“That’s because I don’t want anyone to steal my thunder,” Lara hissed softly, “and kill you before I get the chance.” She lifted her head to stare at him. “Put me down.”
“You fainted,” he said. “I’m not putting you down until you see a doctor.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “But I swear to you, Damion, if you don’t put me down right now, you won’t be.”
Michael chuckled. “I think I like this woman.”
Damion ignored him, speaking to Lara. “Right after I find a doctor to check you out.”
She glared at him, the vulnerability of a doe-caught-in-headlights just beneath the defiance, but still her chin lifted. “I might be here. I might be your prisoner, but I’m not done fighting.”
“Good,” he assured her, a smile teasing the corners of his mouth. “Because neither am I.”
And he wasn’t. He’d fight to protect her, to find out the truth about her life. He’d do both, despite a deep sense of uncertainty that told him there would be a price for doing so. His soldier logic told him that price might be too high in the big picture of war that quite possibly divided them. But to the man in him, holding her, feeling her warm in his arms, he was pretty certain logic had gone missing.
***
Deep beneath a Mexican mountain range in the Serenity headquarters, Logan Reynolds finished reading through the data on the latest Bar-1 conversion that one of his scientists, Jenna Jennings, had handed to him on a clipboard a few moments before.
“The subject’s brain wave activity is peaking much earlier than we once thought possible,” he commented, glancing up from the material and offering Jenna a satisfied smile. “Good news, considering Powell plans to bring us a new recruit next week. He’ll be impressed. Now if only we had unlimited serum, we’d be able to create the manpower Serenity needs to truly shut down all other GTECH operations and secure our country from a takeover.”
“You mean womanpower,” Jenna teased. “And my team is working diligently on the serum, trying to re-create it, but it’s not going well. And it needs to go well. I might not agree with all of Powell’s methods of leadership, but Adam Rain’s desire to create a ‘perfect Zodius race’ reads a little too close to Hitler’s ‘perfect Aryan race’ for comfort.”
“Agreed,” he said, setting the clipboard on a lab table. “And Caleb Rain and his Renegades might say they’re different, they might even be different, but they’re too big a risk to leave alone. I am making some progress on Bar-2.” That being the male version of Bar-1. “If I can perfect it, we can use it on the Renegades and the Zodius to control them, rather than kill them.”
“You’ll get it,” she assured him and batted long lashes at him. “You’re just that good, I guess.”
She was a cute little blonde, and with her peachy perfect skin, she looked more like twenty-two than her real age of thirty-two. She had brains and a rocking body to boot. Not to mention how well she played the demure flirtation game, unintentional as it may be, to tie-him-in-knots perfection. “Not me,” he corrected softly. “We. We’re that good.”
Their eyes locked and held, and while the look in hers was both shy and uncertain, his, he was quite sure, was far more hungry and primal than he should have allowed it to be.
The air virtually crackled with her unspoken question. Am I crazy, or do you want me too? A question he knew came from the ever-present call of passion between them that remained unanswered.
But there was what he defined as a “complication,” a reason he didn’t dare touch her. Still… Logan could almost convince himself nothing mattered but pulling her into his arms and tasting her.
Abruptly, that moment of fantasy came crashing to an end, quite literally when the lab door opened and slammed into the wall. “Get out!” came the harsh female command.
Both Logan and Jenna looked up to find Sabrina—the “complication” herself—in the entryway, and her attention wasn’t on Logan. It was on Jenna.
“I said, get out,” Sabrina repeated to the other woman through clenched teeth.
Jenna stood transfixed by the other woman’s presence. Logan could see why. Sabrina was certainly a striking presence, posed in the doorway, her long flaming hair brushing her broad, but slender shoulders, her ripped jeans and snug Harley T-shirt molded to her lithe body like a second skin. Untouched by Bar-1, and uncontrolled by anything but her need for Powell’s protection, she was as wildly arrogant and assuming as any of the GTECHs that Serenity was designed to destroy. One look at Jenna’s pale face told Logan that Sabrina terrified her.
The urge to comfort her was strong, out of character. He didn’t do the coddling, sensitive thing, but Jenna brought out urges in him he didn’t understand. He actually cared that she was alone, without family, and that her work, her place here with him, was all she had. These were nonsense things that had nothing to do with duty and the job at hand, yet somehow they were important where Jenna was concerned.
The hatred burning from Sabrina’s black eyes into Jenna told Logan that Sabrina knew Jenna mattered to him, and she didn’t like it. “Give me a few minutes, Jenna,” he urged, trying to get her off Sabrina’s radar, out of danger. Sabrina would hurt Jenna—he had no doubt. Causing pain entertained Sabrina.
“And since they might be the last few minutes he knows in this lifetime,” Sabrina said, “don’t hurry back. I’d hate to taint your delicate sensibilities with the sight of blood.”
Jenna gasped and turned to Logan in silent question.
“It’s okay,” he assured her, more than accustomed to Sabrina’s threats, even physical demands, and then smiled. “If she kills me, you get to be in charge.” Her eyes went wide, and he laughed. “I’m joking.” He glanced at his watch, shocked at the time. “How did it get to be two o’clock in the morning? Go to bed, Jenna. We’ll start fresh in the morning. Or rather, later in the morning at this point.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to leave. I—”
“It’s okay,” he assured her, oddly warmed by the realization that she was worried about him. No one worried about him. He was a loner by design, by duty. Yet, even now, with his assurances, she looked as if she might dig in her heels and insist on staying. “I’m okay.” He motioned to the door. “Go rest. Tomorrow is another day.”
She didn’t look convinced. “You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
She studied him a moment and then nodded before reluctantly heading to the exit opposite from where Sabrina stood, glancing over her shoulder as if she might change her mind.
The minute Jenna shut the door, Sabrina slammed hers. In a blink, Logan was shoved against the concrete wall. Pain bit a path down his spine, and air lodged in his lungs.
“You know I like it rough, baby,” he said breathlessly, “but I thought we’d agreed to keep the violence in the bedroom, preferably with you naked, before we get started. Somehow that makes the pain endurable.” Sadly, more than endurable. More like darkly erotic in ways he’d never thought possible. He hated this woman, yet he wanted her, and he had no idea why. Even now his cock was hard; even now, he was ready for her.
Not like Jenna. Jenna had changed everything, made him regret Sabrina, made him wish he didn’t want her and wish he could turn back the clock. But it was too late. He was in too deep with Sabrina, and he couldn’t turn back.
Sabrina’s hand snaked out, a strong GTECH finger pressing to his throat, choking him. “Is that rough enough for you, Logan, honey?” she asked, her free hand sliding up his thigh and pressing to his crotch. “Because right now, I’m feeling like hurting you real bad. You converted Lara too quickly. She conspired with Lucian and sold us out to the Renegades.”
For Logan, the implications of her words were lost to one need. “Air” Logan tried to gasp, but nothing came out. He couldn’t breathe. Desperately, he grabbed at her fingers, trying to pry them free of his neck. “Please.” The strangled word was barely audible. Her fingers dug deeper into his neck, and somehow he fo
rced out the words, “Can fix… her… Lar… a…”
She glared at him, her eyes black ice, so cold he was sure he was a dead man. Instead, a disgusted sound slid from her lips, and she dropped him to the ground. “Pathetic human,” she said. “Your begging disgusts me. It changes nothing.” She whirled around, giving him her back, and sauntered to a lab table.
He sucked in the sweet bliss of air and rubbed his bruised neck. Contrary to her insults, he knew she loved when he begged, loved playing dominatrix—but he wasn’t a fool. She would still kill him. She’d just drag it out and make him suffer first.
She leaned against a lab table, watching him with a mixture of amusement and lust. Hurting him turned her on. Damn it to hell, why did it turn him on too? Deep down, he knew. He wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. Confinement to the Serenity lab had stolen that rush of danger, the high of living on the edge that being a CIA assassin had given him.
He felt it now through the rush, the adrenaline pulsing through him. He was standing on a ledge about to be pushed, and he freaking lived for this feeling. This was where he was best—on the edge, where his mind worked best. And why he’d been a damn good undercover agent.
“Bring Lara to me,” he said. “The Renegades trust her. I’ll reprogram her to use the Renegade trust to destroy them, and Lucian along with them.”
“I killed Lucian, but Lara is already under Renegade protection,” she said. “I can’t get to her. The damage is done. Serenity is exposed.”
“Powell is a master manipulator,” Logan said. “He’ll find a way to spin this with the White House. Serenity will survive this. It will go on.”
“And so will I,” she said. “Which means Powell has to know I dealt with those who failed him—definitively and decisively. You have to die, Logan.” She shoved off the table and sauntered toward him, pressing against him. “I’ll make it good for you, sugar. When you come, when you’re feeling no pain, I’ll end it then. For old time’s sake.”
“Why would you want to kill the one person who can give you Lara?” he asked. His mind raced, calculating how to turn the tables and make this work for him.
She laughed. “Right. You can give me Lara. I don’t think so.”
“Every GTECH subject I assimilated to Bar-1 has a built-in trigger,” he said. “And that trigger, when activated, will bring them back to their old self. Use that trigger in the right way, the way I alone know to use it, and Lara will not only come running right back into your hands, she’ll be a blank canvas ready for creation.”
“You’re lying,” she accused. “The GTECH immune system destroys any foreign objects. A trigger wouldn’t survive insertion.”
“That’s where my scientific expertise comes into play,” he said.
She narrowed her gaze, angst in their depths that he read as fear that, she too, possessed such a trigger. “Powell knows of this trigger?”
“I never, ever, show my full hand until necessary,” he said. “A way to ensure I’m necessary.”
“Show me,” she said. “Use this trigger now. Bring Lara to me.”
“I’ll use the trigger with Powell present or not at all.”
Her gaze narrowed. “You failed with Lara once. Why would any of us trust you to brainwash her again?”
“Just because Lucian lured Lara to the dark side with the Renegades does not mean I failed,” he said. “It simply means Lucian succeeded and should never have been trusted in the first place.” Nor should Sabrina, he suspected, despite her desperateness to maintain the protection from Adam that Serenity offered her.
“If you’re suggesting Lara turned on us, but didn’t regain her memories, that we simply lost control over her, then that means we could lose control of every last member of Serenity. If you actually expect Powell to feel good about that—” She patted his cheek. “You need therapy. Sorry, sugar. You might as well face the facts. You’re a walking dead man and not for long, because I can’t allow you to live through this. Powell isn’t going to trust you again.”
“Oh, but he will,” Logan said, his heart thundering in his ears at her threat. “He’ll trust me again because he wants Serenity to be more powerful, and he wants the destruction of the GTECHs who are outside his control. I can give him those things.”
“How?” she demanded.
“We send a newly brainwashed Lara back to the Renegades. Once she’s inside Sunrise City, she places a few strategically located bombs inside, and it will be dust.”
She studied him, her fingers doing a slow, calculating roll, back and forth on his shoulder, as if that were a part of her thinking process. “If I let you speak to Powell, there’s a good chance he’ll still have you killed.”
Better odds than he had with Sabrina right here and now. “I’ll convince him he needs me.”
“And if you do convince him, and then you fail, I can promise you… you’ll wish you were dead by the time he finishes making you pay.”
“I won’t fail,” he assured her.
He’d barely finished the last word of the vow when a knife appeared in Sabrina’s hand, drawn from somewhere on her person, and she pressed the blade to his face. “Sorry again, sugar, but I have to make sure Powell knows I made you suffer for your mistake. It’ll ease his anger and make him focus on your plan.”
The blade bit into his flesh, a small trickle of blood oozing down his cheek. In a quick shift of her wrist, she sliced it down his shirt, the steel grazing his skin, before her hand flattened on his chest, and she walked him to the wall. Her palm slid down his chest and settled on his crotch, a smile touching her lips when she felt the bulge there.
“Apparently,” she said, “you know this is for your own good.”
No. He was pretty sure, in fact, that this woman was as bad for him as a shot of arsenic straight into his veins, but he couldn’t seem to care right now. Not when he was rock hard with anticipation and pure white-hot lust for her. A momentary mental image of Jenna’s lovely face brought with it a sense of regret. Sabrina’s teeth roughly bit at his nipple, pain and pleasure ripping through him, and he lost the image. There was nothing but the ache of wanting more—more pleasure, and yes, more pain.
Who was he fooling with Jenna? He loved the idea of her, but he could never be the man she needed—and deserved. No. He lived for the kind of high Sabrina gave him, the edgy, dark, perverse high of pain mixed with pleasure and the danger of going too far or not far enough—made easier by a shared desire to save the world before an uncontrollable GTECH population took it over.
Sabrina lifted him and then slammed him down onto a lab table before straddling him. Pain crashed through his skull as it hit steel, quickly forgotten by the demanding pressure of her tongue sliding into his mouth, the feel of her hips arched against his. Oh yeah, baby, he whispered in his mind. This woman, this GTECH, took him to the edge and kept him there—and the edge was exactly where he wanted, and needed, to be.
***
From inside her private quarters, Jenna barely contained a scream as she watched the lab’s video footage play on her computer—feeding to her from the camera meant to allow the monitoring of procedures when she wasn’t present. Logan knew the camera was there, knew she had access to it as well.
It was almost as if he wanted her to see this, as if he were telling her what he hungered for. It wasn’t little, sweet Jenna. She glared at the image of Sabrina roughly dominating Logan, of his grunts of pain and moans of pleasure, and then hit the end button. She couldn’t watch another second.
All her life, the Sabrinas of the world—conniving sex vixens who took and bled you dry of happiness—had taken from her. Juliette Rogers had been the one before Sabrina, the one who’d stolen her husband and scientific mentor back at Yale. With him had gone her role in a cutting-edge research program. She’d lost her life, her happy, wonderful life. She didn’t please him in bed, her husband had said, and then he’d gone on to call her boring and predictable, too naive and guarded to ever take the scientific world by storm. br />
Juliette had used her husband, screwed him senseless, and he’d not seen what she was up to until it was too late. Juliette had left him, and not only taken the funding for his research with her, but made it look like he’d stolen the cash. He’d lost everything, including his reputation. Just like Sabrina was going to destroy Logan, and Serenity, if something wasn’t done to stop her.
Jenna flipped open one of the rectangular black boxes, one of seven she secretly possessed, which were now sitting on her glass desk. She stared at the row of filled syringes.
Each time she’d dosed Lara, she’d diluted her serum and taken some for herself. Jenna had calculated through her private research, with findings she had yet to reveal to Logan or Powell, that Lara would convert to GTECH just fine, and she had. Foolishly, Powell’s previous scientific teams had been using more of the precious serum than needed. After skimming serum from Lara and the newest recruit presently undergoing conversion, Jenna had enough to fully change herself into a GTECH. Finally, she was ready to begin dosing herself.
With a shaky hand, she lifted one of the syringes and stared at the golden liquid inside—the unique DNA of an alien. The DNA that would soon pour through her body. The DNA that would give her the power Sabrina now possessed. She wanted that, yet the idea of injecting herself with it set her heart to racing, thundering loudly in her ears.
Desperate to regain her resolve, she reached forward and punched a computer key, bringing the lab back into view, letting the sounds and sights of Logan’s desire for Sabrina fill the room, fill her mind, and expand in her chest. Logan’s face contorted with so much lust and desire for Sabrina that it twisted Jenna in knots. She wanted a man to feel that kind of ultimate desire for her, but instead, the men in her life had wanted the Juliettes and Sabrinas of the world.
Why didn’t Logan, and even Powell, see what kind of poison Sabrina was? She was no different than the GTECHs they were trying to stop—uncontrollable and power hungry. It was clear to Jenna, just as it had been with Juliette.