by Kit Rocha
Mace froze, then dragged in a rough, uneven breath. “Or pissing all over the furniture.”
Uncertainty vanished. How many times had they exchanged those wry words in the first months after Knox had formed the Silver Devils? Rafe had been all of twenty-three years old, and Conall just twenty-one. Their exuberance at being freed from the rigid confines of training had been exhausting sometimes.
Moving slowly, Knox settled cross-legged in front of Mace, his hands resting carefully on his legs. No weapons. No sudden movements. “They still piss on the furniture sometimes, but they grew up okay.”
Mace looked at him. Studied him, his gaze flickering from Knox’s relaxed hands up to his face, then back again. “You’ve changed.”
“We all have.” Knox didn’t hide the pain from his voice. “Losing you changed us.”
Mace didn’t react to Knox’s words or his pain. His stare remained flat, dead. “My captain never turned away from hard truths.”
Knox exhaled softly. “You’re a trap.”
“Yes. So what are you waiting for?”
“Were you released, or did you escape?”
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe. How did you find us? Richter?”
“No. I know you better than Richter ever did.” A simple answer, one that Mace followed with a soft noise of impatient disgust so familiar that it ached. “You’re stalling.”
“No,” Knox corrected him. “I’m doing what I’ve always done when presented with a trap. Studying it to understand my enemy. What kind of tracker did you have?”
“Trackers,” Mace corrected. “Standard subcutaneous and IM installations. Several satellite-enabled, and a backup radio frequency model.” He paused. “I cut them out, but there might be more.”
“Conall will look. He has this whole building signal-blocked, so no one’s getting anything off them right now, even if they are there.” Knox focused on keeping his hands relaxed as he asked the question he didn’t want to know the answer to. “Why were you attacking Gray?”
Mace shuddered. His eyes glazed over, and he whistled a few discordant notes before shaking himself and focusing on Knox once more. “Richter is hoping you’ll be too sentimental to do what needs to be done.” His voice dropped. “Prove him wrong, Garrett. Now, before it’s too late.”
“No.” The word cracked out of him too harshly. Knox couldn’t claw it back. Wouldn’t. He turned over his right hand and uncurled his fingers, one by one.
Mace’s dog tag sat there, edged with Knox’s blood.
“I will not kill you,” Knox told him softly. “Don’t ask me to go through this again.”
A hint of sympathy and something like regret flashed through Mace’s eyes, gone in the literal blink of an eye. “I warned you. Remember that.”
“I don’t need warnings, Mace. I need intel.”
“And I don’t have it to give, Captain.” He exhaled roughly. “All I have is a mission. And the Devils don’t know how to fail … even when they want to.”
“I won’t let it come to that.” Knox rose and curled his fingers around the dog tag once more. “Conall’s going to scan you, and then we’ll make a plan. Okay?”
Mace turned his head, his wrists straining against his plastic bonds again as he resumed whistling.
His heart shredded, Knox returned to the tense knot of people on the far side of the room. Conall had returned with a bag of equipment, his expression haunted. Rafe looked shaken, and even Gray’s eyes were tight with concern.
Nina’s sympathetic gaze was Knox’s only relief as the potential pitfalls of their situation spun out in front of him, every plan he considered prohibitively dangerous.
Nina touched his arm. “Is it what we thought?”
“Yes. A targeted weapon, sent to eliminate us.” Knox looped the dog tag back over his head and tucked it under his shirt. The metal burned over his heart. “He asked me to kill him.”
Conall made an incoherent noise of grief, and Maya wrapped an arm around him with a soothing noise. “That’s not an option,” she stated firmly. “Obviously.”
Knox couldn’t look away from Nina. Reality loomed between them, vast and unspoken.
Tobias Richter knew they were alive. Maybe the rest of the TechCorps didn’t believe him. Or maybe they did and they were keeping that knowledge off the record for reasons of their own.
It didn’t matter. Only one thing did. “He’s a threat,” Knox said softly. “To all of us, but to you, too. Especially Maya. If Richter tracks him here…”
“Then we’ll deal with it,” Nina said firmly. “Mace is your family, Knox. His place is here.”
“If Richter shows up, I will murder the shit out of him,” Maya said, her cheerful confidence a thin layer of bluster over the fear lingering in her eyes. Knox opened his mouth, and she glared at him. “Or I’ll let one of you bastards do it. I don’t care. Dead’s dead, and between all of us, we can make the guy real dead.”
“Hell yeah, we can,” Rafe said.
Knox turned to Dani, who shrugged one shoulder. “I’m always up for a little murder. It’s my favorite pastime, right?”
That easy. Knox supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. They’d reached out a hand to save him when he hadn’t deserved it. Of course they’d extend a hand to Mace, a man who had never done anything but try to help people. Healing was a bone-deep instinct in Mace, the truth that had defined his life.
And Tobias Richter had broken him into pieces small enough to reassemble him as a killer.
“He’s still dangerous,” he warned.
“He’s fighting it,” Gray insisted. “He had the element of surprise and a sleeping target. I should have been dead before the first drop of my blood hit the floor, but I’m not. He’s trying.”
“Of course he is.” Nina slid her hand down to Knox’s and gripped it tightly. “We’ll take precautions. We’ll be careful, and we’ll help him through this. I promise.”
The tightness in Knox’s chest eased. He took a full breath and let it out as he squeezed Nina’s hand in return. “That means I’ll have to stay with him tonight instead of chasing down leads at this club of Maya’s.”
Maya choked on a laugh. “Wait, you thought you were coming? To Convergence? You’re gonna have to loosen up a lot more before visiting any criminal nightclubs.”
She could have been trying to give him a guilt-free out. Then again, solid tactics required an awareness of his own limitations, and setting criminals at ease was not part of his skill set. “Fine, Rafe and Conall can go—”
“Nope.” Conall shook his head. “Sorry, I can’t go to Convergence. I … might have had a run-in with the owner.”
Maya spun on him. “You had a run-in with Savitri?”
“Kind of. I tried to hack her, and her chief of security humiliated the shit out of me before booting my ass.” He winced. “So yes. Big run-in. Anyway, I scored myself a lifetime ban without ever setting foot inside, so I should probably stay here. Besides, I need to do these scans.”
“All right.” Knox turned to study Gray. His shoulder was already bandaged, and he had a bruise rising on his face, but otherwise there was no indication of any pain he might be experiencing from his implant rejection. Gray always hid his discomfort, major or minor. Knox would never know how close he was to dropping until he hit the ground.
Every instinct screamed for him to hold Gray back. But the man met his eyes, calm and determined, and Knox knew he couldn’t. Gray had sacrificed so much for the right to decide how he lived his life.
He had the right to decide how he died, too.
Knox swallowed pain. “Gray? You up to it?”
The answer came, steady and certain. “Always.”
It would have to be enough.
October 15th, 2075
I told her the truth about her brain. The cruelest parts, the ones that will make her hold back. The parts that will make her cautious, and small, and scared. I’m doing it to save her. Does that make it better?
<
br /> She’ll never know how amazing she could be. But neither will the TechCorps.
The Recovered Journal of Birgitte Skovgaard
TEN
The entrance to Convergence was an unassuming steel door decorated with faded recruitment posters promising exciting job opportunities up on the Hill. The door itself was tucked in between a tattoo and body-mod shop on the left and a secondhand tech parts peddler on the right. At first glance, it didn’t look much like a door at all. There was no handle, no keypad, and clearly just enough space between the neighboring businesses to house a tiny closet.
Or a staircase.
“Doesn’t look like much,” Gray observed.
“Looks can be deceiving,” Dani shot back. “But you know that, don’t you?” She gestured to the scant space between the tattoo shop and the parts store. “If you guys had come to us for help instead of kidnapping us—”
“Excuse me,” Rafe interrupted. “You mean invited you on a delightful road trip under false pretenses.”
“Whatever. This would have been our first stop. I’ve never met her personally, but Savitri has the best black-market shit around—and she knows how to use it. Rumor is, she’s some sort of tech savant.”
“Oh, it’s more than rumor.” Maya eased the copper chain over her head, and the light reflected off the old-fashioned circuit board embedded in her pendant. “Brace yourselves.”
Regulars to Convergence had tiny, embedded RF chips that opened the door. Maya, unwilling to let anyone embed trackable tech in her body, had scored a highly coveted permanent visitor’s pass from the contact they were about to meet. As she swung the pendant close to the door, the invisible RF chip triggered the lock.
A soft click sounded in response, and a crack of neon-blue light spilled into the shadowed street.
“Anyone else miss the days of secret passwords?” Dani muttered.
“They were sexier,” Rafe agreed.
Maya huffed and pushed the door wider. Stairs lined in glowing LED lights led down to a tunnel. “Trust me, you’ll get all the sexy you could ever want inside.”
“Don’t spoil the surprise now, Maya.” Dani went first, striding in like she owned the place, Rafe hard on her heels.
Gray rolled his eyes. “At least they’re predictable.”
Looking at his eyes was a mistake. Looking at him at all was a mistake. Considering the way Gray made a T-shirt and jeans look like combat fatigues, he should have looked ridiculous rolling out dressed like a techno punk kid. But he wore the shredded jeans and strategically ripped retro shirt as easily as he did the chain-wrapped boots and heavy belt buckle. The big silver rings only emphasized the sheer size of his fingers, and the liner smudged around his eyes gave him a sleepy, sexy look that shivered straight through to her toes.
His eyes were blue. She’d spent so much time angsting over their dark Gothic quality that she’d never really noticed their color. They were the ocean at midday, deep enough to drown in.
And observant. Too damn observant. She could not get caught gawking at him.
Planting a hand on his shoulder, she gave him a push that felt as effective as shoving a brick wall. “Come on. If we leave them unsupervised down there, who the fuck knows what’ll happen?”
Inside the entryway, the graffitied walls seemed to pulse with the force of the dull, throbbing music, an effect that only intensified as they descended deep into the tunnel. More strident lights cast its narrow length in stark glows and deep shadows, alternately revealing and hiding the clubgoers leaning against the walls.
If hell were full of neon, it would probably look like this.
Then they reached the end of the tunnel, and everything opened up. Everything.
The club was enormous. Buried three stories underground, the main dance floor was at least the size of a city block, with a high ceiling strung with enough flashing LEDs to light half a neighborhood. They pulsed with the music, shifting color with the mood of the song and the energy in the room.
On the far end of the room, dual staircases blocked off by silver chains and guarded by hulking muscle swept up to the second-floor balcony that ringed the main dance floor.
The VIP floor was the kind of exclusive reserved for serious debauchery or the highest class of criminal hacker—neither exactly Maya’s area of expertise. She probably could have bought her way up to see the club’s elusive owner with a few of the TechCorps secrets buried in her brain but not without exposing herself in ways that would end her life as she knew it.
Opposite the staircase was the centerpiece of Convergence. A sleek, six-meter-long bar was crowded three deep with people jostling to reach the embedded ordering tablets. Behind the bar itself, dozens of glowing backlit tubes climbed the wall, a dizzying array of liquor and mixers and wildly colored liquid alchemy that, according to rumor, could do anything from give you a pleasant buzz to open your mind to the mysteries of the universe.
All of the tubes fed into a trio of elegant machines that whirred and hummed and produced perfectly mixed drinks as fast as the pair of bartenders could provide the glasses. Blended, straight, on the rocks, glowing, smoking—the only thing the drinks had in common was that you could feed a family of six for a week on the credits you had to fork over to enjoy one.
That was Convergence in a nutshell. Big. Flashy. Expensive.
Too much.
Maya had only been here a handful of times. No place in Atlanta beat it if you wanted black-market tech or hacks—be they software, hardware, or biological. But the sound of it alone was enough to set her bones to humming. The flash of lights, the press of half-naked bodies, the smell of those expensive drinks and aftershave and sweat, the taste in the air, like high-scale crime and lush sin had been converted to oxygen.
Sensory overload wasn’t just a danger after a trip to Convergence, it was an honest-to-God certainty.
But it was the only place where she could meet her most dangerous contact.
“Are you going to be okay in here?” Gray spoke close to her ear, the only way to be heard. His breath tickled her skin, the warmth of it too intimate combined with that honey drawl.
She was not going to be okay if he kept doing that.
“I can handle it,” she replied, turning so he could hear her soft words. “I can almost always keep it together when I have something to focus on. A mission. I’ll just crash a lot harder tonight when we get home.”
“All right,” he relented, but his gaze held hers, intense and searching.
Dani broke in, bouncing a little to the beat of the music. “Who are we meeting here, exactly?”
Maya checked her watch, but no new messages had come through. “She’s not here yet.”
Rafe grinned and tilted his head toward the dance floor. “Then I’m doing recon.”
“Knock yourself out, Morales.” Dani headed in the other direction, slipping into the masses of people moving together.
Maya swayed, instinct almost driving her after Dani. Dani was the perfect clubbing partner for someone who needed to exhaust her body without dealing with the constant physical contact that came with a mass of thrashing dancers. Dani’s entire vibe screamed fuck off loudly enough that Maya usually danced it out in a blissful circle of personal space. The few idiots who crossed the boundary and actually touched one of them were lucky to leave with all of their fingers.
As the crowd closed around Dani, Maya took a step back. Her arm pressed into Gray’s. His entire body was scalding heat against her, but for all that her awareness of him was an ever-present prickle against her skin, his presence didn’t bother her the same way.
Gray was like Nina and Dani. Gray was safe.
“Can I ask a favor?” She had to stretch up on her toes to be easily heard.
He touched her elbow, so lightly she almost wondered if she’d imagined the contact. “You know you don’t even have to ask. Just tell me what you need.”
“Turn on your scary predator vibe.” Someone bumped into her from behind, and sh
e edged closer to Gray, close enough to curl an arm around his neck. “Just don’t let them all dance into me.”
He nodded, one arm sliding around her. His palm pressed against the middle of her back, right between her shoulder blades, and his other hand landed on her hip. Then something changed—his expression hardened, and waves of sheer possession crashed outward from him.
The crowd writhed around them. Nothing obvious, nothing overt, but within a minute it was like an invisible force field had edged the dancers back. Some eyed them with curiosity, some with appraisal … but no one accepted his silent challenge and encroached on Gray’s starkly declared space.
Survival instincts were one thing everyone in Convergence had in abundance.
The music booming over the speakers shifted to something slow and deep and grinding, and the rhythm of the crowd shifted with it. The bright neon lights flashed across the dance floor and faded, replaced with a sultry red that turned the twisting bodies into some puritanical preacher’s nightmare vision of a hell populated by lustful sinners.
The large hand splayed between her shoulder blades flexed, and Maya curled her other arm around Gray’s neck. Their bodies were already moving to that rolling bass beat, and she wasn’t sure which of them had started it. “You’re really good at that.”
He didn’t bother asking what she meant. “You learn early on the streets, or you don’t last.”
Sympathy tightened in her chest. “Is that where you grew up? Was it here in Atlanta?”
He nodded. “Bankhead. Spent most of my time in a church-run orphanage.”
She fought an instinctive twist of her lips. Some of the churches had clung to a message of hope and healing after the Flares, but too many had gone in the opposite way—fire and brimstone and shouting that the collapse of the world they had known had been fitting punishment for society’s sins.
Maya didn’t want to imagine how those orphanages treated their charges. She curled her fingers protectively around the back of his neck, the short hair there tickling her palm. “Did your parents…?” She trailed off. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to answer if it’s too personal.”