what I told you earlier?”
I racked my brains, trying hard to remember anything Lorne had said to me at all. “Did you say anything?”
He just watched me, his face even paler than usual. “I am so sorry, Jolene,” he finally said.
“It’s okay.”
“You don’t even know what you’re forgiving me for,” he said in exasperation.
“Well, I can’t remember why I would be mad at you, so, you know… whatever.”
After a moment, he got up and walked out of my room. I showered and changed into sweats. I couldn’t remember what, if anything, Lorne had told me. I couldn’t remember if I’d made Connor angry somehow. I couldn’t even remember what I’d eaten that day, or if I’d eaten at all.
But I remembered every word of Portia’s press conference.
I studied my closet doors as if some kind of monster lived behind them. I slowly made my way across the bedroom and pulled the doors open, revealing the only two items there: my Mayhem uniform, and my StrikeForce uniform, the one I’d been wearing the day Connor had snuck me away.
I reached out to touch it, then drew my hand back as if it would bite me. I let out a small, nervous laugh, then reached out again and ran my fingertips along the arm of the uniform, the gray stripes down the sleeves. Then I rested my hand on the gray five pointed star emblazoned on the chest.
Daystar was a hero.
Tens of thousands of lives.
Loved.
Had Daystar been a murderer? Had she felt the same cold, empty feeling I did when she killed? Because according to Connor, I’d killed during my time as Daystar. Had it been easy, the way it is now? No matter what uniform I wore, I apparently had always been a thief. Some things, maybe, just never change.
Had Daystar been this weak, though? I thought, before even realizing I’d had the thought. Like everything, it drifted away before I could examine it too closely.
After a long while, I closed the closet doors.
Daystar couldn’t have been that amazing.
I was here, wasn’t I? If she’d been such a hero, she s
hould have been able to save herself.
Me, that voice I tried to ignore pointed out. She should have been able to save me, and I hated it a little more.
Chapter Eleven
Jolene
I didn’t see Connor, or anyone else for that matter, for four days. Other than Lorne, the place felt deserted.
I was sleeping like shit. Nightmares. Over and over again, and I didn’t know if they were real, things I’d actually lived, or shit my psyche was making up to mess with me. The ones that hurt the most were like isolated moments, little flashes of what seemed like a good life. Sitting with Mama, enjoying Saturday breakfast. Laughing and watching movies with a woman I recognized as Jenson from StrikeForce. Saving lives.
Quiet moments with a man with the prettiest, warmest brown eyes I’d ever seen. In his arms, his lips on mine.
Those were the worst. Even more so than the ones with Mama in them. I still had memories of my mother, and I knew I’d loved her and been a good daughter. I knew she’d loved me. I missed her, but at least I knew she’d been real.
This man… I mean, I knew this was Caine. Were these things I’d actually done with him, or was this my mind playing tricks on me? Was any of it real?
Because if it was, if any of that was a real memory… I didn’t know what that meant. Had I loved him?
Had he loved me?
God, it felt real.
Even Lorne’s blessed injections couldn’t erase the persistent sense of weirdness I carried with me. I was antsy. I probably just needed something to do, I told myself.
I spent four days staring at the white walls of my room, four nights wrestling with dreams that made my heart ache, made me wake with tears drying on my face.
I was losing my mind.
Well, what I had left of it, anyway.
The fourth night after I’d watched the press conference with Portia, I was haunted by nightmares again. I tossed and turned and cried out, then fell back into another sleep battle.
I woke screaming, and jerked to a seated position. It only took me a moment to realize that Connor was there, looming over my bed.
Strikeforce (Book 4): Day's End Page 13
