Smiling faintly, Braden did as she requested. When Alisa clutched at his arm and refused to go, he wondered why.
Other footsteps entering the room alerted him that something was going on. He smelled the acrid odor of cigarettes and felt a flash of alarm.
“Braden,” Alisa said, terror thrumming along the perfect pitch of her voice, “we need to do as she says. Katya has brought armed men who are not with our protection detail with her. They have rifles, all aimed at us.”
Chapter 17
The instant she saw the five men who entered with Katya, Alisa knew she was looking at the traitor. “You,” she said, glaring at the other woman. “You’ve betrayed us.”
“No,” Katya snarled. “You’re the one who’s betrayed your own kind. You are an abomination.” Her accent made the last word unintelligible, but Alisa got the drift.
Still. Katya as the enemy? Alisa could hardly come to terms with the idea. Katya’s parents both worked in the palace and she herself had worked there since she’d been a teen. If anyone should have been loyal to the royal family, it was Katya.
Queen Ionna had even made her Braden’s assistant, which perhaps was not so different from personal assistant to the queen.
“What is this?” Alisa demanded, as Katya and her contingent of men pointed their wicked-looking silver pistols and long, black rifles at them. “Why have you turned against us? We’ve always been good to you.”
Briefly, Katya lowered her gaze, showing she felt some measure of shame. But a moment later when she raised her chin again to face them, Alisa saw nothing but defiance in her hazel eyes.
“None of that matters now,” Katya said softly, her tone unapologetic and strident. “This began when I was still a small child. When my people learned about you and what you can do, we began to see what you wanted to turn us into. You wish to erase the Pack from the face of this earth.”
“That’s not true! I—”
“Silence,” one of Katya’s men roared. “We are not here to debate with you the right and wrong of what we have done. You are our prisoners. You will do as we say.”
“I am your princess,” Alisa began.
“Shut up,” the man ordered. When she opened her mouth again, he actually dared to raise his hand as though he would slap her.
Next to her, Braden made a sound of protest. Alisa squeezed his arm hard, begging him to be silent. After all, they might find him expendable while she, clearly, was not.
“Six of you,” Alisa said scornfully, wanting to give Braden an idea of what they faced. “Katya, you brought five armed men to subdue a woman and a blind man?”
Busy squinting at her down the barrel of her shiny gun, Katya didn’t answer, though one of her men must have understood English since he flashed Alisa a savage grin.
“We did not want to take any chances,” he said.
As a matter of fact… Alisa did a double take. He looked familiar. Very familiar. An instant later, she realized where she’d seen him before. He’d been one of the men in the grainy video back at the palace, one of the three who’d posed as royal guards.
Braden’s head snapped up. Apparently he’d recognized the voice as well. “Rok.”
The other man’s grin widened. “You’ve got a good ear.”
Expression hard, Braden nodded. “I assume Igor and Thomas are here also?”
“That’s right. They both have weapons pointed directly at you and the princess.”
“Good.” Jaw clenched, Braden looked furious. “As I remember, they do speak English, correct?”
“Only a little,” Rok said. “Katya and I and George over there are the best English-speakers.”
George was the one who’d acted like he wanted to hit her. Alisa filed this name away for good measure. If she ever escaped from this mess, she’d be sure that one was punished.
Evidently, Braden had a similar idea.
“Since they speak limited English, Rok, I want you to pass them this message for me. I want to make sure they understand it. Tell them when this is over, I intend to make them pay for what they’ve done.”
Staring, Rok appeared unsure whether or not to take him seriously. Evidently, he decided he would not, because he laughed. “I’ll do that,” he said. “Another time.”
Braden jerked his head in a nod.
“Now,” Rok’s amused tone changed, becoming icy and brisk. “We’re going to have to split you two lovebirds up. You, Dr. Streib, will be coming with me and my men. Princess Alisa, Katya and two guards will escort you to your chambers.”
Bad idea.
“I’d prefer to stay together.” Alisa lifted her chin.
Again Rok laughed. “Your preferences mean nothing to me.”
“He needs me,” she elaborated. “I act as his eyes in unfamiliar places.”
“Sorry. He’ll just have to manage without you.”
Trying to appear unconcerned, Alisa shrugged. “All right. I tried.” She hadn’t really thought they would let her, but at least she’d made the attempt.
“Let’s go,” Katya barked.
“Just a moment.” Keeping her expression pleasantly blank, Alisa snagged her tote bag from the back of the chair. Her cell phone was inside and as soon as she could, she’d place a swift SOS call to Ruben.
“Let me have that.” Without waiting for a response, Katya snatched the bag out of Alisa’s hands. “I just need to take your phone.”
Fishing the cell out, she turned it off before dropping it on the floor and smashing it to pieces with the heel of her boot.
“Next,” she said, holding out her hand for Braden’s.
Since he couldn’t see, Alisa opened her mouth to tell him what Katya wanted. But before she could, Rok elbowed Braden in the side, hard enough to knock the breath from him in a startled oomph.
“Give her your phone,” Rok barked.
“Consider yourself lucky you outnumber me,” Braden snarled, his jaw clenched. Nevertheless, he dug his phone from his pocket and handed it over. It met a similar fate under Katya’s heel.
So much for hope of escape. Struggling to control her racing heart, Alisa told herself they’d think of something. Of course they would. They had to.
Then Rok and his men surrounded Braden. Alisa stood watching helplessly as they slapped some sort of metal cuffs on him, hands behind his back, before he was taken away.
* * *
Marching along with his little contingent of guards, Braden knew he had to come up with a plan and quickly. Both his and Alisa’s lives were in danger. What he didn’t understand is why they’d been taken prisoner rather than simply killed on the spot, which would have been more logical.
Since the extremists didn’t want them dead, obviously they wanted something else. But what?
As he was taken down the hall into another room, he cursed his lack of vision. Though he didn’t want to be separated from Alisa, he went where directed, biting his tongue and wishing furiously that he could have one of those brief little episodes of sight. If only he could look upon the face of this man who sought to take everything from him. If only he could see his surroundings so he could judge the probability of escape.
No such luck. The ever-present darkness remained undisturbed.
“Your princess is going to die, unless you save her,” Rok said. The heavily accented voice filled with hatred gloated, repulsing him. His wolf paced, fierce and furious and wild, ready to fight to be free.
Should he? Braden flexed his fists. Despite the fact that they were chained behind his back, he had to suppress a desire to throttle the other man.
“In here.” Rok shoved him in the back, sending him stumbling. He crashed into something made of metal. Window bars? Of course. To prevent his escape. Never mind that he had no idea what floor they were on, or what was actually outside the window. These people had planned for a situation, even the patently impossible.
Inside, his wolf roared, pushing impatiently to be set free. Braden’s impotent anger fueled the beast.
Briefly, Braden considered his wolf’s desire to change. Cuffed and chained as he was, the action would be foolish, especially since Rok was a shifter as well.
“Yes,” Rok continued, as though Braden had responded to his earlier statement about Alisa. “Only you can keep her from dying a slow and horrifically painful death.”
Again, Braden bit back a retort. If his captor wanted to torment him with words, Braden refused to give him the satisfaction of a reaction.
“Do you hear me, Dr. Streib?”
Slowly, Braden nodded, refusing to wince at the sharp pain the movement caused. “Have you hurt her?” he asked, demanding an answer. “What have you done to her?”
“She is being detained, like you.”
“Is she hurt?” Braden took a step forward. “So help me, if you hurt her…”
The other man chuckled. “Threats? As if there was anything you can do, blind and bound and chained inside your little room. But I will tell you this—the princess is unhurt. As of right now.”
Unconvinced, Braden lifted his hands. “Is she shackled like me? I don’t think she’ll be able to handle this. You mustn’t put chains on her.”
“You really care for her, don’t you?” Rok seemed to find this hilarious. “Don’t worry, she’s fine. Her lily-white skin is unblemished. And her astounding ability to remain human still remains a secret, despite your attempts to discover how she does this.”
“So you’ve been monitoring me. Since obviously you know I was not successful, why have you brought me here?”
“Unsuccessful?” Rok laughed again, the unpleasant sound skittering along Braden’s nerves. “That’s just it. About your research—your completely worthless research,” he continued.
Braden refused to bristle. “What about it?”
“Don’t you find it odd? You are, according to everything we read, the top Pack neurosurgeon in the world and one of our kind’s foremost researchers. Yet with Princess Alisa, you failed miserably. Did you not wonder why you never found anything?”
Still refusing to be baited, Braden said nothing. His silence didn’t seem to bother Rok at all.
“There’s a reason for that,” Rok continued. “Or, should I say, we are the reason for that.”
Braden blinked. “Of course. How did I not see this before?”
Again Rok gave a chortle of mirth. “We’ve always had people working on the inside. Several people, actually. Katya served as your research assistant. Each time your results were loaded into that machine, she switched them for results we’d prepared in advance.”
“You sabotaged me?” Though he still kept his face expressionless, Braden’s heart raced. All this time, analyzing and re-analyzing test after test and finding nothing. No anomalies. Now he understood how such a thing could be possible. Someone had rigged his research to make sure he didn’t find a single damn thing.
Which meant the answer—the key to Alisa’s amazing abilities—was still out there waiting to be found. Unless it was all in her mind. Her amazingly strong willpower. He’d make sure they didn’t learn about this.
Damn them all to hell.
“These tests,” he said carefully. “My results. Did you have someone review them? Someone qualified?”
“We did.” Rok sounded entirely too smug and self-satisfied. “We know what they say, but we did not have the opportunity to make your machine analyze them.”
True. “That night you broke into my lab?”
“We’d planned to steal your machine. Only you showed up and stopped us. But this does not matter. After all, we knew you would wind up here as our prisoner eventually. You have your equipment, including that machine, and we have the actual test results. You will review them and when you have the results, you will share them with us.”
And then you will die. The unspoken promise hung in the air like a poisonous mist.
As long as he had no illusions. Braden could see the logic in this and he was amazed that Rok believed he could actually live with it. Once he had the answer, he would be worthless to these people. Once he gave them what they wanted, he was as good as dead.
As was Alisa, he supposed. After all, what would they need her for once they knew all her secrets?
Of course, the machines would reveal nothing. He had to save her…
“Where is the princess?” he asked carefully. “And why do you wish to harm her?”
“Oh, we won’t hurt her,” Rok answered, sounding positively gleeful. “Not yet.”
Again, Braden understood. As long as they needed her alive, Alisa was safe.
“Either way, Doctor, we’ve recalibrated your machines.” Rok’s voice now sounded cold. “I’ll let your own machine give you your results in a language you’ll understand. Remember, you have twenty-four hours to figure out what it is and to decipher the princess’s secret.”
Crossing his arms, Braden shook his head. Time to dig in his heels. “Why should I? You’re going to kill me anyway. I think it’s a safe bet that you won’t be sharing my findings with anyone else. What’s the point? What’s my incentive to do the research now?”
“Ah, you think are a smart man.” The smirk in Rok’s voice set Braden’s teeth on edge. “But you have missed one very important aspect to this thing. If you discover what gives the princess her special abilities, she will not suffer and we will let her live.”
The raw hope slamming into him made his chest hurt. A second later, he cursed himself for a fool. “Once again, as you so succinctly put it, I am not stupid. If I discover the secret, you have no reason to let Alisa live.”
“But we do. Because if her ability is genetic, it can be passed on. We will breed her and test the offspring.”
This made no sense. He’d believed they wanted to stop the research. Not this.
Alisa as a brood mare? Every fiber of his being rebelled against the thought. This would be a life of pure hell, for both her and her children. He knew she would rather be dead. “I won’t be a part of that.”
“You have no choice. Either you do it, or we’ll find another doctor. We don’t need you as much as she does.”
“Kill me now,” Braden spat, hopefully somewhere near the other man. “Then you can go find some other doctor and pray he can interpret the test results.”
Swearing a blue streak in Teslinkian, Rok grabbed Braden by the collar, and slapped him, hard enough to send him back into the hard stone wall behind him.
Cursing the darkness, cursing his bonds, Braden lurched forward, seeking some kind of retribution. Instead, Rok hit him again, twice as hard this time. Braden could feel the warmth of blood running down his split-open cheek.
“You will do what we tell you to do,” Rok ordered. “Or your princess will die a painfully slow death in front of you. Too bad you won’t be able to see it happen. Ah, well, hearing the sound of her screams will have to do.”
Chomping down hard on the inside of his cheek, Braden nodded. Time. He needed time to try and figure things out. “I’ll give you what you want. But I’ll need my machines and all the results—the original ones that you took from me.”
“They will be provided.” Satisfaction rang in Rok’s voice. “In a few minutes, guards will come to escort you to another room. The room is windowless and can only be entered by a six-inch-thick metal door. We have equipped it similar to a gas chamber.”
Masking his rising horror, Braden winced. “You’re going to kill me by gassing me?”
“If you don’t achieve results, yes.” The other man snickered. “All in all, it’s not a bad way to die.”
Easy for him to say. He couldn’t possibly know about Braden’s irrational claustrophobia. And, because if Rok did know, he’d use it to his advantage, Braden kept his mouth shut.
“Are you certain twenty-four hours is enough time?” Braden finally asked. “I’m certain there is a large amount of raw data to go through.” Since he knew the data was worthless, he was merely buying time.
“Dr. Streib, we know
as well as you do that your machine won’t take long to give you results. I imagine it will be less than half an hour after you plug in the data and your computer reaches a conclusion.”
“If you’ve reviewed the results…”
“We know what is wrong with the princess. You are absolutely correct. What we don’t know is if this is what gives her the ability to remain human for so long. That is what we need you to tell us.”
“Wrong with the princess?” Braden froze. “What do you mean, exactly?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
Braden scratched his head. “I don’t understand. Why don’t you just tell me? Why make me listen to all the results first, especially since you’ve given me such a short window of time?”
Rok went momentarily silent, though not for long. “Fine,” he said, a grim satisfaction ringing in the harshness of his tone. “You want to know what’s wrong with your princess? She has something on her brain.”
“Something on her brain?” Braden had difficulty following Rok’s line of thought. “Could you be a little more specific? What do you mean?”
“Remember when you took a CT scan early on in your visit?”
“And an MRI. Both of which showed absolutely nothing,” Braden began, then realized that those results had most likely also been switched out. Again he cursed under his breath. So much time wasted.
“Oh, they definitely showed something,” Rok practically chortled. “Now, I’m no doctor, but even I can tell when there’s something in an X-ray that shouldn’t be there. I’m thinking your princess has a tumor or something. Maybe cancer. Very advanced, I’d say, judging by the size of the blotch on her brain.”
Blotch on her brain? In his career, he’d seen a thousand such films. None of them had boded well for the patient.
That didn’t mean anything, he told himself firmly. Rok was not a trained medical professional. And who knows what he’d actually seen? For all he knew, the Teslinko machine was damaged, or faulty in some way. Still…
Braden opened his mouth, then closed it. “I doubt there is anything seriously wrong with her,” he said coldly. “Princess Alisa has exhibited no other symptoms. No headaches, loss of balance, speech or thought problems. A subject with a dark spot on the film of the brain would exhibit some symptoms, especially in an advanced stage.”
The Wolf Princess: The Wolf PrincessOne Eye Open (The Pack) Page 21
