Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1)

by Shannon McKenna

  “You lying, treacherous prick,” she said.

  Noah let out a controlled sigh. “Caro—”

  “You had your own agenda from the beginning. The whole time you were just manipulating me. Jerking me around. All those things you said.”

  “They were all true,” Noah broke in.

  “Oh, shut up. How could you play me like that?” To her dismay, she was dissolving. This asshole didn’t deserve her tears. She barely remembered the other people in the room. She was alone with Noah. The others were wallpaper.

  “I meant everything I said to you,” Noah said. “And the two of us are on the same side. But my people and I have secrets that have to be kept at all costs.”

  “Secrets?” She laughed wildly. “Oh, great! All costs, huh? I’m the cost, Noah. Who the hell are you guys? What is your deal?”

  The others exchanged uneasy glances and looked to Noah for their cue.

  “It’s complicated,” Noah said.

  “I just bet that it is.” She glared at him through a haze of furious tears. “Let’s keep it simple. Just give me the flash drive.”

  “If I do that, everyone I care about will die,” he said. “Or worse.”

  Something in his voice undercut her anger. An intuition of some shadowy threat that loomed over all of them. Noah was not lying.

  And that helped her not one bit. She had her own monsters. She had no compassion to spare for anyone else. Maybe if he had not sucked her in so completely, she might have been more open-minded, but as it was, no.

  “Guess what, Noah?” she said. “That is not my problem. You are my problem. You stalked me, seduced me, lied to me and fucked me left, right and sideways. I will not smile and make nice. Give me that flash drive, you son of a bitch.” She dove for his hand.

  “Flush this.” Noah tossed it into the air toward Zade, who caught it one handed. Then Noah seized her in his arms.

  Panic exploded in her chest. “No!” She fought like a wildcat to free herself. Nothing doing. He was insanely strong.

  “You sure about this?” Zade said to Noah.

  “Get it over with.” Noah’s voice was implacable.

  “Don’t!” Caro yelled. “Don’t do it! Please!”

  Zade flashed Caro a pained look, and did as Noah commanded. They saw the bathroom light switch on. Heard the swoosh and gurgle as the flash drive was swept out of reach.

  Zade came back, avoiding Caro’s eyes. “Done.” His voice was subdued.

  The strength that outrage had given her drained away. If not for Noah’s hold on her, she would have crumpled. All that effort. Months of plotting, searching.

  “I’ll fix this for you,” Noah said forcefully. “I’ll find another solution. I’ll protect you from Mark for as long as you need protection. I promise, Caro. Just please, be patient.”

  She started to laugh, but it degenerated into tears. She choked them back.

  Noah deposited her in a big easy chair and stood looming over her as if afraid to turn his back on her. “Relax,” he said.

  “How?” she asked, with a bitter laugh. “Maybe you should just fuck my brains out. It worked so well for you the last time. Too bad it’s just a temporary solution.”

  Zade and Sisko edged warily toward the door. “Hannah,” Zade said in a warning tone. “Let’s get the hell out of here. These two have things to discuss.”

  “No. We don’t.” Caro’s voice rang like out a bell. “I’m not likely to live long enough to be a problem for Noah.”

  “Caro, shut up and listen to me!” Noah’s voice was harsh with frustration.

  Sisko snagged a big black wool overcoat from the closet near the door. “You won’t go all AVP apeshit on her, are you?” he asked.

  “Get lost,” Noah said curtly. “All of you. Fast.”

  They filed out fast, eager to be gone, but Hannah stopped at the door and turned to look at Caro.

  “I am so sorry,” she said. “I never wanted to hurt you. It’s not who we are.”

  “Really,” Caro said icily. “I’m touched.”

  “Don’t hate us,” Hannah persisted. “Please.”

  “I don’t hate you,” Caro said. “Good enough? Now get out of here, unless you want to watch me rip off your brother’s arms.”

  Hannah’s eyebrows shot up. “Good luck with that,” she murmured.

  She scurried out. The door slammed. The two of them looked at each other.

  “Caro,” he said. “I swear I won’t let anyone hurt you. Is that understood?”

  Caro crossed her arms over her chest. Her neck felt sore, looking up at him. “You mean, except for yourself?”

  “I couldn’t tell you secrets that weren’t my own to share,” Noah said.

  “You lied through your teeth to me!”

  He waited for a moment. “Last night you asked me what happened to us after my mother disappeared,” he said finally. “Do you still want to hear that story?”

  “Sure. Why not. Like I have a choice.”

  Noah made a frustrated sound. “Are you going to bust my balls indefinitely?”

  “That is the least of what I am going to do to you, Noah Gallagher.”

  He shook his head wearily. “OK, here it is,” he began. “For what it’s worth. I told you about our mother disappearing. After that, Child Protective Services sent us to foster homes. Asa and Hannah and I ran away. We shoplifted to get by, when we weren’t eating out of supermarket dumpsters. Hung out on the streets when we weren’t stealing. Slept wherever we could. Then one day, I get approached by this guy, out of nowhere. He told me about this amazing experimental program for young people. An awesome opportunity for us all.”

  Oh, shit. Dread tightened her belly, but she kept her face sternly blank, and nodded for him to continue.

  “He didn’t talk like a pimp, for what it was worth,” Noah said. “And we prided ourselves on knowing how to dodge them and the chickenhawks looking for underage kids. There was something different about him. Even so I figured there had to be a catch. But Hannah was sick. I needed medicine for her. If we’d gone to a clinic, we would’ve ended up in juvenile detention. I couldn’t risk that.”

  “Got it,” she said. “And?”

  “I figured, I’d go along, check it out. Walk out whenever I wanted to. Lying and cheating and stealing, picking locks, deactivating alarms—I was an ace at all that.”

  Caro couldn’t afford to sympathize with Noah’s desperate younger self. He’d tried to parent his brother and sister as best he could, yes. But she had to stay in the center of her own goddamn story. “Go on.”

  “So I said yes. Asa thought the whole thing stank. He wanted nothing to do with it. So he disappeared, and Hannah and I went to Midlands.” He paused for a moment, his eyes bleak. “I’ll have to live with that decision for the rest of my life.”

  “How old were you?” she asked, in spite of herself.

  “Seventeen,” he said.

  Shit. Already, she was falling into his trap of feeling sorry for him. He was playing her again. “Finish your story,” she said. “Be quick. I’m not enjoying this.”

  “It seemed OK, the first couple of weeks,” he went on. “The food was great. Hannah started getting better right away. As soon as her lips stopped looking so gray, I began to plan how we’d get out. Which was when I realized that the place was a prison.”

  She was leaning forward, she realized. Hanging on his every word. Damn him.

  “There was no way out,” he said. “I was in over my head. Things proceeded. They got our group organized, told us we’d be a beacon of hope for humanity. They didn’t tell us how much it would hurt. How many of us would die in the process.”

  The haunted shadow in his eyes could not be faked. It chilled her.

  “What did they . . . how . . .” Caro’s voice trailed off. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to hear the rest.

  “Our odds of survival weren’t good to begin with,” he went on. “And if the experiments didn’t go the way they wanted,
their plan was to plow us under and start over with fresh meat.”

  Caro hugged herself against the inner cold. She wanted to say something, but couldn’t.

  “We were ideal subjects. Intelligent, relatively healthy children who weren’t addicts, and about whom no one on earth gave a flying fuck. My crew all has the same sad story.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Not as many as there should be. I led a rebellion at the research facility when I found out that a bunch of us, including me, were scheduled for disposal. I had to move fast. Before they took out the trash.”

  Caro bit her lip and waited for the rest. She couldn’t bring herself to ask any more questions.

  “There were twenty-seven of us fighting on rebellion day,” Noah said. “It was bloody. High casualties on both sides. I can think of twelve more who died before that, during the trials. We lost seven in the battle. Twenty of us escaped. Four more died over the next few years. PTSD, depression, suicide. The rest of us are still hanging in there. New names, new lives. Lethal secrets.”

  “And Mark?”

  “Mark was one of the twenty,” Noah said. “He was in my group. One of the Eyes Guys. Didn’t stay with us long. He wasn’t a team player.”

  “I bet he didn’t like taking orders from you,” she commented.

  “No, he didn’t. I made rules, about not using our abilities to take advantage of people. Mark found that insulting. After what was done to him, he felt entitled to grab whatever he wanted as payback. But nothing could repay what they took from him. It was driving him out of his mind, even then. He’ll never be satisfied.”

  “I see,” Caro said, though she didn’t. She felt numb, and stupid.

  “We’ve followed his career,” Noah said. “He changed his name, of course, but so did we all. And he was never hard to find. We just follow the death and destruction.”

  “You never turned him in?”

  “How could we? He would retaliate, and I’m still responsible for fourteen other people. If Obsidian tracks us down, they’ll wipe us all out. We’re a threat. We could go public, expose them, I guess, but it’s not like the quality of our lives would be improved. Our existence would scare the living shit out of everyone.”

  “So Mark is stealing Obsidian’s secrets,” she said. “To punish them.”

  “Mark wants to punish the whole world,” Noah said. “And he will never stop.”

  “Well,” Caro replied, after several seconds. “In spite of all this, you have a wonderful life. I don’t know how you pull it off. I’m huddled under a rock, eating ramen, and you’re making gazillions helping humanity with visionary biotech. You live in a lakefront mansion with art by Delaunay and Bosch on your wall, you drive a Porsche, you eat filet mignon for dinner and hand-peeled grapes for dessert. I am in awe.”

  “I’ve been at it longer,” Noah said. “You learn some tricks.”

  She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Is that so. Tell me more about these modifications. Are you, like, Superman?”

  An ironic smile flashed across his face. “Hardly,” he said. “We have implants. We had to undergo brain stimulation and intense biofeedback, plus experimental gene splicing. Muscle fiber mods, intensive combat training, ultra-heightened reflexes. They wanted supersoldiers. Each of us has a specialty, according to our dominant abilities.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “Eyes,” he said simply.

  She sighed. “Of course. Can you see in the dark?”

  “Yes. I have hardware in my eyes, for far vision and night vision, and AVP uploaded into my brain. Augmented visual processing. I see a wider spectrum of frequencies, and I process visual information extremely fast. And react the same way.”

  “Kill first, think second?” The question just came out.

  “It’s happened,” he said, unfazed by the question. “Not lately. Took me years to learn to calm down the stress response.”

  Caro got up from her chair and grabbed her coat from the back of the couch where Hannah had draped it. She shrugged it on. “That is just an amazing story, Noah, but I don’t want to hear any more. It’s time for me to go now.”

  “No.” Noah moved between her and the door, blocking her. His huge body was a wall between her and and escape.

  Her throat constricted. “You can’t force me to stay.”

  “I don’t want to force you to do anything. But I can’t let an angry person with a grudge who knows my family’s secrets just go walking out my door.”

  “Oh,” she said. “So, you’re a super-assassin, right? You don’t even need to outsource a hit. Shall I say my prayers? Is this my big moment?”

  “I already told you.” His voice was stiff. “I would never hurt you.”

  “You already did,” she said. “You’ve hurt me more in the past half hour than I ever have been hurt by anyone. Including Mark. Open the goddamn door, Noah. There’s no danger in letting me walk away. I won’t say anything about you. No one in their right mind would believe me if I did. You’re perfectly safe from me.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Caro,” he said. “Not happening.”

  The look on his face made her want to scream. He felt completely justified in what he was doing, no matter how supposedly sorry he was to do it. It made her feel so alone.

  A thought crept into the back of her mind, which was right where she had to keep it. It had to stay small, huddled up. If it got any larger, he would sense it. The way he sensed fucking everything. Always.

  Sexual energy buzzed between them. She couldn’t stop it if she wanted to. Her body responded to him without her consent. That heat in his eyes did something to her that was light-years outside her conscious control. It made her frantic. Furious that he had so much power over her. Besides all the other powers, all his crushing advantages as an adversary, he had this, too.

  Sex was the only weapon she had to turn back upon him, as alert as he was. If she could keep her thoughts small, and cold, and secret.

  Sex might distract him for a crucial moment. If she could manage not to get totally swept away by it herself. A very big if.

  She took a step closer. Shrugged the coat open. Shoulders back. Tits out.

  “So what’s the plan for me, then?” She made her voice go low and husky. “A golden cage? A collar and leash? Is this going to be my life now? Will you keep me naked in your bedroom, ready to fulfil your every sexual whim?”

  His eyes narrowed. “That’s a fast change of subject.”

  She shrugged. “I suppose. You make me so angry. And even so, we always find ourselves . . . right here.” Another step brought her close enough to reach out and stroke the thickened bulge at the front of his jeans with her fingertip. “Every damn time.”

  He shuddered but stood tall, a hot flush on his cheekbones. “Oh fuck.”

  “Screwing me over really turns you on,” she said. “Look at that.”

  “You too,” he shot back.

  “You think?” Caro grabbed the hems of her layered T-shirts and pulled them up, baring her breasts and tight nipples. “Well, would you look at that. You’re so right.”

  His eyes had that hot amber glow that made her crazy, but she controlled herself, sliding her hand into her deep coat pocket as she sidled closer. “If you’re not going to let me go, what do you propose to do with me? I’d love to hear the details.”

  Noah’s body heat made sent a shivering ripple of excitement through her body, making her nipples tingle wildly.

  “No,” he said unsteadily. “We’re not doing that now. You’re too angry at me.”

  “That’s not going to change,” she told him. “But I’m in a crazy mood.”

  “Caro.” His voice was strangled. “Anytime you want it, just take it.”

  Caro kept her purpose cold and clear as her trembling fingers closed around the smooth cylinder in her pocket. “Not this time,” she said. “You take it.”

  She whipped out the pepper spray and blasted it into his startled eyes. T
hen she grabbed one of the brass candlesticks from the table.

  The sound he made was awful. A bellow of betrayal partly drowned out by her own screaming. She screamed with horror, and guilt, and anger, at having been driven to do something so fucking horrible to someone she loved.

  Loved. Yes. She did love him, goddamn him. She realized that fully the same instant that the brass candlestick connected with the side of his head.

  She felt it through her own nerves as if she’d taken the blow herself.

  Noah grunted at the impact, dropping to one knee, hands clamped over his eyes. He let out another roar that rattled her bones. Caro scrambled away from him.

  Everything was overbright, disjointed. The world through a shattered mirror.

  The keys to the Porsche. She snatched them, stumbling and weaving through a smear of colors out the door. Something broke behind her. He was still bellowing.

  She was crying so hard she could barely breathe. She dropped the key fob, had to fish for it in the wet grass. Once she was in the car, her legs couldn’t reach the pedals, and she lost precious seconds groping for the button that slid the seat forward, terrified that Noah would descend upon her in an avenging fury.

  She hesitated before putting the car into drive, and groped in her pocket for the phone she’d kept for calls from Gareth. She turned it on. She couldn’t leave Noah like that, after hitting him on the head.

  She got the information across to a methodical 911 operator, then turned the phone off and shoved it back into her secret pocket, the one she’d sewed way down in the seam. She’d toss it the next chance she got.

  The paramedics would come to his rescue—while she sped away in the luxury car that she’d stolen from him. It was so fucked up. Tragic and twisted. But it wasn’t like she could go back and minister to him. He might actually feel justified in killing her after what she’d done to him.

  At least the Porsche wasn’t a stick shift. She’d be doomed.

  Still crying, she blundered through unfamiliar streets, constantly expecting sirens, strobe lights. When she finally made it home she left the car in a tow zone. Noah must have a GPS tag on it. She’d leave the keys in her apartment for him to find, along with a note of apology.