He reached up and cupped her cheek. “Then let me help you find out.”
Her hand went to his. “Don’t make me regret this,” she said, knowing her statement, in and of itself, was admission of some level of trust.
“Nor you me,” he said softly, a hint of tension in his voice, his hand falling from her face. “I don’t throw caution to the wind, but I am, for you.”
“Don’t,” she said, suddenly afraid of more than trusting him. “Please don’t. I’m as afraid for you to trust me as I am for me to trust you. I don’t know how I am or even what I am. So… don’t trust me. Not yet.”
“Too late,” he said without hesitation. “I’ve already decided I’m going to do enough trusting for both of us. You can catch up later.”
“And if I don’t deserve it?”
“You will. And I will. Watch and see.”
“You can’t know that.”
“Sometimes the facts aren’t clear, and all a good soldier has is his innate survival instincts. Mine are stronger than most. They’ve kept me alive too many times to count. I think yours are too, which is exactly why we’re standing here now—united against Lucian and Sabrina. And it’s also why we’d much rather kiss each other than kill each other.”
They stared at one another, time standing still, a bond weaving between them, a silent connection that reached beyond the raw sexuality of their attraction, broken only by the announcement of their stop. The doors opened, and Damion grabbed her hand. Lara tugged him back, drawing his attention. “What if while we are trying to make Lucian and Sabrina chase their tails, we end up right back in their path?”
One corner of his mouth lifted, softening the hard lines of his expression. “We find another umbrella.”
Sabrina waited impatiently outside the subway while Lucian tended his wounds with supplies she’d bought at a drugstore a block away. Finally, he sauntered down the hallway leading out of the restroom, a large bandage taped on his face, looking tall and broad, his civilian attire of jeans and a T-shirt doing nothing to disguise the soldier beneath. The female in her warmed at the sight he made, but the soldier in her—the leader of Serenity—fumed at his slow, loose-legged swagger that said he was in no rush, making her want to strangle him.
Sliding her teeth together in a hard grind, she charged toward him. “They saw you,” she said. “The Renegades saw you, and Lara was fighting against us. Serenity is as good as exposed, and yet you seem in no rush, as if you don’t even care. What is wrong with you? We have to make a plan. We have to decide what to do now, not later.”
He reached down and took the subway map from her hand, amusement in his dark midnight eyes. “What we aren’t going to do is get desperate and behave foolishly,” he said, his gaze and his tone hardening as he indicated the map. “And this is the kind of foolishness I expect from a follower, not a leader.” He motioned toward the exit. “Come now.” He started walking.
Dread curled inside Sabrina, a jab of searing warning. Calling Lucian had been a mistake, a desperate, horrible mistake, which had now trapped her.
Charging after him, she caught him at street level and grabbed his arm. “They know we aren’t with Adam,” she ground out. “Lara will tell them about General Powell. She was helping them. She was fighting with them.”
He stared down at her, unmoving and hard, then suddenly grasped her arms and backed her into a dark corner behind a rank-smelling Dumpster. “Control yourself,” he said, “before you convince me I should tell Powell you aren’t capable of leading. Leaders lead. They solve problems. They don’t panic like some schoolgirl princess who can’t get a manicure on schedule.”
He was so like every man who’d abused and used her throughout her entire life. She hated him. “What are we supposed to do?”
“One step at a time, doll,” he said, brushing his fingers over her cheek. “Take out the targets, and then do damage control.”
Doll. Oh yeah, she hated him all right. She despised him far more than the life that had ensured there would never be schoolgirl manicures, shopping malls, and family and hearth in her future. She’d always been alone until Serenity, until Powell. She’d foolishly created a situation that threatened to steal her security, her place where she finally belonged.
“She’s underground,” she said, resolved to deal with this problem before it got out of control. “You won’t immediately locate Lara when she comes above ground again, and she’s someplace secure.”
He snatched Chale’s cell phone from his pocket. “We have Damion’s number. We call our tech team, and they signal us the minute his phone pings to life. Damion is a Renegade. Unless he feels imminent threat, he won’t wind-walk in front of onlookers. We’ll wind-walk to their coordinates, and I’ll have Lara’s energy link again. They won’t escape. They die tonight.”
What part of this didn’t he get? “Even if that works, the other Renegades saw us, and we don’t know what she’s already told them. The damage reaches beyond their lives now.”
“I’ll smooth this over with Powell,” he said, sliding his hands to her waist. “I’m to return to his side by morning, and by tomorrow night, he’ll have made sure we’re both linked to Adam as one big plot to undermine the Renegades. And neither Lara nor the Renegade with her will be alive to dispute that.” His hands brushed up her rib cage and brushed the curves of her breasts. “Then we’ll celebrate our new arrangement. You and I… leading Serenity.”
You and I leading Serenity. The bastard was going to double-cross her with Powell, use this to jockey more control for himself, and less for her, just as she’d feared. Even if she held onto her position as leader of Serenity, she’d be led around by his cock for the rest of her life. She was done with that life. She’d been a fool for calling Lucian into this. A damn fool.
He pushed off the wall and dialed their tech team, setting up Damion’s phone trace. Sabrina listened, her heart thundering in her ears, her stomach so sick she wanted to throw up, on him preferably, but that would be short, cold comfort.
He flipped his phone shut. “Damion won’t return to ground level anytime soon. He’ll want to take his time diluting Lara’s trail. So let’s go eat. I don’t like to kill things on an empty stomach.”
He turned and started to walk away. Adrenaline rushed through Sabrina’s body, and a sense of being out of her body, of acting without thinking, took hold. She’d fought too hard to get where she was to lose it now—she feared death, feared life. No. She couldn’t lose it now, not over Lucian.
She pulled her gun with its silencer, pointed it at the back of Lucian’s head, and fired the fatal shot, all too aware that even a GTECH couldn’t survive a direct hit to the brain. Before he ever hit the ground she was behind him, wrapping her arms around him, and wind-walking to the top of a mountain near the cabin where they’d found Lara. It was too dark to see down the steep incline she knew to be to her left, but she could hear the river she’d seen earlier below.
She dropped Lucian’s dead weight on the ground, removed both his cell phone and Chale’s from his pockets, and then shoved the body over the incline, waiting until she heard the splash. Without hesitation, she wind-walked to the subway terminal, which she’d determined would be a good bet for Lara and Damion’s exit, while studying her maps. A long shot, but one she had to take. At least she was a close wind-walk to any location the cell might ping to.
Sabrina waited for the tech team’s call, thinking through what came next after she killed Lara and Damion. Smiling, she realized exactly what she’d tell Powell. Lucian and Lara had been plotting to take over Project Serenity, and she, Sabrina, his most loyal follower, had killed Lucian, Lara, and the Russian. But not before they’d potentially exposed Serenity to the Renegades.
Powell didn’t want Serenity exposed any more than she did. He’d do damage control. He’d fix the leak of information, work his magic. Most importantly, she’d be given credit that he’d even had the chance to do that. It was perfect. She w
ould look like a goddess and have more trust and power than ever before.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The train pulled into a scheduled subway stop, and Damion motioned Lara forward. “We’re getting off here.”
“Right,” Lara said, looking pale and tired. “We need to change directions again.”
“No,” he corrected. “This is it. We’re going above ground.”
Relief bled into her face, but to her credit, she wasn’t willing to simply stop working their original plan. “I thought we were doing ten trains, not eight.”
“This location was my intended endgame,” he explained. “I miscounted the trains.” Or rather, skipped a few after noting Lara’s failing efforts to hide her weakening physical condition. She was pale and moving slower by the second. She needed rest, food, and probably a good dose of vitamin C—and she needed those things quickly. Truth be told, he needed food too. The GTECH metabolism had its plus sides, like rapid healing, but it also demanded to be fed, a large amount and often.
“Why don’t I believe that’s the whole story?” she asked suspiciously at the same moment the door’s warning system went off, telling them they were going to miss the stop.
“I guess you were born suspicious,” Damion said, latching onto her arm and pulling her out of the car.
“You know,” she said, making an effort at feisty, but sounding exhausted. “If you keep manhandling me, I’m going to get mad.”
“And here I thought I’d already made you mad a million times over.” They were headed toward a concrete stairwell that would lead them to the landing of a main station. It was a weekend hot spot above ground that he knew well. It was the perfect Friday night, an eleven o’clock spot complete with a crowd for camouflage. “When we exit above ground,” he said, taking the first step in unison with Lara, “if we turn right onto the sidewalk, we’ll be headed into a popular area of nightclubs and restaurants. If we go left, we head toward a complex of retail stores that will be closed. We’re going left and looking for a discreet corner to wind-walk.”
She brushed wayward strands of rich brunette hair from her eyes to watch him closely. “And I assume I hang on for the ride because you aren’t about to tell me where we’re going.”
“I haven’t steered you wrong yet, now have I?” he asked in a light tone he didn’t feel, knowing she wouldn’t like hearing they were headed to an underground safe house in Nevada, near Sunrise City.
More and more, Damion suspected someone had messed around with Lara’s head, and she needed medical attention. He intended to convince her of that much as well. Considering the Renegades had only human doctors who could not wind-walk, he wanted her as close to that medical attention as he could possibly get her, in case her condition suddenly took a turn for the worse.
A resigned sigh slid from those tempting, soft lips, the lips he hadn’t stopped thinking about kissing the entire eight train rides.
“Right now,” she said as they stepped to the top of the ramp into the scurry of people that surrounded them, “all I care about is sleep and food.”
“Ask and you shall receive,” he promised, nonchalantly—when he felt anything but—and slid his hand down her arm to lace his fingers with hers. They crossed the platform and headed to yet another set of stairs, to what he hoped was an uneventful exit from the subway into the city, but truth be told, he had no idea how advanced Lucian’s tracking skills were. Many of the GTECHs developed new abilities over time, much like Michael’s ability to control the wind, and Caleb’s ability to read emotions and to darn near read minds. For all he knew, Lucian might have the ability to track below ground and still have a grip on Lara’s location, which meant they could be headed straight into the mouth of trouble.
But he would have charged right into that trouble if he wasn’t stopped dead in his tracks by the sound of his cell phone ringing. Damion pulled Lara back down several steps, out of the range of a potential sniper shot, and snatched his phone from his belt.
She stumbled and fell against him, the soft curves of her body melting into his—a sign of trust, even if she didn’t know it. But he did, and he also knew right now he didn’t deserve it. Not when his nemesis of a cell phone that he shouldn’t even have on his person was ringing.
Fuck! What had he been thinking? Hell, he was more of a tech guru than even his brother, the damn CEO of Megatech, and he knew all too well that a cell phone could be traced. The chances that Lucian and Sabrina had his number after Chale’s capture were pretty damn certain as well.
One look at the “unknown” on the phone’s screen, and he knew he’d not only fucked up, he’d fucked up royally. Lucian and Sabrina didn’t have to call him to track the phone, but he couldn’t wind-walk and talk. Calling, getting him to answer, or even pause to check the number, slowed his progress, distracted him, and wasted precious seconds their pursuers would exploit.
“Damion?” Lara asked urgently. “What’s happening? What’s wrong?”
He closed his hand around the phone, his words low and tight, but without definitive explanation. “Stay between me and the wall.” He didn’t give her time to reply, not with this beacon in his hand announcing their location.
He tugged her forward, and the minute they were above ground, he chunked his cell phone as far as it would go, hoping it would be followed, knowing that wasn’t likely.
“What the—?” Lara murmured beside him.
That was all the warning he got before she forcefully yanked him into the crowd. He held his footing, and her hand, and tried to redirect her. However, he quickly reconsidered his actions when he spotted the source of Lara’s urgency—the rapidly approaching Sabrina. Parting the crowd, she wasn’t even trying to conceal herself.
Lara whirled around to object to his delay. “We have to—”
“Go.” Damion said, leading Lara back in the direction she’d wanted to go in the first place, distancing them from Sabrina, who could be packing Green Hornets. Though Damion was fairly certain that he and Lara were about to be sandwiched between Lucian and Sabrina, he didn’t see he had much choice in direction.
He had to come up with a plan and do it quickly. Simply wind-walking to some random location wasn’t the answer because Lucian and Sabrina would track Lara. But he couldn’t stay in the crowd where innocents could be hurt either. Nor could he risk a confrontation with Lara in her current physical condition. The only safe destination Damion knew was the one where the playing field was so weighted in their favor, there would be no room for hostages and death bargains. A place Lara would refuse to go to if he gave her the option, and so he wouldn’t.
“This way,” Damion said, wrapping his arm around Lara and ushering her into the tiny pizzeria they were about to pass.
“Are you crazy?” Lara demanded, aimlessly tugging against the hand he’d wrapped around hers, already charging forward with a locomotive tug that did nothing to stop her objections. “We’ll be like trapped rats in here.”
He didn’t reply, just led her past the empty red booths and the counter where pizza slices were displayed, heading to the concealed back hall and the rear exit that he knew from a past visit. The instant that Damion shoved the door open, he faded into the wind, taking Lara with him. They were headed to Sunrise City.
Minutes later, with Lara by his side, Damion materialized in front of the entrance to Sunrise City. High-tech scanners instantly identified Damion as one of the Renegades. The doors, hidden beneath stone and mountainside, parted a hair’s breadth—just enough to allow a wind-walker entry. Taking Lara with him, Damion faded back into the wind, and they reappeared inside the facility, sealed in by the closure of the doors. At the same moment, one of four elevators opened, and Caleb and Michael strode forward.
“Damn it,” Damion cursed under his breath, aware that any chance he’d hoped for to explain himself to Lara was now lost.
And sure enough, she shoved away from him, her gaze ripping a path around the paved garage filled w
ith rows of motorcycles, where weapons and supplies lined the walls, then back to the two approaching men, and finally to Damion.
“You lied to me. You said you would keep this between you and me, and you didn’t.” Her voice condemned, her eyes glinting with enough sharpness to throw shrapnel.
“I can explain.” Damion swore, stepping toward her and stopping when her knees bent, her body readying for attack, offering him a silent promise of retribution. “We were being tracked, Lara. They would have followed us. They would have taken human hostages to draw us out again, like they did back at the cabin. I couldn’t let that happen. This was the only place I knew where he wouldn’t dare follow.”
“But you didn’t warn me,” she rebutted.
“There wasn’t time,” he argued.
“I’m no fool, GTECH.”
“My name is Damion,” he ground out.
Her eyes flashed fury. “I know what our situation was, Damion, and I know we could have gone underground and talked. But you wanted a reason to bring me here.” Her fingers curled into her fists by her sides. “We both know I’m your prisoner, and that’s why I wasn’t given options.”
If he was honest with himself, she was right, at least partially. He’d wanted a reason to bring her here—he’d wanted her safe. He’d wanted her under medical care—and Sabrina and Lucian had given him that reason. But there wasn’t time to deal with that now, as Caleb and Michael drew to a halt beside Damion.