by Jaime Rush
Eric collapsed back on the couch. “Nobody messes with my family. He tried to make me kill my own people. He tried to kill my sister.” He took a ragged breath. “Fonda was on top. I started the fire beneath him to give her a chance to get away.”
Nicholas’s stomach heaved. “I need to go downstairs. Work off some nervous energy.” He disappeared down the passageway.
Alarms woke Olivia. She threw on her robe before racing out into the hallway. The smell of smoke and an acrid odor hit her nose first. When she turned the corner, she saw smoke and heard shouting. Another sound cut right to the center of her chest—a woman’s howling screams.
She turned the far corner to the hallway where the offices and the subjects’ suites were. One of the guards was spraying waves of foam from a fire extinguisher into Jerryl’s suite. Her father, wearing blue silk pajamas, tore past her. Something made a hissing sound, and water began spraying from the ceiling near the doorway. Smoke billowed out of the room, along with that terrible odor, making her eyes sting and her throat burn.
Fonda was the source of those horrible screams, punctuated by harsh coughs. Her naked body was folded into itself, her hands over her face. Olivia looked her over, expecting to find burns. Thankfully, she saw nothing but old scars. What she thought was a burn mark on her hip was a tattoo of a kitten. A guard raced past from behind, carrying another extinguisher.
Olivia hurried forward. Her father looked up at the movement. “Stay back! We’ve got it under control. You don’t want to see this. Trust me.”
The guard standing in the open doorway stared inside the room, horror-struck.
“What happened?” she asked.
Fonda screamed, “Erica Aruda burned him! While we were making love, they burned him!”
The Rogues…burned. The smell. Oh, God, it was burning flesh. “Is he…?”
Her father was staring into the room, where smoke was still drifting out. “If he wasn’t, he’d want to be.”
Fonda started sobbing again.
Olivia stopped her imagination from filling in what Jerryl must look like. She sank to her knees and pulled Fonda into her arms. She shook so hard, Olivia could hardly hold on to her.
“How did he get in?” She looked around frantically, but no one was in a defensive posture, only dealing with the fire. She remembered when the fire had broken out at the asylum. Her father told her Eric Aruda had a special skill for setting fires but never explained how.
Fonda’s voice chattered. “Pyrokinesis!”
“What?”
“He sets them psychically.”
No. Impossible.
Fonda tried to talk between her sobs. “He did this out of…revenge, I know it.”
“Revenge?” Olivia coughed. “For what?”
“Jerryl tried to kill Eric’s sister.”
Gerard said, “That’s enough, Fonda. He did it because he wants to destroy us.” He turned to Olivia. “You see what Nicholas is part of now?”
She couldn’t deal with that thought. She pulled off her robe and helped Fonda into it. Everyone was coughing, jagged and raw.
A pounding noise on the door at the end of the hallway got their attention, along with a panicked male voice: “Hey! What’s going on out there? There’s smoke coming through the floor!” The prisoner.
“We’ve got it under control. Just a small fire.”
Just a small fire. To trivialize it like that. Not that Gerard should tell him what had happened.
To the guards, he said, “Check in with the others in case the Rogues are using this as a distraction like last time.” He took a cell phone out of his pocket—did he sleep with it?—and made a call. “Pope, it’s Gerard Darkwell. I’ve got another situation that needs to be handled…No, it wasn’t Andrus. Eric Aruda just torched one of my people…Jerryl Evrard. I’ll need a fire marshal’s report. Accidental. Body disposal…. Thank you.” He disconnected.
Pope again.
Gerard’s expression was grim as he walked over and knelt in front of Fonda. “Did you get burned?”
She shook her head. “He…screamed, and I thought I’d hurt him and jumped off. A second later…”
He gently took her chin in his hand, forcing her to look at him. “Listen to me. This was an accidental fire. If anyone asks, if you talk to his family, a candle fell onto the bed and caught the sheets on fire. Do you understand?”
She nodded, her face wet from tears.
Olivia couldn’t believe it. “You’re covering it up?”
“I can’t disclose the truth without exposing the program.”
Fonda started crying again.
“What is the truth? Is it true, what she said? No, of course not. What is going on here?”
He took Fonda’s wrists and pulled her to her feet. At first Olivia thought he might hug her, though he’d rarely done so to her. He put his hands on her shoulders. “Do you want to let them break you down? Or do you want to take them down?”
Anger transformed her grief. “I want them all to die. Especially Eric Aruda.”
Olivia shivered at her hatred.
“Good. Use your anger as fuel. Keep working on your skills, and you’ll be able to take him out.”
Olivia asked, “What are her skills?”
“That’s not important.” She had never seen that mask of controlled anger on his face. He looked at Olivia. “Take her down to the kitchen and get her something to drink.”
Olivia helped Fonda down the stairs. She led the girl to the table, where only days before she and Nicholas had shared a piece of cake—and more. She went to the sink and filled a teakettle. “You said Jerryl tried to kill Eric’s sister. How?”
Fonda slumped in the chair, her gaze vacant. Her ears were pierced multiple times, each loop a different color. “He got into her head and tried to make her kill herself, but one of the Rogues saved her.”
The water spilled out over the spout. Fonda said it so matter-of-factly. She believed it. Olivia shut off the water and set the kettle on the gas stove, remembering something she’d overheard Jerryl say to Fonda: I was too busy fighting to get into his head. Olivia thought he’d meant psyching out the enemy.
No, this was crazy. But how could the Rogues set two fires without being anywhere near? Special skills, that was all she knew, skills Fonda, Jerryl, and Nicholas used while closed away in those missions rooms.
What if it was real? What if her father was doing something much more sinister than just spying? Like what Nicholas had suggested? “Fonda, tell me more about how Eric set…how he did this?”
“I don’t know how this stuff works, it just does. We were born this way.”
Olivia’s chest tightened. Impossible, her brain screamed, but she said, “Tell me about Jerryl, what he could do.”
Fonda’s wet eyes glittered. “He…was…was so talented. He could remote-view.”
“What’s that?”
“See other places without going there. Psychically spy.”
No way. “And the thing about getting into someone’s head?”
“That was his most amazing talent. He could mind-control.” She looked at Olivia. “He could get into your head and make you do things.”
Olivia shivered. “Like…?”
“He tried to get Eric to kill the Rogues. But he was strong, too. He shot himself instead. He should have died! If he had, Jerryl would still be here!” A new wave of sobbing ensued.
Olivia tried to make sense of it, but it overwhelmed her.
“He was everything to me,” Fonda said to no one in particular a few minutes later. “For the first time in my life I felt complete. Jerryl made me complete.”
Olivia sat down at the table with her. “That’s not true.”
Fonda looked at her through teary eyes, her liner dripping down in black streaks that reminded Olivia of Akill-eaze’s makeup. “My mom died when I was a kid. She killed herself because I wasn’t enough to live for. I was never enough, except with Jerryl. He loved me for who I was.”
<
br /> Olivia’s heart squeezed into a hard, small ball. “I do understand, Fonda. My mom took off when I was a baby. I’ve never heard from her, don’t know if she’s even alive.” Those words tightened her throat. She rarely spoke them aloud or let herself think them. That and Fonda’s fear of never, ever being enough echoed in Olivia’s soul.
It was hard to see Jerryl as someone who could care about someone, but maybe he had a different side that only Fonda had seen. Hadn’t Nicholas made Olivia feel good about herself, before all his questions and doubts? He’d seen her as a person, not an expectation.
Fonda looked at her. “What about your dad?”
At first Olivia thought she knew Gerard was her father but realized the question was general. “I was lucky. He raised me. Loved me.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t have anyone to love me. My dad married the first bimbo who would put up with his drinking after she got a whiff of the money the Army gave him for my mom’s death. Connie once told me the money was barely worth putting up with me, and back then I was a quiet, sad little girl who tried to be good because she desperately wanted to be loved.”
Bitterness tightened Fonda’s expression. “It didn’t matter. She hated me whether I was cleaning the apartment or acting up. She screwed him in more ways than one, running up so much debt they went bankrupt and moved into a shit-hole apartment. She also introduced him to her circle of friends, druggies who got him hooked on heroin. He was worthless after that.”
Olivia remembered hearing Fonda saying she’d had to deal with rapists and drug dealers, that she’d been taking care of herself for a long time. Now, with Fonda broken and vulnerable, Olivia saw beyond her cavalier façade. She saw the sad little girl who just wanted to be loved.
Then the little blonde Olivia was imagining morphed into a girl with long, brown hair and hazel eyes, trying ever so hard to be lovable.
“Can you top that?” Fonda said, covering pain with her bluster and need to have the worst story.
“No.” Olivia didn’t want to imagine what Fonda might have gone through, a pretty girl among people like that, no one to protect her.
The bluster faded, though, and Fonda pulled up her bent legs and hugged them to her chest. The robe fell away, revealing fine scars crisscrossing her calves. “Jerryl was the first person ever to protect me. For the first time in my life, I felt loved. Like I was worth being loved. And now…he’s gone. And I’m nothing again. He’s gone…gone!” She descended into tears, burying her face against her knees.
Olivia reached out to touch Fonda’s shoulder but hesitated. She was a rose, beautiful, delicate, but prickly with thorns. Olivia dropped her hand. She wanted to point out that it seemed their relationship was more about sex than love, and that maybe Fonda was confusing the two, but she held her tongue. It wouldn’t matter.
She sat in silence and watched the girl cry, her pain twining around Olivia’s heart like a strangler vine. Olivia felt the same way. She hadn’t attached her self-worth to a man’s loving her. For her, it was her family. Without them, and their approval, she was nothing. So she toed the line, lived within their expectations out of fear, just as Nicholas had suggested. She only now understood why: What were you worth if your own mother couldn’t love you?
CHAPTER 22
While Amy, Petra, and Zoe were out getting supplies, Lucas asked Eric to take a walk in the tunnel with him.
Eric’s shoulders were puffed with victory. “It feels so good not to have to worry about that son of a bitch anymore. A big weight’s been lifted off my shoulders.” In the dim lights of the tunnel, he studied Lucas. “How come you look miserable?”
Lucas paused, jamming his fingers into his front pockets. “I’ve never been thrilled with the idea of your burning people alive. But I understand it with Jerryl. I’m relieved, too. That’s not why I wanted to talk to you alone.”
“So, shoot, bro. What’s up?”
“I lied about not seeing the face of the man who’s going to kill Olivia.”
“You know I don’t care if the enemy’s daughter gets it. But Nicholas does, and that’s a worry, too. I know how you guys are when you’re in love. You go kind of crazy.”
“Eric, listen to me.” His voice echoed softly against the concrete walls. “I lied about seeing the guy’s face.”
Eric’s face paled. “It wasn’t me, was it? I consider her an enemy, but killing her like that…that’s sick stuff.”
“It was me. I saw my face.”
For a rare moment, Eric was speechless.
“I felt the guy’s pleasure at killing her. It wasn’t because she was in the way or the enemy’s daughter. It was just…pleasure. And then I saw his face. My face.”
“No way, man. That’s not you.”
“I know. But with this stuff inside me, the blackouts, and shooting Robbins—”
“That was Jerryl.”
“I don’t think it was. It was different than being mind-controlled. You and Nicholas hear his voice in your head. I lose control. I’m not even there. I doubt Zoe’s dad was the kind of guy who’d shoot people. But he did.” Lucas put his hands on Eric’s shoulders. “Somehow, I’m going to kill Olivia on Saturday. It’s probably going to be psychically. That’s how I killed those men who were going to hurt people. I strangled them in their dreams.”
“So we keep you awake Saturday. You don’t leave the tomb.”
“It’s not only Olivia. If I’m capable of doing that, of killing a man who was about to tell us something important, I’m capable of…killing you guys. Remember the promise you made.”
“That you made me make. I’m not going to kill you, Lucas. You’re like my brother.”
They were like brothers. When Lucas’s mother died, Petra and Eric’s dad took him in. They’d just lost their mother, when she’d burned to death in a supposed lab experiment gone wrong. Except they knew it was Darkwell’s experiment.
“I might kill you. Or Petra. Or Amy.” Lucas shuddered at the thought. “And if I did, I’d kill myself. I couldn’t live with that. It’s hard enough living with the fact that I killed Robbins. So if I’m going to end up dead anyway, take me out before I hurt someone else. Spare us the pain.”
“Does Amy know about any of this?”
“No. You can tell her afterward. I’ll leave her a letter so she won’t blame you.”
He slapped his hand to his chest. “Blame me? She’ll friggin’ kill me!”
“Not when she understands. She knows about our pact, so it won’t be a complete shock.” He met Eric’s gaze. “You can handle Amy. I’m calling in my promise. You and I will go down to the shooting range. The girls don’t like being down there anyway, and if anyone else wants to tag along, we’ll tell them we want to do some male bonding.”
“Oh, great, they’ll think we’re gay lovers.”
Lucas laughed despite himself. “You all like those sordid reality shows. It’ll give them something to talk about.”
Eric took a deep breath, planting his hand against the wall. “Until I tell them I shot you.”
“You have to do it. It’s getting worse. The other night I woke up in the storage room. Where the guns are kept. Amy didn’t know, and I didn’t tell her. I didn’t want to worry her.”
“And she is worried.”
Lucas rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I know. It’s going to hurt her.”
“It’s going to devastate her. That woman loves you like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
The thought of leaving her, of hurting her, made his chest ache. “It would be even worse if I hurt one of you. Especially if I’m aiming a gun at her. This is no different from when Jerryl was in your head, trying to get you to shoot Zoe, Amy, and me. You shot yourself instead. That’s what I’m doing here. You have to take me out first. Promise me.”
Eric hesitated at that bit of logic.
“Dammit, promise me. I’d do it myself if I didn’t think I’d either chicken out or just maim myself. Or that Amy or one of the girls would find me f
irst.”
“Okay, okay.” He released a sigh. “I promise.”
Lucas’s shoulders relaxed. “Thank you. I know what I’m asking is hard.”
“Hell, that’s what it is. You’re putting me in hell.”
“No, Eric. For once, you’re an angel.”
It was afternoon before Olivia could go into the business wing to her office. All the windows had been opened, but the horrid smell lingered. The door to Jerryl’s suite was closed, and construction and scrubbing sounds floated from within. Could you really clean away that kind of horror? Would she ever get it out of her mind or her nostrils?
She emerged from her office and came face-to-face with…Lucas.
The bizarreness of it stole away her breath. The armed guard who’d been stationed at the end of the hallway since Wednesday accompanied Lucas, who wore wrist and ankle chains. Had her father captured him again? Her stomach twisted at the thought.
Seeing him brought back the nightmare, especially when a smile broke out on his face. “Well, well, who do we have here?”
“Keep moving,” the guard said, pushing him along, though Lucas kept looking at her.
“Wait.” She caught up to them. “Lucas?”
“No, darlin’.” He bowed, his chains clinking. “Sayre Andrus, at your service.”
His Southern accent wrapped around those words, adding sensual undertones that were emphasized by the gleam in his blue-gray eyes. He took her in, not exactly leering, but with such intensity…it sounded crazy, but it made her feel like he was touching her. “Mm mm, you are like a dream.”
She was dumbstruck. His hair was shorter than Lucas’s, but he had the same lean build, same slightly exotic features.
“Olivia.”
She turned to see her father standing in his doorway. She recognized the order in his tone and broke out of her spell to walk to his office.
He closed the door behind her. “He’s not Lucas Vanderwyck.”
“But it…he looks…”
“It’s his identical twin. The prisoner I warned you about.”
The one he’d told her not to get taken in by. She bristled at his suggestion that she’d fall for a prisoner. What had he said? He’d be charming until he got his hands around her neck.