Born to Darkness (18 page)

Turmoil. Intensity. Ferocity.

Heat.

“You
can
help,” Bach told her. “I made arrangements for your things to be packed up and moved here, into the OI compound.”

“What?” She pulled free from him.

“Why don’t you use this time to unpack?” he continued. “That way, if we do find Nika, we’ll be bringing her back to a place that
feels at least a little bit like home. That’ll help her more than you can know.”

He was out the door before Anna recovered from her surprise, before she could find her voice. Still, she ran to follow, calling after him, “When I said I’d stay, I didn’t mean
forever
.”

But Bach was already gone, almost as if he’d vanished into thin air.

“I hate when he does that,” Elliot said. “Come on, I’ll show you to your rooms.”

Shane figured it out.

Important
.

Mac had used the word twice—once to refer to her job, and then again when talking about his position as a Potential at Obermeyer Institute.
My work is important
, and then,
It’s important that you go
.

It was that, plus the nagging question: how many people out there even knew the word
Potential
? It led him to the somewhat shaky conclusion that the woman he’d had sex with, multiple times last night,
worked
at OI.

Possibly in the very same security department that he’d fantasized would hire him after his time as an R&D test subject came to an end.

What he couldn’t figure out was why her working there made her so skittish and absolute in not wanting to see him ever again.

Until after he was buzzed in to the place.

He’d gotten his seabag from the rental locker where he’d stashed it, and then, because the T had stopped running for the night, he’d hitched and humped his way on foot to the compound.

It looked, absolutely, like the former college campus that it was. Beautiful brownstone buildings on a grassy hillside, with gardens and shade trees—surrounded by an electrical fence, with both a kick-ass high-tech security system
and
manned guard towers in intervals around the perimeter.

Shane was kept waiting outside of the gatehouse even after the guards took his name, searched his bag, walked him through a metal detector, and then gave him a pat down—and no doubt a probe while they were at it. Medical scan technology was improving in leaps and bounds, and a jot scan, also known as a partial scan, could be done without a subject’s knowledge or permission, since your clothes stayed on and you didn’t have to stay still. It was illegal in public places, hence the nickname “probe.” It violated personal privacy laws, up the yin-yang. There was currently a battle going on in Congress, where lobbyists were attempting to redefine all places of employment as “private.” But the truth was that jobs were so scarce, that even if the bill
didn’t
pass, no one in their right mind was going to raise a stink if their employer probed them, even on a daily basis.

Still, it was disturbing.

But most people believed that freedom and privacy was for shit if they couldn’t feed their children.

After about twenty minutes, the gate finally opened, and Shane was ushered into a security vehicle and driven up the hill by an uncommunicative guard to a resplendent old building with arched windows and doors. The place had to date from the turn of the nineteenth century. It was the building called “Old Main” from the OI website slide show.

It was pretty damn impressive.

There was a small area off to the side where a variety of vehicles were parked—including a pair of motorcycles. Shane couldn’t tell from the distance, in the dim streetlight, if either of them were Harleys, let alone if one was Mac’s.

Still, it was enough to make him hope as the guard left his cart out by the curb and walked Shane inside.

There was a manned desk right at the entrance, with another metal detector—which impressed the hell out of Shane. Most organizations relied solely on their perimeter security, which meant that once an intruder was inside, he had free rein. But not so, here.

Apparently, the Obermeyer Institute was run by someone with brains.

It was then, as Shane was spread-eagled to allow for an even more detailed pat down from the guard, that Mac appeared, heading for the doors.

His heart leaped—it actually did gymnastics—when he saw her.

Except she was walking with a man whose picture could have appeared in the dictionary next to
tall, dark, and handsome
. He moved the way she did—whoever he was, he was a warrior, too. And wherever they were going, there was real purpose to it. The dark-haired man said something to her and she laughed, and the look they exchanged …

It said it all.

That look was filled with intimacy and trust. Whoever this man was, he was Mac’s teammate—probably in every sense of the word.

And it was then that Mac saw Shane. She did an almost imperceptible double take, and her eyes widened only slightly before she turned her face into an expressionless mask.

She didn’t look up at her giant friend, and she didn’t look over at Shane again—she just walked out of the building with the man by her side.

A blast of cold air from the open door hit Shane as the guard searching him gave a nod. He could put his shoes and jacket back on. There was a bench where he could sit, so Shane sat where he could look out of the windows in the big doors, and sure enough. He heard it before he saw it—the sound of not one but two motorcycle engines being started. They pulled out of the lot, and he could see their twin taillights—red and bright in the pre-dawn darkness—disappearing down the hill.

Mac and her boyfriend had his and her bikes—wasn’t that sweet?

Shane carefully kept his voice even as he asked the guard who’d walked him in, “Who was that who just left?”

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

Of course he wasn’t.

“If you’ll follow me to processing …” The guard gestured down the hall, in the opposite direction from where Mac had appeared.

Shane grabbed his bag, which had been thoroughly searched a second time, and followed him, a little queasy and a whole lot disappointed—and far more jealous than he knew he had a right to be.

And it was only because jobs were so scarce that he didn’t just turn and walk out the door.

Besides, Mac had said it was important that he show up.

Although it was kind of clear that she hadn’t expected him
quite
so soon.

The mechanic’s garage in South Boston was deserted by the time they arrived. The place was a total ghost town—Rickie Littleton had clearly known that someone would be coming after him.

Mac stood in the middle of the vacant center bay and lowered her mental shields, closing her eyes to get a better sense of …

The slap of fear she could feel was strong, but it wasn’t sharp, and she knew it was a residual from the past. Still, it was enough to make her gasp and quickly reshield—someone had been killed here. Raped, and then killed.

God.

But not recently—which meant it hadn’t been Nika.

Mac felt nothing from the girl, which was either good or bad, depending on how you looked at it. It was good in that while Nika was here, she hadn’t awakened to find herself at the mercy of two very nasty-ass men. It was bad in that it suggested Nika hadn’t been here long enough to wake up from whatever sedative she’d been given during her abduction.

And that meant that their trail was cold and getting colder with every passing minute.

Diaz was already on the phone to OI, reporting what they’d found and requesting SAT images of the garage for the entire afternoon and evening. Analysis needed to track every car and truck that had left this place—although there was room in here for at
least twenty vehicles. More, if they’d been parked tightly. It was going to take time to track them all to their destinations, and even then, it didn’t mean that Nika hadn’t since been moved again. And again.

Mac took a deep breath, and bracing herself for the awfulness of that rape, she lowered her mental shields again. She had to ignore the now-dead girl’s fear and pain, and focus on the other emotions in the room, hoping for a clue that would lead them to Rickie and his cohort.

But the rapist had bitten his victim over and over again as he’d slammed his body into hers, and—God, the murdered girl had been only a child, sobbing and pleading for him to stop. Her voice echoed with fragments of memories that Mac had long-buried:
Don’t, Daddy, please don’t …

The force of the horror and pain pushed Mac down onto the cold concrete on her hands and knees, as she fought to stomp back her own ugly memories and to feel beyond it, to get to the emotions of the people who’d been here today.

And there it all was—there had been a lot of people in this garage, not too long ago. Dozens, if not more. Again, not a good sign—they were probably the drivers, hired to move cars out of the place—to make it impossible to track the one carrying Nika.

Mac searched among them for the strongest emotions and found a sense of triumph and glee. His ship had come in, he was going to be rich …

And then, from someone else … An intense sense of need. Someone was jonesing—not just for drugs, but for …

The girl. He knew he couldn’t do it, but he wanted to bite Nika like he’d bitten the other one and—

Jesus
.

Mac threw up, right there on the concrete. But then Diaz was there—not just picking her up and wrapping his arms around her, but he was also inside of her head, helping her get her defenses back into place, helping her breathe, helping her stop shaking.

“Maybe you shouldn’t do this anymore,” Diaz said.

“Maybe you should suck my dick,” Mac countered before she threw up again.

She tried to push him away, because he couldn’t do anything to calm her stomach—it needed to be emptied, and there was really only one way for that to happen. Plus, Diaz didn’t have very much control when he walked around inside a fellow Greater-Than’s head—not the way Bach did. Bach could stay away from private thoughts if he wanted to. And right now, Mac knew she was an open book when it came to her sordid past. From childhood to adolescence to last night’s hookup with Shane …

She found that she was clinging to those memories of the former SEAL, focusing on the way he’d smiled into her eyes before he’d kissed her and …

God
.

She felt Diaz turn away from her too-graphic memories, kind of the way someone polite might do if they stumbled upon you taking a dump with the bathroom door wide open. But he didn’t let go of her. He didn’t stop trying to absorb at least some of her nausea.

And finally her stomach was empty and it was over. She’d thrown up the crackers and tea, the whiskey and the wine, and whatever else was still in her system after a long day and night with too little food.

And then she and Diaz just sat there. She’d knew he’d gotten a glimpse of everything she’d felt from this hellhole of a garage, so there was no point in discussing it in detail.

One of Nika’s kidnappers was a serial child rapist and murderer. As if the threat from the Organization weren’t bad enough.

But Diaz felt compelled to say, “They grabbed her for the money. There’s no way the greedy one is going to let the other kill her.”

“But he might let him …” Mac couldn’t say it.

Steady
. She felt Diaz beside her, and she let him breathe for her for a moment.

“I know this is hard for you,” he said quietly.

“Yep,” she said. “And I couldn’t tell which one was which. So when I find ’em? Littleton and his partner? I’m going to kill ’em both.” After she squeezed every little last bit of information out of them.

Even though Diaz was no longer inside of her head, he knew what she was thinking, and he nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”

She glanced at him. “Sorry about …” She didn’t need to be specific. Again, he knew precisely to what she was referring.

And he shrugged. “Yeah, well, I have some pretty fierce fantasies, too.”

So okay. He either honestly thought those pictures in her head of her and Shane had been make-believe instead of memories, or he was pretending that was the case, in order to make her feel less embarrassed.

But then he surprised her by saying, “He was really hot—that man we saw in the lobby at OI, but I’ve discovered that I’m kind of a one-man man, even when it comes to daydreams.”

The look she gave him must’ve been an odd one, because he added, “What? You know my secret.” And as realization no doubt dawned in her eyes, he
then
added, “Except, okay, you didn’t
really
know.” But then he backpedaled. “Not that I was intentionally keeping anything a secret. It just wasn’t …”

“Relevant?” Mac finished for him and he nodded. “What I knew is that it’s hard for you. The celibacy thing. No pun intended. And, for the record, you know as well as I do that the no-sex rule
is
bullshit.”

“No, I don’t know that,” he said on a heavy exhale.
This
part of the conversation they’d had plenty of times before.