by Tiffany Snow
“I’m afraid I’m very much alive,” he said, taking a step toward me. I took a jerky step back. “No thanks to you and Devon, of course. Lucky for me, Kansas farmers are so helpful to an injured hunter. It’s taken me weeks to recuperate, but I’m ever so glad I didn’t kill you before, because I need you now.”
Confusion warred with panic. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Of course you don’t,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. You’re coming with me.”
“The hell I am,” I snapped, tightening my grip on the knife in my hand. I lunged, my only advantage that of surprise.
But he was fast, faster than I’d thought he’d be. I sliced him across the chest, but not deep enough to do damage. Then he had my wrist and twisted it in such a way that I had no choice but to release the knife with a pained cry.
“Look at you, drawing blood,” Clive bit out.
“Anna would have fought you, too,” I retorted. At the mention of his dead wife, Clive flinched. “She would have hated what you’ve become, what you’re doing to me.”
His hesitation gave me another instant and I brought my knee up hard, getting him right in the crotch.
Clive let go of me instantly as he dropped to the floor. His body blocked the hallway. I wasted no time scrambling over him. The door was open and it loomed like a beacon for me.
I’d made it two steps when Clive grabbed my ankle and gave it a vicious yank. I fell hard and kicked backward, trying to get away. I made contact with something, because I heard a crunch and a grunt, but he wouldn’t let me go. He was pulling me backward, climbing on top of me as I clawed at the carpet, desperate to get away.
Opening my mouth, I drew in a ragged breath and let loose a scream. Surely someone would hear and call the police. I prayed Beau would come out of his door the way he had so many times before. But his door remained firmly closed.
“Fucking bitch,” I heard Clive mutter. I heard something clatter to the floor, then felt a sharp prick in the back of my neck.
Bright lights. That was the first thing I saw when I woke.
I stared at the ceiling, slowly blinking. The thought that being knocked unconscious and waking in an unfamiliar location was becoming a commonplace event in my life flitted briefly through my mind.
Fluorescent lights, the kind you find in a hospital, adorned the ceiling of flat, white tiles. A persistent, steady beeping sound was emanating from something close to me.
Turning my head was more painful than it should have been, and I winced, but I saw what was making the noise. A heart monitor and blood pressure cuff were attached to my left arm.
I tried lifting my arm and realized I was strapped down. My breath caught and I turned to my right, only to see that arm was likewise restrained. In trying to move my legs, I found my ankles held immobile, too.
I was able to lift my head and look around, hoping I was in a hospital. Maybe someone had heard me scream and come to help. Maybe they’d chased Clive off.
But I wasn’t in a hospital. And I wasn’t alone.
A man in scrubs and a white lab coat stood in the corner, his back to me, messing with something on the counter.
“Hey,” I called to him. “Hey, where am I?”
He glanced back at me, but didn’t answer. After a moment, he went back to what he was doing.
“Hey, I’m talking to you,” I tried again. “Where am I?”
The man walked toward me and I thought for a moment he was going to release me, then I saw the needle and vials in his hands.
“Who are you? What are you doing?” I asked, panic edging into my voice as he swabbed my right arm and I smelled the sharp, antiseptic odor of alcohol.
Again, there was no answer. He tied a rubber tourniquet around my arm and readied the needle.
“Stop! Let me go!” I cried, struggling to get loose. Alarm and panic flooded me as he continued to ignore me.
“Will you be still?”
The stern voice made me whip my head around and my stomach sank when I saw who’d entered the room.
Vega.
Fear morphed into fury. “I should have known,” I said, struggling to stay calm. Nothing would be achieved by me losing my cool. Right now, I had to focus on trying to get out of this, preferably alive.
A pinch in my arm made me twist again to see the man was drawing blood from my vein, filling one of the vials he held.
“Your obsession with me is reaching the level of paranoia,” I said to Vega. “My blood? Really? You could have just asked.”
“And deprive Clive of his opportunity at redemption?” she asked. “I wouldn’t think of it.”
“You sent him after me?” I asked, confused now. “He tried to kill Devon.”
“I know,” she said with a sigh. “I’m not very pleased with him for that. Devon is far more useful to me than is Clive, which is too bad. He used to be one of my best agents. Then he met that woman, and it spelled the end of him and his usefulness.”
“You mean Anna,” I said.
Vega shrugged, glancing at the vials the man was filling, one after the other. “Was that her name?” she mused.
I studied her. “You know it was her name. You know Clive fell in love with her.”
“A stipulation of all my agents is the lack of familial ties,” Vega said. “Did you know that? Clive was the only child of a single father who was killed in a car wreck when he was ten. No siblings. No extended family.”
“No one to compete with his loyalty to you when you swooped in to rescue him,” I guessed.
A smile played about her thin lips and her gaze returned to mine. “You’re an astute woman, Ivy. Ties of loyalty and brotherhood link men in the armed forces. A soldier will put his life on the line for the soldier at his side. But in my business, agents are solitary. Loyalty to queen and country is ephemeral and mercurial, subject to change. But loyalty to a person—especially one to whom they feel indebted—that is concrete and not easily dissuaded.”
“You’ve brainwashed them,” I said.
“I saved them,” she retorted. “I gave them a purpose and a focus for their lives.”
The man interrupted our conversation by removing the needle from my arm and undoing the restraint. Reaching over me, he removed the monitor and restraint on my left arm, too. I rubbed my wrists where the bands had left marks against my skin as he removed the ankle bands, too.
“Why the blood?” I asked, sitting up on the gurney. I was glad that the restraints were gone, but it also made me uneasy. Was Vega just going to let me go?
“When agents cease being useful,” Vega said, ignoring my question, “they must be eliminated. Clive was no longer useful—indeed he’d become a dangerous nuisance, targeting another agent as he did, and involving civilians.”
“So you’re the one who put the hit out on Clive?” I asked, incredulous. “You’d murder the man you said you ‘saved’?”
“You say murder, I say terminate his employment.”
“That’s just semantics.”
Vega turned around and the guy in the lab coat walked out, vials of my blood in his hands. She didn’t do anything to stop me, so I slid off the gurney. I had to wait a moment as lightheadedness struck, but then it passed.
“Come with me,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
I followed her out of the room and into a long, generic-looking hallway. A guard waiting outside the door followed us.
We walked past a couple of closed doors, then Vega opened a third door. Entering behind her, I saw it was empty, save for one wall with a huge window into the adjacent room.
I was surprised to see Clive in the other room. He was pacing, and I could tell he couldn’t see us in the window. Was it just one-way, then?
Another man stood in the room with Clive, and he reminded me of a soldier or a guard. He didn’t interact with Clive, but merely stared straight ahead, his face expressionless.
“I warned Clive,” Vega said. “Warned him that Anna wasn’
t good for him, that he needed to keep his mind focused on the work and put aside the childish delusions of love and marriage.”
“You can’t just tell people to turn their feelings off,” I said. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“Doesn’t it?” Vega replied, her gaze still on Clive. She sighed. “I suppose you’re right. Sometimes drastic measures need to be taken. Clive was suspicious of me, I think, and hid himself and Anna from me.” She flashed me a cool smile. “Fortunately, Devon is exceedingly good at finding people.”
Looking at her, a sudden thought came to me. “Heinrich poisoned Anna, infected her with that virus. But he knew where to find her because you told him.”
“Let’s just say, I made a strategic move,” Vega said. “Heinrich rid me of a problem, and we also got to see firsthand the effects of his virus.”
A cold chill crept up my spine. Vega showed absolutely no humanity, no remorse for having served up an innocent woman to a horrible death.
“Does Clive know what you did?” I asked. Somehow I doubted he’d have been so adamant on meting out his revenge if he’d known who exactly was behind Anna’s death.
“Of course, if I’d known how completely useless Clive would become, I wouldn’t have bothered,” she said, ignoring my question. “Now, watch and learn.” She brushed past me and exited the room. The guard who’d followed us stepped inside, taking up a post similar to that of the one watching Clive.
It seemed I was supposed to stay here.
Through the window, I saw Vega enter the room with Clive. I drifted back toward the glass to watch.
Clive looked at Vega and straightened. “I was wondering exactly how long I was supposed to remain here.”
His voice was tinny, coming through speakers that I hadn’t seen somewhere in the room.
“I had business to attend to,” Vega replied.
“So do we have a deal?” Clive asked. “I brought you the girl, told you what her blood contained, just as I said I would.”
“You’ve done very well,” Vega said.
The relief Clive expressed was nearly palpable to me.
“Brilliant,” he said. “Then I can go my own way, and the Shadow, theirs.”
He headed for the door, but his way was blocked by the guard.
“It’s not that simple, Clive,” Vega said.
Clive spun to face her and I saw the fear he was trying to hide.
“I’ve done everything you asked of me,” he said. “All I want is to be left alone to live my life. I’m not going to say anything to anyone or write some tell-all novel.”
“Clive, you know I can’t just let you walk out of here, knowing what you know,” Vega replied, her voice as calm and reasonable as if she were discussing dinner plans.
“What are you going to do?” Clive asked in exasperation. “Kill me? I’ve proven my loyalty to you and the Shadow over and over again.”
“You have indeed,” Vega said. “And we are grateful for your service.”
Clive stared hard at her, his lips pressed in a thin line, and when she didn’t say anything further, he gave her a curt nod. Turning for the door, he saw what I’d seen a moment ago.
The guard had a gun in his hand, pointed right at Clive.
Clive had no chance to react in any way before he was shot. The single bullet was centered in Clive’s forehead.
His body crumpled to the floor and I was left staring at Vega, who wasn’t even bothering to look at Clive. No . . . she was looking straight through the window at me.
My hands were shaking and I bit my lip to keep from screaming. They’d just killed him in cold blood, for no reason. Even now, Vega was casually stepping over Clive’s body as she slipped out the door, careful to not get any blood on the nude pumps she wore.
“Clean this up,” she said over her shoulder to the guard, who hastened to obey. A moment later, Vega was back in the room with me.
“Were you watching?” she asked. At my silence, she smiled. “Of course you were. It’s a valuable lesson and I hope you learned it well.”
“I don’t need any lessons,” I gritted out, determined not to show my fear to her.
“Oh, you do, actually,” Vega said. “Because this was a lesson in what will happen to Devon . . . if you succeed in persuading him to continue this relationship with you.”
My blood ran cold. “You don’t mean that.”
She actually laughed. “After my demonstration, you really think I wouldn’t do the same thing to Devon? He’s spouting stories of quitting his job, as if he’s love-struck and determined to pursue a happily-ever-after.”
“But . . . Devon is devoted to you,” I said. Her threat to Devon was real and I believed every word. I was desperate to make her not question Devon’s loyalty.
“Of course he is,” Vega said. “And I want to make sure he always will be. Which is where you come in.”
“What do you want?”
“What I want is for you to be dead, but my scientists tell me we need to keep you alive—for a while, at least—because your blood is valuable and contains the only vaccine for that virus. And they need access to that vaccine to properly formulate an antidote.”
I swallowed. My hands clenched into fists at my sides to stop them from shaking.
“So what I want you to do,” she continued, “is to break it off with Devon. Say whatever you need to in order to convince him, beyond a doubt, that it’s over. You don’t want him, you don’t need him, and above all, you don’t love him. Understood?”
“And if I don’t . . .”
“If you don’t, then I’ll be forced to wonder to whom Devon’s loyalty truly lies,” she said. “And in my business, there’s no room for maybes . . . or quitters.”
It couldn’t have been plainer if she’d spoken it aloud. If I didn’t break it off with Devon—permanently—Vega would kill him.
“So,” she said, smiling again as though we were the best of friends, “are we in agreement? And you must be sure to not speak a word of this to Devon.”
“Why?” I asked. “Are you afraid he wouldn’t be so easy to kill if he knew you for what you really are?”
In an instant, her smile was gone and she was in my space. I was tall, but with her heels on, she had a couple of inches on me. When she spoke, her voice was quiet, as if meant for my ears alone, which made it even more menacing.
“If Devon should come to know what happened here today, then not only will he die, but I will personally see that the remainder of your days—numbered though they be—are filled with the kind of pain that will leach your beauty until you’re left with looks that make small children run screaming in terror.”
Our eyes were locked and I didn’t dare look away or show weakness. After a tense moment, she turned and walked away.
I remained where I was, taking a minute to suck in a deep breath to steady my nerves.
“Until we meet again, Ivy,” I heard her call to me.
I had only a moment to see her disappearing into an elevator at the end of the hallway before a hood was yanked over my head. Hands grabbed me from behind as I instinctively screamed. There was a sharp prick in my arm and the burn of whatever it was shot into me. A lethargy overtook me, despite the panic and terror pounding in my veins, and I couldn’t fight back when I was picked up. I was thrown over a man’s shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and my eyes slid shut.
When I woke, I was lying on my couch and the sun was streaming through the window.
I would have thought that perhaps it had all been a particularly realistic nightmare, if not for the needle tracks in my arm.
My movements were automatic as I got up, showered, and dressed. It was Saturday and Devon had said he’d be back tonight.
I thought about it all day, but knew there was no way out of the corner Vega had backed me into. The image of her standing impassively by as Clive was shot dead kept going through my mind, only it was Devon instead of Clive.
Part of me was angry with Devon, for ch
oosing this path in the first place. I knew it was irrational, but I couldn’t help wondering how he’d thought this would end with Vega and the Shadow. Had he considered that at any point? Or had he assumed he’d be killed in the line of duty so it wouldn’t really matter?
And what about me? Vega had made it perfectly clear that she was going to kill me . . . eventually. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide from her reach. I had no means of fighting back. I couldn’t even use the pages from the journal because no way could Vega be allowed to get her hands on that vaccine formula. Considering how easily Clive had broken into my apartment, I was glad I’d had the foresight to hide the journal pages at Scott’s. I should’ve probably found a way to get them back and hide them somewhere safer.
The idea that Vega would kill me right out from under Devon, just as she had to Clive and Anna, made me shudder. Devon had already gone through losing Kira. How much more damaged would he be if I was killed, too? But if we were no longer together, perhaps he wouldn’t even hear of my death.
I didn’t cry. I was too stunned, too horrified by the choice I’d been given, which was no choice at all, not really. I’d rather break Devon’s heart and see him live than watch him die the way Clive had died.
But what to say to him? I didn’t know of anything I could say that he’d believe. I’d wanted this—wanted him—too much for him to think I’d just change my mind.
I was no closer to figuring out what I was going to do when evening fell. I stood in front of my closet, clad only in a matching panty and bra set of nude-colored lace and satin. I surveyed my clothes, wanting to wear something nice, something appropriate for the last time Devon and I would see each other.
The doorbell rang, which I thought was odd. Devon usually let himself in.
I grabbed a robe and threw it on, belting it as I hurried to the door. But when I opened it, Scott was there, not Devon.
“I guess you’re not ready yet?” he asked, looking me over with his eyebrows climbing.
And I remembered. “Oh! Yes, we’re supposed to go to the fair tonight, and fireworks.” We’d planned weeks ago to attend the Veiled Prophet Fair, especially since the headliner for tonight’s grandstand was one of my favorite bands.
