Skin Tight (35 page)

The big man did, placidly enough. Doubtless he remembered the threat of the needle. Good—fear always made people more malleable.

Smith walked up to a battered Toyota. His big body blocked the trunk as he popped it. “Take a look. He’s not dead. I don’t think. Can you die of carbon monoxofide poisoning in a trunk? This is kind of an old car.”

“Imbecile,” Rowan bit out. “If you have killed him, you’re not getting paid.” He pushed his way forward and saw—

A spare tire.

Before he could frame an angry question, the man slammed his head against the open trunk and pushed him inside in a movement so quick his eyes barely tracked it. Dazed and in pain, Rowan fumbled for his needles, but it was too late. Through a red haze, he saw a face superimposed on a face, as if Smith stood inside a vengeful ghost.

The trunk slammed, taking all the light, and then the air seemed to follow. Head blazing with agony, Rowan fell into the dark.

 

 

“It’s time,” Gillie
whispered.

Taye pulled himself off the floor. His bruises looked a lot better, and he seemed to have the control he needed to make this work. If he didn’t, they were going to die slowly, along with everyone else in this place.

It was a miracle they hadn’t been discovered. When Rowan showed up unexpectedly the day before, it was all Gillie could do to keep from panicking. She’d been sure he knew she was hiding Taye, and that Silas was conspiring with them. Instead, he’d behaved like a deranged Victorian suitor. After he finally left, she’d brushed her teeth for five minutes.

In accordance with their plan, Silas had stopped giving Taye his injections altogether. With nothing damping his abilities, he could light this place up like a summer storm. But he had to be careful, too. Fire was extremely dangerous underground. If the lift shut down, they were done for. So the situation called for a certain amount of finesse.

“I’m ready,” he said in answer to her unspoken question. “I’ll sound the alarms at the far end of the complex and fry all the diagnostic equipment. Maybe put a short in some of the lights.”

“Can you open the cell doors?”

“I
can
,” he said. “But do you really think it’s a good idea?”

Gillie thought about the woman who had pressed her hand to the glass. “Yes. I want anyone who has the will and the desire to be able to leave when we do. What happens past that point is up to them.”

“They might do an amazing amount of damage up top.” She regarded him steadily. “So could you.”

“Good point.”

Taye’s brow furrowed, and a soft blue glow surrounded him. She’d never seen him completely unfettered before. His dark curls lifted as if in the wind, but she knew it was electrical current. Voltage crackled from his fingertips, and the lights in her apartment dimmed. Then a siren went off, just as he’d promised. Gillie heard the sound of running feet—techs and orderlies running to check out the problem.

“Now diagnostics?”

He grinned. “That
was
diagnostics.”

“Wow. Impressive range.”

With the air of a kid showing off, he set the lights to flickering. They should be able to move from her apartment now. If anyone interfered with them, Taye could handle nearly anything, and Silas would arrive soon to provide muscle.

She’d been horrified to learn that Rowan held Silas prisoner, too. Staff lived off-site, but since Silas had been part of the original experiments—a failure—the orderly wasn’t permitted to leave. However, the moment Taye shorted the implant in his neck, the life had started returning to the big man’s eyes. Gillie knew they could count on him.

Nausea rolled through her in a hard wave. Now that the moment had arrived, she was frightened of leaving, frightened of the wider world, of which she knew nothing but what she’d seen on TV. Taye misunderstood her expression.

“Is there anything you want to take with you?”

“No,” she said quietly. “There’s nothing.”

“Then let’s go.”

Gillie followed him out of the apartment. In the distance, they heard cries of fear. The electrical problems were growing worse. In passing the first cell, he extended a hand. Blue sparks lit up the keypad and then blazed along hidden connections, giving the wall an errie glow. The doors snapped open one by one as Taye went by.

Most of the prisoners were too far gone to respond. It broke Gillie’s heart, but there was nothing she could do, short of sacrificing her own chance at freedom. Others stepped cautiously into the hall, gazing around like frightened animals. Gillie quickened her pace. Maybe it was wrong, but she was almost as frightened of Rowan’s subjects as she was of the scientist. She knew all too well his gift for twisting humans into beings both wretched and monstrous.

Spotting Silas at the next intersection, she broke into a run. Taye followed, but she noticed him keeping an eye on the escapees trailing behind them. The orderly fell into step as they headed toward the lift. They had no way of knowing whether Taye could make it work as he did the locks on the cells, but it was their only hope. This was the one portion of their escape they hadn’t been able to test.

“Are you all right?” she asked Silas.

The enormous orderly gave a quiet nod.

From the other side of the facility came a distant boom. Something had overloaded. Acrid smoke trickled through the vents, stinging her throat. Gillie tugged her pink scrub shirt up over her mouth and watched Taye at the lift controls.

“It’s much the same as the cell door security,” he said, after a few seconds. “This should work.”

“Then do it. Fast.”

She couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t seen Rowan by now. Someone would’ve called him, and from what she’d gleaned from his odious, egocentric soliloquies over the years, he lived nearby. Still, it was an unexpected boon.

“Here goes.” Taye touched his fingers to the keypad, and a pale ripple of energy flooded outward, enveloping the retscanner.

 

 

Orderlies, nurses, and
techs sprinted past, but it sounded as if they were running
toward
trouble, not away from it. Smoke tinged the air; somewhere, something was burning.

The alarms became shrill.

When Mia’s cell door swung open, she didn’t hesitate for a second. She stepped into the hall. Something had gone badly wrong inside the facility, and her first thought was:
Søren.
But she couldn’t wait for him to find her. With any luck, they would run into each other while she sought the exit.

He had to be down here somewhere. She prowled the corridors, searching for him, but she didn’t know where the corridors led, and she didn’t want to go deeper into the complex. In the end, she turned and ran away from the fire, like any intelligent person.

It was becoming harder to breathe. She imagined him staggering, looking for her. Oh, God, if anything happened to him—

With effort, she forced herself to pull it together. Her flight carried her past the cells, where there were still a number of people who appeared to be beyond saving. Mia paused outside one door, hunched over to stay out of the acrid black smoke. The prisoner inside just sat and rocked, like Madame Defarge.

“Come on,” she said to the man inside, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

Tears started in her eyes.
I can’t save you. But maybe there are others.

Toward the end of the cell block, a woman rushed out of the open cell and attacked. Mia fought, horrified by the emaciated wraith. Maybe it wasn’t kind or compassionate, but this creature was scarcely human. Mia took scratches all over her forearms before she managed to slam the female’s head against the wall. The thin woman went down silently, her body limp as a broken doll.

Mia ran on, desperately seeking the exit.

 

 

Taye focused on
the security panel.

The machinery began to smoke, tendrils curling outward, and then the doors swished open. There was no telling how long repairs would take on this end, which meant it was unlikely anyone would be able to give chase. Access to the facility would be entrance-only for a while, another factor in their favor.

As Gillie stepped into the elevator, a woman came pelting out of the dark toward them. Her dark eyes were focused, her expression determined.

“Hold the doors,
please
,
”
she choked out.

There were three others behind her, a woman and two men. Gillie was ridiculously relieved to identify the woman who had communicated with her the other day. All of them wore gray pajamas, and they all looked relatively sane. At least, none of them bore marks of self harm; nor did they seem to have been punished recently, another good sign. Rational people did what they must in order to avoid pain. Well, except for Taye.

“Move it,” he ordered. “We don’t know how long we have.”

The raven-haired woman reached the lift first, and she almost threw herself into it. Silas steadied her as the other three slipped in. The orderly let go of the doors, and they closed at last. Movement offered the first, tantalizing hint of freedom. With a jerk and a groaning sound, they jolted upward. There were no buttons; this ride had only two stops: top and bottom.

“Thank God,” the dark-haired woman was saying. “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and that’s saying something, considering I once spent a summer in Iran in a burqa.”

The rest of the fugitives stood warily regarding Silas, who said, as the elevator jolted to a stop, “I’m not going to hurt you. I was a prisoner, too.”

They seemed doubtful, so Gillie added, “He’s telling the truth. Rowan stuck a control device in his neck.”

“That sounds like the sick fuck,” the female test subject muttered at last.

As the lift shuddered to life, Gillie felt the heat emanating from beneath her and she prayed they would reach the top.

Killing was too
good for Jasper Rowan. While the man was unconscious, Søren had rifled through his belongings, but found nothing to aid in his search for the facility’s location. When the good doctor awoke, he was a touch recalcitrant.

So Søren had had to be persuasive. His knuckles were bleeding now. He studied the bruised wretch currently at his mercy. The man’s icy, supercilious air hadn’t lasted past the first punch. After that, he sat and blubbered, but he still stubbornly refused to give any information.

It had taken half the day to find a safe spot to interrogate the son of a bitch. The building was condemned, slated for demolition. Inside, it stank of urine and rat droppings, a perfect place for this kind of business.

Damn, he hated working on the fly. His plans were always flawless and executed with Teflon smoothness. Not today. He cared fuck-all for finesse. Only results mattered.

“Travis is dead. I
know
you have my woman. Tell me how to get to her.”

Rowan spat blood and turned up a defiant face. “Never.”

Smiling, he knelt before the bound man. “Look into my eyes and hear me. If I don’t get the information I want in the next thirty seconds, I’ll start cutting off pieces of you.”

“You’ll kill me anyway.”

“True,” he admitted. “But I can make it quick. If you cooperate.”

“That’s incentive? You’re a real motivational speaker.”

Each second this asshole wasted, Mia could be suffering. Just because the boss wasn’t around didn’t mean the underlings would leave her alone. Maybe they even enjoyed the chance to inflict their own personal cruelties. He curled his hands into fists to hide the tremor.

“Fine. We’ll keep playing it your way.” Søren got out a blade, the light running silver on its honed surface. “Let’s see, you’re supposed to be a scientist, right? You’ll find it hard to work without your fingers, but I warned you.”

Rowan jerked, but it was no use. Søren captured the man’s right hand and went for his index finger. As the knife bit into his flesh, the doctor screamed, as his patients must scream. Still, Søren was reluctantly impressed with the man’s fortitude. He took three fingers before the man broke.

“Enough!” His breath came in rapid gulps suspiciously like moans. “Take me back to the car. I’ll give you directions as we go.”

“Give me the directions now.”

“If I tell you, you’ll just kill me here. This leaves me a small chance to win free. Besides, you can’t get to her without me. The lift requires a ret-scan and a fingerprint.”

Though he didn’t say it aloud, the other man doubtless knew; Søren only needed a finger—and he already had three—and a head to make that work. But he wasn’t interested in carrying severed body parts unless it was unavoidable. Such things tended to arouse undesirable interest.

“Give me the first turn as a good faith payment.”

“That is fair, but I don’t know where we are. I can hardly—”

Barely keeping a lid on his impatience, Søren gave their location.

“Then from here, drive out of town and get on the highway, heading west. That’s all I will tell you right now.”

Søren’s fist lashed out, catching Rowan in the jaw. The other man went limp, and Søren slung Rowan’s arm across his shoulders, as if he were a drunken friend. In that way, he dragged him down the broken cement steps to the Toyota parked outside. By the time Rowan came to, they would be well away from here—or any possible assistance.

The car zoomed out of town and Søren followed the directions. At last Rowan stirred, taking stock of his surroundings faster than Søren would’ve credited. In fact, the other man’s composure worried him a little. Søren didn’t like Rowan’s tight little smile; he was doubtless planning something. Once they got inside the facility, he would have to be careful.

He tried not to think how long it had been since he’d seen Mia. Days now. His hands tightened on the wheel.

As the green fields flew by, he glanced over at his hostage, who said, “Here. Exit now.”