Adam wasn’t bluffing. Richard could hear it in the steely quality of his voice. “Fine. But only a tiny tidbit or you’ll run off to find Eli when you should be helping me.”
“Spit it out.”
“Eli was adopted as a child. They changed his name.”
“To what?”
“There’s not a chance I’m telling you that. Not until you bring Clay to my labs. I assume you remember where.”
“If you’re lying to me, you’ll regret it.”
“What? You’ll kill me?” asked Richard, amused.
“No. I’ll give you to Dr. Stynger. She’ll kill you. Eventually su. h=".”
That threat was enough to make Richard reevaluate how he treated Adam going forward. The bo
y had become a man somewhere along the way, and given what Richard knew about him, toying with him was a bad idea.
“There is no need for threats. I’m telling you the truth about Eli. You’ll see as soon as you bring Clay Marshall to me.”
Adam’s reply radiated complete confidence. “Send me whatever information you have on Marshall. You’ll have him by the end of the week.”
Chapter Ten
Clay drove for two hours before he felt like he was far enough away from Leigh’s battered phone to be sure no one could find them. He stopped and bought a GPS, then pulled into a cheap roadside motel and paid in cash for a room.
The close quarters weren’t lost on him, but chances were they weren’t going to be sleeping here, anyway. Once they found a lead, he’d head out. They just needed a private place to stop long enough to dig up some bad memories. No sense in crashing Leigh’s car if he went all batshit or something.
“I think I’ve figured out Mira’s organization of the data,” said Leigh. She sat on the end of the bed. The cheesy pink and blue geometric bedspread was so eighties it was a wonder her hair didn’t get bigger by proximity alone. “If you can remember when you lost time, we should be able to start mapping out where you were. But not until after I patch you up.”
“I’m fine.” His wrists burned, but he’d been through worse.
“Don’t be a baby. The last thing you need is to have those cuts get infected. Just man up and let me do this.” She set her medical bag on the counter by the sink and started digging through it.
“Do you insult all your patients?” he asked.
She paused in the act of setting out gauze and tape and looked at him in the mirror. “You’re not my patient. I’m just helping out a friend in need.”
“We’re not friends, either.”
“Then consider it a repayment for saving my life. You bled for me. It’s only right that I help you stop bleeding.”
“Fine. Whatever.” As much as he hated subjecting himself to any medical procedures, she was right about infection. He couldn’t afford any weakness right now.
He was just going to have to do as she’d asked. Man up. Ignore the queasy anxiety that plagued him every time he got near sterile gloves, tubes, and needles. The feeling was inconvenient as hell—a remnant from whatever had been done to him, no doubt. For all he knew, the assholes who’d fucked with his head had given him a hatred for doctors just to keep one of them from accidentally undoing all the hard work that had scrambled his brains.
Clay presented his bandaged wri vblests to her for inspection. She slowly removed the strips of towel, obviously working not to pull on the wound. Her gloved fingers fluttered over his skin, brushing but not really touching. He was torn between wanting her to leave him alone and wishing she’d take the gloves off so he could feel her skin on his again.
He watched her work, shoving the minor sting and burn of the cuts from his mind. Her movements were efficient. Her hands were steady. A look of deep concentration furrowed her brows. She held her bottom lip between her teeth, letting go of it now and then.
The crazy urge to lick away that little dent her teeth left consumed him, making him wonder just how she’d taste—how she’d sound if he gave in to the urge.
She leaned forward to reach for the scissors and gave Clay a nice view down the front of her blouse. Like a pervert, he couldn’t help but stare. The dark shadow between her pale breasts sucked him in and didn’t let go. As stacked as she was, she didn’t show off the goods, but there was little she could do to completely hide them.
Her freckles became sparser and lighter the farther down they went. He wondered if she had them sprinkled across her belly and hips, too. And if he’d ever find out.
Not likely. As much as his body was on board with the whole discovery expedition, he had to remember who she was.
She wasn’t some barfly looking for a romp. She was Mira’s friend. She took care of the people he worked with. Hell, she was taking care of him right now—and as much as he hated doctors, he couldn’t find the fire in his belly to hate her. At least not right now.
“There are a couple of places where you really tore the skin. They need to be glued or sutured.”
“Glue. I won’t be ripping that out if I get a bit rough.”
She looked up at him, so close he could see the way her dark eyes dilated, eating up flecks of green and gold as her pupils expanded. “The goal is to avoid getting rough.”
He shrugged. She was holding his arm, and the movement shifted her whole body slightly. It made him realize how vulnerable she was—how every little thing he did could so easily affect her. “Some things can’t be helped. It’s your job to get out of the way.”
“Noted. Now, your job is to hold still while I do this, or we’ll be literally stuck together.”
The notion sounded nicer than it should have, which only proved how messed up he really was. The day he got involved with a doctor who was using him would be the day he was laid out on an autopsy table for scientific study.
Leigh finished the job and bandaged him up properly. “If you have any signs of infection—redness, fever—let me know.”
She turned, and the strip of lights over the mirror lit the side of her face. Fingertip-shaped bruises lined her jaw. They were darker now than they’d been before. His stomach tightened at the thought of what he’d done and how it must have made her feel. She’d trusted him and he’d hurt her, scared her.
Clay reached out { reandto angle her face so he could inspect them more closely, but she flinched away. It was an instinctive reaction—one based on what he’d done to her.
“Sorry,” she said, and then she held still as if to prove she wasn’t afraid of him.
Clay let his hands fall slowly, leaving them where she could see them. “You have no reason to be sorry. I’m the violent head case. Not you.”
“I don’t want you beating yourself up over it. That’s not going to get us anywhere.”
“Neither will ignoring it. I tried that for months—pretending that I wasn’t losing time or waking up with injuries I couldn’t explain. I promise it doesn’t work. I’m facing this head-on, Leigh, and that means owning up to everything.” Even though it made him sick. Better to be sick and careful than to hurt her again.
She still wouldn’t look at him. “I’m going to clean up this mess and take a shower.”
Her change of topic was painfully obvious, leaving him no choice but to respect it. She’d been through hell in the last few hours. He wasn’t going to add to that by pushing her.
He couldn’t make her accept that he was a threat any more than he could ask for her forgiveness. That was for men who knew they wouldn’t hurt someone again. Clay could make no such promises.
Leigh cleaned her instruments and then took her suitcase into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her. The shower came on.
Clay stood there for a good minute, trying not to imagine her getting undressed. As mixed-up as his life was right now, the thought of Leigh naked was a much-needed distraction, but one he knew would lead him down the wrong path. She was caring and as sexy as hell, but that couldn’t matter to him. For as long as he was a threat, he had to keep his distance. And as soon as he
was no longer a threat, there would be no reason for them to be together.
Simple. Clear. Final.
Now all he had to do was get his dick to catch up to his brain.
He picked up the thick stack of paper and stared at the numbers without actually seeing them.
Clay dreaded what was going to happen next. He was going to have to slog through all those horrible mornings when he woke up not knowing how he’d made it into bed. The mornings when he cataloged bruises and cuts, wondering how he’d earned them. It was amazing how easily he’d been able to shove those days into a dark hole of denial and pretend they’d never happened. And now he had to dig them all out again.
* * *
Mira hadn’t stopped working since Clay had called her, asking her to break into morgue databases. She’d known something was wrong—something big and bad and scary—but until now, she hadn’t suspected it was this bad.
She stared at the screen, unable to believe what she saw.
After hours of collecting and organizin {ande to beg the list of places Clay had been over the past two months and sending it to Leigh, Mira decided not to let that data go to waste. She located cameras near where he’d been and hacked into some of the servers that held security camera footage. Most of what she saw had been mundane stuff—shots of the back of his head or the side of his face. Images of him driving. One camera had captured him speaking to another man outside a restaurant. She never got a good shot of that man’s face because the only camera that might have had the right angle was outside a bank. While she was confident she could crack the bank’s security, she was also confident they’d find out eventually. Drawing attention to what she was doing was dangerous not only for her, but also for Clay.
Traffic cameras were easy, so she’d started with those, tracking his movements on a particular night about two weeks ago. Grainy images flashed as they were processed by facial recognition software until a hit on one paused the process.
There, staring almost directly at a camera, was Clay. He was close. The image was clearer than most. And what she saw scared her to death.
Clay’s eyes were empty—hollowed out, as if what had made him him had been dumped out and replaced with sand. His jaw was slack, lacking the usual tension she’d come to associate with his intense personality. He didn’t look like Clay at all. Instead, he looked more like the young men she’d seen filing out of her father’s basement lab.
She’d been too young at the time to know what was wrong. All she knew was that it made her mom cry.
But now Mira knew more. She’d made it her life’s mission to know more. All these years, she’d thought that Clay had been spared—that he hadn’t fallen victim to her father. He was her hero. He was the one who’d saved her life when one of her father’s subjects had cracked and nearly killed her.
Her father hadn’t lifted a hand. He’d watched while Clay—only thirteen years old at the time—had charged in and beat the man off her. She’d still been sobbing when her father had retreated to his lab, furiously scribbling notes.
Now all of that made sense. It had been a test. Clay’s test. Her father had done to Clay what he’d done to the others, carving out a part of him and turning it into something twisted and cold.
That was the look on Clay’s face in the image staring at her. Empty, twisted, and cold.
Mira sat there for a long time, trying to figure out what to do. She burned with the need to confront her father, but it would only make things worse. He liked toying with her. He liked knowing that he held power over her. If she gave him even a hint of how much this upset her, he would use it against her. Against Clay, too.
Maybe there was a cure—a way to undo what had been done. She was only vaguely aware of the science her father had used to create his puppets. She’d avoided learning anything about it as a way of rebellion. Her father had wanted her to follow in his footsteps, but his path had been paved with pain and lifeless bodies. She refused to be like him.
Besides, as squeamish as she was, she was better off with electronics and the comforting predictability of logic. Medicine was too messy.
Unfortunately, that left her ill equipped to understand what had been done to Clay and the others. If she didn’t understand it, then she couldn’t find a way to fix it. If such a cure even existed.
But there was one thing she could do. She could find where her father stored his data and steal it from him. All she needed was a place to start hunting.
Clay was the key. If she tracked his movements long enough, eventually he’d lead her back to Dr. Richard Sage. And when he did, Mira was going to make sure that her father could never hurt anyone again.
* * *
Leigh stood under the hot spray of water, trying to gather her wits and find some sense of calm.
Clay shook her to her core. She wasn’t sure exactly what it was about Clay that did it, but whatever it was, it was powerful and compelling. It left her trembling and struggling to find solid ground.
He hadn’t so much as twitched an eye as she’d tended his cuts, as if there were no pain. She’d felt his gaze on her—seen in the mirror the way he stared at her. There was desire in his eyes, but she’d seen that from men before enough times that it didn’t rattle her. What shook her was the fleeting insecurity lurking in his expression, as if he truly didn’t know whether he was a good man.
Any man who would fight with his hands bound behind his back to save the woman who’d chained him couldn’t be all bad.
But he was dangerous. She couldn’t forget that for a minute. He was always only one instant away from turning on her. She couldn’t trust him not to hurt her again. Doing so would be the worst kind of stupid.
She needed to help him find the truth fast, before she ended up doing something reckless—something she refused to name or allow to form in her mind. If she let even the vaguest hint of what she was feeling coalesce into actual thought, she knew she’d be doomed.
He was just a man who needed her help. A sick man. A way to save her brother. Nothing more. And he needed to stay that way.
The best thing for her to do now was to help him figure out where they needed to go to find whoever was behind this and force them to make it stop.
Simple.
With that decision made, she dressed and went to face him—with a fresh dose of tranquilizers prepared and ready to go in her pocket in case she needed them.
Clay sat on the bed with his back against the headboard. He had a small notepad propped against one knee, writing something. As soon as he saw her, he stopped, looking up at her.
His gaze swept over her, making her acutely aware of her dripping hair.
“Nice shower?” he asked.
“Better than I expected in a place like this, actually.”
He hadn’t looked away, { loe l and his scrutiny was beginning to make her nervous. “What? Haven’t you ever seen a woman with wet hair before?”
A faint smile twitched at the left side of his mouth. “You’re pink.”
“The water was hot.”
“It’s just not what I expected. That’s all.”
She wasn’t sure what he had expected, but all this talk about her appearance was uncomfortable. “Have you been able to remember dates?”
The smile that hadn’t quite formed disappeared. “A few. Two nights ago for sure. Three weeks ago, but I can’t remember which day.”
Leigh sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the printed list, and flipped through until she found the approximate time he was questioning. “What do you remember?”
“I’d been working for three days straight with nothing but a few naps here and there. We were guarding a shipment in Los Angeles.”
“What kind of shipment?”
“That’s private client information. It doesn’t matter, anyway.”
“Then what?”
“I stumbled home, exhausted and ready to sleep for as long as I could. The next thing I remember was waking up when Mira called, saying I was
late for work. The problem was, I wasn’t scheduled to work again for two days.”
“Could you have slept for two days straight?”
“No way. I never sleep that long. Plus I felt like I hadn’t slept at all. I was just as exhausted as when I fell into bed.”
There were symbols next to some of the GPS coordinates on the list. Mira’s notes said that she’d marked the times he’d been at home or at the office.
Leigh went back three weeks and scanned the data. “It looks like you went home on Tuesday after being away for three days. You stayed at home for six hours, then left again around eleven on Tuesday night.”
“Where did I go?”
“There are coordinates here, but I don’t know where they are.”
The mattress shifted, and then she felt his heat at her back as he looked over her shoulder. “I’m not sure. South of Dallas, but that’s all I can tell without looking up the coordinates.”
“We’ll figure that out next. First we should look for patterns—places you went to multiple times, maybe.”
“Check where I was two nights ago.”
She slid her finger down the list of numbers until she reached the right spot. “See here. You were home; then you left for a few hours and came back again.”
“It’s not the same place as three weeks ago.”
Leigh circled the coordinates. “Do {nat. Yyou remember any other times?”
He moved away again, and her right side felt cold without him so close. She should have been grateful for the space, but when it came to Clay, she wasn’t thinking clearly.
When he remained silent, she glanced up at him. He’d stripped off his flannel shirt and was inspecting his hands and arms.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking scars. I have a few I can’t account for. I’m trying to remember when I got them.” He ran his finger along a pink scar about an inch long along his biceps. “This one happened right after Mira’s birthday. I missed her party. She thought I’d gone out and gotten drunk.”
“You didn’t tell her otherwise?”
“I didn’t want to worry her. She frets enough about me as it is.” Clay shrugged as if it didn’t matter, but the sadness Leigh saw dulling his eyes told another story.
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