Dr. Chase shrugged.
“Your name came up in this particular story,” he said. “The face of an angel, and the Devil’s hand on her shoulder. His words.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, which pushed her plump breasts together and up. Gabriel almost went slack-jawed at the simple gesture, so without artifice or subterfuge it caught him off guard. “How did you happen to hear all this?”
He had to search for his voice again. “I’m a gladiator. I thought that was obvious.”
“I thought you said no one ever won their freedom.”
Clever, clever scientist. “They don’t. But they do get vacations. I got about three weeks free time before I have to get back.”
“Or what?”
“Or they track me, and drag me back. Already wasted a week here waiting for you.”
“Yes, and why did you, again?”
“Because, doc, you’re going to help me.”
“To do what, exactly?”
He pulled a folded picture out of his pocket. It was almost falling apart. He’d folded and refolded it so many times the color had faded to white in the creases. It had gotten wet a while back and one corner was torn off. But the subject was still recognizable. He slid it across the table to her.
*
Amelia held his gaze a moment longer, but he didn’t blink. So relaxed, telling her all this, feeding her some crap about slaves and gladiators, while her heart was racing and her composure was starting to crack.
Finally, she made herself reach for the piece of paper, dreading what she would find. Her heart sank when she carefully unfolded it. A picture torn from some ancient magazine. There were still remnants of writing in one corner, but it was no longer legible. No one wasted paper like this anymore. Everything in the universe was created and stored in computers. Paper was precious, and that made it all the more sacrilegious for him to have torn a piece of it like this. “A panther?” The shiny black Big Cat snarled at the camera, its mouth open wide, giant fangs gleaming.
“Did some digging while I was here,” he said. That didn’t bode well. “You covered your tracks pretty well, but there were some random notes here and there. I connected the dots, found out it was all true, and here we are.”
“Here, meaning…”
“I want you to do to me whatever you did to the tiger guy.”
Her heart sank more. How could he possibly know? There were no random notes; she’d scoured the place clean after what Hailey…
Hailey!
Would her sister never stop messing up her life? Amelia had wiped her own notes years ago, moved them to a different system, with only a secure uplink cleverly disguised as a bookkeeping file on her lab computer to connect to it. But she hadn’t touched Hailey’s initial work before she left for Torrey, wanting to preserve everything as her sister had left it, in case she needed it one day to, oh, save her own life.
What do I do? What do I do?
Play dumb. Not her strong point, but she could pretend with the best of them. “I’m afraid you’ll have to explain.”
“Naturally,” he said. “Because you have no idea what I’m talking about, right?”
“God, what did you find in my notes?”
He hitched a shoulder in a shrug. “Just random words, really. Double DNA, successfully infected, despite low survival rate, things like that.”
Amelia folded the picture back up, buying herself time to think of something. “No,” she finally said, and gave him the picture back.
“No,” he repeated. “Just like that?”
“That about sums it up.”
He drew his legs back and leaned his elbows on the table. “You’ll reconsider.”
“That confident, are you?”
“I got a few aces up my sleeve.”
Oh, yes, how could she forget? “You think if you hold a gun to my head, I will do whatever half-baked insanity you come up with?”
He scowled. “You saw yourself the gun wasn’t loaded.”
“Well, I have nothing else to say to you. Good bye.” She pushed to her feet and turned to get the door for him.
Something dropped on the table. “Ever heard of ferric diamonds? Fascinating stones. Diamonds that can conduct electricity and shimmer like fairy dust. Before they’re polished.”
Do not turn around. Do not turn around. Amelia turned. In the middle of the table lay a small round stone that glittered like gold-sheened crystal. She could see the iron in it, but despite common sense, the carbon, the diamond, that encased it was completely unblemished by it. In all her years of study, Amelia had never seen one.
“One carat of raw ferric diamond sells for about one hundred thousand to the highest end retailers on Earth and any major colony,” Connors continued in that deep mesmerizing voice of his. “That little bit there is about eight carats. Keep it as a down payment. I’ll give you two more, even bigger, to do this. One when you finish, and one more if I survive.”
So pretty.
Amelia shook herself. “I have no need for more money.”
He grinned. “Ah, doc. A scientist like you, research is like an obsession. And after you cut all ties to the government … all the equipment downstairs can’t be cheap.”
Government employment wasn’t exactly a matter of public records, but at least she had a fairly good idea about where he’d found out about it. In her lab. Her unsecured notes. As far as he knew, Amelia was currently unemployed and quickly burning through her reserves to power this place. He had no idea about her commercial contracts and patents.
“You’re trying to pay me to kill you? An expensive way to commit suicide. And quite painful.”
“No, I don’t want to die. Just need an advantage before they chase me down.”
“Why don’t you sell the stones and use the money to disappear?”
Fury darkened his features. “I want to show you something.” He came around the table, leaving the precious stone there, grabbed her hand and dragged her along to the front door. The suitcase was in his way. He sent it skidding with one solid kick. Amelia wished she could have done that herself. He took her down to the lab, making his way around her equipment in the dark, as if he’d done it so many times already he no longer needed the light.
At the main console, he released her and turned on the computer. He slipped a ring she hadn’t noticed before off his finger, flattened it, and then he inserted the disc into a media slot. The holographic video played almost instantly. Like a scanned image, the disc created a scene in the middle of the room, and in the darkness, Amelia felt like she was there.
Everything was fuzzy; the recorder must have been covered by some kind of veil. An arena appeared in front of her, where three men in ancient armor battled with swords and shields. As she watched, one of them drew blood.
The wounded man dropped to the ground. It wasn’t a fatal injury, but it was serious enough that blood stained the sand. As he struggled to his feet, a lion charged out of one of the darkened archways. It launched itself at the injured man while the others fell away. Blood sprayed as the man was torn apart. The other two fighters immediately teamed up to slay the beast, before they turned on each other.
The entire battle took less than five minutes, but it was enough to give Amelia nightmares for weeks to come. Finally, one man fell, and the other pressed the tip of his sword to his throat. But he stopped. Breathing hard, he looked over his shoulder up into the crowds.
“Right there,” Connors said. “That man in the middle of the balcony. That’s the Caesar. All he needs to do is indicate his wish with a look, and it is done. If he sees a woman he favors, she is his. If someone wears a robe he likes, the person is stripped of it, willing or not. He only has to wave his finger, and a man dies.”
Just then, the Caesar gave a signal and, without looking at his opponent, the gladiator stabbed through the loser’s throat. The man on the ground struggled, but he could not budge the sword. It had stabbed into the ground and pinned him there.
“Why are you showing me this?”
“Evidence,” he said. “I need you to believe me when I tell you this is happening right now. I got a short reprieve, but there are countless others still trapped there. I plan to get them out.”
Her tired mind picked up on something that didn’t quite ring true. Amelia didn’t know what it was but she didn’t have to. He had to realize how idiotic he sounded. “By yourself?”
“It only takes one man to show the others what they’re capable of. All the money in the world can’t stop a raging warrior from slaying his jailer. But that warrior has to know he can do it.”
Had he rehearsed that little speech in front of her mirror? “Like I said, suicide.”
He shook his head. “Not if you help me. Not if I can take out Caesar.”
Ah, and there was the core of it.
“You’re my one hope here, Amelia.”
She flinched at the use of her name.
“If you don’t help me, and I fail, I won’t just die. Caesar will have me punished. Along with everyone I associated with, just to prove a point.”
“Oh, so it’s not suicide you want to hire me for,” she said. “It’s aiding a murder. Well, that changes everything. Get out.”
He blew out a breath in frustration. “The Caesar is the center of it all. Cut the head off a snake—”
“And two more grow back in its place.” She knew this better than anyone. New Alaska had started out with one warden. There’d been five, one for each block, by the time she’d left.
And each had been worse than the guy before. There were nights when she still woke up from nightmares of prisoners breaking out in a riot and wondered how someone like her had survived there.
It never took long to answer herself. She’d been too valuable, her research too precious to risk. She’d been guarded day and night, watched every second to make certain she was safe. Safe, and doing what they wanted her to do.
“I can do this, doc,” Connors said. “But not without your help.”
She reached past him to turn off the projector. “I really don’t see myself caring.”
He caught her arm before she pulled away. “Of course you care,” he said softly. He was staring into her eyes, as if he could see her soul. His gaze was sharp, but somehow still hot. His fervor was evident. He needed her to do this. “I can see it clear as day.”
“Then you see what you want to see,” she countered.
He half smiled, but it wasn’t with amusement. “You hide your feelings; push them deep down so no one can touch you. But you do it to protect your heart, not deaden it. Because if you let yourself, you care too much. And it hurts.”
Chapter 4
It was a shot in the dark, but Gabriel must have gotten a lot better at them over the years, because the truth of what he said was in her eyes. He wouldn’t apologize. Thousands of lives had already been destroyed, and more got added to the count every goddamn day, because someone somewhere in the last twenty years decided it would be fun to recreate antiquity. With all its blood and gore. Amelia was the only one he knew of who might have the ability to trigger a change. Probably the only one alive who’d give a damn enough to try if he played this right.
He’d thank her for it. On his knees, if he had to. For helping him bring down Caesar, he’d willingly hand his life to her.
But he would not apologize.
Amelia extricated her arm from his grasp, and somehow it was a pointed gesture with a clear message: Do Not Touch. She stepped back from him, seeming uncomfortable being so close. Gabriel couldn’t blame her. Taking her time, avoiding his gaze, she spoke. “If what you say is true—”
“It is.”
“—and that video is authentic…” Amelia shook her head. “This is ridiculous. A single man can’t change decades of money. You’re talking about taking on the most influential people anywhere. You think they haven’t already anticipated the possibility of petty riots?”
“The course of history has been changed hundreds of times by the actions of a single man or woman. Martin Luther, Joan of Arc.”
“Attila the Hun, Adolph Hitler,” she said, her tone arch. “What makes you think something you do will make things better?”
“Anything is better than this,” he said, hardly able to grate the words between gritted teeth. She still didn’t understand. She’s never been there. The recording was just the tip of the iceberg. One of several. “And to answer your other question, there is nothing petty about what I have planned.”
No. For what they did, and continued to do, the Patricians would pay with currency they understood very well. Blood. Lots of it. They said that fear never touched Caesar. It was unknown to a person who doled it out with a twitch of an eyebrow. Gabriel could prove a very effective tutor. He would teach Caesar to fear shadows.
One single being. The smallest signal. And all of Rome shuddered. The Patricians played their games, pretended they were better than everyone else. The enlightened society.
They couldn’t see they were as much slaves to Caesar as the people who cleaned out the latrines were to them. The only difference was they dressed better doing it.
Cut the head off a snake … and two more grow back in its place.
Perhaps. Everything in life was a gamble. It was just a matter of how high the stakes were. He might not bring the Republic to its knees, but he might be able to free a small portion of it, including himself. Wasn’t that a worthy enough undertaking?
“You might come to regret those words,” Amelia said. “There are things far worse than this. You’re asking me to do them to you. At best, you survive and go on a killing spree. At worst you die.” She shuddered, as if she was remembering. “Horrifically. In pain like you have never felt before. I’ve seen men beg for death. The lucky ones didn’t survive long enough to speak.”
It was as much a confession as it was a warning. “I’ve got nothing left to lose here.”
She scoffed softly and looked at him with pity in her gaze. “You don’t know how wrong you are about that.”
“Does that mean you’ve made up your mind?” If she said no, could he force her to do his bidding?
Yes.
Amelia drew a deep breath and exhaled on a defeated sigh. “I need to think about this.”
“Tick tock, doctor.”
She nodded. “I’ll have an answer for you by morning.”
Gabriel was tempted to push, but by the looks of her, that was the surest way to push her in the wrong direction. “Fair enough,” he said instead. “It’s late. I’m sure you’re tired from your trip. Sleep on it.” He typed a sequence into the computer to get access to the building’s systems. Voice only worked for her as the owner. He would be changing that soon.
“What are you doing?”
“Just a precaution,” he told her. “In case you happen to get cold feet at night, I don’t want you bolting for the door.”
She swatted at him to get to the controls. “You’re locking me in?”
Gabriel held her aside with ease. A simple command here, a push of a button there and it was done. The front door wouldn’t open until he decided to let it. “Temporarily.”
“Argh! This is unbe-freaking-lievable.” She was still grumbling to herself when she headed back up to her apartment.
Gabriel finished with the computer and hurried after her.
“I try to be rational,” she said to herself, loud enough for him to hear, “and what do I get? No, no, no, there is no rational with this guy. Freaking baseball bat to the head probably wouldn’t work.”
“Probably,” he allowed.
She turned around with a gasp, a hand pressed to her heart.
Gabriel grinned. “I’ve been told I have a very hard head.”
A wet lock of hair fell over her eye and he had to amend that very soon, his head would not be the only part of him suffering from that particular condition. “Wh
at will it take to get rid of you?”
“You know the answer to that.”
She swiveled and continued to the kitchen without a word.
“Come on, Amelia. One life among many. You’ve never heard of me before I showed up, and you’ll never see me again once I’m gone. What’s the problem?”
“Do no harm,” she said. “That’s the problem.” She took a bottle of juice from the cooler and slammed the door shut. There would be a fresh bottle in its place the next time she opened it. Such a simple thing, a self-replenishing cooler. Standard in every home of every civilized colony, on every inhabited planet. A man who’s had to kill for a drink of water might easily resent those simple little luxuries.
He frowned. “That hasn’t stopped you before. What, you suddenly grew a conscience since the government cut all ties?”
She took a big swig from the bottle. “Right. Because everyone is free and unfettered outside of the Republic. No one could possibly understand the life of a slave. Poor you and your friends. Such a tough life you have.” She pointed at him. “That’s the biggest fallacy in your argument, Connors. You think you’ll be free once you fight your way out of Rome.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You’re saying someone forced you to do those experiments?”
Amelia rubbed her forehead. “I’m going to bed.”
“Yeah, good idea.” Long day. He could use a few solid hours of sleep.
They reached the bedroom at the same time. The door was open and they clashed, trying to go through it at the same time. Amelia jumped back. She crossed her arms over her chest.
“What?” he said.
She cleared her throat and raised an eyebrow, waiting for something.
Gabriel almost groaned. “Right,” he said. “Your bedroom. I’ll go crash on the couch.”
“Oh, please,” she replied. “Don’t let me stop you from going to a hotel. Really.”
He scowled. “Can I at least get a pillow?”
Amelia scoffed.
Gabriel didn’t budge.
There was no way she could beat him in a battle of wills, and she was beginning to realize it. She rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said on a cute little growl and marched into the room, shoving past him. A second later, she tossed an empty pillow case at his head and slammed the door in his face.
Blood Debts (The Blood Book 3) Page 3