Dangerous Promise (The Protector)

by Megan Hart

  She didn’t dare to turn around and look at Donahue now. She swallowed, waiting for pain to slit its way up her gut like a knife, but emptiness swelled inside her. A blank, still force crept along her nerves and settled at the base of her brain. She wasn’t calm. She was merely . . . nothing.

  “It didn’t say who,” Leona added quietly, her brows knitted.

  Nina shook her head. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? Had he been reset?”

  “I can’t say. Client privilege.”

  Which meant yes.

  “I wanted you to hear it from me,” Leona went on. “You know the story will break and be spun a hundred different ways. The media is going to have a field day with this.”

  “Thanks. Is there anything else?”

  There wasn’t, and Leona disconnected. Nina slipped the comm into its spot on the leather harness circling her thigh and finally turned to face Donahue. He was no longer pretending not to know her.

  “Allan Hendricks,” he said. It made sense that he knew the name. Most of the world knew all the names of the enhanced, if only from the media reports that had been so rampant about them.

  “Yes. You overheard.”

  “I’m sorry,” Donahue told her. “Were you . . . close?”

  That was another question that had no good answer. Certainly not one she owed him, anyway. Nina met his gaze from across the room.

  “I’m not sure I want to talk to you about this,” she said.

  Donahue looked first irritated, then almost relieved. “Right. Sure. I understand. It’s not any of my business.”

  “You should get back to work,” she told him. “I’m sure you’re very, very busy.”

  Again, Donahue looked annoyed, but although he opened his mouth, he shut it without speaking. He turned back to his computer. Nina returned to her spot on the couch where she’d been trying to read, but nothing could hold her attention and soon she was up, unbuckling the various weapons on her harness and laying them out on the table in front of his desk.

  Donahue looked up. “What are you doing?”

  “Cleaning. Inspecting. Making sure everything is in order, the way it should be. Because if something should happen and I wasn’t prepared, it would make it that much harder for me to protect you.” She glanced at him. “Not impossible. Just more difficult.”

  Donahue didn’t reply to that. After a moment she heard the whisper of his fingers again on his touchboard. She kept her attention on what she was doing but felt the weight of his stare. She looked up.

  Donahue got to his feet and came around the edge of the desk to lean on it. He crossed his arms. “I don’t like to talk about my feelings.”

  “You did not come across to me as someone who would.” She wiped a soft cleaning cloth over a knife blade and held it up to the light to inspect for dings or chips on the cutting edge.

  “If you want to, though . . .”

  Nina glanced at him. “I don’t mind talking about my feelings, if that’s what you’re getting at. I’m just not sure I want to discuss them with you, in particular.”

  “Oh.”

  She waited for him to go back to his computer, but he didn’t. He watched her return the knife to its place on her thigh. She cleaned another, again holding it up to make sure it hadn’t been chipped or dulled before she put it back into its place on her harness.

  “He was my lover,” she said finally when it became clear Donahue was waiting for her to say something. “I would call him a boyfriend, except that mostly we only ever fucked and didn’t do the rest of the stuff you’re supposed to do when you’re in a relationship with someone. No flowers or walks holding hands, no snuggling on the couch.”

  “He didn’t want that?”

  She shrugged, concentrating on the weapons she’d laid out on the table in front of her. “Oh, he did. At least he did before I went away. I was the one who held him off. It didn’t make any sense to me. I knew I was going into the army, and I knew that meant I wouldn’t be able to see him for a long time. Maybe never again. It didn’t seem right to get all worked up emotionally over something that wasn’t going to last. I wanted sex, not love.”

  “Been there,” Donahue said.

  She glanced up with a small, humorless grin. “I’m sure you have.”

  “It’s a human need,” Donahue told her. “But then again, they say love is, too.”

  Her smile faded. “Yeah. I believe that. Don’t you?”

  “In theory. In practice, though, we tend as a species to consistently fuck it up.”

  Nina swallowed hard at his words and continued cleaning and sorting her gear. “Some people get it right. They stay in love.”

  “I don’t believe it,” he said with a shrug. “There’s no way to prove it.”

  “No way to prove love?” Incredulous, she looked up at him. “You don’t believe people who say they love each other?”

  Donahue stared at her, his expression indecipherable. “Emotional responses can’t be quantified.”

  “And because you can’t measure them, that makes them not real?”

  “It makes them unreliable,” Donahue said. “And I don’t work with unreliability.”

  She supposed that made sense. Even so . . . “That’s sad.”

  He shrugged and tilted his head to study her as he changed the subject. “What happened when you went away?”

  “He joined the army, too. We were not assigned the same unit, but it didn’t matter. We both ended up enhanced. Imagine that,” Nina said without so much as a waver in her voice. “The odds? There are only fifteen of us. What had to happen in the universe to put us both in the wrong place at the right time to even be eligible for the procedures?”

  “If I believed in the Onegod, I might think it had something to do with it,” Donahue said without so much as a hint of a smile. “What happened after that?”

  She slipped her shockgun into its holster and then put her arms though the harness, heavy with the weight of her equipment, and buckled it in the front. She felt better with it on. Less naked. Nina stretched carefully, making sure everything she’d put back on fit without restricting her. She faced him.

  “I died,” she said. “Then I spent months in recovery. When I came home, I was followed by controversy and drama. I fell out with my family. Friends. I wanted to be loved more than anything. I needed it more than I ever had.”

  “I’m sorry,” Donahue said with a twist of his mouth that wasn’t quite a frown.

  Nina closed her eyes for a blink that lasted longer than it should have. “He said he thought fucking me would be better than it had been before, since I had all this new stamina and whatever. Like somehow my ability to control my breathing was supposed to make me better at sucking cock.”

  Donahue let out a slow, strangled noise that she ignored. She opened her eyes. His brow had furrowed, his lips parting as though he meant to speak but wasn’t sure what to say.

  “He fucked me, but I needed him to love me.”

  “And he didn’t?”

  She forced herself to straighten her shoulders. Lifted her chin. She waited for her voice to crack with emotion, for tears to fall, but there was only that soothing emptiness. That calm. The nothing. “He did. Probably more than he had before. The problem wasn’t him. It was me. I couldn’t . . . feel . . . anything for him. I remembered what it was like to want him. I knew that once upon a time, if I hadn’t loved him with everything I had, at least I’d loved him enough. After I got the tech, I could feel desire, but I couldn’t feel . . . love.”

  “Because of the tech,” Ewan said, his voice hoarse and strangled and gruff.

  “Because of something,” she said. “I can regulate my heart rate. Why not my emotions, too?”

  “Is that what you were doing?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe subconsciously? I only know the more I tried to feel something for him, the less I felt, overall.”

  “Fight or flight. The body reacts to intense emotions the same way it does to real,
physical threat,” Donahue said. “The tech is supposed to give you control over all that.”

  “Yeah, but not make me an automaton,” she said. “Although I guess that’s exactly what you’d want a super soldier to be, huh? Incapable of strong, emotional connection. Human connection. If we can’t be compromised by our feelings, how much better can we be at killing?”

  Donahue flinched. “Some people would be happy not to have strong emotions dragging them down.”

  “People like you?” She snapped at him. “Why don’t you outfit yourself with the tech, then? You’d never have to worry about it again.”

  “I don’t worry about it now!” Donahue shouted.

  For a moment, neither of them spoke. Nina relaxed her clenched fists, noting the way Donahue’s gaze watched her do it. Again, she wondered if there was some strange part of him that got off on trying to rile her up.

  “Someone so concerned about what makes other people human or not should absolutely care that he’s incapable of emotion,” Nina said through gritted teeth.

  Donahue recoiled as though she’d punched him in the gut. Good, she thought. Let it hurt him.

  “You have no idea what it’s like,” she continued. “Hendricks said I wore the face of the woman he loved, but everything else belonged to a monster. I was selfish, I know that. I wanted him to love me, but I couldn’t love him in return. I tried, Donahue. I just didn’t have it in me.”

  “But Hendricks had it in him.”

  She hesitated. “Yes. But—”

  “So it was you. Not the tech. You can’t blame it.”

  “Funny to hear that coming from you, since you’re the man who came out in the international media declaring the fifteen of us—what was it, again? Oh, yeah. ‘Unethically transformed into something outside the realm of true humanity.’” She used air quotes to emphasize the last sentence, which might have been paraphrased but was close enough to get her point across.

  His expression told her a lot about what he thought about hearing his own words tossed back at him.

  “I never in any way suggested that you or any of the others wasn’t a person,” Donahue said fiercely. “Or that you were less than human. What I meant was that the enhancement procedures took on a role and responsibility that was in direct opposition to the very idea of humanity. I mean that it was wrong to have the ability to remove a person’s memories, the things that make them who they are—”

  “Emotions make us who we are, too,” Nina said fiercely. “The ability to hate, to fear, to love. That’s what makes us people, too. Did you know I heard you speak, once? Right before the vote to outlaw further research and improvements in the tech.”

  “You did?” He looked first surprised. Then guilty, which surprised her. “Where?”

  “I was at the summit meeting. A few of us were. We had to petition to be there. You didn’t know?”

  Donahue shook his head. “No. If I had . . .”

  “What would you have done?” Nina challenged. “Changed your mind? Maybe you’d have been a little less harsh in your assessment of us as people, rather than commodities? You are aware, aren’t you, that your lobbying and influence directly resulted in a complete ban on further development of the enhancement tech, and as a direct result of that decision, the rest of the world launched into a full-out attack on us, the enhanced?”

  “You’re blaming me for the international treaty against the use of enhanced soldiers in warfare?”

  She gave him a grim smile. “Shouldn’t I?”

  “You should be glad and grateful,” Donahue told her. “Would it have been better if you’d been auctioned off to the highest bidder? Bought and sold? Because that’s what they meant to do to you. My lobbying led directly to the basic declaration of your human rights, Nina. All of you were headed to being named as property of the North American United States government. All the parts of you, and not just the tech inside your heads. You’d have been treated like equipment. Not people. You have no idea how close you all came to becoming slaves.”

  She’d heard rumors of that. “Nobody’s ever proven that. If anything, those allegations have been refuted over and over again.”

  “Of course they have,” Donahue said. “Do you really think any of that would be allowed to get out into the public?”

  “You want me to believe your motives were completely altruistic? For my benefit?” She shook her head. “Even if you could convince me that somehow the NorthAm government could have claimed us and forced us into service, that doesn’t change the fact that because of you, I’m stuck with a set of tech implanted in my head that will eventually stop working. Planned obsolescence. I will be left with permanent brain damage that will slowly strip away not only the enhanced functions I’m currently able to access, but eventually, all normal functions, too. Beyond the inability to process emotions, you sentenced us to slow and painful deaths. You’ve taken away from us exactly what you said makes us people. Our memories. Whether any of us are reset a hundred times or never even once, we’re going to lose them, because the tech is degrading, Ewan.”

  She’d never called him by his first name before.

  Horror contorted his expression, but only for a moment or so before he visibly smoothed it. He swallowed hard, again and again. He started to speak, his voice rough and rasping, then went silent and tried again.

  “I believe with everything in my heart that the enhancement tech did more harm than good. That you are better off without it.”

  “But we already have it!”

  “I can’t help that now!” he shouted, loud and harsh and furious. “That’s been done. We can’t take it out, and we can’t change it. But I can be damned sure that nobody else has to suffer. That’s the best I have, Nina. You don’t have to believe my reasons. That doesn’t matter to me.”

  Nina rubbed at the spot between her eyes, then looked at him. “I used to get headaches, a lot. Right there. I don’t anymore. Instead, they creep around the base of my skull and clamp down toward my temples. The tech got rid of the tension headaches, the minor migraines, the sinus aches. But I still have pain along the incision points. The brain isn’t supposed to be able to feel pain, Ewan, but guess what? I can tell you where each and every chip is located, because sometimes it hurts me there, and it’s going to keep doing that and getting worse, because it hurts the most when my body is trying to use the enhancements that the tech controls, but the tech itself is breaking down.”

  “It’s not supposed to hurt—”

  “But it does,” she snapped, interrupting him. “It does. Sometimes physically, sometimes just in the idea of knowing that I am considered ‘less than.’ As though I don’t have the right to be any more than what was done to me. I didn’t have a choice about the tech, you know. I’d signed that agreement when I went into the service, giving them the right to use my body as they saw fit in the service to my country. I thought that meant donating my organs, something like that. I had no idea it meant they could keep my corpse alive long enough to experiment on it. I didn’t know they were going to outfit me with a bunch of hardware and software that would end up killing me slowly. I went into the army to avoid that ‘dying slowly’ business. If I have to die, and we all do, I want to go out making a difference in the world. Working for good. Most importantly, I want it to be fast.”

  He flinched, his ire finally dimming. “You want me to apologize for something I can’t be sorry about, Nina.”

  “The tech has allowed me to help more people, to be of use, to save lives that might have been lost if I hadn’t been there to stand in front of the bullet. I wanted to become a soldier, and that tech has allowed me to be the best I could be, better than I ever could have been without it. So I’m not sorry I got it.”

  “Do you think Hendricks meant you? In the note he left.”

  “He could have meant anyone,” she snapped, hating that Ewan was practically a stranger to her and still guessed her worst fear. “He had a daughter. He might have meant her. Or his mo
ther. Or his ex-wife. Or even Leona. We’ll never know who it was, and it doesn’t matter. He’s dead.”

  I could never love a monster.

  Hendricks’s last words to her rippled through Nina’s mind and left her as empty and blank as she’d been when he said them to her originally. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t mourn. Could not grieve. The swell of emotion teased her, just out of reach, before subsiding.

  “And you feel nothing?” Ewan asked in a low voice, his gaze piercing hers.

  Nina nodded. “I want to. I know I should. But I can’t . . . quite . . . manage.”

  She thought he might say something else after that, but Ewan only shook his head and went back to his desk. He sat in his chair and focused on his computer, leaving her standing there. After a while, she returned to the couch and picked up her tablet, but she couldn’t concentrate on it.

  She ought to be weeping for the loss of the man she’d tried so hard to love. Feeling something. Anything. She put a hand on her heart, feeling the thumping rhythm of it. It should be breaking, but all it did was continue to beat.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Having Nina as his constant shadow made it a little harder for Ewan to set up the dinner he’d planned. But what had she said about fighting without her weapons in top shape? Difficult but not impossible? Ewan didn’t have weapons in his arsenal. He had skills, one of which was making things happen. Not that arranging a meal in his own home was anything close to hand-to-hand combat, but he still felt accomplished at pulling it off without her finding out until he took her into the dining room.

  Her words had stayed with him long after she’d said them. No matter how hard he tried to shove them away, he couldn’t shake the idea that somehow, she was right. That the tech had somehow stolen even more from her than he’d thought possible. Ewan had spent a number of hours going over old records, the ones nobody else had access to after Gray Tuesday. The tech had never been meant to suppress emotions. He could find nothing in his original specs that indicated anything like that had been part of the programming, and yet he couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d said.