Shadow Alpha

by Carole Mortimer

  “Katya, look at me.” The man grabbed her gently by the tops of her arms and shook her slightly. “Look at me, damn it!”

  She didn’t want to look at him. He sounded too much like that other man from the past. The one who had gone away and never come back.

  He had been her friend. Oh not openly, that wouldn’t have been allowed by her father, not when he belonged to the Montgomery family and she was a Markovic. She had only been fifteen, but in her girlhood fantasies they had been a modern day Romeo and Juliet, their love denied, and the two of them separated by a family feud.

  All nonsense, of course, when they had only met half a dozen times. But he had been kind to her on those occasions, and in her mind she had blown that kindness up into love.

  Then one day he had just disappeared. Gone, without a word of explanation or goodbye. And there had been no one Kat could ask why or where.

  “Katya!” Dair growled again, knowing by her blank expression that she had drifted off somewhere again. “Katya, you have to listen to me.” He gave her another gentle shake. “What are they giving you, little Kat? Whatever it is, you have to stop taking it. I can’t hope to get you out of here when you’re like this—” He broke off as she began to laugh.

  Not that happy, carefree laugh he remembered from so long ago, but a bitter, defeated sound. As if even the thought of leaving here was beyond her.

  “Kat, I’m going to have to leave you here for now. But I’m coming back. Tomorrow night. At eight o’clock, when there’s the confusion of a changeover in staff. Are you listening to me, Kat?” he prompted determinedly. “I want you to dress warmly and sensibly. Flat shoes. Jeans. A sweater. The lights will go out, but you’re not to be afraid, do you understand? Because when those lights go out it means I’m coming for you. Do you understand me? Kat, please tell me you understand what I’m saying to you,” he groaned in frustration.

  She blinked up at him, as if she were still having trouble focusing on him, let alone comprehending anything he said.

  Dair’s jaw set grimly. “I don’t know how they’re getting the drugs into you, Kat, but you have to stop taking them,” he bit out angrily. “Don’t take any more tablets, or the food or drink they give you. Pretend to eat. Throw the drinks away. Drink only water straight from the tap. Do you understand me?” he pressured as he saw the three guards from earlier making their way across the garden towards them; obviously the walk in the garden had lasted long enough for their liking. “Kat, please give me some sort of sign that you understand what I’m saying to you!” he pleaded as the other men drew nearer by the second.

  There was no way, absolutely no way he was going to make it out of here tomorrow tonight with a woman who was so heavily drugged she was almost comatose. Much as Dair might want to, he knew that just wasn’t going to happen.

  His heart sank as Kat gave no response.

  Only for it to rise again as she slowly began to nod her head. “I understand,” she spoke for the first time.

  Her voice was husky, as if from lack of use, but it sounded like the purest music to Dair’s ears. “You understand that I’m coming back for you tomorrow night?”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  Her second response sounded too robotic to Dair, but there was no time for him to say more as the guards reached them and he had no choice but to turn Kat over to them.

  For now.

  But he would be back tomorrow night, and if the opportunity arose to kick some ass while he was doing it, then he was going to take it.

  And the muscle-bound bully was first on his list of likely candidates.

  Chapter 3

  Kat felt as if she had woken from a long, dark nightmare, filled with monsters and ghouls, whose ugly faces jeered at her as they mocked her helplessness.

  As the drugs slowly wore off she came to realize it hadn’t been a dream at all, that the monsters and ghouls were Sergei and the people who worked here, and that they were the ones who had jeered and mocked her helplessness.

  She had also realized she wasn’t mad at all, that she had been drugged, and those drugs had robbed her of free will, reducing her to a twilight world, where nothing quite seemed to touch her.

  In the past thirty-six hours she had done as Dr. Law requested and hadn’t eaten any of the food brought to her, had instead secreted it away in a towel down the side of her chair. All she’d had to eat today was several pieces of fruit from the bowl on the table, and she had drunk only water straight from the tap. Now, although the drugs weren’t completely out of her system, they had certainly worn off enough for Kat to realize that she had to continue to act as if she were drugged, otherwise both Sergei, on his visit this morning, or Nurse Palmer, would start to become suspicious.

  Unfortunately the meds had also worn off enough for Kat to realize she would have been wiser to continue taking them. Because without them she was able to remember all the horror that had preceded her being brought here.

  It had broken her heart to lie to Gregori, on the two occasions Sergei had allowed her to talk to her brother on the telephone. But if she hadn’t lied to him, Sergei had assured her that her brother would come to New York, asking questions and making trouble. And when he did the Orlovs would have no alternative but to kill him. Gregori was the only person Kat had left in this world, and she loved him; she would not be responsible for his death.

  With the drugs no longer numbing her, she also realized that unless she did what Sergei and Ivan demanded of her, she would almost certainly die in this exclusive and secluded prison. So far she had managed to resist the daily pressure from Sergei, but she had no idea how much longer she was going to be able to hold out against him; keeping up the pretense of being drugged during his visit this morning had taken all of her strength, when what she really wanted to do was lunge for his throat.

  Once she gave in to Sergei’s demands her fate would be sealed, and she would never be able to escape him again.

  And if she didn’t give in then she would possibly be the cause of her brother’s death, as well as many other members of the Markovic family.

  Damned if she did, and damned if she didn’t.

  And the man from yesterday morning? The man she had thought she half recognized?

  Another hallucination, brought on by the drugs. The proof of that was in the way she had even imagined him as looking like—

  Kat drew her breath in sharply as the lights went out.

  Follow by the thought ‘he was real’!

  Stupid, Kat. Of course he wasn’t real. No one, least of all him, is coming to save you from this nightmare.

  But there was no denying that the lights had gone off, the darkness outside the window showing her that the lights in the garden were out too, same for the rest of the building. Did that mean that the alarms were off too, or were they on a different electricity circuit than the lights?

  Was it worth her trying to break one of the windows, perhaps by throwing a chair through it, and just walking out of here?

  To go where?

  The lights may be out, but there were still guards patrolling the grounds outside, night as well as day; Kat had seen them.

  There was also a guard on the main gates, which meant she wouldn’t be able to escape that way, nor could she climb the high walls surrounding the property without the help of a ladder or rope, neither of which she had. And if she did get outside the grounds, she had no idea where she was. Or what she was going to do for money.

  Besides which, what was the point of her attempting to leave here? Sergei would only find her again. And when he did—

  Oh stop making excuses, Kat, she finally remonstrated with herself disgustedly, and just get off your scrawny ass and do something to help yourself.

  Maybe if she could walk out of here, she would be able to just disappear? The Orlovs would question Gregori, of course, but when he had no idea where she was either, they would be forced to accept that he hadn’t been involved in her escape. It was—

  She
turned quickly as she heard a noise behind her. “Who’s there?” she demanded sharply as she saw a dark shape moving towards her in the darkness. “Don’t come any closer,” she warned as that shadow continued to move forward. “I have a gun and—”

  “I’m the one with the gun,” a gravelly voice assured softly. “And if we don’t get out of here soon I may just have to use it! Stop fighting me, little Kat,” she was instructed harshly as she tried to jerk her arm away from the man’s grasp. “And let’s go.”

  That voice. It was that same oh-so-familiar-voice. The same voice Kat had thought she’d heard and recognized yesterday morning and then decided she must have imagined. His voice. The voice of—

  “Dair…?” Kat was almost afraid to say his name, afraid she really had to be going insane if she was imagining the man in the darkness could possibly be Dair Grayson.

  Sergei had told her repeatedly she was off her head and imagining things, but she hadn’t believed him. But maybe this, thinking this man was Dair, was a part of that madness? Maybe—

  “Yeah, it’s Dair,” that voice confirmed in the darkness.

  —this was another one of Sergei’s games—

  “Gregori sent me,” he added as Kat continued to resist.

  Gregori had sent Dair? No, that couldn’t be right. There had been an uneasy peace between the Markovic and Montgomery families for years now, but not close enough for Gregori to have ever asked one of them for help—

  “He said to tell you, if you doubted my word, that he gave you a doll for your sixth birthday. You named her Sarah. With an ‘h’.”

  Kat drew her breath in sharply; she had never told Sergei about the doll Gregori had given her as a present. She certainly hadn’t told him of the joke she and her brother had shared, regarding her insistence on how to spell her doll’s name. “Gregori did send you…?”

  “He did, yes.”

  “And you’re really Dair Grayson?”

  “I’m really Dair Grayson,” he confirmed dryly.

  The man she had seen yesterday morning, with his dark military style hair and that livid scar at the temple of his harshly hewn face—and his body hard and muscled beneath that tweed suit—had been Dair, after all, and not a hallucination?

  She really wasn’t going mad? Wasn’t imagining things?

  “We’ll have time for a reunion later,” Dair drawled. “I’m guessing we have five minutes max to get out into the garden before the lights and alarms come back on, and I want the two of us to be out of the building, out of the grounds too if possible, before that happens.”

  “The guards outside—”

  “Taking a little nap.”

  “You killed them?” she gasped.

  “No, I didn’t fu—I don’t have time for this.” Dair had been momentarily thrown off guard when Kat seemed to have recognized him from the sound of his voice—and not as Dr. Law from yesterday, but as himself, Dair Grayson—and was now thrown off again by her assumption that he must have killed the guards to get in here, when in actual fact he had used tranquilizer darts. The guards would have a headache when they woke up, but otherwise they would be fine.

  As Dair had expected, once his unofficial visit here yesterday morning had been reported to the Orlovs, there had been more guards outside patrolling the grounds this evening. But not so many that he hadn’t been able to disable them all, it had just taken him a little longer than he might have wished.

  Kat’s assumption, regarding his method of ‘disabling’ those guards, wasn’t exactly flattering, but he supposed he should be grateful that she wasn’t still in that comatose state of yesterday morning. “Let’s go. Move it, Kat,” he instructed, the night-vision goggles he was wearing allowing him to see that she had remained stubbornly in place. “If you don’t, I’ll have to throw you over my shoulder and carry you out of here. Good girl,” he murmured dryly as she finally began to move, but towards the door out into the corridor rather than the ones out into the garden. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “There are other innocent people locked up in here.”

  “I came for you, Kat, no one else.”

  “I’m not leaving them here!”

  Dair swore profusely under his breath. “I can’t save all of them, Kat. And even if we delayed leaving and unlocked their doors, most of them will only be captured again. Which is what’s going to happen to the two of us too if we don’t get out of here soon,” he added urgently.

  “I-am-not-leaving-them-locked-up!”

  Dair felt a nerve pulsing in his clenched jaw as he saw the determined glitter in her eyes. “How about I make a phone call once we’re well away from here? Report this place to the authorities.” He saw her hesitate. “I’ll do it, Kat. I promise you I will.” He wasn’t any happier about the way this place was run, or the criteria under which the patients were admitted, than Kat obviously was. “Kat, please, we have to go.”

  “I—okay.” She finally nodded her agreement. “I just—” She broke off in obvious alarm as there was the sound of an explosion.

  “A small bomb in the empty laundry room I entered by,” Dair explained economically. “The diversion of the explosion and the ensuing fire should keep most of the staff occupied until we’re well away from here.”

  “You’re very good at this…”

  “Would you rather I wasn’t?” he came back harshly.

  Kat would rather that none of this was happening at all. Not the reason Sergei had put her in here. Or the need for Dair Grayson to rescue her. She certainly didn’t want to think about what would happen to Dair if they didn’t make it out of here—

  No, she really couldn’t think about that right now. They would make it out of here, and once they did she would have to try and think of a way of getting away from Dair. She might even be able to steal some money from him too, to help her disappear—

  “I’m through waiting, Kat,” Dair informed her grimly as he threw her over his shoulder and then kicked open the French doors before moving outside.

  Kat clung helplessly to his muscled back. “Dair—”

  “Not a word, Kat,” he hissed in warning. “Not one bloody word, or we’ll both be caught.”

  She clamped her lips shut. Which wasn’t to say she wouldn’t have plenty to say, once they were safely away from here.

  Dair moved stealthily through the undergrowth of the garden, not even breathing hard from carrying Kat over his shoulder. She saw several dark shapes on the ground as Dair moved determinedly towards the back of the building. She also saw the flames coming out of the windows of one of the rooms, and lots of people milling about attempting to put out the fire.

  Dair was good at this, she acknowledged thankfully; even if they were seen, with Kat thrown over his shoulders it would be assumed that he was rescuing her from the burning building.

  He didn’t put her down on the ground until they had gone through a copse of trees and reached the high wall surrounding the grounds, where a rope dangled down as evidence of how he had gotten into the facility in the first place.

  “Think you can make it or shall I go first and pull you up?” he prompted grimly.

  So far Kat knew she hadn’t made too much of a show of being capable of doing anything; she was going to climb the rope to the top of that wall if it killed her.

  She did make it. Just. And she made it down again on the other side too, with Dair standing at the bottom of the wall to steady her as she dropped to the ground.

  “Good girl.” He nodded approval. “I have a vehicle parked in the woods about a quarter of a mile away.”

  Climbing the wall had taken most of Kat’s strength, but she wasn’t about to admit that to Dair. The sound of sirens in the distance was an added spur as she quickly followed Dair into the darkness and shelter of the trees.

  Even so, she was breathing hard by the time she had stumbled along following him to where a black SUV was parked, and shaking a little too in reaction to the past fifteen minutes of exertion after so many week
s of doing nothing.

  “Get in,” Dair instructed as he looked up and saw the reflection of the lights back on in the grounds of the clinic, and those emergency vehicle sirens sounded much closer too. “Kat!” he prompted sharply as he turned back and realized she hadn’t gotten into the vehicle but simply stood beside it staring across the hood at him. “We need to go.”

  “Take off the goggles.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you until you take off the goggles and I can see you are who you say you are.” She folded her arms stubbornly in front of her chest as she looked at him challengingly.

  Dair didn’t know whether to feel glad that Kat was no longer acting like a zombie, or tell her to move her butt—now—or he would move it for her.

  She could have all the answers she wanted once they were far away from here, but until then…! “You already acknowledged I’m Dair Grayson.”

  “I fed you that line.”

  “What about the doll?” he reasoned impatiently. “How the hell would I know about the doll if Gregori hadn’t told me?”

  “Take-off-the-goggles!”

  Dair’s jaw tightened at her stubbornness. So much for the sweet and innocent Katya he remembered! “Fine!” He ripped off the night-vision goggles to glare across the hood of the SUV at her. “Satisfied?”

  Kat wasn’t anywhere near to being reassured. Yes, she had followed this man into the woods, because he seemed to know where he was going. But five years of being Sergei Orlov’s wife had taught her never to take anything at face value. That nothing was ever as innocent as it looked. Least of all Sergei.

  “Open the door of the SUV so that the interior light will come on and I can see you properly,” she instructed tautly.

  There was the sound of an impatient sigh in the darkness. “And allow the light to alert anyone looking for us to exactly where we are?”

  “We could stop wasting any more time if you just did what I asked,” Kat reasoned.

  “I think I preferred you when you weren’t talking!” The driver’s door was wrenched open, giving Kat her first clear view of the man who had carried her out of the clinic.