by Ava Gray
Anticipation blossomed as T-89 jerked. Today could be the day Rowan made history.
“It’s time.” The disembodied voice sent a cold chill through Gillie.
Horror flickered through her, but she knew better than to resist. If she didn’t stand ready at the door of her quarters, Silas would take her against her will. Resistance only pissed Dr. Rowan off. He liked to pretend her compliance was voluntary—that she wasn’t a prisoner here. By his reckoning, she was a “special guest,” performing an invaluable service. That might be true, but they put a price on it right enough. They just didn’t pay Gillie for her time or her gift.
She knew the truth: they believed her a commodity, not a person, one to which they owned sole rights.
Taking a deep breath to brace herself, she stood by the door, and a few moments later, Silas unlocked it. She stepped out, letting him escort her to the medical lab. Though she’d done this many times, the wrongness of it never paled. Silas said nothing as they walked, a dead-eyed giant who did as he was told.
Once she’d thought he might save her. He’d take pity on her and find a way to smuggle her out of here. But as the years passed, she decided Rowan must have done something to him, something that kept him silent and loyal.
Now he opened the door and said, “They’re waiting for you.”
Of course they were.
“Thanks,” she said with gentle sarcasm.
Silas gave no sign he understood she wasn’t being sincere. He merely turned and walked away. Her hands trembled as she stepped into the pristine white room. The lights were too bright. Everything was sterile and shining, except for the bed shrouded in the blue wraparound curtain.
That was to protect the privacy of the client. She never saw the faces of those whose lives she saved. Rowan claimed it was for her protection, but she knew better. It was really to keep her from going after them, should she ever manage to get out of here. Though Dr. Rowan didn’t believe that would ever happen—hence, him relaxing enough to permit the semi-privacy of her apartment—he was a cautious man by nature.
His offer to provide candid videos had surprised her, but she had no doubt the faces would be blacked out when they reached her, preventing her from identifying any of them. It was a sop to her isolation, nothing more. And she had to pretend it meant something—as if any kindness could make up for what had been done to her. Sometimes it was so hard to keep from going mad like so many of her peers. Sometimes the weight of the anger seemed impossible to carry.
“Ah, Gillie.” Rowan turned with a smile. “You’re right on time. We have quite a difficult case today, inoperable pancreatic cancer.”
She shuddered. Don’t let him touch me.
Skirting his outstretched hand as if she didn’t see it, she hopped onto the hospital bed herself. She swung her legs up and leaned back, presenting her arm. Clinical contact couldn’t be avoided, but she refused to let him pat her hand and stroke the back of it with his fingertips, as if she would relish the caress. How she loathed him.
“I can take care of it,” she said quietly.
It wasn’t arrogance; it was the truth.
Rowan nodded. “I know. That’s one of the reasons you’re so precious.”
Sickness rose in her stomach. To fight the feeling, she closed her eyes. Some people might have found that it left them defenseless, but she’d gotten good at building alternate worlds in her mind’s eye. In a flicker of her eyelashes, she could go somewhere else.
“Are you tired?”
He wouldn’t permit her even that escape. “No, I’m fine. Shall we begin?”
In answer, he sank the butterfly needle into her forearm. Gillie knew he used it on her because it looked smaller, but like all of Rowan’s kindnesses, this one was deceptive. A butterfly needle was still twenty-one gauge, and it hurt no less. The inner curve of her elbow made her look like a junkie, so many times had they tapped her.
Deftly, he connected the needle to the IV tubing, and then he pushed through the blue curtain, connecting her to the dying patient beside her. They’d transfuse him with half a pint of her blood. The type didn’t matter.
Her blood was liquid gold, the universal panacea, and they’d never let her go. Now it was attracting the diseased cells inside the patient’s body, gathering them. If the cancer had spread, her blood would bind it into a single mass. This was the easy part, the part that required very little effort. She could lie here and pretend it wasn’t happening.
“Are you ready for the next step?” Rowan asked.
As if she could say no. She extended her hand. To Gillie’s eyes, it was small, pale, and didn’t look as though it could work miracles. Rowan pulled her bed closer, making sure not to tangle the IV lines.
He put her hand on the patient. By the papery, raddled skin, she could tell she was healing an old person, someone with more money than time. This part of the process was automatic. Using the link of her touch, mingled with her blood, the gift activated.
Gillie could feel the sickness pouring into her. She never knew if it came in through the tube linking them or if it melted through her very skin. The pain was real. She knew this person’s suffering and sickness intimately, and it echoed with the memory of so many near deaths when she was a child. She didn’t want to remember the brittle ache of her bones and the weakness that left her unable to lift a spoon.
Death whispered through her veins, and she recognized him, too. He carried with him doleful music and the whispering of wings. The cancer burned in her blood, fighting with the gift. She wished she could heal it herself, but her gift was nothing so clean or lovely. Gillie thought of herself as a magnet, attracting all things diseased and decayed. It wasn’t a gift she’d wanted; the doctors had discovered it as a fluke when she first recovered from a particularly virulent strain of leukemia.
Her parents had been so delighted to have her back, whole and healthy—a normal kid for the first time. They’d been reluctant to let the Foundation run their tests, and when they became suspicious, they’d moved, so many times that Gillie had lost count. But when she was twelve, they took her on the way home from school.
Her gift was too rare and wonderful not to be used, they’d said. She was a natural resource, like oil or diamonds. At first they’d tried to convince her she wanted to help, but Gillie had only ever wanted to go home. Rowan had told her years ago that her parents were dead now, and so there was nothing for her in the outside world anymore. She didn’t know if she believed him.
Now the worst began. Her blood would filter the sickness while she lay near death, suffering someone else’s anguish. That took hours. Hours of agony she hadn’t earned, but the rich clients paid the Foundation handsomely for the use of Gillie. It was said she could cure anything.
The rotten waste resulting from said filtration would have overwhelmed her kidneys, if not for dialysis. Even with her eyes closed, she knew what Rowan was doing now. He was preparing the machine; he needed to be ready when she conquered the old man’s cancer. She knew he watched her while she twisted and suffered. Doubtless he thought bearing witness gave them some kind of connection. It only made her hate him all the more.
“You’ll be right as rain in less than twenty-four hours,” he whispered, brushing the sweaty hair back from her brow.
This, Gillie hated most of all. But then the pain took her, as it always did.
CHAPTER 10
“Mia,did you finish running those reports yet?”
She clenched her jaw. “Working on it.”
Greg Evans smirked. “I need those before you leave tonight. Don’t forget.”
No wonder she’d never worked a regular job. She was discovering she had serious issues with authority.
It had been a week since she lost her mind and spent the night with a man whose real name she didn’t know. Mia expected regrets to spring immediately from that lapse in judgment, but instead, she regretted their truce had been for one night only. She wanted him, despite his murky secrets.
; If nothing else, he’d proved her brain could shut off under the right circumstances. That gave her hope for the future. At least going home with him established Mark had been wrong; she could be spontaneous.
But she had a job to do. First she set the parameters for Greg’s stupid report. She knew the son of a bitch would just shred it, but she couldn’t break cover by telling him to fuck off. Her clients were paying for discretion.
Four names remained on her list of potential embezzlers. Unfortunately, the culprit had left no signs of his passage in company systems, which meant he was very good at what he did. Mia would have to be better. She’d studied their résumés and none of them had a Computer Science degree, but that didn’t mean they lacked knowledge. After all, she intended to access their financial records when she got home, and she didn’t have a CS degree, either. Some things you learned outside school.
Mia hadn’t worked in the facility long enough for intuition to give her a favorite. Plus maintaining the pretense of doing real work handicapped her investigation. Greg hadn’t believed her when she said, point-blank, she didn’t want his job. So he was constantly assigning her busywork, checking network protocols, troubleshooting workstations that didn’t need repair. Something was off here; she’d worked other classified assignments before, but nothing ever felt as wrong as this.
Maybe she’d been going at this from the wrong angle, assuming a single guilty party. Maybe Greg was in on it. Maybe he’d fixed the records. Though she rather doubted he was clever enough, that opinion could be colored by sheer dislike, as he’d made her life damned difficult the past few weeks. Mia decided to have a look at his bank records, too.
Quickly, she pulled his social security number from the system. Once she had that, she could do damn near anything. She tapped her fingertips on the desk, considering her suspects: two men, two women. Embezzlement was an equal opportunity crime.
Melissa Stuart, accounting manager. She was young to have landed in such a position of responsibility, not quite thirty. The woman favored designer clothing and expensive handbags, but her annual salary wasn’t impressive enough to support said couture habit, unless she carried heavy credit card debt.
Mia had seen Greg flirting with Melissa more than once. It didn’t mean they were conspirators, but she couldn’t imagine why anyone as pretty as Melissa would give Greg the time of day. The man was a bit of an IT troll. Putting him aside for the moment, she went on to her next suspect.
Darrell Brown, assistant controller. On the surface, he was the perfect employee. The man never came in late, never called in sick. He spoke little and fit the basic profile for antisocial behavior, which included theft from a sense of entitlement. More interesting, he had a sealed juvie record. Mia wondered what he’d done and whether it had any bearing on her investigation.
Janine Young, bookkeeper. She was a plump, motherly woman in her fifties who dressed like a Sunday school teacher. Janine often brought cookies and left them on the table in the employee break room for everyone to enjoy. She worked hard and got along with others, offering a smile and a kind word if they happened to pass in the hall.
Of her four suspects, Mia most hoped it wasn’t Janine. She liked her. But the woman had the opportunity to alter the books, siphon from the company. Once again, Mia faced the likelihood the embezzler had a partner. This crime was simply too clean for it to be one person.
Finally, she had Michael Troy, auditor. He was a weedy individual in his forties, average in every respect, save one. The man had a plethora of nervous tics. It was possible he’d always had them, just one of those things, but perhaps they came from guilt or stress. Some people started down a road without reckoning how rough the way would be. He might well be regretting his theft by now.
With a start, Mia noticed the time—after five. She went to the printer, pulled her report, and tossed it onto Greg’s desk. He was already gone for the day, no surprises there.
Like the other drones, she powered down her workstation and headed for the front doors. She’d do more at home.
On her way out, she waved at the employees who chatted with her during the lunch hour. Very few people went off-site to eat, because the facility was in the middle of nowhere. By the time one drove to a restaurant, the break was more than half over. She’d learned a lot about the place in general, but nothing helpful to her real task.
Mia told herself she wasn’t looking for Strong, but she scanned the lot as she unlocked her car. It wasn’t her business what time he left, or if he did. Sighing, she got in the car and drove to the condo, where Peaches waited at the front door. Though she’d never been a cat person, she couldn’t deny the satisfaction of coming home to a warm, furry body that didn’t care who she was. He only wanted her to fill up his dish and rub his belly.
She took care of the cat first thing and then changed out of her dark suit. Nobody—not even Kyra—knew Mia loved flannel pajamas, the louder and brighter the better. No sexy lingerie for her—she would take flannel any day. Today’s jammies had big gaudy hearts and pink stars on a white background. She jammed her feet into white fuzzy slippers, pulled her hair up into a bouncy ponytail, and rummaged in the cupboard for dinner.
Earlier in the week, she’d gone grocery shopping, mostly cans of soup and bagged salad, but it was nice to come home and eat dinner instead of ordering takeout or dining alone in a restaurant with a book. At least she had a cat for company.
After she ate, she powered up her laptop and dug out the social security numbers of her four suspects. She doubted she’d find anything in their personal accounts, but she’d check just in case. That took all of five minutes.
Nothing. No unusual deposits or large withdrawals. She’d expected as much, but it was a bit disappointing. Mia did confirm that Melissa carried heavy credit card debt, though, rendering the woman’s addiction to designer labels an expensive but lawful pursuit. It wasn’t enough to cross Melissa off the list, but she moved the accounting manager down to the bottom. She’d ask her to lunch tomorrow to see if intuition kicked in.
Before she could make further plans, a knock sounded. She sighed, thinking it was a friend of the old couple who didn’t know they’d gone to Arizona already. Mia didn’t bother with a robe; it wouldn’t take long to get rid of the unwanted caller.
“I’m sorry,” she began, flinging open the door.
It wasn’t a stranger, at least not entirely. Since she’d come home, it must’ve started to rain because droplets glistened on his hair, gilding his skin. His eyes glittered like the sea, threatening to drown her. He took in the picture she presented in silly pajamas, furry slippers, and a schoolgirl’s ponytail, and a teasing smile curved his mouth.
“Why are you sorry?”
“I thought you were someone else,” she muttered.
“Someone to whom you needed to apologize, I take it. May I come in?”
She clenched her jaw. How could she have ever thought she wanted him? He was fiercely aggravating. Mia didn’t bother asking how he’d found her. As HR director, he had access to all personnel information, including home addresses. If their situation were normal, she could sue him for harassment over a stunt like this. Since it wasn’t, she stepped back and waved him in.
“What do you want?”
“Would you believe me if I said you?”
“I’d think it was a nice line.” Mia shut the door behind him, trying not to color up over the way she looked. This was too close to reality for her tastes. At his place, she could pretend it was a fantasy interlude, nothing that would ever touch her real life, and yet here he was in her living room.
“These are for you.” He produced a bouquet of pink flowers, their petals glimmering with raindrops.
For a moment, she simply stared. Nobody had ever brought her flowers. It was the most ridiculous, courtly gesture. Part of her melted as she took them and fumbled in the kitchen for a vase.
“They’re camellias,” he said, sounding as nervous as she felt. “In the Ming dynasty, they
were called the ‘most beautiful flower under the heavens.’ ”
“So you brought them to me?”
“Yes. It seemed fitting, as you’re the most beautiful woman under the heavens.”
Another line, but he delivered it with conviction.
A fist tightened around her heart. “Tell me why you came.”
“Very well. I have a proposal for you.”
Søren loathed the necessity of this. If there had been any alternative, he wouldn’t be here. It went against his better judgment to share even a portion of his secrets, but there was no way around it. She wouldn’t help him blindly, if she lent her assistance at all, and he’d already wasted months at Micor—and he was no closer to achieving his objective than when he’d hired on. At this rate, he could spend the rest of his life as Thomas Strong.
He took a seat at her gestured invitation. She sat across from him in a recliner. Fuzzy slippers peeped out from the overlong legs of her flannel pajamas.
“Are you suggesting a partnership?” she asked. “To what end?”
“You can get into the lab. I need to see what’s there.”
Her expression hardened. “Why?”
There was no help for it. He had to tell the truth. “I suspect Micor is conducting illegal experiments on human beings. I want to stop them.”
“What are you, Batman? You go around righting wrongs?”
Despite his tension, he smiled. “Something like that. But latex gives me a rash.”
Mia bit her lip, thoughtful. Søren wanted a taste, wanted to lick her lower lip until she kissed him back. He’d thought she could get no sexier than when she was bound to his bed, but tonight she had a touchable quality that made him want to pull her into his lap and bury his face in her throat. He set his hands on his knees to resist the impulse.
“If what you say is true, then they need to be stopped. We should inform the authorities at once.”