“Copy that,” she said and shot him a playful salute.
Gesturing to the laptop, he said, “Get anything else out of there?”
Liliana’s smiled firmed and broadened.
“You bet I did.”
Sins of the Flesh: Chapter Sixteen
Mick nudged the door open and walked in, looking fresh and well rested, but Caterina knew he had spent the night in the chair by the bed again.
Whenever she woke from a sleep packed with fitful images, he had been there, alert as well. Offering comfort. His dark eyes seeming to register every little facet of what was happening, as if to catalogue the events for further analysis.
He had even released her once during the course of that uneven night, escorting her to the bathroom so she could relieve herself. This time he had waited outside the door, sparing her the embarrassment of the day before.
Back in the room, he had tied her back up again, but not as tightly.
Had he come to believe I'm not a threat? Caterina thought.
As Mick approached the bed, Caterina wondered how he could have reached such a decision when she herself still doubted.
The images that had come to her during the night had been violent. Horribly so. A slideshow of blood, destruction, and death. Vividly real in her mind, but with enough gaps that it made her memory inconsistent.
Through every nightmare he had been by her side, providing stability and comfort.
“Good morning,” he said, walking to the foot of the bed. He released the bindings, but didn’t re-tie the restraints.
At the headboard, he did the same, freeing her from her bondage.
She rubbed at her wrists, not that they were sore. She had stopped fighting against the restraints last night after supper, realizing that this man and the young woman didn’t intend to hurt her.
Not like she had struggled at Wardwell.
Wardwell.
She remembered now the name of her captors. Remembered that Dr. Wells hadn’t necessarily been all goodness and light, although he had befriended her.
“They used to tie me down,” she suddenly told Mick.
A flicker of emotion darkened his almost impenetrable gaze as his eyes met hers.
“Edwards?” he asked, seeking confirmation.
She nodded. “Wells, too. And Dr. Morales.”
He plopped down into the chair, but leaned forward, his elbows resting on broad powerful thighs. His fingers loosely laced together.
“Morales is their assistant.” His tone seemed to seek confirmation of that statement.
Caterina searched her brain, trying to remember more about Morales. The name had popped into her recollection last night as she forced herself to try and recall what had happened to her.
Nothing came to her about Morales. She shook her head. “I can’t remember.”
“Dr. Morales isn’t a physician. He’s a geneticist from what we could gather from your files.”
She again tried to place the name. In a burst of intense powerful images that nearly blinded her, he flashed into her mind.
She closed her eyes and pressed her hands to her temples as if that might keep her head from exploding as the visions pounded at her.
A dark-eyed little man.
A thin smile as sharp as the instruments in his hand.
Burning pain in her veins from his needle.
The images came over and over interspersed with agony so real, she needed to escape it. She surged forward, but encountered a hard chest. Buried her head there as he wrapped his strong arms around her.
* * *
“Easy, Cat. They’re just memories,” Mick said softly.
She grabbed hold of his t-shirt, her hands fisted tightly into the fabric as she keened like an animal. Only the press of her body against his was very human and very womanly.
Too much so, Mick realized, fighting his visceral reaction to her proximity.
“Why is this happening?” she murmured against his chest, rubbing her head there as if by doing so she could erase the images.
He cradled the back of her head with immense restraint and tenderness, sifting his fingers through the thick curls. “They gave you small doses of LSD in addition to a bunch of other hallucinogenic drugs. It may take a little while for all that medication to work out of your system.”
“What’s a ‘little while’,” she said and wagged her head more forcefully, as if trying to dislodge the visions.
As he glanced down, he realized she had gone all camo on him again. Her hands were the color of his dark blue polo shirt and the rest of her was beginning to blend into the rust brown of the over-sized t-shirt he had offered her to wear.
“A couple of days or even weeks. It’s hard to tell with LSD, but try to focus, Cat,” he urged, recalling the mantra she had used the day before to regain control.
She listened to his command. She repeated the word over and over and as the tightness left her body, so did the color, but not before she caught a glimpse of herself in her altered state.
She released him and raised her hands. Held them before her and examined them while her skin slowly faded back to normal.
“What am I?” she asked, puzzlement in the stormy ocean blue of her eyes when her gaze skipped to his.
He could have lied. Tempered his words with tenderness, but he had a limited quantity of that and holding her had expended most of it.
“A science experiment,” he said, released her, and returned to his spot in the chair.
Her eyes narrowed as she considered his statement. The soft curls of her hair bobbed back and forth with the motion of her head as she said, “They were supposed to help me.”
“You’re not blind anymore,” he reminded, although he wasn’t sure she would consider that a worthwhile trade-off to becoming someone’s lab rat.
He wouldn’t.
She leaned back against the headboard, raised slender elegant fingers to her temples and rubbed tiny circles there. “Toward the end, when I was sick, I couldn’t see. But it was the pain in my head . . . ”
Meeting his gaze directly, she said, “It was the pain that stole the music.” Tapping a spot above her heart with one hand, she added, “My music.”
The passion in her words was unmistakable.
He understood it. Admired it.
He couldn’t allow those sentiments to change what he had to do. “Someone killed Wells. Do you know who?”
“If I did, don’t you think I’d tell you so you’d let me go?” she shot back.
“Not if you were the one who did it,” he replied calmly, barely controlling his smile at her show of spunk. He liked feisty Cat much more than the mewling weak Cat the drugs had created.
She threaded her fingers into her hair, pulling it back off her face. Releasing the long locks to fall back onto her shoulders as she said, “Why don’t you turn me over to the police? Let them decide.”
He shrugged and intentionally kept his tone neutral. “Because I’ve been paid to return you to Edwards.”
Her skin paled for a moment before a bit of the t-shirt’s rust color leaked onto her body.
Fight or flight, he thought again.
“You’re afraid of Edwards. He hurt you?”
“Morales. Edwards,” she admitted, looking downward at the sheet covering her body. Plucking at the folds of it nervously before she asked, “Are you going to give me back to Edwards?”
“Do you think that’s what I’m going to do?” he said, perversely intrigued to hear her initial thoughts about him.
She slowly lifted her head and tilted it at a slight angle. She examined him intently, but the look wasn’t one like he generally received from most women. This one reminded him of the look from one of his elementary school teachers.
Exasperated described it best. That brought a disappointment he didn’t understand, so he arched a brow and said, “Well?”
She raised her chin a defiant inch. “I think that if you were going to do that, you would have don
e it already.”
Her slightly rebellious response roused his smile once again. “So what do you propose I do?”
Her chin shot up another tiny bit, but there was nothing tiny about the determination in her voice.
“Help me find out who killed Dr. Wells.”
Sins of the Flesh: Chapter Seventeen
Mick considered her request and the challenge she had presented since the moment he had seen her photo.
“I’ll think about it,” he said, unwilling to admit that her request had him intrigued.
“It’s still early. Why don’t you try to get back to sleep,” he said. Dark circles lingered under her eyes.
“I can’t sleep anymore. Besides when I sleep . . . ”
She hesitated, afraid to reveal more, but there was apparently little she could hide from him.
“You see too much.”
He nodded and continued. “I know what it’s like when there are only nightmares, but . . . If you let them come, eventually they won’t be as scary.”
She couldn’t imagine the visions which visited her in the night not being frightening unless you had somehow shut off your soul. Or worse: Lost it.
As she lifted her face, his deep brown gaze locked on hers. Steady and controlled on the surface, but in the depths of those eyes, she imagined she saw his demons. Realized they weren’t as frightening because he had mastered them. She supposed he had controlled his fears in much the same way he ruled over everything in his life.
Much like her father had dominated her mother until nothing remained of her spirit and passion.
Her father had tried to do the same to her over the years, but somehow she had survived it. Could I survive this man’s controlling ways until I'm free again? she wondered.
“You think I’m guilty, don’t you? You think I – ”
He surged toward her on the bed and covered her mouth with his hand. His palm was rough against her lips. His grip hard, but not so hard as to hurt.
“What I know is that someone violated your trust. Violated you. If I had been in the same position, I might have done the same thing, so I don’t care right now whether you did it or not.”
Before she could respond, or even fully process his statement, he was in action.
He stepped away from the bed, back to the door, and with a negligent flick of his hand he said, “We’re having breakfast before Liliana goes back to the hospital. After that, you and I are going to go over your medical files. Understood?”
“Understood,” she replied and resisted the urge to snap off a salute.
Definitely ex-military it occurred to her now, his tone, posture, regimented attire, and haircut screaming it out loud at full volume.
She rose from the bed and stretched, working out the kinks from being bound for so long. When she was done, she took a moment to walk around the room, examining it more fully.
The furniture was simple. Heavy rustic oak pieces. Simple fabrics that would wear well. Above the dresser was a mirror and as she caught a glimpse of herself she was once again shocked by her appearance.
She leaned on the surface of the dresser and peered at her image. So much thinner. Paler. Her face almost swallowed up by the long rebellious locks of her dark hair. But it was still a human face, the strange skin color that came and went notwithstanding. She even tried to call forth the camouflage, focusing on her hand as it rested on the wooden surface, but it wouldn’t come.
She ambled to the old cello leaning against another chair close to the bed and touched it lovingly, the rough feel of the strings and slick varnish ingrained in her memory. She itched to sit down and play, but he probably expected her to join them downstairs for the meal. She was surprised he had released her, but then again, she still wore the bracelet that would allow him to track her.
She walked out into the hallway, feeling amazingly free although the slight weight of the bracelet on her ankle was a constant reminder that she remained his prisoner.
A prisoner and yet one who had been treated very well so far. Liliana had taken care of her injuries which they had both discovered were all healed when she taken a shower the night before. They had fed her. Provided some clothing, she thought, readjusting the overly large shirt that kept on slipping down one shoulder.
Mick’s shirt judging from the size and the smell of it. If she inhaled, she detected remnants of his very masculine scent on the fabric.
The sweat pants he had provided were also large at the hips, but close to the right length. She had tightly knotted the ties to keep the pants from falling off her hips which had been made almost boyish by her weight loss.
In the hall, she took only a cursory look at the one bedroom. It was obviously his office judging from the computer, monitors, and papers strewn on the large wooden worktable.
The room at the head of the stairs was clearly his bedroom.
She paused at the door. A large king-sized bed occupied most of the space. The dresser surface held a few pictures, but not much else. Everything was militarily neat.
Walking to the dresser, she examined the pictures. The people in them had such strong physical similarities that she didn’t doubt they were related. Which meant that besides Liliana there were two other siblings as well as a mother and father.
No girlfriend, she thought as she picked up and looked at the remaining photos in the frames.
She laid the frame back down, making sure she returned it to exactly where it had been. Her father had always insisted that there was a place for everything and everything should go back in its place.
Exiting the room, she paused at the top of the stairs, uncertain of just how much freedom he intended to give her. She should just go downstairs, she told herself. A cold tremor snaked through her gut as she recalled what would happen to her at Wardwell when she disobeyed.
The sensation was so strong that something shimmered along the edges of her vision, creating a weird halo effect over all that she saw. She remembered seeing something similar before. Maybe when she had first escaped into the forest.
She gripped the banister more tightly, disoriented as she discerned the shapes of the real images sporting the unusual and colorful auras.
Her hand on the railing. The steps leading downward.
The images were all there, oddly limned, but there.
She took a first tentative step down the stairs, her knees wobbly from the shock of the change in her vision. Then she straightened her spine, closed her eyes for a moment and inhaled deeply. Held her breath as she took one step and then another until she was finally at the bottom of the stairs.
She stopped on the polished wood floor in the living room immediately off the stairs. Heard voices to the right of her, down a small hall that ran beside a comfortably sized dining room.
His voice. Her voice. Talking about her. Their voices vibrating loudly in her brain. More loudly than was normal.
“You can’t turn her over to Edwards. You read the file. You know what they did to her.”
A tired sigh followed, filled with more regret than she had expected. “If she killed Wells, I have to turn her over to somebody.”
Somebody.
The police, Caterina hoped, until it occurred to her that in her current state, the police would not know what to do with her. Or worse, that they would return her to Wardwell.
“How long before they turn her back into a science experiment?” Liliana said, echoing her thought.
Caterina turned to go to the kitchen, but then realized she could see them. Or rather, she could see weird-colored outlines of their bodies through the walls ahead, like some kind of radar.
The irrational images dizzied her as she tried to put things to right and as the room began a slow lazy spin, she fumbled to steady herself against a large oak sideboard nearby.
A terra cotta pitcher on the surface flew off and crashed to the floor as she misjudged the edge of the furniture. Once she latched onto the edge of the heavy sideboard, the wood gave slightly ben
eath her fingers as she stabilized herself.
The noise of the pitcher smashing against the floor brought the two siblings running, but Liliana paused halfway down the hall, a shocked expression on her face. She raised her hand to her mouth, disbelief on her expressive features.
Mick had no such hesitation.
He plowed forward toward her, his mouth a tight line across his face. His cocoa brown eyes blazing with anger.
She flinched as he neared, only his touch was gentle as he wrapped one arm around her shoulders, offering support.
* * *
“You can let go. I’ve got you,” Mick said in soft measured tones, realizing that Caterina was on the brink. That if she lost her balance, he didn’t know what might follow. That maybe he couldn’t handle what might follow if in fact she had been the one to kill Wells.
She sagged against him and her fingers popped free from where they had dug into the hardwood of the sideboard.
“That’s it. Easy,” he said, worried that if the medical file was accurate, rage might follow Caterina’s current state.
Her skin had taken on the colors of the room around her – a deep coral color but with a slight shimmer like diamonds in spots. As he locked his gaze on hers, he detected bits of glowing green in the normally deep blue of her eyes. The GFPs tracking the expression of the genes Wardwell had implanted, he guessed.
“What’s happening?” she whispered, giving him some measure of relief that Caterina remained aware that something unusual was going on. Unfortunately, he didn’t have an answer.
“I don’t know, Cat. I’m going to pick you up and take you over to the couch,” he said and at her nod, he did just that, slipping his arms beneath her knees and carrying her.
She eased her arms around his neck and laid her head against his shoulder, the action so trusting that his heart skipped a beat from the emotion of it.
Somehow, Caterina trusted him. Possibly believed in him.
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