Lost

by Laura K. Curtis

  “Exactly.” Gritting her teeth, Tara poured a cup of tea and passed the pot to the woman on her other side.

  Jake slipped into the hall only moments before Owen ascended the steps to the stage. Head down, he didn’t even glance Tara’s way as he took his seat. What had happened? It couldn’t be too bad, or they wouldn’t have let him rejoin the group. Tara’s hands shook, and she shoved them under the table and locked them together.

  No hint of tension inflected Owen’s pre-meal sermon and prayer. Had Samuel not informed him about the computer problem, or was he really that good an actor? Or maybe he found theft from Outsiders acceptable. She couldn’t read him at all. How much of his own hype did he believe?

  • • •

  JAKE ATE QUICKLY. Not that it would do him any good, since the Chosen were excused from the table when Owen decided, not when they finished eating, but nervous energy pushed at him. He needed to talk to Tara. The media fostered an image of FBI agents, particularly profilers, as loners, but in truth they worked in teams. As a programmer, Jake considered himself damned good at making logical connections and seeing patterns. But personalities, the very illogical nature of humanity, confounded him. It was why he’d failed Lisa. Over and over he’d tried to explain that the heroin was stealing her life drop by drop. Over and over, she’d gazed up at him with those faded blue eyes big in her pale face and told him he didn’t understand.

  And, dammit, he didn’t. Lisa hadn’t been the first to accuse him of being as much a machine as the computers he programmed. But the others hadn’t been family. And they hadn’t died. Sure, one woman had thrown a shoe at his head as she left his apartment, but she—like all women he dated—had known what she was getting with him. Good food, good company, good sex, and nothing more. Despite her tirade—what was her name?—he hadn’t suffered an ounce of guilt even after ducking the shoe. He hadn’t failed her.

  But he’d failed Lisa, and if he couldn’t get a handle on what was happening among Owen’s lieutenants, he’d fail Tara. And that might just be the end of him.

  Beside him, two men discussed the fire. Both longtime Chosen members, they’d seen other fires and lived through other rebuilds.

  “They’ll pull most of us off normal duties tomorrow,” one explained to Jake. “We’ll clear the remnants, even if it’s still raining, and Aaron and Jonas will pick up supplies. Won’t take but a week to frame a new place. Another week and they can move back in.”

  Jake didn’t have to ask what the women would do in the meantime. The pregnant ones from every bunk had been shifted into the infirmary and nursery, the others parceled out to spare beds. Joy and Mary were to share the bed in the second room in his cabin. Too much to hope that he and Tara would be left alone, but still disappointment and suspicion nagged at him. He could feel the eyes and ears, tickling his nerves, raising the hairs on the back of his neck and along his arms.

  Every nerve screamed, Run! He fought back the sensation, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Relax the toes, feet, ankles, calves . . . He’d performed the exercise since his teens, when a doctor had prescribed it for hyperactivity, and it still worked. By the time he’d loosened his shoulders, Owen was releasing them from their seats, and he could walk casually across the room to join Tara. Mary and Joy came over, too, and he matched his pace to theirs as they sauntered through the gathering dusk to their cabin.

  The moment they arrived, the urge to snatch Tara up and take off returned.

  “Joy, Mary, you ladies go ahead and shower first. Serena and I can wait.”

  The instant they were alone, he dragged Tara into his arms. A brief, surprised hesitation, and then she melted against him. Her arms slid around his neck, and she buried her face in his neck. The most intimate embrace he’d ever experienced, it rocked him in a way no sexual act ever had. He let himself savor the sensation before whispering the word he knew would end it.

  “Serena.”

  Tara tensed in his arms and her breath hitched against the skin of his neck.

  “How did it go this afternoon?” she asked. “Did you figure out how to solve the computer problem for the Leader?”

  “Not yet. And Samuel told me not to speak of my work.” Christ, now he was parroting the self-consciously formal language of the Chosen. “I can say I’ve been taken off my work rotation in the sheds to spend more time bringing the computer up to speed.”

  She leaned back, looking into his face for cues, and immediately he missed the warm weight of her. “I have faith in you. You’ll fix it.”

  “But you know how antsy I get chewing on a programming problem.”

  “It’s stopped raining. Maybe we should go for a run. Like we used to. And then we can come back and burn off the rest of that excess energy.”

  “Oh, hell yes.” Unable to resist, he buried his fingers in her hair, tugged her head back, and covered her lips with his own. She opened to him, hot and sweet and greedy, and he lost himself in the kiss.

  Tara recovered first. She reached up and cupped his cheek in one small, delicate hand. “Run first, then fun. You can’t concentrate on me properly until you get all that nervous energy out of your system.”

  In the basement security room, Samuel and Francis listened to the mics they’d planted that afternoon while delivering supplies for Joy and Mary.

  “What do you think?” Samuel asked when they heard the door close.

  “I wish we had eyes in there. Body language is a whole lot easier to read.”

  “No way. He’s too paranoid.”

  “So you said.” Francis massaged his temples. “And he did find Jonas’s extracurricular business, which is helpful. You’ll deal with that?”

  “I told Owen ages ago Jonas had to go.”

  “Don’t bother Owen. Just do it.”

  Samuel’s brows shot up. “And when he asks where his apostle is?”

  “Tell him you confronted Jonas about filming porn inside the compound and he ran off. Or leave him in his room dead of an OD and let Owen figure out how to spin it.” Francis watched as two figures jogged across a screen and then out of sight. “I don’t care how useful this Jason Norman has been, I don’t trust him.”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s broken. You could see it the minute she showed up here with Andrea. If it weren’t for her reaction to him, for the fact that at least the relationship part of their story is obviously real, I’d have insisted Owen kick him the fuck out the second he arrived. We can’t afford this when we’re so close.”

  “How much longer?”

  “The addiction curve is set. The only thing left is the euphoria phase. If it’s strong enough to make them want more, they lose functionality and the ability to keep earning a paycheck.” Francis grimaced. “Sometimes, it kills them outright.”

  “Shit, I thought we were past that.”

  “Look, the formula’s not perfect. But with a few more weeks of experimentation, it can be. We’ve been at this a long time. One man is not going to fuck it up. Even if Owen does believe the ‘Powers’ sent him in our time of need.”

  Samuel snorted. “Yeah.” He glanced at the monitors. “I wish he didn’t keep going out of range.”

  “Yeah.” Francis tapped his lips with his forefinger. “Take care of Jonas. Then run a deep check on Jason Norman. I want to know when he took his first steps, his favorite restaurant, the name of every woman he’s ever screwed.”

  “And her?”

  “She doesn’t matter. After all, all we have to do is kick her out and cut off her supply, and she’ll take care of herself.”

  Samuel grinned. “There is that.”

  • • •

  OUT BEYOND THE reaches of surveillance equipment, Jake slowed to a halt and Tara followed suit. But when she expected him to speak, he dropped to the hard, wet earth, pulling her down so she sat between his knees, her back resting ag
ainst his chest. Did he worry about being overheard even out here?

  His arms came around her, locking her into position, almost as if he expected her to run. A prison of pure muscle surrounded her—his thighs and calves along hers, his chest, his arms. But beneath all that solid strength, his heart beat too fast. And not from that brief jog. He could probably run a marathon at that pace without breathing hard.

  “What happened after I left?” she asked.

  “That loophole, it’s how Jonas runs his porn business. I saw it the first day I scanned the code, because I was looking for anything out of place. I thought it might be a test, so I had to ‘find’ it before too long, but I wanted to trace exactly what it was first. The good news is that while Aaron and Samuel were asking questions, they let slip which portal belongs to who on the system. Aaron has very little tech savvy, but Samuel’s conversant enough to track down the links himself once I showed him the oddities.”

  “He seemed shocked. Though he came into the room immediately after you mentioned it—like he had an office mic feed piped to an earwig while he was hanging out in the dining hall comforting the flock. He had to have heard what we were talking about before.”

  “Yeah.” Against her stomach, his hand clenched into a fist. “I wish I were better at reading people.”

  “You’re a profiler.”

  “But profiling’s about data, not about people. At least, the part I do. There’s a guy on my team, give him twenty minutes with a suspect and he can tell you every aspect of life that makes the guy uncomfortable, every time he thinks he’s failed, every resentment he holds. That’s not me. If you show me a data set—blonde women in their twenties, drowned, with their lips and eyes sewn shut—I can extrapolate from that what kind of monster we’re hunting. And usually, more data is better. But the pieces don’t fit together here, and I can only assume it’s because we’re hunting multiple monsters all operating in the same small area. And I can’t separate them out because I can’t figure out which results, which data, belong to which set.”

  “The porn versus the drugs.”

  “Like that, but even more. Who’s really in charge? I’d bet serious money that Owen’s passed from pathology into psychosis, too screwed up to run this complex an op himself.”

  It fit her own observations. “But he has to know about the drugs, even if he’s not in charge. He told you I could never leave.”

  “Right. But why would a guy convinced he’s the voice of God—or the Powers—drug his followers?”

  Tara turned the question over in her mind, trying to examine it dispassionately, to separate it from Elizabeth’s rape and Andrea’s murder. “He has to believe the drug benefits people.”

  “I agree.”

  “But Samuel’s no true believer,” she said. “He has to have another motivation. Sure, he gets to leave the compound on occasion, and his quarters are probably luxurious compared to ours, but he wouldn’t live out here in the middle of nowhere without a damned good reason.”

  “No.”

  “Aaron—” Tara considered her experiences with the man. “He’s a follower. The kind whose loyalty you buy. Samuel brought him into the room with you, I saw that, but did he stay while you explained everything?”

  “Yeah. You have an idea why?”

  “It was a test. To gauge Aaron’s reaction, see whether he and Jonas were in the porn business together.”

  “How can you tell?” Frustration bled through the words. Poor Jake, he really didn’t like relying on other people. Or was it just that he didn’t trust her instincts?

  She took a deep breath. Exhaled. “Look, I know I screwed up Lucy’s case.”

  “No—”

  “Shush. Listen. I got . . . confused. There are good reasons not to let cops work cases involving friends or family. Being that close messes you up. It’s too hard to untangle the past from the present, what you see from what you feel. This is different. When I look at Aaron, there’s no residual information. It’s all fresh.”

  She paused, sorting through her observations in her mind before laying them out. “He must be part of the drug business, because they send him out to the desert with the ones who come back and need to be cleaned up. So they trust him. But they trusted Jonas, too—you could see that on Samuel’s face when he came in.”

  “He was pissed.”

  “Yes. But also shaken. And he had to be wondering why, if you found the hole, John never did. Which brings up the possibility that John was helping Jonas. And if John, why not Aaron? All three of them—John, Jonas, Aaron—probably fall under Samuel’s supervision.”

  “What about Francis?”

  “You’ve spent more time with him than I have. He’s rarely around during the day, and I’ve never been assigned to the greenhouse team.”

  “Our drive out to the greenhouses was a dance of distrust. Neither of us said a damned thing. The only information I gleaned was that he’s smart and immensely suspicious. Not a lot to plug into the matrix.”

  She thought about Francis. Aloof, always busy with the greenhouses. “I don’t have much to add. On one hand, he’s been here since he was a kid, so he was already here when Owen brought Samuel back from med school. On the other, I don’t believe they could run a large-scale drug operation without his knowledge.”

  “What does your gut say?”

  That was easier than her brain. “I don’t trust him. He may not be working toward the same end as Samuel, but he’s using the Chosen—and Owen—just the same. Notice how Samuel didn’t invite him into the office? He didn’t need to test him.” She waited for another question. When none came she posed her own.

  “What did Ethan say?”

  Jake sighed, his chest expanding and contracting behind her. “The cops he spoke to have noticed a higher than average number of ODs among the junkie population along with an increase in suicides. They put the ODs down to an unusually pure batch. That’s the standard cause. Junkies know to the drop what they can take, and they’ll shoot whatever they can handle. If they’re used to stuff that’s been stepped on four times, and what they get has only been cut twice, they pay with their lives.”

  He spoke clinically, but the words had to hurt, had to remind him of his sister. Tara tilted her head back and pressed her lips to his stubbled cheek. His arms tightened around her. He shifted slightly and suddenly she was sideways in his lap, the press of his body hard and hot against her own. His lips devoured hers, the simple kiss of comfort gone complex and hungry in an instant.

  His hands slipped over her body, sliding beneath her T-shirt. She allowed herself the same liberty, running her fingers over smooth skin and bunched muscle. A quick lift and twist and she sat astride him, the hot throb of his erection against the juncture of her thighs.

  He made a strangled sound. “Tara, sweetheart . . . ”

  Those two words, the sound of her own name in that husky, passion-rough voice almost sent her over the edge. She gripped the bottom of her own T-shirt and drew it off over her head.

  “Oh, Christ,” he said. “Baby, the ground is wet, it’s cold. We should take this back to the cabin.” But his eyes begged her to disagree. Not as if she had any choice. Her knees were jelly. If he wanted to go back, he’d have to carry her.

  “I promise I’ll keep you warm,” she teased.

  “You burn me alive,” he said, and a shiver went through her at the intensity of the words. His fingers slid over her breasts, then found the clasp of her bra and freed them. “So fucking beautiful,” he murmured before bending his head to suckle first one, then the other. The cold night air pricked at the damp, tender spots he left and sent lightning shooting through her from nipple to womb. She ground her body against his.

  “Slow down, baby.”

  “I can’t. I don’t want slow.” She slid her fingers between their bodies to cup him. They’d both changed into sweatpants for th
eir run, and beneath the soft, worn cotton he was heavy and hot and pulsing in her hand. “Now, Jake.”

  “Jesus. Lift up.” She did, and he stripped her sweats and panties. But he kept his own, settling her once more on his legs. He bent his knees and pushed her back so she lay against them, and his rough, calloused fingers found her center.

  She was beyond words, beyond shame, beyond anything but the fire threatening to consume her. She arched back, offering herself to him, and he slid two fingers deep inside, letting his thumb caress her clit. She could feel the pressure building, and she wanted to protest, to insist on him being inside her when she came, but she’d lost her voice, and all that came out was a series of pleading sobs as he took her higher and higher until she exploded into a million fragments.

  When she came back down, she reached for him, but he stopped her. “Not here. I want to be where we can really take our time, get comfortable. I want to lay you out in front of me where I can watch you . . . ”

  The words caused muscles impossibly relaxed to clench with desire, and she dressed as quickly as fumbling fingers and trembling legs allowed.

  • • •

  JAKE SAT ON the edge of the bed watching Tara sleep. He should have been sleeping himself. God knows, she’d worn him out. Sex, a shower, more sex . . . Every muscle was exhausted, but his mind wouldn’t let him rest. He had four more days to get her out. And then what? He’d told her they’d find the antidote. But what if they couldn’t?

  Ethan’s note had scared the shit out of him. Suicide after suicide after overdose after overdose. Jake didn’t know much about people, but his sister had made him something of an expert on junkies and depression. Not all depression, even untreated, led to suicide. If it did, the population on the streets would be a lot smaller. No, suicidal ideation was something else entirely, more intransigent and harder to treat. What did the drug do to people that it sent them off that cliff, and so quickly?

  And the overdoses. When junkies died from heart failure or the like, their deaths were rarely examined closely. Too expensive to screen the blood of every known user who dies with a needle in her arm. Had Samuel been testing an injectable form of the tea, cutting it into heroin for sale on the streets?