by J. A. Huss
Lincoln said to come find him. And that’s exactly what I plan on doing. Only this time, I’m going prepared. I pat the pocket of my leather jacket where my gun is stashed. And I’m not coming back until I’ve checked every last dirt road on Wolf Pass Highway.
Chapter Twenty - Lincoln
A modified servo robot goes whizzing by, barely missing my head as I lie next to the bike, messing with the brake line.
“I’m not falling for your passive-aggressive bullshit, Sheila. And I don’t think you’re gonna run me over with one of those monstabots.” I do think that, actually. She’s been programmed to act like a woman and that automatically makes her cunning, vengeful, and able to carry a grudge until she wins.
But she’s not going to win. She wants details about last night. She wants for me to hear her out. She wants me to stop. And no. That’s not happening. None of it is on the table. I’m too far in. I’ve risked too much. I’ve… changed, and those changes can’t be undone.
Another servo goes by, clipping me on my bare shoulder. “Goddammit, you bitch.”
Sheila manifests into her holographic form in the center of the room. She wears the same clothes as always, but today, she’s got her hair different.
Am I supposed to notice that?
I roll my eyes and ignore her. Fucking women—even fake women—are beyond comprehension.
She walks over to me and stands there, silently waiting, and tapping her foot. It even has a sound effect. A tiny pat, pat, pat against the polished concrete floors.
“Can I help you?” I ask.
“You can’t keep doing this.”
“I can and I will. Until someone stops me.”
“Just what exactly are you trying to prove by murdering people?”
“That I’m capable. That I’m inhuman. That I’m perfect. That I’m Alpha.” I snort out a small laugh. “Even you know that can’t be changed. So why bother fighting it?”
“Because you deserve a future that’s not dependent on the past. I only want you to be happy, Lincoln. I want you to find a nice girl before you waste your youth on this plan filled with hate, and darkness, and revenge.”
“I can’t deal with this shit right now, Sheila. Just go away.”
“I think this Molly woman is the one.” She says ‘the one’ in a whisper like it’s a secret.
“Would you leave me alone? All I want to do is work on my bike in peace. And that means you need to go—”
Eeeeent, eeeent, eeent—the perimeter alarm goes off. I look at Sheila and she disappears to go investigate. Two seconds later she’s back, smiling.
“What was it?”
She crosses her arms and looks smug.
“What the fuck was—”
“I think you better go check the tunnel, Lincoln. You have a visitor.”
“Shit,” I say, throwing down a wrench with a clang that echoes through the cave. “That girl found me.” I get up off the ground and wipe my greasy hands on my jeans as I walk over to the security room and see Molly fucking Masters on all sixteen monitors as Sheila traces her movements from the moment she crossed onto the secured property. I own more than six hundred acres in all directions from the center of the cave. But not all of it is secure. Only the parts I don’t want people to find.
Detective Masters is on a street-legal dirt bike. I recognize it from her trailer last weekend. It’s a high-end motocross model that looks like it could kick some serious ass. Also, very powerful. So Miss Masters must be a rider. Since her brother was Wild Will—infamous dirt racer who viewed death as a viable alternative to losing—I have no doubt Molly Masters knows exactly what she’s doing on that thing. It gives her confidence.
But maybe she needs a little run for her money? Because even though she gave in to me last night, I’m damn sure that she’s regretting it today. Looking for revenge, maybe? Counting on the fact that I never got off and might be wishing I had? Thinking she might reel me in and I might be the final piece of the puzzle she needs?
I grab my leather off the back of a desk chair as I head to the tunnel entrance and make a promise to myself to deliver exactly what she came for.
Answers.
And she’s not going to like them one bit.
I can hear her yelling my name before I even get a quarter way to the gate.
“Lincoln, I know you’re in there! I know you can hear me! Show your face in the light, you coward! You wanna drug a girl, take advantage of her? Erase her mind? Well, I’ve got—”
“Keep your fucking voice down. I’m right here,” I say, walking into the hazy light coming from the gate entrance. Molly has her fists wrapped around the bars like she’s trying to get out instead of in.
“Well, finally. I’ve been standing out here for twenty minutes. You told me to find you, so I did. Now I want to know what the fuck your deal is.”
I walk up to her, stop less than a foot away from the rusted steel gate, and stare into her eyes. She recoils and I know why. The coldness inside of me pours out. The thirst for revenge, now that it’s so damn close, bleeds from me as if through an open wound. “How can I help you?” I growl through my gritted teeth.
“I want to know what you’ve been doing at night.”
“Do you now?” I sneer. “You sure about that, Detective? Because you’re not gonna like it.”
“There’s been some murders up at Blue Corp.”
“Sucks to be them, I guess.”
“And the murderer has been leaving calling cards. And that anarchy patch on your shoulder makes me wonder.”
I lean into the bars, pressing my head against them so I’m only a few inches from her face. “Is that right?”
She swallows and then sucks in a breath. My eyes drop to her chest as it rises and falls underneath a black leather moto jacket. “Who are you?”
“You don’t want to know that. And I’m gonna need you to go before you get hurt. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“But you’ll fuck me in public? That’s OK?”
“You wanted it.”
“You wanted it, asshole.”
“I’m not the one who got off.”
Her face turns red, her hazel eyes blazing with shame, or regret, or both. “I’m gonna look up this tract of land you’ve got here. I’m gonna find out who you are, what you’re doing, and I’m gonna stop it. Because anyone who does what you did to me last weekend is an evil motherfucker. And I don’t need to be a detective to know you’re connected to those murders. I can feel it. You’re gonna regret ever meeting me, Lincoln.”
“Well, you got that last part right,” I say, a cold wind whipping past my face and making my jacket open to reveal my bare chest.
She looks.
I shake my head when she meets my eyes again. This time I catch embarrassment. “Shy much, gun girl?”
She stays silent.
“You want me to save you the trouble of all that pesky sleuthing? Give you what you came for? Well, get out your phone, Molly Masters, and look up the name Lincoln Wade.”
She huffs out some incredulous air through her teeth.
“Go on,” I encourage her. “I’ll wait.”
“Fine,” she says, setting her jaw and tipping her chin up. And then she grabs her phone from her jeans pocket and types my name in Blue Search. I can see the little earth logo in the top corner of her screen.
Ironic.
Her brow furrows and her eyes squint down as they race across the screen, taking it all in.
“Well?” I ask a few seconds later. “There you are.” I point to the search page. “And now you know.”
“I don’t understand,” she says, looking up from underneath her hair. “What’s this mean?”
“What’s it mean?” I laugh. “I’ve searched my name before and I know what comes up first. So just open it up, gun girl. Read the fucking paper that doctor wrote. It’s spelled out clear as day for anyone who knows what to look for.”
She gives her head a little shake and then begins to re
ad out loud. “‘Lincoln Wade, the only remaining member of the Wade family, was abducted as a ten-year-old child, along with several dozen other children from the Cathedral City area. The Wade family offered rewards for years, before dying in a fire that destroyed the family home. Lincoln Wade and Case Reider were found wandering along Wolf Pass Highway in the dead of winter when they were fifteen. After many months of questioning and therapy in the Cathedral City Psychiatric Hospital for Children brought forth no answers, the Reider family adopted Wade and the boys went home.’”
She stops reading, but I continue for her. I know that report by heart. “‘Both Reider and Wade exhibited strange behaviors and were monitored by local mental health authorities until they turned eighteen. But no kidnapper was ever found and no reason for their long disappearance was ever offered by either boy or the Reider family. Reider went to a local university and graduated with a degree in computer engineering, while Wade faded from public record.’”
“But…” she stutters. “You’re here. You came back?”
“I never left. They just figured it was better to leave me out here alone in the dark than get in my face after I gave them an ultimatum.”
She swallows hard, wanting to ask, but forcing herself not to.
“I broke into the psychiatrist’s house the night before I turned eighteen and told her if she didn’t close our case I’d come back for her.”
“Come back… and do what?”
“Use your imagination, Molly.”
She’s silent for a moment and then her expression goes from confused to angry. “Then what the fuck is going on? Why did you come find me last night? Why did you tell me to find you?”
I shrug. “A moment of weakness. Now, if you have everything you came for, then—”
“No. You’re not getting off that easy. You tell me some sob story about your childhood—”
I reach through the bars and grab her coat, scaring the living fuck out of her, and then pull her into the cold metal gate. “Watch. Your. Mouth. Detective. And don’t even pretend like you know my sob story. Because what they said in that paper was the scrubbed version of events. The court put a gag order on the really fucked-up shit.”
Chapter Twenty-One - Molly
“Wait,” I say, as he lets go of my coat and starts to turn away. “Just wait a minute, OK?”
“Why?” he asks, giving me a sidelong glare. “You didn’t get the message? I’m a danger to society, Masters. And your job is to protect it. We can’t be friends. We’re enemies—then, now and forever.”
What does that even mean? Then? Now? Forever? But I let it go, trying my best to stay focused even though every time he’s around, I lose my head. “You’re killing those scientists, aren’t you? You’re setting them up to look like suicides and then you’re killing them.” As soon as the words come out I know I’ve made a mistake, because any bit of softness in his expression is immediately gone.
“I never touched them, Detective.” He laughs. But that laugh, holy shit, it sends a chill down my spine. “And no matter where you’re looking or how much you think you’ve got figured out, you’re still in the dark.”
“How would you know? You said you didn’t do it.”
“It’s not about who did it, Masters. It’s about why they did it.”
He’s toying with me.
We watch each other for a few moments. The only sound is the wind passing through the pine trees and the birds. It’s a nice day. The sun is out, the sky is blue, and the temperature is mild.
But down that tunnel he so badly wants to retreat to, it’s black. That’s his world, I tell myself. He’s darkness and he’s giving me a chance to leave.
I should take it.
So I turn away and begin to walk.
“I know who you are,” he calls out after me. It comes out desperate. Like he can’t let me walk away. A ploy to keep this interaction going. “I felt it back there out on that highway. I know more about you than you know about yourself.”
My heart skips as I think of all the possible ways he could be keeping track of me. Cameras in my house? Tracking on my phone? I whirl around and face him again.
“Don’t hate me, Molly,” he says, pulling out his phone and pressing a tab on the screen that makes the rusty gate begin to lift up. “I want you to walk away, I really do. But not before I get my say. Because I never asked for this. I never asked for you to come find me. That was all you. That part was always you.”
“No,” I say, backing up and never taking my eyes off him. “You told me to come find you, Lincoln.”
“You’re wrong. I told you to run. I told you to never look back. I saved you and you don’t even know it. But then there you were out there on the road. Saving me back. And once I accepted the fact that you were really here, I did my best, Molly. I did my best.”
He takes a step out of the tunnel, and my gun is out, pointed at his chest in an instant. But a wave of revulsion hits me in my stomach, enough to make me double over and start to retch.
“Sorry about the inhibition sickness. But fair is fair, right? It’s only temporary, anyway. Not like mine.”
He walks forward, grabs the gun out of my hand and throws it on the ground. The waves of revulsion in my stomach ease.
“What the hell?” I ask, righting myself to look at him through my hair.
“What the hell? What the fucking hell, Molly?” He grabs me by the coat again and gives me a good shake. My head is still spinning and this just makes it worse. “You owe me everything. You owe me your life.”
“Fuck you,” I say, gaining back some control. “Just fuck you, you crazy vagrant. Living in a tunnel. All that weird shit you have in there. Is that hologram your wife?”
He shoves me so hard I stumble backwards and hit a tree, knocking the wind out of me. Now it’s his turn to double over. I can almost feel his pain. I imagine it to be like the revulsion that receded from my own gut seconds before. “You were only eight back then,” he says, spitting on the ground and regaining his composure so he can look up at me from under the hair that drapes over his eyes. “I was fifteen. I had all the power then. You were never gonna live through it, Molly. Not without my help. You were never going to make it. Never.”
“Shut up!” I don’t even know why I’m so mad. But I don’t want to hear anymore. I need to get the hell out of here.
“And when Thomas said, ‘You need to kill her, Lincoln. You need to kill her or she will come back and kill us,’ I didn’t. But I should’ve, Molly. I fucking should’ve done it. And if I was as smart as they say, I would’ve done it.”
I bolt to the left, but he grabs my arm and throws me down on the ground. He straddles me, one foot on either side of my hips, looking down at me like a wolf might look at prey.
A memory flashes through my mind. Fire, everywhere. Explosions.
Lincoln kneels down with me between his legs and shakes his head, grimacing like he’s still in pain, but that only makes him clutch me tighter. I feel fear. Real, honest-to-God fear. “I set you free that night. I told you to run, you stupid girl. I saved you even though your only purpose in life was to hurt me.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” He’s insane. And I’m dead. He is the killer and he’s gonna get me next.
He grabs both my shoulders and gives me another shake. “Remember me, Molly? Remember me? I was your only friend even though you did everything they told you.”
“No, I don’t know you. I don’t know you!” I say, desperate to make everything stop. My head hurts so bad. My vision blurs and my heart is beating so fast it sounds like the thunder created by a galloping horse. “I’m Molly Masters. You’re confusing me with someone else. You’re crazy. You’re a criminal. You hate the world and you want to make me crazy with you.”
He kisses me on the mouth.
Hard and soft at the same time. His hands wrap around my face, pulling me towards him. And then he withdraws and I am so stunned, I cannot move.
“I
saved you, Molly,” he whispers into my mouth, trying to kiss me and talk at the same time, grabbing my face like he can’t bear to let me go. “I saved you even though you’ll kill me if you ever have the chance.”
“Stop,” I say, pushing him away, tears streaming down my face. “Stop!” I scream it this time. I kick my feet up and even though I’m trained to take down men twice my size, I am powerless as he looms over me.
“You can’t make me stop, Molly. But don’t worry. I can’t really hurt you. It’s how they made us.”
“No,” I say. “No. Everything you’re saying right now is a lie. I want you to get off me. I want you to let me go. I want to go home, Lincoln. I want to go home—”
Chapter Twenty-Two - Lincoln
Chapter Twenty-Two
Alpha #3
Prodigy School
Fifteen years ago
“Tell me what to do, Alpha.”
The little girl looks at me with her wide hazel eyes and swallows down her fear. She is one of only a handful of people I should be afraid of. But I love her more than anything. She is the only good thing in my life. Even in this place filled with hate, and greed, and cruelty she makes me feel love.
If I were following orders she’d be dead right now. Lying in her bed in a pool of her own blood. The other Alphas have already finished. They are waiting for me so we can escape. But the other Alphas don’t have little girls as their Omega. The other Alphas don’t feel the way I do.
“You have to run, Omega.” I wish she had a name. I wish so much I could give her a real name. But it’s too late now. She’s leaving my life—dead or alive. One way or another, the time for naming is over.
“Don’t leave me, Alpha,” she pleads in that little-girl voice that makes me love her even more. “Don’t leave me here.” She whispers the last part, a tear trickling down her cheek. Her face is so pale in the bright moonlight shining through her bedroom window.