Brazen (B-Squad #1) (14 page)

T
he constant soft
beeping ate its way into Bianca’s consciousness, lifting the veil enough to bring the throbbing pain in her shoulder to the forefront. Clenching her teeth against the pain, she opened her eyes and spotted two blurry Vivis sitting in a plastic chair across the white room. It came back to her in flashes.

The gunshot.

Her head cracking against the floor.

The needle.

Taz!

Heart hammering against her ribs, she jolted into a sitting position but the room tilted and she flopped back down.

“Look who finally decided to wake up.” Vivi crossed to the bed and held out a small water bottle with a bendy straw sticking out of the top.

“Where?” she asked, the single word scraping against her raw throat, before turning her head and taking a sip.

“You’re at the resort’s infirmary.”

“No.” She shook her head and the one Vivi became two again. “Where’s Taz?”

“He’s down the hall.” She set the water bottle down on the small table next to the heart monitor, which was beeping much faster than it was a minute ago.

Bianca inhaled a deep breath through her nose, gritted her teeth and fisted the thin white sheets in her hands as she struggled to sit up. Sweat broke out on her forehead and her stomach roiled.

“Whoa there.” Vivi pressed on Bianca’s good shoulder, easing her back down. “He’s still knocked out and you’re still feeling the effects of Genie’s Wish.”

A large shadow fell across the foot of the bed. She glanced over. Clay Blackfish loomed in the open doorway, wearing his black BDUs, a T-shirt with DEA Agent printed across the front and dark circles under bloodshot eyes.

“We need to talk before you see him,” Blackfish said.

“I don’t have time for that,” she said as she mentally prepped to try to sit up again. The need to see Taz for herself and make sure she hadn’t killed him tore a hole through her that hurt more than anything that had landed her in an infirmary bed. “I need to get to Taz.”

Clay snorted. “You better make time, because you’re not going anywhere until we talk.”

His declaration sucked the fight right out of her—well, that and the searing pain in her head that had joined the throb in her shoulder. The fact of it was, moving more than an inch or two was impossible in her current state. It would be nice if she could blame it all on the gunshot wound, but she knew in her gut she couldn’t.

She’d been hit with Genie’s Wish before and hadn’t gone all mind-control victim with a bone breakingly bad hangover the next day. Whatever was in the latest incarnation of the drug was beyond bad. And she’d shoved two doses into Taz. This time the pain squeezing her lungs had nothing to do with the gunshot wound or Genie’s Wish. While waiting for the sedative or whatever else they’d given her to wear off, she could talk and do a little digging of her own.

“What do you want to know?” she asked.

“Everything.” Clay sat down in the chair Vivi had vacated earlier and opened the small notebook in his hands. “Start with spotting Gidget on the security feed.”

So she did, with Vivi standing by her side and shoving the water bottle in her face whenever her voice went raspy. It took less time than she would have figured to explain how everything had gone from sunshine and puppy dogs to a category-five hurricane with a side of crocodiles. On the thank-God-for-some-good-news-finally side of things, her headache had dulled to a manageable six on a ten-point scale by the time she was done talking.

Clay stood up and pocketed his notebook. “Thanks. I’ll talk to you lat—”

“Stop right there,” she said, managing to sit up without her head exploding. “Your turn. What aren’t you telling me?”

He gave her a considering look, then glanced over at Vivi. They did some nonverbal communicating thing that only people who’d worked closely—or were in a relationship—seemed to have. Finally, he looked up at the ceiling and mumbled something under his breath.

“We found the Genie’s Wish lab here on the island,” he said. “What we discovered was worse than we’d expected, and our predictions were already pretty damn bad.”

He paused, rolling his neck and exhaling a deep breath as if he had to psych himself up for what was coming next.

“The lab was here on the island in an unused part of the wastewater facility. Yasmin leased the building the lab was housed in. We’ve confirmed that the resort staff and administrators had no idea what was going on. The bartenders didn’t know the orange juice had been spiked with the drug. The only people who knew were Yasmin, Walsh and a chemist named Byron Ward.” He rubbed the back of his neck and began pacing the small space. “Walsh is in custody. Yasmin and Ward are in the wind.”

“How in the hell did that happen?” she asked, frustration swirling through her. “We had the coordinated raid planned perfectly.”

“Mechanical issues on our end delayed us,” Clay said. “By the time we hit the beach near Yasmin’s bungalow, the B-Squad team was already in place. There was chaos inside. Marko had to shoot Gidget and you. Yasmin used Gidget as a human shield, blocking any shot from Marko or Lash. We headed straight toward the scene and weren’t expecting B-Squad sentries set up on the perimeter. There was an exchange of friendly fire but, luckily, no fatalities. Yasmin slipped through the net using the craziness as a cover.”

“It was a cluster,” Vivi agreed from her spot near the door.

Missions went sideways—even the best-planned ones—but this one mattered more than the others had. That she’d failed by getting caught and people had been hurt because of it sliced deep.

Clay went on. “By the time we got to the lab, most of it had been destroyed already but in the twenty-four hours you’ve been out, we’ve been able to put most of the pieces back together. The latest version of Genie’s Wish had to be liquid because it delivers a microchip into the bloodstream.”

Holy shit. Welcome to science fiction territory.
“But Taz and I drank it at the cocktail party and it didn’t have the same effect.”

“That was version two,” Vivi said, taking over the narration. “The first version was the aerosol that was breathed in. That proved effective but they needed a better delivery system so they could target individuals. That led to version two, which can be added to drinks or food without the person taking it even knowing. According to the files we were able to decipher on Yasmin’s hard drive, that’s when they were finally able to go to version three, which had been the plan all along. Version three gave all the benefits of versions one and two when it came to accessing the brain and the added bonus of—”

“Mind control.” She flashed back to the moment when she couldn’t stop herself from plunging the needle full of Genie’s Wish into Taz’s arm and she wanted to puke, to cry, to scream and tear her hair out. Shame. Guilt. Terror. Find a word that meant all three and it just about summed things up.

“Ain’t technology grand?” Clay asked, sarcasm twisting the message. “The only drawback to version three from the makers’ perspective is that it has to be injected.”

He took out his notebook and pulled out a folded sheet of paper and handed it to her. She opened it to reveal a picture of a penny with a small square sitting next to it.

“That’s for comparison’s sake,” he continued. “That square is a wirelessly controlled microchip that sails through the blood stream. We think the controller was in that device Yasmin had that looked like a dog-training clicker. The microchip is three millimeters by four millimeters and can be steered by the controller toward the brain stem. Once there, it sends out electrical impulses, just like your brain does, telling your body what to do while at the same time surpassing your brain’s ability to do the same thing. The initial tests showed that a small but significant percentage of the test subjects had adverse reactions, including death.”

Her blood turned to ice. “I gave Taz two full doses. Is he going to die?”

“We don’t know.” Vivi hurried over to the bedside and took Bianca’s clammy hand. “The doctor on staff said his vitals are all good. They sedated him, just like you, because there’s no way to know if he’s going to be under Yasmin’s influence. She’s gone but there are so many variables about how Genie’s Wish works that we don’t know, like the effective distance of the wireless controller.”

It just kept getting worse. She’d never be able to forgive herself. God knew Taz would never forgive her. “So she’ll always be able to just turn it on and control us if she’s close enough?”

“No.” Clay shook his head. “That was one of their two biggest frustrations with version three, according to their files. One, they haven’t been able to make the non-microchipped version two addictive. Two, the microchip in version three is only viable for twenty-four hours. That’s why they had to continually shoot up Gidget.”

Poor Gidget. Yasmin had held her prisoner for months. That would fuck up a person without even adding any lingering effect of Genie’s Wish. Gidget was strong though, and she had her girls from St. B’s to lean on, not to mention the guys on the team who’d already devoted so much time to finding a woman they’d never met. Whatever Gidget needed and however long it took, she’d have it.

“Where is she?” Bianca asked.

“She went straight to a military hospital in Hawaii. Lexie, Elisa and Marko are with her,” Vivi said. “She was unconscious after Marko had to shoot her to save Taz and she’d been injected with so much Genie’s Wish since she’d been kidnapped that we needed her in a secure location while she detoxes. No one knows what she’ll be like when she wakes up.”

“But Taz will be waking up soon.” She couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more they were holding back.

Clay and Vivi exchanged a look.

“We don’t know,” he said. “But we hope so.”

Gritting her teeth against the expected pain, Bianca tossed back the sheet and pivoted so her legs dangled over the edge of the bed. “I’m going to be there when he does.”

“You’re still recovering,” Clay countered, moving to stand directly in front of her in an attempt to block her way. “You need to stay here.”

That wasn’t going to happen.

Tapping into the fury and worry filling her, she lowered her feet to the cold tile floor and shoved Clay back a few inches. “Unless you pull a gun on me, you’re not keeping me from Taz—and even if you had the brass balls to do that, I wouldn’t bet on you winning.”

Vivi rolled a wheelchair over to the bedside. “Get in. We can’t have you shooting a federal agent, even if he is a total pain in the ass.”

Muscles shaking in protest after all that had happened, Bianca got into the wheelchair. Without any other comment, Vivi spun her around and wheeled her down the hall, turning into a room three doors down from where she’d been.

Her heart stopped.

Taz lay in a bed with about a dozen more beeping monitors surrounding him than were in her room. His skin was a pale imitation of his normal tawny brown color and the circles under his closed eyes were so dark they were almost black. A clear mask covered his mouth and was connected by a narrow tube to the nearby respirator.

“Oh my God, Vivi.” She covered her face with her hands. “What have I done?”

* * *

A cold darkness surrounded Taz. It was so complete, so all-encompassing that it wasn’t worth fighting against even if he could remember why he should. This coal-black blanket was all he needed. It was his
soartă
to be alone like this. He’d always known it, which was why he’d always held back.

Inside this cave of shadows though he was free. No angry specter of his father stalked him, thundering and threatening. No sad spirit of his mother followed him, softly weeping as she pretended everything would be alright. No quietly disappointed ghost of Freddie clung to him, wondering when he would realize there was more to life, to love, to everything than Taz had believed. There was no failure, no disillusionment, no wish for something more he couldn’t define.

Here, there was only perfect quiet and total aloneness.

But it didn’t feel right. Something—no someone—was missing.

Again, he tried to remember…but there was nothing.

A line of warmth curled around his waist, sinking into him and making the pitch dark a few shades brighter. It brought with it memories that tugged at him with silken webs. A woman’s ruby-red smile. The softness of her skin. Her teasing laughter. The sweetness of her satisfied sighs. All of it pulled him closer to the light.

Little sounds began to intrude into the gray darkness. A soft beep and another at a higher pitch. The whoosh of pumped air. Voices in the distance.

He turned away from it, but the silk strands held tight, bringing with them the smell of sweet flowers, the sky after the rain and something as enduring and illusive as hope. The darkness faded more to the pink-gray of first dawn.

It wasn’t fair, taking him out of the inky safeness.

But whoever said life is fair?
a woman’s voice asked.

The question danced around him, like tracer lights in the sky. At the same time the answer thumped against him with the steady rhythm of a heartbeat.