Never Let Go

by Cynthia Eden

  But the guard’s fingers were squeezing the trigger. Elizabeth threw her body forward, trying to protect Sawyer. She’d just gotten him back. She couldn’t lose him…even if…

  Even if he’s a monster?

  I’m Frankenstein, and I made the monster…

  Pain hit her, burning right through Elizabeth. She called out Sawyer’s name as she fell.

  I’ll always come back for you.

  Sawyer was the last thing she saw. He was staring down at her with his stormy blue gaze—a gaze that held zero recognition…and no emotion at all.

  Chapter Five

  Wyman Wright smiled as he watched the video feed. “Excellent test run.” He nodded to his guards. “Release the gas. When everyone is knocked out, you can remove the first test subject. Sawyer Cage should be transferred to the Lazarus facility immediately.” His fingers tapped against his desk. “Go ahead and move Flynn Haddox, too.”

  In the live feed, Sawyer was still holding the gun. He was also still staring down at Dr. Elizabeth Parker. Landon and the guard who’d just fired were trying to back out of the lab.

  “Sir…” The man behind Wyman cleared his throat. “Should we…should we go ahead and inject Flynn Haddox before removal? His body did go through the preservation process.”

  Wyman smiled. “We are absolutely going to inject him.” Elizabeth had done it. She’d brought back the dead. Talk about a fucking miracle.

  And a perfect weapon.

  Elizabeth didn’t know that he’d altered her formula, just a bit. Landon had been only too happy to make the changes, per Wyman’s instructions. He’d needed a soldier who came back with a strong desire to hunt. To destroy.

  A soldier with no emotions.

  Smoke began to fill lab five. Not smoke, though—gas. A very powerful gas that would knock out the newly risen Sawyer Cage.

  The gun fell from Sawyer’s fingers. He staggered forward, and then he sagged to his knees…right beside Dr. Elizabeth Parker.

  Elizabeth’s shirt was soaked with blood.

  “I might need her,” Wyman said, frowning. Her mind would be a terrible thing to lose. “Get medics in there.”

  Sawyer reached out to Elizabeth. His hand pressed to her chest. He shuddered.

  Then he collapsed, his body falling on top of hers.

  When the medics rushed into the lab, their faces covered by masks, they dragged Sawyer off Elizabeth. Surprisingly, he roused enough to fight them…

  And to try and hold tight to Elizabeth Parker.

  Wyman leaned toward his monitor, watching the feed avidly. “Now isn’t that interesting…”

  As far as Wyman was concerned, the experiment had been a full success, and things were truly just getting started.

  Chapter Six

  Three Months Later…

  “It’s really quite phenomenal,” Landon said, and there was admiration in his tone. “Your research and work were so ground-breaking, Elizabeth. The things that we’ve accomplished in a short amount of time—it’s just, well, like I said, phenomenal, truly.”

  Elizabeth just stared at him. She didn’t let her expression alter even the tiniest bit, but her heart raced frantically in her chest. The rhythm was so fast and hard that Elizabeth was surprised Landon couldn’t hear the desperate beat. Her palms were wet with sweat, yet her back was ramrod-straight. She was afraid, and she was desperate, but she would never show those emotions to Landon.

  The guy was on her shit-list, and he’d forever remain there. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice…and it will be your last mistake.

  Landon gave her a warm smile. The overhead light glinted off his glasses. “I’m so glad that you’re back with us. I had faith in Wright, of course. When he wants something…” His smile faltered. “It’s pretty hard to tell Wright no.”

  And the great Wyman Wright had wanted her back on his team. Well, he wanted her back at the moment. But that hadn’t been the case originally. Not when Project Lazarus had first…been a damn go.

  After that nightmare day, she’d been abandoned. When Elizabeth had gotten out of the hospital, Wright had been nowhere to be found. He’d emptied their labs and offices in D.C. and shut down the facility there. All of the other employees—everyone had vanished. Elizabeth had been left alone, with a healing bullet wound in her chest.

  And Sawyer was gone. They took him away. She’d tried desperately to find out where Wright had relocated his group, but she’d gotten stone-walled at every turn.

  But then—two weeks ago—things had changed. Wright had come back to D.C. The conniving bastard had literally just appeared at her door. He’d acted as if he were just dropping by for a visit. A friendly little chat. As if she hadn’t spent months tearing D.C. apart as she searched for Sawyer. And as every door got slammed in my face.

  “Wright needs me.” Elizabeth was proud of the fact that her voice came out calm and steady. She and Landon were walking down a long, curving corridor. They were in the middle of Arizona, at Wright’s new research facility. What he’d called the Lazarus Facility. No wonder I couldn’t find the place in D.C. He moved everyone across the country!

  Just getting inside the place had been one hell of a challenge. The outside entrance had been heavily guarded by armed men and women. Before she could get inside, she’d had to be thoroughly searched and show her ID at four different checkpoints. Then, and only then, had she gained access to the main facility…a facility that happened to be carved into the very side of a mountain. She figured the new Lazarus research location was only creepy by about—oh, one hundred percent. “Don’t bother trying to sugarcoat things for me, Landon. I know exactly why Wright came to me. Something is wrong with the program, and he thinks I can fix the problems.”

  Landon was sweating, too. Only his sweat was more obvious than hers. She could see the trickles sliding down his temples. At her words, Landon stilled in the corridor and faced her. He swallowed, once, twice, then said, voice hushed, “I didn’t want things to end…that way.”

  Her brows rose. “What way, exactly?”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed.

  Elizabeth moved closer to him. Her shoes slid over the stone floor. “You mean…with you stealing my project? Or with me getting a bullet to the chest?”

  Silence.

  “Perhaps you mean that you didn’t want things to end with me being abandoned in a hospital as I fought to live? With me waking up and discovering you and Wright had shut me out completely and left me? That you had stolen all of my research—both from the facility in D.C. and my home?”

  Landon licked his lips. “Pretty much all of that.” He cast a frantic look around them, and his gaze lingered on the security camera perched high on the wall to the left of them. “I didn’t have a choice. Wright called the shots.” Landon barely seemed to breathe the words. “He still does. When the guy says jump, I do.”

  But I don’t. She had her own agenda. She wasn’t jumping for Wright, no matter what the sonofabitch might think.

  “I know he offered you a whole lot of money to come back on board…” Landon began.

  Right. Like money was the reason she’d come back. Money might matter to Landon and to Wright, but she had other priorities.

  “We need you,” he added grimly. “There are things—”

  A door opened down the hallway. A guard appeared. Elizabeth knew he was a guard because this guy was dressed just as the others had been—all in black from his neck to his boots, and he had an earpiece tucked into his right ear. A gun was holstered on his hip.

  The guard nodded to her and Landon as he passed by them in the corridor. Landon didn’t speak again, not until they were alone once more in that narrow hallway.

  “Our test subjects are perfect weapons.” He nodded briskly. “Their heart-rates are steady, their adrenaline levels stay within our new parameters when stressed, but more importantly, their senses are enhanced. It’s pretty unbelievable what they can do. Their hearing, their sight…hell, they perform ten times better t
han normal soldiers. They’re super soldiers, I guess you could say.”

  No, she wasn’t going to say that.

  “They’re stronger than normal humans. They move faster. They have reflexes that will blow a typical human’s off the charts.” He turned and began walking down the corridor. “Because your test rats showed increased strength and enhanced reflexes, we were hoping to replicate those results with the Lazarus subjects. We had no idea just how significant the changes would truly be for them, though. Developments we didn’t expect, but are certainly thrilled to see.”

  She followed him, slowly. She was wearing a white lab coat, and it fluttered behind her.

  “They sound perfect.” Her voice drifted around them. “But if they are so perfect, why do you need me?”

  They slid around the curve in the corridor. Up ahead, another guard waited. When they approached him, both Landon and Elizabeth had to show their ID. Five times now. After he verified their identities, the guard typed in four digits on the key-pad that waited near the heavy, metal door. A loud beep sounded, and then the door opened. She started to step forward—

  “Sorry, doctor,” the guard told her, immediately moving into Elizabeth’s path. “I know you’re new here, so you don’t know the drill yet. But no one gets past this check-point without a pat-down.”

  Her brows lifted. “I’ve already been searched.”

  The guard—a big, red-headed guy with dark green eyes—exhaled on a heavy breath. “Sorry, ma’am, but you’re going to be patted-down again right now. It’s procedure. Everyone must follow procedure, or I can’t let you into the tombs.”

  The tombs.

  Goosebumps rose onto her arms. Was the place called the tombs because all of Landon’s “super soldiers” had once been dead?

  Since she had nothing to hide—not then, anyway—Elizabeth lifted her arms. The pat-down was fast but thorough, and Landon was searched as soon as she was done.

  Then they went inside. They crept down three flights of stairs and Elizabeth saw— “The tombs.”

  Only they weren’t tombs. Not really. They were more like cells. Small rooms that she estimated to be about fifteen feet long by ten feet wide. A bed was in each room, a small table and a chair. A toilet.

  It’s like prison.

  Only there were no bars on the cells. The walls were big, clear chunks of glass.

  “We can see them, but they can’t see us,” Landon said as his shoulder brushed against hers. “One-way mirrors for walls. Kind of like what cops use in their interrogation rooms. Only from inside, the material doesn’t look like a mirror. It looks like a plain, white wall—a wall that happens to be very, very strong.”

  Her legs were shaking as she stepped forward. “You have…there are a lot of rooms here.” She didn’t see anyone in those rooms, not then. Where are all the test subjects?

  “Wright wanted us to increase our research pool.” A new tension had entered his voice. “And that’s where the trouble began.”

  She’d been gazing down at all of the rooms, desperately looking for one test subject in particular, but at Landon’s words, her gaze swung back to him.

  “That increased aggression that you were so worried about…” Landon licked his lips. “It’s showing itself.”

  Her heart stopped beating. “You don’t think that when Sawyer woke up and immediately attacked everyone around him that he wasn’t exhibiting increased aggression?”

  “Uh, yes, about that…” He hurried past the cells. “Sawyer Cage was pre-programmed, if you will.”

  She lunged forward and grabbed Landon’s arm. “What?”

  He was sweating even more now. “I guess Wright didn’t tell you that part, huh? Didn’t mention it when he came to see you?”

  She gave a hard, negative shake of her head.

  “Um, well, our additional research has shown that when you administer too much of the Lazarus formula, the brain’s functioning is altered. Emotional responses to situations can be amplified and primitive instinct takes over. Sawyer woke to find himself surrounded by unfamiliar, armed guards. His primitive response—it was to attack. To eliminate the threat. To kill.”

  “You gave him too much,” she gritted out. “I was telling you that then! We could have all died.”

  He sucked in a sharp breath. “And that’s why you are here. So that no additional miscalculations will be made.”

  He opened a door to the right, and she saw a small office waiting inside.

  “Some of the subjects are showing low serotonin levels. I think their pre-frontal cortexes have a harder time creating an appropriate response to anger—and that’s where we’re seeing the surge in aggression.” He walked around the paper-filled desk and crashed in his chair. “We did expect the aggression, but we had no idea about the memory loss.”

  She stood in the doorway. “Memory loss?”

  He glowered at her. “You didn’t warn me about that part. It wasn’t in your notes.”

  “That’s because none of the rats I used exhibited memory loss. They could still perform all of the same functions that they’d completed before being dosed with the Lazarus formula. I tested them all to make certain their brain function was within normal parameters, but I didn’t test on humans.” Because we were not ready for them. Not even close. You don’t go from rats to humans, that was bullshit. Wright had been working his own agenda, from day one. He’d wanted super soldiers, and he’d wanted them immediately.

  Landon’s fingers steepled beneath his chin. “Is it possible the rats only recalled procedural memories?”

  “I don’t know—my research wasn’t completed,” Elizabeth snapped out. Procedural memory…the memories that most people took for granted. Memories that allowed people to do simple things like tie their shoes or use a knife and fork when eating. The simple tasks that people completed over and over again became procedures for them to follow, and these memories were attached to the cerebellum, the motor cortex, the putamen, and the caudate nucleus. “Areas involved in instinctive action,” she murmured as her mind puzzled out this new development. Dammit, yes, it was possible that the rats had been displaying procedural memories when they ran through the mazes. They’d gone through her mazes over and over again. She’d assumed memories were intact for them, but that had been a huge mistake on her part. The aggression displayed by some of her test subjects had captured her attention, and she hadn’t even stopped to consider—

  “The memory loss isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”

  What?

  “If the subjects had remembered their pasts, then they might have wanted to reconnect with loved ones. Not really a possibility. The memory loss allowed the subjects to start with a clean slate, if you will.”

  Elizabeth glowered at Landon. She bit her lip, hard, so she didn’t scream at him. Sawyer doesn’t remember me? At all? None of the subjects remember? “Anything else?” Elizabeth asked carefully. “Things I need to be told about now?”

  His gaze darted away from hers. “The subjects perform well in the field. Far better than regular soldiers—”

  She flew across the room and slapped her hands down on his desk, sending papers flying to the floor. “They’ve already gone in the field?” Wright was a freaking lunatic. And she would be shutting his ass down. The sonofabitch thought that all he’d needed to do was throw money at her, and she’d been right back on his team.

  Wrong. Elizabeth couldn’t be bought. She was in that facility for one reason and one reason alone…to fix the nightmare that she’d helped to create.

  “Yes.” Landon spoke haltingly as he explained, “Wright wanted a full test. He wanted to see just what the subjects could do. We began with simulated missions.”

  “It’s been three months.”

  “Yes, I know, but the test subjects showed such aptitude that Wright insisted on sending them out right away, with proper supervision, of course.”

  She forced herself to take several long, deep breaths. Her temples were throbbing. “And
there were no issues?”

  His eyelashes flickered.

  Shit. There were issues. Plenty of them, Elizabeth was betting. Wright had been desperate to get her back on his team, after all. There was always a reason for desperation.

  Landon smiled at her, but it was a fake grin, she could tell. “You’re here to smooth over any glitches.”

  That’s what you think. “I want to see the test subjects. Immediately.” She straightened away from his desk.

  He nodded quickly. “Right. Absolutely. I’ll get Subject Number—”

  Her skin had iced. “You only speak of them by numbers, not names?”

  Landon swallowed. She heard the faint click of his Adam’s apple. “Y-yes.”

  “You’re de-humanizing them. You can’t do that. They are people.”

  Sweat trickled down his temple. “The men you knew before—Sawyer and Flynn—they’re gone.” His voice was careful. “You understand that, don’t you? These subjects don’t remember who they were before Lazarus. As far as they know, they don’t have a past.” He grimaced. “Using a name wouldn’t have meaning for them. The people they were before Lazarus—well, those lives are over for them. The men truly died.”

  Like she needed that reminder. Elizabeth would never forget the sight of Sawyer’s body spread out on that table. So still.

  With a cough, Landon added. “So, um, yes, we give them numbers. Easier that way.”

  She turned away from him so he wouldn’t see her rage. “You give them numbers and you keep them in cages and you think that’s okay?”

  “We monitor their mental health.” His voice was sharp, as if she’d offended him.

  Before she was finished, Elizabeth would do a lot more than offend the guy.

  “And they aren’t in cages. They have rooms, comfortable accommodations—”

  “Accommodations that have walls you can see through! They have no privacy. No security!”

  But Landon shook his head. “We need to be able to monitor them. For our safety. The men are able to come and go through the facility here, but they are always trailed by a guard. Until we can be certain of them—until we know that there won’t be any dangerous surprises, the men will be watched.”