Christine Feehan

by Deadly Game

  “No.” Jack said the single word in a low tone that spoke volumes. “I won’t let you set yourself up so this bastard can grab you. It’s not happening, Ken.”

  “We can trap him, Jack. He’ll come out into the open for me.”

  “Lily, don’t listen to him,” Jack cautioned. “He’s a little nutty right now. Meeting Mari has shaken him up and he’s in martyr mode. I’m not allowing it, and anyone trying to help him is going to be in trouble.”

  Lily continued to work on Mari, wiping her face with a cold cloth, adding another bag of the yellow liquid, and checking the amount of blood Ken had given her. Seeing that Ken couldn’t let go of Mari’s shirt, she tugged up a thin sheet to add to her patient’s privacy while Logan removed the needle from Ken’s arm.

  Ken sat up and let his feet drop to the floor.

  “Sit there for a minute and let Ryland get you some juice,” Lily cautioned. Her gaze slid to Jack. “You don’t need to threaten me, Jack. I have no intention of ever handing anyone over to my father. Whatever Ken’s reasons, and I’m certain he has them, nothing is worth that.”

  “We can find him,” Ken insisted. “Right now he’s in the shadows. He’s got all kinds of protection, layers of coverage we can’t break through. His security clearance raises red flags every time we try to hunt him using a computer. If we go through the admiral or the general, they get the same runaround. Someone very high up is protecting him. The only chance we’re ever going to have to stop him is to get him out in the open.”

  “And then what, Ken?” Lily asked. “What do you think is going to happen? If we take him prisoner, whoever is protecting him will simply step in and take him away from us.”

  There was a small silence. Lily looked from Ken to Jack and then to her husband. She shook her head. “You want to use me to draw my father out into the open so you can kill him? Is that your big plan?”

  “Actually no, Lily,” Ken replied. “I was planning on using myself as the bait to draw your father out into the open so we could eliminate him.”

  “By eliminate you mean kill,” she persisted.

  “What do you think we should do with him? Hand him back over to his friends so they can pat him on the back and give him a bigger budget for his experiments?”

  Lily glared at him. “I’ve done everything I can to help all of you, but I’m not about to lure him to you so you can kill him. I won’t.” She backed away from the bed and glared up at her husband. “Not that—not for any of you. No matter what he’s done, he’s still my father. I want to get him help.” Even as she said it, she pressed a hand to her rounded belly and shook her head. It was clear she knew what had to be done; she just couldn’t accept it yet.

  Ryland held out his hand to her. “There is no us or them, Lily. There is only we. We’re all in this together. We’re GhostWalkers; we’re what your father made us and we stick together. We can only trust each other. That’s it. We can’t even trust the men who send us out on missions.”

  Lily opened her mouth to protest, and then closed it again. It was well known that her family had been very close with General Ranier, the man in charge of the special ops team Ryland Miller was responsible for. Whitney and Ranier had been good friends. Lily had grown up practically in Ranier’s house. He too had believed Peter Whitney had been murdered, and he seemed to be on the side of the GhostWalkers.

  “Someone attempted to have General Ranier murdered,” Lily pointed out. “He isn’t part of all this.”

  “His wife wasn’t in the house, Lily,” Ryland said gently, “and you and I both know she is almost always there. Odd coincidence.”

  “You don’t trust the general, Ryland? We’ve had dinner at his house several times. How can you sit at his table and at the same time suspect him of conspiring with my father to do these horrible things?”

  “What horrible things, Lily?” Jack asked. “Peter Whitney has worked for the government in one capacity or another for years. He’s got the highest security clearance, has provided weapons and defense systems as well as drugs and genetic enhancement far before the rest of the world even knew it existed. He’s been invaluable. He came up with an idea for supersoldiers, enhancing both physical and psychic abilities, and he has provided both of those things. As far as the people he answers to are concerned, Whitney has delivered.”

  Ryland nodded. “Colonel Higgens tried to highjack his program and sell the information to other countries, and he was stopped. If Whitney told his people he needed to fake his own murder and disappear, well, it was one more sacrifice for his country. Ranier would view it that way. He would fake grief, promise to look after you, assume command of all of us, and be thankful a man such as Peter Whitney existed in the world.”

  Lily leaned against the bed as if her legs couldn’t hold her up. “Why didn’t you tell me this before? You’ve mentioned it in passing, but no one ever has just come right out and explained why you believe it is a possibility. Put like that, there’s every possibility, because that makes my father look a hero, rather than a traitor.”

  Jack glanced at Ken. Lily is a brilliant woman when it comes to academics, but she’s so blind when it comes to people. It was a small warning to keep Ken’s anger from boiling over. She’s struggling to accept that Whitney needs to die, but she needs more time. The pregnancy also probably makes her more emotional when it comes to her father.

  When the hell did you get so smart? Ken demanded.

  I’ve been reading all the pregnancy books. Jack sounded a little smug.

  “He isn’t selling his work to a foreign country. He turns over his work to the government, and as long as no one knows how he got his results, they’re all happy,” Jack said aloud. “They don’t want to know how he does it, only that he gets the job done. And Whitney has a track record of providing results.”

  “We can screw all that up by exposing him, and that means exposing the government, at least a very elite group of men in the know,” Ken said, trying to gentle his voice when he really wanted to yell at her.

  “The president?” Lily asked.

  “Probably not. My guess is he knows he has supersoldiers and a few special ops teams called GhostWalkers, but I doubt he knows anything more than how we can be used,” Ken added. “Someone goes before the committee and gets funding for some of these projects. He has to report the results and sugarcoat it so Whitney’s extremes are never brought to the light. I’ll bet the breeding program is called something altogether different. The president and the committee of senators are certainly not going to approve anything with the word breeding in it.”

  “Everything we do is classified,” Ryland said. “No one knows we do it, and no one is going to admit it. If we take out a drug lord in Colombia, or tip the scales of power in the Congo, the last thing the government wants is for anyone to know we were there. There’s the entire point of having us. GhostWalkers don’t exist.”

  “So why are we being pitted against one another?” Jack asked. “Why was Mari’s team told about the assassination attempt when our team was already on it? You know the admiral is talking to the general, and whoever is giving orders to Whitney’s team has to know what we’re doing at all times. How else was Mari’s team tracking her?”

  “The other thing I think we’re going to have to accept,” Ken said, “is that Whitney has his own team, men reported dead, men who have, like us, gone through the School of Warfare, special ops training, and had plenty of experience. Whitney tested their psychic abilities and profiled them, just as he did all of us. Something in their profiles appealed to him, so he set out collecting his own little army of supersoldiers. Jack and I ran into them when he sent them after Briony. Jack recognized one of them from when he tested. He was supposedly killed in Colombia right after a mission he went on with Jack.”

  Lily frowned at them. “What would be different about those soldiers?”

  Ryland and Ken exchanged a long look. There was a small silence. Lily straightened. “Don’t keep me in the dark
. I know my father has lost his grip on reality. I know something has to be done about him. I need to know all the facts.”

  Ryland stroked a caress down her hair. “The fact is, some soldiers enjoy killing. It doesn’t much matter whether it’s a soldier or civilian, they like the rush having the power over life or death gives them. We think he’s collected a few of them, enhanced both their psychic and physical powers, and now he uses them for his own end. He has to be sinking into paranoia at this point, Lily.”

  “So you think he has soldiers no one knows about for his own personal use as well as a team considered black ops that he can command when orders come down.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what we think,” Ryland said.

  “Where do Mari and the other women come in?”

  “They were originally, from childhood, educated and trained as soldiers. He needed them to continue his experiments as well as have women he could study who hadn’t been raised in families,” Ken said. “When he decided it was too difficult to hook the women up with the men he had intended to pair them with …”

  “I know that he did choose women and men by their genetic abilities and IQ as well as the strength of their psychic gifts and what those talents were,” Lily admitted. “I’ve been reading quite a lot on it ever since I became pregnant.”

  “He’s gone to plan B,” Ken said, keeping his voice flat and calm and nonjudgmental, when he felt his rage cold and utterly deadly, building with a strength that shook him. “He’s forcing the women to be with men they aren’t paired with—men who are obsessive about them, but who the women have no real feeling for.”

  Lily’s hand went to her throat in a defensive gesture. “What do you mean forcing? Rape? Are you saying he’s condoning the rape of women?”

  “It’s science,” Ken said.

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” Lily said. “He’s given children cancer, sent men into jungles to be tortured—I can’t take this. I don’t know what to do.” She began to cry silently. “How can he do these things? I kept thinking if I worked hard enough to make up for the things he did, I could somehow make it better, but I can’t. He doesn’t stop. He just keeps doing horrible, unforgivable things.”

  “Sit down for a minute.” Ryland took her hand and led her to a chair. “This is too much for you right now, Lily.”

  She shook her head. “No, I have to know. You can’t keep anything like this from me. When I was growing up, I knew he was always pushing boundaries, but I believed he knew right from wrong. When I discovered we’d all been taken from orphanages, that he bought us for experimenting on children, I knew something terrible was going on with him.” She pressed both hands protectively to her stomach. “He wants the babies, and if he has the chance, he’ll take them. You’re all right. I know you are. I know it.” She sounded lost, hopeless.

  There was a small silence. Lily sighed, her lips firming. “We have to get the women out of there and we have to protect our children from him.”

  “Lily,” Ken said, “I believe he has psychic talent of his own.”

  “He always said he didn’t.”

  “But no one can read him, and how could he possibly know which infants had psychic talents. He had to have sensed it in some way. There’s no other answer. That’s probably why he’s always been so obsessed with the subject,” Ken insisted.

  “He would never admit it, not to anyone,” Lily said. “He wouldn’t want to be considered anything but a man of science. Psychic talent is still considered freaky, and Peter Whitney would never, at any time, want someone to laugh behind his back.”

  “Anyone laughing at Whitney is at risk to disappear,” Ken said. “I understand you’re torn about this, Lily, but the truth is, unless Whitney dies, none of us are ever going to be safe, and neither are our children.”

  “He needs help. We can put him in a hospital.”

  “He knows too much. You know he’s considered one of the smartest men on the planet. He knows secrets and he has powerful friends. He could name names. They’ll never leave him in a hospital.”

  Lily shook her head and remained silent. Ryland kept his hand on her shoulder in an attempt to comfort her. She knew they would have to kill her father. His experiments would never stop until Whitney was dead. She was finally accepting that there was no real way to save him, and Ryland wanted to spare her the inevitable grief.

  Ken felt sorry for Ryland. Ken wasn’t married to Mari. Mari wasn’t carrying his child. He hadn’t even had time to get to know her, yet he felt protective. Ken hadn’t known he had protective genes in his makeup, or even tenderness. He hadn’t known lust could be so sharp and urgent and intense. That it could crawl inside a man and eat him from the inside out. He hadn’t known lust could be wrapped up in dark emotions, black jealousy and obsession, the need to control and dominate. He hadn’t known softer emotions could cut through everything dark and ugly inside of him and make him want to be a better man—make him need to be better so that he was worthy of one woman—the only woman.

  Ryland had found those things with Lily, and Jack had managed to discover them with Briony. Ken might want to be a better man, but he wasn’t certain he was strong enough to overcome his darker tendencies. Mari wasn’t a submissive woman like her sister. She didn’t have a soft, sweet nature, willing to compromise and soothe Ken’s rougher side. Mari would fight his dominant nature, wanting freedom and control, and he would never be able to concede. The more she fought him, the worse he would get, until he would be like his father, a monster without equal, until their fights were real and it became a clash of wills to see who would win.

  Not if you fall in love with her, Ken. Jack’s telepathic voice interrupted his thoughts. You haven’t figured that into the equation. Briony didn’t exactly change me, but she brought out the best in me.

  And if there is no best? Ken glanced down at the pale face lying so still beside him. She looked too young for a man like him. It was different when she opened her eyes, and he saw her too-old eyes—where he read the same edgy hunger and need. Then he could imagine himself with her, even if it was only briefly, but not like this, not when she was so small and fragile-looking.

  Then the old man won after all, Jack replied harshly. And you let him.

  Fuck you, Jack.

  Right back at you. You’ve never walked away from a fight in your life. This is the biggest, most important battle you’ll ever have. You’re going to leave her to Brett? Or Sean? Hell, if you do, Ken, you don’t deserve her and you’re not man enough to have her. She needs someone who will stand up for her.

  Shut the fuck up.

  You only swear when you know you’re full of shit.

  Ken glared at his brother. You walked away from Briony.

  The first time, yes. I wasn’t strong enough to give her up the second time, and I had to learn more about myself than I ever wanted to know, and that was a good thing, Ken, because I learned I could control the things that would hurt Briony. I don’t want to see her disappointed or hurt by something I say or do.

  And if you couldn’t control it?

  How do you know if you don’t try?

  Ken’s eyes glittered with menace. I know I don’t want to take a chance with her life. You saw me acting like an animal. The things I want to do to her scare the hell out of me. If I end up hurting her, don’t you think that’s a win for the old man?

  You would never hurt her. I know you better than you know yourself. Jack suddenly turned his attention to Lily. “What do you know about post-traumatic stress, Lily? Can a child suffer a trauma that would cause the symptoms? What about years of tracking and killing enemies? And torture, Lily, would that bring out the symptoms?”

  Logan and Ryland glanced at Ken’s face, the gridiron mask of scars disappearing into the neckline of his shirt. For the first time in his life, Ken felt color rising and was utterly aware of his patchwork skin. He looked like a freak show, sewn together to keep his body from falling apart. “Go to hell, Jack.” His tone
dropped to a low caress, a growling purr of warning.

  “Of course a child can suffer trauma,” Lily said. “Posttraumatic stress disorder is very common in men who go into life-and-death situations. It’s usual to have nightmares and not be able to sleep. Often someone experiencing PTSD has feelings of detachment and a belief that they have no future.”

  “I don’t want to hear this,” Ken said.

  “I do,” Jack persisted, keeping a wary eye on his brother.

  Lily took a deep breath and continued. “They can easily become irate and have outbursts of seemingly irrational anger. They might become increasingly vigilant and can become paranoid that a loved one may be in danger, so their reaction is intense to the extreme.”

  “This is bullshit, Jack,” Ken warned. Anger swirled close to the surface, threatening to break through the icy calm he presented to the others in the room. If you’re spoiling for a fight, I’ll oblige, but not here, not around the women, he added.

  Are you listening to either Lily or yourself? You hardly ever sleep. You have nightmares all the time. You pace half the night.

  So do you.

  Not anymore. Briony is there now.

  Yeah, Jack, thanks for the vision. I don’t want to hear any more. Leave me the hell alone.

  Beside him, Mari stirred, her hand sliding across the bed until she found his arm.

  You okay? Cuz I’m a little sore here. I feel like someone beat the holy hell out of my chest, but if you need backup, I’m all over it.

  Her voice was soft and carried a tinge of humor and even more determination. His heart did that curious overheating-and-melting-into-a-puddle thing he was beginning to recognize only Mari managed to induce in him.

  Shh, honey. Go back to sleep. Everything is fine.

  Was I asleep? I thought I was dead, but then I thought maybe you needed me so I came back to you. Her thoughts were completely unguarded, entirely open to him when she reached out to make the connection. I think you need me, Ken. I’ve never actually thought about being needed, or having a home.