As Cold As Ice (18 page)

Jessica had promised herself to never let
that happen. Every sexual experience she’d had was always practical
as a result. The purpose was to get off, relieve some pent-up
stress and frustration, and that was it. Nothing more, and nothing
less. If her current boyfriend wanted to wake her up in the middle
of the night for sex, then she’d give it to him, even if she wasn’t
in the mood. She understood that need to get off, and it didn’t
seem fair to her to deny her lover just because she was too tired
to make an effort on herself.

Not that she was ever silent and cold about
it, either. Jessica knew how to enjoy herself, even when she knew
she wasn’t about to get off.

But this, hearing the words of her belief
system spoken out loud for probably the first time in her entire
life, was stunning to the point that she was uncomfortable. Not
necessarily because what she’d said wasn’t true. It was. It had to
be.

It was because without realizing it until
that moment, she’d gone outside of the rules she’d laid out for
herself, had convinced herself she needed to be true for her and
everyone else.

She’d attached some sort of emotional
feeling to sex when Soren had her against the wall, and down on
that steel table with his hands on her.

And she didn’t know where he was anymore.
Was he caught? Had he been found out and locked away? That was the
only explanation that made sense, and Jessica’s heart pounded
faster and faster inside of her chest, like it was trying to
destroy her ribs and leave them in splinters.

They were just nearing the double doors that
would lead to the arena when they burst open and a figure flew out.
It looked that way anyway, considering how the bodies all soared
through the air before landing hard on the ground.

It was several guards in white tackling a
man with red-brown hair, wearing a paranormal jumpsuit.

Jessica’s breath hitched. It was the hair
that made her think of Soren, made her actually see his face
screwed up and angry as he tried to escape from the guards that
were pushing him down, yanking his arms roughly behind his back,
and then pulling him kicking and screaming back to his feet.

It wasn’t Soren. She knew it, but she had to
blink a few times before she could see it, and only then could she
breathe again. It was probably all the thrashing around that made
it difficult to see the man’s face, made it easy for things to blur
inside of her mind and make her see someone who wasn’t even there.
The man’s hair was all wrong, anyway. It was too short, and it was
only the fluorescent lighting that made her think there was more
red in there than there actually was. The man’s hair was actually
dark brown, like the color of soil, and not at all like the color
that could be found whenever she’d stripped the bark off a paper
birch.

The man was dragged back into the room,
screaming all the way. The guards who took him away didn’t even
seem to notice or care that Jessica was even there, and the guards
surrounding her certainly hadn’t bothered to help the others. The
most they’d done was stop their own walk for a couple of seconds to
give the other guards room to work and take away their
prisoner.

For the first time since she’d thought about
it, the worst kind of icy chill, the kind she couldn’t control and
didn’t want, made everything inside of her chest freeze up and hold
in place. For a second, her chest constricted and she couldn’t
breathe. That hadn’t been Soren, but he was being held somewhere.
She didn’t need to be able to read minds, see into the future, or
have the power to look through walls to know something like
that.

“
All right, let’s go,” said
the doctor.

Jessica’s feet moved on autopilot. There
wasn’t any time to get her breathing back under control, or stop
the light trembling in her limbs. She was just going to have to
hope no one else noticed it.

When she walked into the room with the
female doctor and more than a dozen guards circling behind her, she
half-expected to see Markus, but not in person, which made the
sight of him sitting in one of those obnoxiously huge leather
chairs a surprise.

She also hadn’t expected to see the other
recruits she’d been training with over the last couple of days.
They all stared at her while several frowned, as though not yet
getting why she would be dressed in the same pajamas that the other
paranormals wore. Then the whispering started. Several of them
sneered at her. She wasn’t wearing any black gloves. There was no
hiding the shackles on her wrists.

The other person she hadn’t expected to see
was Soren himself.

Jessica was caught off-guard. If she’d known
he would be there, she would’ve had time to school her features, to
prepare for it. Instead, she caught herself as her mouth tugged up
at the sides. She’d stopped herself before letting it go full-out,
but it was too late. When she turned her eyes to Markus, he was
clearly looking at her, and he knew who she’d been staring at. Who
she’d been about to smile at.

Even that wasn’t enough to fully lessen the
impact of just seeing the other man was all right. Though Jessica
had never experienced a death of someone she’d loved, she had been
disowned and sent away by her family. That was as close to having
people close to her die as the actual thing. How she felt for Soren
right then, as though she’d already thought he was dead, and then
could see him alive and well, everything felt like it was going to
be all right.

In her happiness, the stupid emotion that
clouded out reality, she didn’t notice right away how the bags
under his eyes were a little more pronounced than they usually
were. His hair was all over the place, and though he looked clean
enough, and his lab coat was only as rumpled as it usually was
whenever he slept in it, something looked decidedly off.

He was holding another clipboard in his
hands, and with his elbows bent, it pulled back at his white
sleeves just enough to show off the shackle on his wrist.

Oh, no.
No
.

Markus called attention to himself with a
resounding clap of his hands. Everyone in the room stopped
murmuring, stopped shifting around, and they all gave their
attention to the man, even the paranormals who were huddled in the
middle of the arena, which thankfully, hadn’t been lowered yet.

“
Everyone, thank you for
answering my summons and taking the time to come down here.
Usually, this is only for VIPs, but since the recruits will all be
graduating soon and receiving their licenses, I figured something
of a treat was in order.”

Jessica didn’t like the sound of that. She
looked to Soren, trying to see for herself if he was hurt. He shook
his head at her, so softly she barely noticed it.

“
It seems there was an
effort, right under my very nose, to help certain individuals
escape from the building.”

Markus looked right at her, a smarmy little
smirk on his face, right before he rose from his chair and walked
over to Soren.

Soren kept his eyes down on his
clipboard—what in the hell could he be looking at?—so he either
didn’t see it coming or decided not to react when Markus slammed
his fist into his gut.

Soren’s blue eyes popped so wide that even
from a distance, Jessica could see the whites all around them.

“
Stop that!” Jessica
roared. She marched forward maybe two steps before two guards
stepped in her path, grabbing her shoulders.

Soren dropped his clipboard and fell to his
knees. One hand was flat on the concrete floor while the other
clutched at his gut. He coughed and wheezed. Jessica’s insides
ached for him. She knew his strength, and knew the shackles on his
wrists had to really be sucking him dry for Markus’ one punch to
have had an effect like that.

“
I do not appreciate
insubordination among my employees!” Markus lifted his foot up and
stomped it down hard on Soren’s hand. Soren screamed with what
little breath he had in his lungs. A lot of that pained noise
sounded like wheezing air as he grabbed his wrist.

Markus seemed to take great pleasure in
moving his heel, as if he was stomping out a cigarette butt.

Jessica groaned with her inability to do
anything, to help Soren when he needed it the most.

No
. No, no, no.

Markus sighed, finally lifting his foot off
Soren’s bleeding hand. He walked back over to his fancy leather
chair. It had a cup holder on the arm, because of course it did.
That was the sort of thing a man sat in when he was about to get
some entertainment. There was a bottle of Coke in the cup holder
that was perspiring. It released a fizzing noise when Markus turned
the cap, and then tilted his head back to get a drink.

He made the same noise every actor did in a
Pepsi or Coke commercial, as if the act of hitting and torturing
Soren had been so back-breaking that he needed a carbonated drink
to replenish his energy. What Jessica saw could’ve been a
commercial right there, especially when he smiled at her. “You
can’t trust anyone these days. If I want shit done right, I have to
oversee everything myself.”

Chapter Twenty

“
It’s my fault. I seduced
him. I made him…I made him…I…” Jessica couldn’t think of what to
say. She was stuck. It literally felt like her brain and tongue
were stuck, and no matter how much she tried to calm down, tried to
get back in control of herself so she could just
think
and figure out
what to say to fix this, nothing came.

Markus seemed to notice this in her. He put
his bottle back down in the cup holder of his leather chair. “Not
so confident with yourself now, are you?” he asked.

“
It was my fault. He didn’t
mean to,” Jessica pleaded, although she knew it wasn’t helping. He
would just be aware that she was full of shit that he was going to
see through her stupid, thin, weak little lie and call her out on
it, but she couldn’t even do herself the favor of keeping her
damned mouth shut.

Like every villain in every book, movie, and
comic, Markus took great pleasure in pointing that out to her.

“
The fact that you’re doing
your best, if it can be called that, to draw attention away from
him, and to place blame on yourself, means you didn’t just seduce
him. Also, being a dragon shifter is enough of a reason to put him
in shackles. I should've done it sooner.”

Jessica sucked in a breath as the vertebrae
in her spine locked stiffly into place. “How did you know about
that?”

The words were a soft whisper from her
throat, but they carried. He not only knew, but from what he'd
said, he'd known for a while about what Soren was.

Markus shrugged. As Soren grabbed the
clipboard off the floor and attempted to wobbly get back to his
feet, Markus rushed over to him and launched is knee into Soren’s
face.

Drops of blood glistened in the air as Soren
flew backwards and landed hard. A shocked scream sounded in the
air. It came from Jessica, she felt it leaving her throat, but it
didn’t seem like a noise she would normally make.

Markus pointed at her.
“
That
is the kind
of noise that comes from a person emotionally invested in someone.
The same as how someone with an emotional attachment for another
person—say, like my employee, Soren Birgir, has for you—would cause
him to do something incredibly fucking dangerous. You’re
good-looking and everything, but not
that
good-looking. This guy wanted
to get you out because he’s in love with you. This isn’t some lust
thing like what happens with my handlers on occasion.” He said it
with a wave of his hand, as if he was used to this, almost as if
he’d expected it.

Jessica couldn’t take her eyes away from
him, and she couldn’t believe the stupid asshole was being as calm
as he was about the entire thing. “I was really hoping my friend
Soren wouldn’t go behind my back like this. Do you have any idea
how rare it is to find someone who can change into a dragon? I
would’ve preferred it if he could breathe fire, or spit acid, or
even turn himself into rock, like other dragons claim to be able to
do, but I’m a man who firmly believes that you just can’t have
everything you want in life.”

“
Says the
billionaire.”

Why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut? Why
couldn’t she just shut her stupid mouth this one time?

Markus looked at her, a slow turn of his
head, and he smiled. The only thing that would make him look more
evil was if he replaced the damned Coke bottle with a cigar, and if
he had an obnoxiously fluffy white cat roaming around.

He approached her.

Soren scrambled to his feet. “No, sir,
wait!”

“
Hold him down,” Markus
said, not even looking back when three guards rushed to Soren,
grabbed him by the arms, and put him flat on his back. One of the
three sat on his legs. Soren yelled and bucked, trying to get them
off him, but they couldn’t be moved.

Soren roared and yelled at the men on top of
him, but they ignored him. Jessica’s heart ached for him. Her heart
never ached for anything, but it was actually hurting in that
moment. He probably wasn’t used to not being as strong as he was,
and those guards in their stupid white uniforms were holding him
down like he was a toddler throwing a tantrum.

She was going to kill them for what they
were doing. She was going to blow so much cold up their asses the
first chance she got, and when she did it, she was going to make
sure they all froze to death from the inside out. For the time
being, however, she kept her eyes locked onto Markus’ as he
approached.