"What are you doing?" he asked, his voice a little gruff.
I moistened my lips and whispered into his ear, "Shh. I need to concentrate."
And I did.
And I flexed.
I heard him gasp softly as I entered his mind.
The sensations flooded over me. The true Rogan was revealed beneath my fingers and into me.
::::::::Alone
Tired::::::::
Angry::::::::
::::::::Revenge
Despair::::::::
::::::: Disappointment
Betrayal::::::::
::::::::Guilt
Sadness::::::::
::::::::Desire
It didn't hurt yet, and I sensed something else inside of him. I slid deeper into his mind.
No… I didn't do it…. She doesn't believe me…. She hates me…. She's so beautiful… so brave … so strong…. I need to kill him…. He needs to be stopped…. I need to stop this once and for all… once and for all… all my fault… all of this is all my fault..
I pulled my hands away from him as the pain suddenly knifed through my brain, and I fell to the floor holding my head and moaning.
Oh, God. The agony! It spread around my entire brain, squeezing and squeezing until I thought my head would burst. But then it finally eased, leaving behind a pain deep enough that I had to keep my eyes shut, grinding my fists into them to focus myself.
Were those actual thoughts? Did I just read Rogan's mind? But they couldn't be real thoughts. They were disjointed and didn't make any sense. They were all over the place.
It was more like an imprint-like a snapshot-of who Rogan truly was in words.
Painful words.
"Kira," Rogan murmured as he fell to the floor beside me and gathered me into his arms. He kissed my forehead softly and stroked the still-damp dark hair back from my face. "Are you okay? What was that? I felt you. I felt you in my head."
Without saying anything-I wasn't sure I could have if I tried-I let him hold me, and I wrapped my arms tightly around him. I wasn't lying before. He smelled good, so very good. I let his scent fill my senses, and it helped to chase the pain away until I could think straight again.
Finally I moved back, but he held my face in his hands, staring at me so intently. His robe gaped open at the front, and I could see the smooth line of muscled chest down to his waist.
"You definitely didn't do it," I said simply, and a great relief filled his gaze.
He shook his head. "No, I didn't."
"I believe you."
"So I'm guessing you're a psi."
"Good guess. I was low-level, but it seems to be getting a hell of a lot stronger as time goes by, if you ask me."
He stroked the dark hair off my forehead again. "That was a hell of a lot sexier than a regular palm reading."
I smiled weakly. "What can I say? I aim to please."
He gave me a lopsided grin. "All right, now that we've established that I'm innocent once and for all, now what?"
"Now I want you to tell me what you're really guilty of."
His grin fell away. "What do you mean?"
I met his gaze and held it, while my head continued to throb. "You said yourself that you're guilty as hell of something I probably wouldn't forgive you for. And I just felt it right then. It's eating you alive inside. Whatever this is, you hate yourself for it, and you think I will, too. And if it isn't the rape and murder of innocent women, and if it isn't killing my family, then I don't know what else it could be."
He tried to look away, but I grabbed his collar again.
'Tell me," I said, firmer. "We're not going anywhere until you do. And I don't want to use my flex on you again, because my head just might blow up next time." I frowned.
"What is it?"
"It's just… just that I've never heard the person I'm reading before. It's always just been flashes of insight. Moods or feelings or… I don't even know how to explain it. But with you, just then, I could almost… read what you were thinking down deep."
He raised an eyebrow. "And what was I thinking?"
My cheeks warmed. "You were thinking that I'm beautiful."
He made a barking laugh noise. "Now that she's all bathed and shampooed, she's gone conceited on me."
I just looked at him.
He cleared his throat. "Well, that's a given, really. You're gorgeous, and I'm sure you damn well know it. How can I not notice that? So what else did you mind-read on me?"
"That you want revenge on somebody so badly you want them dead. And that you feel deeply responsible for something horrible that happened. That's happening."
His jaw tensed and he didn't say anything.
I stood up from the floor and moved toward the spread of food again, thinking hard. "You know, ever since this game began, you seem to have known a hell of a lot about it. Little insights and little helps that I wouldn't have guessed. I mean, right at the beginning you knew that the room we were in had collapsed on itself, remember? But you didn't actually see that. How could you know?"
His throat worked as he swallowed. "Kira … just forget it."
"No, I'm not forgetting it. You said you came from Saradone. But how do I know that's true?"
"It's true." There was no more lightness in his voice. "I was in there for four goddamned years. Don't tell me that you're doubting me again. I thought we established that I'm not lying to you."
"No, but you're not telling me something. That's different from not lying."
"Just forget it. Trust me, Kira. You don't want to know."
There was silence between us for a moment.
"Do you know somebody named Gareth?" I asked suddenly.
His face went as still and expressionless as stone. "How do you know that name?"
"Jonathan told me that he's the producer of The Countdown." I crossed my arms. "Jonathan told me a lot of things, and even though I now know he's a liar, it doesn't mean everything he said was untrue. I'm just wondering how connected you are with this game. Why did this Gareth guy pick you? Why did they try to injure you at the very beginning so you wouldn't last long? What's so damn special about you if you were just in jail for something you didn't even do?"
His expression had darkened considerably. "You ask a lot of questions."
"And I'm not done yet. Tell me who this Gareth guy is."
He studied me for what seemed like an hour but was probably no more than a minute. "Gareth is my brother."
CHAPTER TEN
I stared at him. "What did you just say?"
Rogan's throat worked as he swallowed. "You heard me."
"But… but how is that even possible? Why would your brother put you in this game? Does he even know you're here?"
He hissed out a long breath and went to stand in front of the display screen with the fake view of that perpetually setting sun. The warm colors reflected against his handsome, scarred face. "He knows. It's … it's complicated."
"How could you have a brother who would create a game like this that kills people for the amusement of the subscribers?"
He laughed then, and it was a hollow, soulless sound. "See, now you come to the true secret, Kira. The one I would rather you'd never found out about me. You really want to know how fucked-up my life is? Maybe then you can go back to hating me."
"What are you talking about?"
He still refused to look directly at me. His arms were tightly crossed in front of him. "My brother didn't create The Countdown. I did."
My eyes widened. "What are you talking about?"
"Look at me, Kira." He turned to face me completely. "Do you see this ruin of a man in front of you? I wasn't always like this. Ten years ago, when my parents died, I was one of the richest people in the world. Have you heard of Ellis Enterprises?"
I blinked, trying to process what he was telling me. Have it make some sort of sense. "I… I think so. Sure. I have. It's the huge company that used to make all the computers."
He nodded. "Yeah
, among other things. I took the money that my father had built up over a lifetime. Shit, the man made money even during the worst days after the plague. Nobody made money then. But he …" He shook his head, his expression pained. "He managed to squeeze out every penny he could. And when I inherited his fortune, did I do any good with all that money?"
"Rogan … are you serious about all of this?"
"Yeah, I'm serious. You've wanted to know more about me since we met. Well, guess what? You're going to get the fast-forward in the Rogan Ellis School of Losers right now. I had billions of dollars, Kira. Billions. I could have made such a difference to the world with that kind of money. But I just spent it on selfish things. Entertainment, cars, property, women." He spat out the words. "Forget Kerometh, I got to try all the fancy drugs that didn't have any side effects. But none of it made me happy. I was so bored with my life that I couldn't think straight."
I shook my head. "No, it couldn't have been that bad. You couldn't have been that bad."
He snorted. 'Trust me, I was. But then I had an idea. I created a game. Six levels. And I got people to volunteer to go on it. Then I got people to pay to watch it. I spent a ton of my father's money on developing this thing, but regular cameras weren't good enough. It needed better technology and a better edge. I sank more money into developing an artificial intelligence program."
"Wait… artificial intelligence? Like the robot from Level Three?"
He pressed his lips together for a moment and then nodded with a jerk of his head. "Yeah, almost got taken out by the same thing I helped develop in the first place. If that isn't irony, then I don't know what is."
I took a deep breath in and let it out slowly. "Okay, keep going."
"Are you sure you want to hear the rest?"
I frowned at him. "No. But keep going anyhow."
He raked a hand through his dark hair and paced to the other side of the luxurious room. "We didn't do so well with the game in the beginning. There was too much competition from the other networks that were still on the air. Jonathan was my friend back then, and he was the head of the Ellis medical research department. It probably made my father feel better about his greed to put some money into something altruistic. Jonathan randomly suggested one day that I take things underground. Make it secret and exclusive, so that only certain people had access to it. Together we started to develop the cranium implants."
I touched the back of my head to feel the incision mark on my scalp. I didn't interrupt again. I sat on the edge of the bed and listened to him, the knots in my stomach getting tighter with every word he spoke.
His mouth twisted. "It was great for a while. Word of mouth spread about this supersecret game. My brother helped me out with the show and testing out the implants. We both got fitted with a prototype-that's the extra mark you found on my head-but they never worked properly. The next ones we developed did, though. We paid off the prison to let us use their inmates. If they won they got a reduction in their sentences. But then, one day, one of them was killed by accident on camera during one of the levels. I thought the incident would shut us down and that would be the end-I'd lose everything I'd worked hard to gain. But instead the show got even more popular, and the addition of the implants only made it cooler to the subscribers. But then they wanted more blood, more death, more everything."
He paced to the other side of the room. "I didn't even think I had a conscience until it was tested. I wasn't going to be the producer of a show that killed people for the amusement of others."
He turned to me then, as if expecting me to have a look of disgust on my face. When I didn't, he looked away again.
"It made me a little crazy, I guess," he said. "Late one night a little over four years ago, I started pulling the plugs on the network and breaking the computers. My brother was there and he tried to stop me, but I knocked him into a bank of computers and there was a power surge-a huge one that shut off the electricity citywide for a couple days. When my brother got up I thought he was going to see logic and maybe help me, but… he didn't. Instead he called the police and had me arrested. When I was in jail waiting for my hearing, I heard the newsbreak. Pictures of me, video captures-all fake- and the story was about the murders of those poor girls."
He rubbed a hand over his mouth, his eyes haunted by memories. "My brother turned his back on me. He disowned me. Then there was the trial, and the jury deliberated for all of ten minutes before they sentenced me to five hundred years." He let out a short, humorless laugh. "Here I thought Gareth never wanted to see me again, and yet he's dragged me back into the game after all these years. I don't know what the fuck he's playing at, but I don't find it funny at all."
He stopped talking and I just stared at him, trying to take in everything he'd just said. Process it. Figure it out and make sense of it.
"Your brother hated you that much?" My voice shook as I said it. "Enough to frame you to get you out of the way? What did you do to him?"
He frowned deeply. "Nothing. My brother and I got along just fine before that night. Fought like cats and dogs, sure, but that's just how brothers are." He shook his head. "The last time I saw him was when he had me arrested. He never showed up for any of the trial. Never to visit me. Nothing."
"I can't believe this."
He raised his gaze from the floor. "Believe it."
"Everyone thinks you're a rapist and a murderer."
"That's right."
I chewed my bottom lip. "When I read you, I did feel guilt. But you feel guilty about creating this game."
"It's all my fault," he managed. "All of these people who've died playing it. More than four years Gareth's been in charge, and it's just gotten worse and worse."
"Just to make money."
He shrugged. "I don't know anymore. Maybe he gets off on the violence, like the subscribers do. Maybe he likes seeing people who don't have a choice make the last mistake of their lives. He never used to be like that. Maybe he's just greedy. I guess he's a lot like me."
My jaw clenched. "I don't think he's anything like you."
He blinked at me. "How can you say that after what I just told you?"
I felt a line of anger move through me. "Because it sounds like you were a self-involved rich boy who was bored and created a game to entertain himself. That makes you an asshole, but it doesn't make you a monster."
"That's entirely debatable."
"Whatever's happened to this game in the last few years is Gareth's fault, not yours."
He shook his head. "No, it's not true. It's my fault."
I tried to think. "You need to talk to Gareth."
He laughed. "He won't talk to me. I've tried to contact him before."
"Do you know anything about the game that could help us get the hell out of it?"
"If I did, don't you think I would have done it already?" He shook his head and then looked at me strangely. "Why are you even still talking to me? I thought you'd want to kill me for what I've just told you."
"I don't want to kill you. Well, not too much, anyhow."
"Then you should hate me. As much as I hate myself."
He looked so despondent at revealing his deep, dark secret that I touched his cheek and stared up at him and felt a swell of emotion. I was surprised that I wasn't angrier about what he'd just told me. But I wasn't. All I wanted to do was take his pain away. He'd just revealed a hell of a lot to me. But it didn't make me hate him.
Not at all.
I placed my hands flat against his muscled chest, spreading the robe to the sides. He didn't pull away.
"What are you doing?" he breathed as I pressed myself against him. I felt his cock immediately harden against me. "Why would you even want to be close to me after what I just told you?"
I licked my lips. "Because when I look into your eyes I see sadness, and such a deep, aching loneliness that all I want to do is make it go away."
"Kira … please …"
I didn't say anything, instead allowing my hands to roam fr
eely over his chest, his arms, his stomach. I pressed my lips against his shoulder-the wound he'd had at the beginning of the game that had already almost magically healed to a flat red mark-and along his collarbone to the center of his chest. He felt so warm.
I slid my hands down his sides to the sash of his robe and untied it, then moved my hands back up to his shoulders and pushed the robe off him, letting it fall to the ground.
He was fully nude in front of me, clean golden skin over tight muscle, and all I wanted to do was to touch him. God, he was beautiful. My heart filled with strange emotion for him, which had only grown since he'd told me his story. Shared his pain with me, thinking it would make me run away from him, when all it did was bring me closer.
He looked at me with some uncertainty and a bit of fear. Couldn't he see in my eyes how much I wanted him? How I'd always wanted him but been too afraid to trust my own feelings? He didn't pull away from me or my hands as they slowly explored his body.
"Just kiss me, Rogan." I rose up on my toes and crushed my mouth against his. A small groan escaped his lips. His hands moved down to my waist.
I slid my tongue into his mouth and tasted him, swirling my tongue around his. He didn't pull away or try to say anything to stop me.
I broke off the kiss, feeling breathless, and our gazes met. His was filled with passion and deep, dark need.
"Kira …" he murmured again. "You don't have to do this."
"Oh, but I want to. Very, very much."
I gave him a wicked grin, then sank down to my knees in front of him. I wrapped my fingers firmly around his length and was greeted by a gasp from his lips. Before he could say anything to either stop me or urge me on, I swirled my tongue over the head of his cock, then slowly took him into my mouth.
His knees buckled, but he stayed on his feet.
"Oh, God, what are you doing to me?"
Hmm. If he didn't know the answer to that he'd been in jail for longer than I thought.
Every moan I coaxed from his lips, every groan of pleasure made my heart swell. I'd never wanted anyone as much as this man I'd been through hell with.
Countdown Page 10