Deadly Game
Page 5

She flushed, unable to keep the color from rising in her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” She glanced at Jack. He was watching his brother, his expression wary—why, she couldn’t tell. “I was checking in.”
“I’ll bet you were,” Jack said. “Ken, why don’t you take a break and I’ll have a little chat with our guest?”
The tension in the room shot up perceptibly. Ken turned slowly, hands out away from his sides. There was nothing overtly threatening in his manner, but Marigold’s heart began to pound in alarm. She reached out without thinking, her fingers sliding down Ken’s arm. She felt his muscles rippling beneath the thin material of his shirt and then the pads of her fingers slid over warm skin and settled there. She could feel his scars against her smooth palm. Once again heightened awareness of him as a man and her as a woman shot through her.
Ken stopped moving, leaving her fingers wrapped halfway around his wrist, but he didn’t turn around. He faced his brother, and Mari glanced at the window, trying to see his expression. In the glass, his scars didn’t show and she could see the same masculine beauty that was carved so exquisitely in his brother’s face. Her heart gave off a curious melting sensation. She had a strange desire to frame that face with her hands, to kiss every single scar and tell him none of them mattered. But she knew they did. Something deadly lay beneath that surface of destruction, and somehow it was tied up in each of those terrible slices made into his flesh and bone.
Jack spread his hands out in front of him, held his right palm up. “It was just a suggestion.”
“I can handle things here, no problem,” Ken said.
Jack shrugged and stepped out of the room.
“What was that?” Mari asked.
Ken turned back to her, his face as expressionless as ever. “You don’t know?”
Did she? Mari was so confused with her reaction to him, with her behavior and the fact that she wasn’t in terrible pain as long as she was close to him that she couldn’t seem to think with a clear head. He had admitted he’d given her painkillers; maybe they were making her thinking fuzzy, because nothing was making sense.
Unless . . . It couldn’t be. She would know, wouldn’t she? Her mouth went dry at the thought that Whitney had somehow paired her with this man. Her fingers tightened around his wrist. “Come closer to me.” Whitney had many, many experiments, and his worst was combining couples—his breeding program. It was why she had convinced the others in her unit to allow her to join them one more time so she could personally speak to the senator.
Violet knew her. Violet would vouch for her. Speaking to the senator and asking—begging—him to intervene was the only way she and the other women could continue to do their duty as soldiers. And if she didn’t get back to the compound fast, too many people were going to get hurt.
“You know,” he said, his voice soft.
She closed her eyes and looked away from him. She’d been trained as a soldier almost since the day she was born, and she was proud of her abilities. But suddenly, Whitney had pulled the women off the units and brought them to a new location, a new training center, and they’d become virtual prisoners. Whitney had paired some of the men with the women using some kind of scent compatibility. It was more complicated than that, but she had seen the results and they weren’t very nice. The men were obsessed, whether or not the women responded to them. And it didn’t seem to matter to most of them one way or the other. She and the other women had conspired to get one of them out of the compound to approach Senator Freeman and Violet in the hopes that he would shut down Whitney’s operation and return them to their units.
Mari had never been attracted to any of the men she knew and respected, yet she was fascinated by a total stranger, her enemy, a man who would have killed her. She was not just attracted; the feeling was all-encompassing. She wanted to soothe away his hurts. She needed to find a way to take away the stark loneliness she saw in him.
Somehow Whitney had paired her with this man. He didn’t act as if he reciprocated, and Mari was ashamed of herself. She detested the men in the breeding program for their lack of discipline and control, and yet she was acting nearly as bad. This was a horrible situation and one that wasn’t going to be easily overcome.
What did she want anyway? To sleep with him, just as the men did with her? Did she think he was going to fall madly in love with her? There was no such thing. Love was an illusion. According to Whitney, it was their duty to sleep with their partner in order to have a child. So far, she had resisted, and she’d been punished numerous times, but the idea of intimacy with Brett, of all men—a vicious brute of a man who enjoyed inflicting punishments—was a little too much for her stubborn streak.
Ken hadn’t pulled away from her, and she let him go, the heat of his skin burning into her palm. He refused to look away. She could feel his gaze on her, and she shook her head.
“You know Whitney,” he said.
“So do you. Why don’t we know each other?” Her lashes lifted, and she silently prayed she was wrong, that he wasn’t going to have any effect on her. His eyes met hers, and her stomach did that stupid flip she was beginning to hate. The tingle of awareness spread, becoming a rush of heat that made her br**sts tighten. She wanted to cry. It was wrong to manipulate anyone sexually—even soldiers raised on duty and discipline.
“Whitney has several experiments going. We’re just beginning to understand how many. He adopted female babies from foreign countries and experimented on them. Regardless of his security clearance, no one was going to authorize that, so he kept the girls hidden using various means. Briony was adopted out to a family, but he kept tabs on her, insisting on mapping out her education and training as well as sending his private doctor to monitor her health. I met her a few weeks ago.”
She tried not to react. It could be a trick—a setup. Another test. Whitney often tested them, and if they failed, the consequences were dire. She said nothing, just stared up at his face. The mask gave nothing away. She was good at reading people, but not him. Even touching him gave her no information, only a strange, soothing peace. And she shouldn’t feel peaceful; she should feel alert. Could it be a new kind of interrogation drug? She almost wished it were. She feared it was the beginning of an addiction to a man, and that was simply not acceptable.
“You’re identical twins, obviously. She looks just like you.”
Mari turned her face away from him, knowing she couldn’t hide her expression. She had longed for information on her sister for years. Now, here it was, if she could believe it. Dropped straight into her lap, and how big of a coincidence was that? She bit her lip to keep from a sarcastic reply. It had to be a setup. There was no way she could casually meet this man and have him know her long-lost sister. But even if he was lying, she was so starved for news of Briony she wanted him to keep talking, and that was just plain pathetic.
“Are you listening?”
Of course she was listening. “I like fairy tales.”
“I can stop then. I wouldn’t want to bore you.” He stepped away from her, back toward the shadows, away from the light. It was the first restless move she’d seen him make, when he was so in control. The movement reminded her of a great caged tiger, pacing with impatience and frustration. He needed to be outside, in the mountains, away from civilization. He was too wild, too much of a predator to be caged in a house.
“I was enjoying the story.” Had she revealed too much, or had she managed to sound as if that was all it was to her—a fairy tale? She wanted him back, wanted him closer. As soon as he retreated, pain engulfed her. “You’re an anchor,” she said.
Without an anchor to draw psychic backlash, she was always wide open to assault. Much like someone born with autism, she no longer had the necessary filters to keep her brain from being under constant attack by all the stimulation around her. He was controlling that for her, she realized.
“Yes. So is Jack.”
Jack. The beautiful one. The one who had Ken’s face. How did it feel to stand beside his brother every day, to look into the face he should have had? It had to hurt. No matter how stoic he was, no matter how much he loved his brother, he had to look at that face and hurt.
Mari studied him as he leaned one hip lazily against the far wall, there in the shadows. She was certain it was a place he was far more comfortable. Did he realize the scars weren’t as obvious as in the glare of light? That when darkness touched him, his face was nearly as handsome as Jack’s? She doubted it. He favored the shadows simply because he could disappear into them.
“And Jack knows this Briony you claim is my sister?”
He sighed. “We’re going to play games?”
“You’re a soldier, probably black ops. How much are you willing to give up? Not even your name, rank, and serial number. You don’t exist in the military, do you?”
“I know your name. It’s Marigold. Your sister told me. She suffers tremendous pain when she tries to remember you, because Whitney manipulated her memories. She’s been frantic to find you. Whitney had her adopted parents killed when they refused to allow her to go to Colombia. You know why he was so determined she go there?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “He wanted her to run into Jack. He wanted her to meet him so he could continue his latest experiment. He wants their child.”
Her heart slammed hard in her chest and the bile rose again. This time she couldn’t stop it. “I’m going to be sick.”
He was there in an instant, handing her a small pan. It was humiliating to lie in bed throwing her guts up under his piercing gaze. She wanted to scream at him to go away and leave her so she could rage at the unfairness—at the betrayal. She had sacrificed everything to keep Briony safe. Everything. She had endured her sterile life, living without a home or family, never seeing the outside of the compound unless she was running a mission, the punishing training, the discipline and experiments—all of it. She endured it without protest so Briony could have a life somewhere. That was the bargain she’d made as a child, with the devil. He’d promised her that if she cooperated, Briony could live a dream life. She could have the fairy tale. Love. Laughter. Family. Briony was supposed to have it all.
Ken handed her a wet cloth to wipe her mouth. She didn’t meet those glittering eyes. She couldn’t. If he was telling the truth—and she suddenly suspected he was—her entire life had been a lie, and if Ken saw her face right then, he would know.
Whitney cared nothing for the soldiers he housed in his compounds. She had watched him as he made his observations on them all, his cold snake eyes excited and fanatical when he got his results, and angry and malevolent when he didn’t. They weren’t real to him—not people—only test subjects.
“Did they meet in Colombia?” Her voice was a whisper, a strangled sound that was too close to tears. Tears were a weakness—one soldiers didn’t indulge in. How often had she heard that as a child? Soldiers didn’t play. Soldiers were about duty and hardship and skill.
“No. Her parents refused to allow her to go and he had them murdered. She walked in right after and found them.” His voice was gentle, as if he knew he was hurting her with the telling. “She has brothers, but like you she needs an anchor. Living in close proximity without one was hell on her at times. Particularly as a child, before she was strong enough to build some small protections.”
Mari nodded. She knew what it was like to be bombarded with too much emotion, and a child living in a household with parents and brothers would have headaches and blackouts, maybe even brain bleeds. “He did it on purpose to see how tough she would be, didn’t he? I was in a controlled, sterile environment and she was put out in a chaotic, busy household. He wanted to compare how we handled it.”