As Cold As Ice (17 page)

“
That’s what I was trying
to do.”

Asshole.

“
Yeah, well, you and the
other handlers will just have to keep jerking each other off in the
locker rooms, because you’re not touching this,” she
said.

Why is this guy here instead of Soren? Is he
sick?

Jessica couldn't ignore the unsettling cold
that had iced her at the thought. What if something happened to
him?

The handler sputtered behind her. “I can
touch you whenever I…want…”

The handler trailed off, like someone was
turning the dial down to slow on his brain.

It was probably one of Jessica’s worst ideas
to undress in front of the man, as it put her in a vulnerable
position. But she was trained to defend herself, and she wanted to
throw the asshole off.

If he thought he was taking power from her
by putting his hands on her, then she needed to get that idea out
of his tiny little head. She was still smarter, stronger, and
faster than he ever would be. This little shithead could bring all
the guys he wanted in there and he could have sex with her in front
of the lot of them, and he still wouldn’t break her.

Jessica grabbed a clean pair of cotton
panties from her drawer after she kicked away her pajama shorts,
bending over to put them on. She couldn’t stop herself from smiling
when she heard the tiny hitch of breath that came from the boy
behind her.

Boy
, because there was no way in hell her mind was going to
continue to think of this kid as a man. The youngest anyone could
be to apply for a job as a handler was eighteen.

“
You ever touch a woman
before, there, junior?” Jessica asked, putting on a fun and
flirting tone. She half-turned to look at him, giving the kid a
view of her breasts.

Naturally, his eyes shot straight down and
stayed there. Not uncommon—Jessica did flatter herself to have a
fine rack—but this guy was clearly young enough that he didn’t know
how to even pretend to have any kind of restraint.

It took him a couple of seconds to realize
what she’d even said to him, and he actually shook his head, like a
cartoon character shaking away a daze. “What? Yes!” he snapped.

It was the fact that he sounded so defensive
that made her doubt it, though she would’ve already known the
answer to that even if he’d said nothing at all.

“
Sure you have,” she said.
Then, just to be an even bigger tease, she decided she was going to
go without her bra for the rest of the day. She grabbed her black
t-shirt with the Head Office logo on it, faced the kid completely,
and then swiftly put the t-shirt over her head, letting it slide
down her body.

This kid definitely had no restraint. She
watched the way his Adam’s apple bobbed hard against his throat.
She couldn’t help but smile.

“
You know, all you had to
do was say you were a virgin, and I might’ve let you keep touching.
At least it’ll be good learning for when you get your first
girlfriend,” Jessica said. Despite the situation, she felt
strangely empowered, like she’d woken up on the right side of the
bed, regardless of
how
this idiot had woken her up.

The kid smiled and shook his head, as though
Jessica was the young idiot in the room. “Lady, you’re really
pushing it.”

“
Uh-huh.” Jessica pulled on
her pants then sat down on her bed and pulled on her socks and
black Head Office-issued shoes. “So, let me guess, you’re here to
take me to the other recruits.”

“
No, I’m here to take you
to see the doctors.”

Jessica froze. There was only one reason why
this kid would be doing that: the implant. The one that had to be
put inside of her before she left this place with the other
paranormals.

Maybe Soren was there waiting for her and
that was why this guy had been sent.

If Soren had been jealous when she’d been
sitting close to Charles, she wondered how he would react when she
told him some acne-faced kid had been trying to feel her up.

She got to her feet, smiling and so eager to
get moving that the handler actually stepped back, like he was
expecting an attack.

“
All right, what are you
waiting for? Let’s go.”

Chapter Nineteen

Soren was not with the
other doctors when Jessica went for her exam, and to have a huge
tracker injected into her arm with the biggest, thickest needle in
the history of time, like out of
The
Hunger Games
or something. Only thicker.
It was shocking that she didn’t need two stitches after the thing
had been injected inside her.

She lived in a world where drills were small
enough to make perfect holes in the stem of a single hair, and
Markus was so damned cheap with the equipment he used on his
prisoners that she got stuck with a horse pill being injected into
her arm.

At least it wasn’t in her ass cheek. She
told herself that again and again, trying to make herself feel
better with that one bit of good news, but it still didn’t make up
for the fact that she had no idea where Soren was.

Getting her blood taken and having a
pill-sized thing injected into her arm was bad enough—Jessica
absolutely hated needles—but the fact that Soren wasn't around was
really making the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stand on
end.

Where the hell was he? Once Jessica thought
about it, she realized she'd never bothered to ask what his actual
title was whenever he was working. He wore a white lab coat like a
lot of other employees, but that didn't necessarily make him a
doctor. Maybe he was just a lab guy, someone who looked at beakers
and into test tubes while trying to find ways of making paranormal
DNA useful to the rest of the human population.

Despite those thoughts going through her
head, Jessica swallowed hard and sat straight, letting everything
be done to her that the men and women around her wanted to be
done.

Soren was in trouble; she'd have to be an
idiot not to see that. He was a paranormal working secretly in Head
Office. The fact that he wasn't there was telling.

The next time a woman in white came up to
her and handed her the pajamas all the other paranormals wore, that
she would be wearing during the fake escape, Jessica smiled and
tried to be casual.

"I heard Soren's sick today. There a bug
going around?"

The woman just smiled at her. "Yeah,
something like that. I hope I don't catch it," she said with a
soft, sincere laugh.

It was the sort of tone Jessica might've
believed, had she not been making shit up.

When the woman walked away, leaving Jessica
to get dressed alone and in peace—not counting the cameras that
were watching her at that moment—she had to keep her head down.

She pretended she was just paying very close
attention to her legs as she put one after the other into each
pajama leg, but she just didn't want the cameras to see her
expression. She knew she wouldn't be able to hide it.

They knew. Somehow, the people working in
this building had found out what Soren was, and he was gone. Was he
still in the building? Was he wearing shackles and being
experimented on somehow?

What had given him away? The fact that
they'd gone down to the arena without needing to? Had there been
cameras watching them after all?

Soren hadn't brought his scrambler with them
into that room, and even if he had, she hadn't seen him activate it
before he'd told her the image she'd seen on Markus' screen wasn't
real.

Markus had to have known. Regardless of how
it had happened, he'd found out, and Soren was gone.

Jessica's throat closed. She bit her lips
together when she felt a tremble there, and then she started
cracking her knuckles as she paced around the tiny white changing
room, waiting for someone to come back and retrieve her.

There was nothing in the room she could
smash or destroy, other than the little three-legged stool in the
corner. She doubted she could get away with breaking that thing
without having someone rush through the curtains to demand what the
hell she'd been doing, anyway.

Cracking her knuckles was another nice way
of relieving stress when there was nothing else for her to take her
aggression out on. Right then, she wanted to cry. Actually cry,
like some little girl who’d dropped the one scoop of ice cream that
had been placed on her cone. She also wanted to kill everyone in
this building then light them on fire. Why couldn't her powers be
fire? Why did Cindy have to get something cool like that?

She wanted the fucking shackles removed from
her wrists.

Someone finally came back for her, the same
woman who'd handed her the pajamas. She held out her arm, and
Jessica walked to her. She allowed the older woman to put her hand
on Jessica's shoulder as she led her out of the white room where
she'd been tested, poked and prodded.

How was she supposed to get
out of there without knowing what happened to Soren? How was she
supposed to cut the tracker out of her arm then leave him behind?
She didn't even know if he was dead or not. He
could
be dead. These people didn't
exactly care about anything other than themselves. Markus might've
decided it was too humiliating to have three employees in a matter
of weeks revealed to him as either paranormals or traitors, and
just killed him for the fun of it.

Jessica clenched her fists tight and
followed the female doctor, along with at least three other guards,
down to one of the coded elevators.

She kept her face as neutral as possible,
though she felt the twitch of a coming frown when the button for
the basement floor was pressed.

Was she expected to sit in her cell again
for a while amongst the other paranormals before they were let
out?

She didn't even know the details of how that
was going to happen. Stupid Charles and his stupid asshole
need-to-know bullshit.

No one in the elevator with her would offer
any answers either, so she didn't ask, just waited until they were
on the basement floor.

When they made it, she was greeted with more
guards, a couple of handlers, and even the asshole handler who’d
felt her up when she was in bed.

The guy smiled at her. She
winked at him, and made a gentle kissing motion with her lips, but
no sounds. She didn’t exactly smile at him, but she knew how to
give off that
come hither
look that let guys know she was in the mood for
sex.

The kid actually blushed, and if she was
lucky, was also troubled with an immediate erection as he was
surrounded by his peers.

God, she really hoped she’d done that to
him. Jessica was a woman, but she knew how much guys, especially
young guys, were embarrassed whenever they had public erections. If
Jessica was lucky, then one of his friends would notice the awkward
way he started to shift from foot to foot, and then later rub it in
his face when he got to the locker room.

“
You shouldn’t do things
like that,” said the female doctor walking with her. Apparently,
Jessica’s teasing wasn’t going unnoticed. The guards and handlers
walking with her probably saw it, as well. Good. That meant the kid
was definitely going to hear about it later.

“
Why not?”

The older woman’s lips thinned. “I don’t
necessarily agree with a lot of the things some of the handlers and
guards do around here, but they do like sneaking into the rooms of
pretty paranormals from time to time. If you tease him like that,
he’ll want to get back at you. No one would help you if that
happened.”

Jessica rolled her eyes.

“
I’m being serious. Don’t
give him a reason to think he needs to retaliate.”

“
Sex is sex. It doesn’t
matter.”

“
Doesn’t matter? You don’t
care if that young man tried to rape you because you teased
him?”

To this woman’s credit, she sounded
genuinely concerned. Jessica couldn’t decide if it was a woman
thing, or if she was maybe a halfway decent person who got sucked
into doing something she didn’t want to. Anyone could be anything
in this building.

“
The entire point of rape
is to prove control over the victim, to break a person, and to get
off. If that kid wants to hold me down and stick his dick inside of
me, he’ll get to do only one out of those three.”

The woman looked away from her, keeping her
eyes back on where they were going. “I’m shocked you feel that way.
Most other people have a different view on sexual assault. Has
someone in this building already hurt you?”

Again, she sounded sympathetic.

“
No, but if they did, it
wouldn’t matter.”

“
Because sex is
sex?”

“
It only means something if
I let it. As far as I’m concerned, that kid is nothing, and he’ll
continue to be nothing even after he and his friends have fucked
me.”

The woman beside her said nothing. Maybe it
was because Jessica had shocked her.

She’d kind of shocked herself, actually. She
believed those things she said, and not just because she’d been
telling herself those exact words ever since she’d been shackled
and thrown into a hole. The fact that no one had made a serious
attempt to have sex with her yet was a shocker in itself, but
Jessica had known that was the sort of thing that went on with
prisoners ever since she’d become a hunter.

She’d conditioned herself to never care, to
look at sex for what it really was. People who attributed sex with
some sort of emotional importance were missing the entire point and
setting themselves up for disaster. It was why people were always
so devastated when a loved one cheated, or why many people walked
around with a haze of misery and distrust surrounding them even
years after being assaulted themselves.