Beast in the Tower

by Julie Miller

  “Who is this?” This voice was full of swagger and flirt, definitely not her brother’s style.

  “Sorry, I must have the wrong number.”

  “You call me anytime, baby.”

  Unimpressed with the lothario’s charm, Kit hung up and checked the number on her phone. That had to be right. This time she dialed the number manually. It picked up after one ring.

  “Yo. Miss me already, baby?”

  She wasn’t amused. “Where is Matt Snow?”

  “Who?” The noisy background still made no sense.

  “I believe you’re using his phone.”

  “And I believe you might be my destiny.”

  Kit snapped the phone shut and disconnected the call. “What is going on?” Had Matt loaned his phone to a friend? Had it been stolen?

  The next thing she knew, her phone was ringing. Kit answered. “Hello?”

  “You know, babe, I believe in fate. You could come meet me down—”

  “You’re not my type.” She automatically hung up on the crank call, then turned off her phone. “Thank God.”

  But it wasn’t good riddance that earned her thanks. It was welcome home. Kit knocked on the window, trying to get the attention of the man outside. He shuffled along the sidewalk across the street, shoulders hunched down against the cold. He wore a red-and-gold Kansas City Chiefs parka and carried a black backpack slung across his shoulder.

  A wave of relief washed over her, easing the tension in her gut. Matt was home, safe and sound.

  Kit scooted out of the booth. She needed a hug first. Then she’d get some answers. And make him wash the dishes. No, they’d wash them together. That way, any reminders she made about checking in and being responsible would come across as conversation and not a lecture. Heck, she just wanted to spend the time with him.

  “Matt?”

  He paused at the steps in front of Hannity’s. He looked over his shoulder, looked ahead into the night beyond the streetlamp. Looked across the street at the Sinclair Building, at the neon sign marking Snow’s Barbecue. At her.

  Kit waved. Sort of. She stuck her hand into the air, but curled her fingers into her palm and pulled it back when he didn’t respond. Why was he just standing there?

  His face was shadowed by his fur-trimmed hood, his features obscured by white clouds of warm breath in the cold air. But she knew that coat. Knew that backpack.

  Was something wrong? What was he waiting for?

  Why was she waiting? Kit hurried to the door. “Matt?”

  The figure turned away and climbed the concrete steps, disappearing into Hannity’s Bar. Of all the stupid, irritating… He had to have seen her. She shoved open the door and ran out onto the sidewalk. “Matt!”

  A blast of cold wind absorbed her shout. But it didn’t make any difference. He was gone. She’d give him the benefit of the doubt for not hearing her—he was probably blasting music in his earphones. But she couldn’t excuse the choice he’d made. What’s an eighteen-year-old doing in a bar?

  Kit hurried back into the diner, grabbed her quilted jacket off the coatrack, and shrugged into it as she called back to the kitchen. “I’m running an errand across the street, Germane. Go ahead and lock up when you’re done.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on things. Don’t you worry.”

  But Kit was already out the door. She darted between two parked cars and crossed the empty street. She was up the steps and inside Hannity’s before she ever got her coat zipped.

  Just inside the door, the darkness stopped her. The stale smells of spilled beer, old smoke and the cleanser that couldn’t quite cover it all stung her nose. While her eyes adjusted to the “atmosphere,” her ears picked up a couple of conversations that were loud enough to be heard over the jukebox. Two men raising the stakes over a game of pool. Another man trying to coax a blonde who was too smart to listen onto his lap.

  Why on earth would Matt come into this place? Was this sinkhole where he’d been spending all his unaccounted-for time? She hadn’t smelled it on his clothes, but still…

  “Over here, honey.” An Irish drawl called to her from behind the bar. “You look lost.”

  Kit crossed to the bar but didn’t pull up a seat. She was scanning the pool tables and patrons on the stools beside her. Though she recognized members of Kronemeyer’s construction crew, there was no sign of Matt. “I’m looking for my brother.”

  The jockey-size bartender slapped a coaster in front of her. “You’re that bird from across the street. Are they ever gonna get that work finished on the Sinclair? Didn’t know you had a brother. What’ll you have?”

  “Nothing, thanks. He’s six feet tall, has spiky brown hair. He’s wearing a Chiefs parka.”

  “We get a lot of football fans in here on the weekends. Beer?”

  Kit shook her head, trying to peer into each dark wooden booth across the room. “He just came in a minute ago. He’d be underage.”

  “Not in my bar, he wouldn’t.” Hannity’s was known for plain drinks, plain talk, and no questions asked. She’d just broken all three rules. “You’re welcome to look around all you want. But if you sit at the bar, you have to buy a drink.”

  “Thanks, anyway. Do you have any back rooms or—”

  There. A glimpse of red slipping around the corner from the hallway next to the restrooms. “Matt!”

  He disappeared without responding to her call.

  At least he wasn’t carrying a drink.

  Kit dashed through the archway after him. The flat-screen TVs in here were all tuned to different sporting events. Had he come into Hannity’s to watch some college basketball?

  Curiosity had already become concern and was quickly moving its way toward angry frustration. There were dozens of Chiefs emblems in the room—arrow-heads on the walls, helmets on the shelves. Red shirts. White shirts. When she finally spotted the only moving logo, it was headed out the emergency exit door.

  “Matthew Allan Snow!”

  If her shout didn’t earn her a glare from every man in the room, then the blaring buzz of the open-door alarm would. “Sorry.”

  Hot on his trail now, Kit didn’t stop to apologize again. She burst through the exit into the alley behind the bar. It was cold. Dark. Empty. Other than trash cans and power poles, there was nothing here. Her brother was gone. She didn’t need to be here any more than he did.

  “Start walkin’, girl,” she chided herself, flashing back to memories of Helen’s attack and feeling a shiver that had nothing to do with the icy temps.

  There’d been a man in a Chiefs parka then, too, stooping over Helen—more interested in the contents of her purse than the woman bleeding at his feet. There’d been a smaller man beside him, snapping orders. Small as in jockey-size?

  Kit slowly turned and backed away from the steel door, as though the enemy was watching her from the other side. She’d spotted the two men outside Hannity’s shortly before the attack. And a third one had appeared out of nowhere to slam her against the wall.

  Maybe she wasn’t as alone as she thought.

  Lengthening her stride, Kit hurried to the relative safety of the sidewalk out front. Even if the exit hadn’t already locked behind her, she had no intention of going back in that place. But there was no red parka to be found out here, either.

  “Dammit, Matt. What’s going on?”

  Maybe she hadn’t been chasing her brother at all. But why stop to make eye contact with her? Like the man she pursued had done, Kit looked up and down the block. There were only a handful of people out and about on the bitter night—a couple of Henry’s friends, digging through the trash at the corner, a car leaving the parking garage and nearly colliding with a city bus as it swung around the Kronemeyer dump truck parked on the street, another man heading up Hannity’s front steps.

  Kit pulled on her gloves and tied her scarf around her neck, trying to see the scene through the eyes of the man in the parka. The diner was the brightest spot on the block. With all its windows, he had to ha
ve spotted her. If it had been Matt in that coat, why not just come home?

  If it hadn’t, then what was he looking for?

  The Sinclair Tower, wrapped up in its wintry coat of scaffolding and plastic and mystery, offered no answers. She saw no signs of movement at any window, and only the lights from the diner and Kronemeyer’s first-floor office gave any indication that people lived and worked there.

  Kit tipped her face up into the starless night, up toward Damon’s sky-high prison. There was a solitary light shining way up there as well. What was Damon doing now? Fixing a late dinner? Writing out equations? Thriving on his loneliness? Forgetting about her?

  She couldn’t understand it. How could a man with so much to offer the world lock himself away from it? Was he really so hung up on his harsh looks? So hurt by the honest responses of human interaction? Or was that sensitivity just an easy excuse to avoid conversations and compassion and caring?

  How could a man who held her hand so surely, and watched over her like a guard dog while she lay in a hospital bed, turn around and treat the most completely seductive kiss of her life like a failed science experiment?

  If she closed her eyes and imagined, she was being swept away by a fierce pirate. But if she opened her eyes—as his practical nature demanded she should—she was in the arms of a very real, very complicated man. Damaged by life inside and out. But so utterly masculine—so gruff, strong, sexy…

  A squeal of brakes and hiss of air dragged her attention back down to the reality of the street where she had to live. The bus.

  Not so out of context now.

  Trusting an instinct, Kit walked toward the end of the block. That was the sound she’d heard on the phone. The mechanical drone of the engine, the conversations and music of passengers onboard.

  The bus had stopped at the corner, trading off weary working people for nighttime revelers heading south toward the nightlife of the Plaza. She pulled her phone from her apron, turned it on and speed-dialed Matt’s number.

  “Don’t answer,” she whispered, walking faster and praying she was wrong. “Don’t pick up.”

  “Yo. Change your mind about me, baby? H’lo?”

  Kit ran to catch the bus. He was there. Climbing the steps and taking a seat.

  Breathless from the cold as much as the chase, she reached the front door just as it was closing. She knocked on the glass and the driver let her in. “Thanks.”

  She dug the necessary change from her apron and wove her way to the back of the bus to find a seat. Chiefs parka, second row from the rear. Kit listened to her phone and watched the young, twentysomething Asian man say the exact words she heard in her ear. “Don’t toy with me, baby.” They hung up together.

  Kit sat down across the aisle from him, saw the black backpack at his feet, embroidered with the initials MS, a rare surviving example of her mother’s needlework. The coat probably had her own less-skilled stitching on its label.

  He pulled back the hood, scratched his fingers through the scruffy mess of raven-colored hair on his head and smiled at her.

  “I’m Kenny.”

  “Kit Snow. You have my brother’s things.”

  That’s when she saw the tip of the gun, pointing at her from the end of one bulky, oversize sleeve. “And I have you.”

  Guess she was taking a trip to the Plaza.

  “HELLO, MR. BLACK HOLE.” Damon turned the computer screen to watch his unseen nemesis launch his opening maneuvers to gain access into the SinPharm database. Now the game would begin—bypassing security walls, decrypting codes, searching through level after level on the SinPharm site for the most restricted areas that held Damon’s research in their translated form. “You’re early tonight.”

  Early or not, he was ready. After watching the admirable savvy of his opponent quickly getting through the first two levels of encryption, Damon launched his own counter program. While Black Hole of the Universe hacked his way deeper and deeper into Damon’s system, Damon was quietly worming his way into his.

  During the last online attack, Damon had been able to determine that the hacker was right here in Kansas City. Tonight he intended to find out exactly what building, what room, what keyboard the spy was using. Then Damon intended to pay his online pal a live and in-his-face visit.

  Finding the hacker would put him that much closer to finding who was so hell-bent on stealing his work and destroying his life. Damon wasn’t sure how yet, but he was dead certain that payback would be painful and thorough and swift.

  “That should keep you busy for a while.”

  With his computer program activated, Damon rolled his stool back over to the work station to analyze the agar in petri dish #K26 beneath the microscope again. Kit—26 years old. His newest donor to his Miranda’s Formula research.

  He held his breath as he placed his eye against the scope. That couldn’t be right. Damon leaned back, rubbed any trace of fatigue from his eye and looked again. “Son of a bitch.”

  The blood rushed to his head and pounded in his ears just as fiercely as it had when he’d let go of his sanity and kissed Kit.

  He pulled another light over to study the sample again. “One. Two. Three. Four.”

  He took a deep breath and scraped his palm across the late night stubble on his chin. It was real. It was real! Kit had insisted that reality was more important than any dream. She was some damn fine kind of reality plowing into his life.

  She should see this.

  Kit was the reality that had made this happen.

  Damon crossed to the scribbled equations that covered the white boards along an entire wall in his lab. He picked up a marker and circled the answer. Added an exclamation point. Wrote out K26 and stepped back, feeling the adrenaline rush transform itself into a quieter, more reverent energy inside him.

  K26.

  Kit Snow.

  “You’re the miracle, sweetheart.”

  In more ways than he could ever fully document.

  Being the practical scientist he was, Damon tabled his emotional reaction to his discovery and quickly sat down at an independent computer terminal to record the equations, results and observations on the K26 experiment. He’d encrypt them and print them out later.

  Right now he needed to share the news with Kit. Would she appreciate what this could mean? Her background in chemistry would help her understand the terminology. But would she want to hear anything from him? Could she accept that he wanted to share this—his work—with her? But that he couldn’t share, that she wouldn’t want…that his work was all he could give her?

  Damon rolled his stool over to the camera monitors to search for her. She wasn’t in the diner. In fact, Germane was locking the doors and turning out the lights. Damon had no way of knowing if she was even home. Not wanting to acknowledge his disappointment at not being able to see her, Damon shifted the cameras to their normal security views and made a mental note to have Easting call Kit in the morning to arrange a meeting with her. Damon could put his findings in a report and Easting could deliver…

  “What the hell?” The camera that watched the building’s main entrance had picked up a familiar figure wandering out of the alley across the street.

  Kit’s breath in the cold air obscured her face, but he recognized the ponytail and the curve of the jeans. She was on her phone, looking down the sidewalk. Damon swung the camera around to follow the direction of her gaze.

  A man in a Chiefs parka.

  Matching her description of the man who’d assaulted Helen.

  Getting on a bus at the corner.

  And Kit was running after him!

  Damon shot to his feet. “Does that woman have a death wish?”

  And where was the security guard Easting had assigned to her?

  “Stop! Dammit, woman.” Kit was actually getting onto the bus with the man she’d followed down the sidewalk.

  Damon memorized the route number of the bus on the monitor and shed his lab coat. If his latest variation of Miranda’s Formula
wasn’t showing that slight but significant promise, he’d be out the door already.

  But he had to protect the work.

  He had to protect the miracle.

  He was half-afraid to move the petri dish. Almost afraid to leave it at all, in case the four new skin cells growing there turned out to be another cruel dementia from his nightmares.

  “Reality, Doc.” Kit Snow wanted a neighbor who’d step out the door if she ever got into trouble. And he had a very bad feeling that she was in it up to her eyeballs.

  He looked one more time before locking the K26 sample inside the sterile vault. The cells hadn’t mutated. They hadn’t died. The rejection factors he’d studied in Kit’s bloodwork may have provided the key he’d been looking for.

  His formula just might work.

  But what kind of redemption would that be if finding Miranda’s cure cost him the life of another woman?

  One who seemed to have some damn illogical ideas about how to take care of herself. One who seemed to think that she could change the world if she just stepped in front of the speeding freight train often enough.

  Damon locked down the lab and boarded the elevator. As soon as he pressed the ground floor button, the car lurched on its cable. “Son of a—”

  Bracing his hands against the walls, he held on as the elevator shuddered around him. It dropped six inches. Caught. And then, with the metallic whine of steel straining against steel, the gears ground together and the elevator began its normal descent.

  If this thing had ever shown any signs of life, he’d be dissecting it in his lab right now.

  Damon pulled his cell phone from his coat. J. T. Kronemeyer would be his second call. SinPharm headquarters was his first.

  “Easting.” No sense wasting time with pleasantries. “Which of your security team is supposed to be watching Katherine Snow right now?”

  “I’m in the middle of a meeting, Damon. Remember? Japanese delegation? Kenichi Corp investors?” Irritation colored Easting’s voice. “I don’t have that information in front of me right now.”