Slow Burn (30 page)

Griffin sat up straight in his chair, straining against his bonds.

I made a small wave from the grate.

He saw me. His eyes widened.

The door slammed closed after my father.

Griffin smiled at the man. “Well, I guess you’re going to kill me now.”

“You’re a dead man.”

“Come here and do it then.”

What was Griffin doing? Why was he saying that? Did he want me to do something? How was I supposed to know what that was?

The man brandished a sharp knife and advanced on Griffin.

And jerked back, howling. Blood was trailing from his face, gushing.

Griffin spit. There was blood trickling out of his mouth. He’d bitten the man! Gross.

“Leigh,” he said. “Jump on him.”

Oh. Okay. I was part of his plan. I pushed the grate aside and leapt out onto the man.

I landed on him and the two of us rolled together on the floor. The man was struggling against me, kicking out hands and feet.

“Knife,” said Griffin. “In front of you.”

I spied it, gleaming and bright, just in front of my face. I reached out. I grasped it.

The man had blood all over his face. He couldn’t see. Still, he managed to land a punch on my jaw.

I flinched, absorbing the impact. It had
hurt
.

“Back of the neck, Leigh. Back of the neck.”

Right. If he had the serum, then the only way to stop him was to cut his spinal cord and keep it from healing.

I slashed.

Blood flowed.

“Deeper,” said Griffin.

The man elbowed me. I stumbled backwards. I was going to have to cut him again?

I lurched forward, pushing him face down onto the floor. I put pressure on the back of his head. I held up the knife.

I cut him.

There was so much blood. It was everywhere, deep purply red, glistening in the fluorescent lights. I backed away, the knife falling out of my hand.

I killed him.

There was blood all over me.

I killed him.

I never killed anyone before.

“Doll.” Griffin’s voice was soothing, like a dark, winding river. But I couldn’t look at him. “You’re okay.”

I stared at the dead man. “I killed him.”

“Yes, you did,” he said. “You did a very good job. And now you have to get me out of this chair.”

I shook my head. There was so much blood.

“You can’t think about it anymore, doll,” he said. “You have to turn it off.”

I looked at him. “Griffin.”

“Come here,” he said. “You have to get me out of the chair.”

He was right. I had to do that. I had to get Griffin out of here.

I went to him.

The metal bonds on the chair dug into Griffin’s skin. It looked painful. My fingers fumbled over the releases. My hands were covered in blood, and they were slippery. I was getting blood all over Griffin. I wiped them on my pants. Now my pants were bloody.

I grimaced, fighting tears.

When I looked at Griffin, his mouth was bloody from where he’d bitten the man. He looked like a vampire.

Finally, though, I got him free.

He dashed across the room to a sink and shoveled water into his mouth. He spit. More water. He spit again. He did it twice more. “Doll, get over here and wash your hands.”

I couldn’t move.

“Trust me, it will help.”

I willed myself to go to him. The water did help. My clothes were still bloody, but it was good to have it off of my hands. Griffin used a paper towel on my face.

“It’s on my face?” I might be hysterical.

“Not anymore, not anymore,” he said. “You’re fine.” He took my hand. “Let’s go.” He was already dragging me across the room, back to the duct. He boosted me up so that I could climb back in.

He came up after me. “Shit.”

“What?”

“I wanted to put the grate back, but it’s way down there. They’re going to know where we went.”

“Should we—?”

“No, just go. They can always check the cameras anyway.”

I crawled, Griffin right behind me, showing me where to turn.

“Where are we going?” I asked. I hoped we were going to an exit somewhere. I wanted out of this place, away from my father who wanted to make me an assassin, away from the body of the man I’d killed.

“Quieter,” he whispered.

“Sorry,” I said in a softer voice.

“We’re going to Caldwell’s office. That’s the plan.”

We were still following the plan? “But...”

“Nothing’s changed, doll. Things are going as well as could be expected.”

“My dad?”

“They’re going to hear us talking,” he said.

I got quiet. But the plan was to kill everyone who knew about Op Wraith that also headed it up. That included my dad, and he wasn’t dead anymore. Was Griffin going to kill my father? I didn’t know if I could handle that. He was horrible, but he was my dad.

There were voices drifting through an upcoming grate, and Griffin had me halt. Together, we eased up on the room. I looked down into it. It looked like a regular office room, carpet on the floor, a desk in one corner, overstuffed leather chairs in front of it.

There were two people in the room. One was a man in a suit, the other was a woman with her hair pulled into a severe bun on top of her head, her makeup artfully applied. She was beautiful, but there was something hard and frightening about her.

“Damn,” said Griffin. “That’s French. If she’s alive, it means Knox didn’t get to her.”

The man was on the phone. He must be Caldwell. “Look, I’m not sure I want Griffin dead. He’s really first rate. Why don’t we just wipe his memory?” He put his hand over the receiver of the phone and addressed the woman. “How far back does the stage one memory injection wipe out?”

“Up to a year, sometimes two,” she said.

“Leaving intact his early memories, then,” said Caldwell. “The ones we can use.”

French nodded. “Exactly.”

Caldwell uncovered the receiver. “So go back down there, Thorn, and tell him not to kill him, just wipe his memory.”

Thorn? He was talking to my dad? And it was about Griffin.

“I don’t care that you want him dead. Do as I say,” said Caldwell. A pause. “What do you mean your daughter’s missing?” He sighed heavily and listened. “Okay, well, I’m going to have to come down there, aren’t I?”

“I don’t think so,” muttered Griffin. He removed the grate and leaped out of the duck onto Caldwell’s back.

Caldwell dropped the phone and went sprawling.

Griffin’s hands encircled Caldwell’s neck, squeezing.

The woman, French, clapped her hands together. “Oh, Griffin, it’s so good to see you again. I’ve missed you.” She reached into her purse.

Caldwell’s fingernails scrabbled against the carpet.

Griffin continued to squeeze. He ignored French.

French pulled a syringe out of her purse.

“No,” I yelled, jumping out of the duct and tackling her.

She shrieked, but she didn’t lose her grip on the syringe. Instead she plunged it into my neck.

The world went blurry, swirly, and then dark.

Chapter Nineteen

I awoke lying on cold stone. I opened my eyes to see that above me were the same fluorescent lights I’d seen elsewhere in Op Wraith. But now I was in a completely empty white room. Griffin was in the corner, his arms around his knees. That woman—Jolene French—was kneeling next to him, talking to him.

At first, all I could hear was the cadence of her voice, smooth and soft, musical. I couldn’t make out what she was saying. But as I grew more awake, I could understand.

“I must say it was exciting to see you kill Burt. There you were pressed against him, his face on the floor. That must have been exciting for you too.”

What was she saying to him?

“I knew it, Griffin. I knew you thought about Burt that way. What was it like, being behind him, your hands tight around his neck, squeezing him? Was it everything you hoped for?”

Griffin shied away from her.

She reached out and touched his face, running perfectly manicured red nails over his cheek. “Oh, Griffin. How many times did I tell you not to repress those feelings? How many times did I tell you that what happened to you in jail was a release for you?”

He was shaking.

“What did they make you say, again? Didn’t they make you tell them how much you loved cock? Did you want Burt’s cock?”

He shut his eyes.

“Why don’t you say it for me, Griffin? Tell me how much you like to suck big, hard—”

“Stop it,” I said, pushing myself to my feet.

She turned to face me. “Oh. Look at you, awake.”

My legs were unsteady, possibly because of whatever she’d injected me with. I staggered across the room. “Get away from him.”

She laughed. It sounded like sleigh bells at Christmas. “Oh. You’re really adorable, aren’t you? You have a crush on him, don’t you?”

I stopped next to Griffin and knelt down next to him. He wouldn’t look at me. He was holding his knees and shuddering. I glared at French. “You bitch.”

“Must be frustrating, being with a man who catches for the other team.” She smiled at him. “You do like catching best, don’t you, Griffin?”

Griffin flinched as if he’d been slapped.

I seized his hand. “Nothing about him is frustrating.” I turned to him. “Don’t listen to her. She’s just messing with your head. She doesn’t know anything about you. She only wants to control you.”

French lifted her eyebrows a little bit. “How could it not be frustrating? He’s incapable of anything remotely sexual.”

I shook my head. “No. He’s quite capable. Trust me.”

She looked surprised. “Impressive.” She drew herself up to her full height. “I hadn’t thought anyone could penetrate the mess I’d made of his brain.”

I stood up too. “You were wrong.”

“Capable of everything?” she said.

“Everything,” I said.

“Is that true, Griffin?” she smiled down on him. “You manage to keep your little soldier standing tall with her mouth on you?”

“Shut up,” I said.

“That’s what I thought,” she said. She shrugged at me. “He’s still mine.”

There was a creaking noise. I turned to see a large metal door on the far wall. It was slowly opening.

“French,” yelled a voice from outside. I recognized it. “You let my daughter out of there!” It was my father.

French laughed her pretty, tinkling laugh again. “Oh, Thorn. You’re so melodramatic. This is simply a secure location. I’m not going to gas them.” She strode across the room to the door. “At least I don’t think so.”

My father struggled inside. He was sweating. “You let her go, Jolene. I won’t let you—”

She put one finger on my father’s chest and pushed him back through the door. “Let’s not talk about this here, okay?”

The door slammed shut after her.

“Griffin?” I said.

He didn’t speak. He was still shaking.

I went to him. I wrapped my arms around him. He didn’t seem to notice I was there. “What did she mean about gassing us?”

He didn’t say anything.

I remembered that Griffin had told me about a gas room when we were at Blackwater Falls, when my biggest problem was trying to figure out why Griffin didn’t want to mess around with me. “Are we in that room you told me about?”

“Doll,” he whispered.

“
Are
we?”

“Yes,” he said. “They’re going to kill us.”

We sat there, huddled together against the wall, quiet and frightened. Neither of us spoke or moved for a long time.

“Maybe they aren’t,” I said. “Wasn’t Caldwell saying something about wiping your memory?” I also remembered Griffin telling me about that back at Blackwater Falls—it was something my father had also worked on.

“It would be the same thing,” he said. “If I lose a year of my memory, I lose all memory of you. It would be like we never met. And that would be like dying—to go back to being the man I was before I knew you.”

I knew what he meant. Griffin and I had changed each other. I held him tight.

“Probably, they put us in here to decide what to do with us,” said Griffin. “But either way, once that gas goes on, we’ll be dead to each other.”

“We should escape,” I said. Then I peered around the room. “Or are they listening to us? Are there cameras?”

“They can’t see or hear us,” he said. “They’re sick, but not so sick as to enjoy watching people die.”

“Then, how do we get out of here?”

“We don’t,” he said.

I didn’t want us to die. Honestly, when I tried to think about it, it was too big, too much. I couldn’t even really conceive of the idea of just... ending?

I took Griffin’s hand. “We’re not dying.”

He touched my face. “Oh, doll.”

“This isn’t the end.” I kissed him.

He kissed me fiercely, his tongue claiming my mouth. Then he broke away. “It’s not working.”

“What isn’t?”

“I can’t get French’s voice out my head.”

“Griffin, she was—”

“She was right, you know. When you tried to go down on me, it didn’t work.”

“
Don’t
listen to her.”

He turned away.

I thought about being dead again. It made me feel crazy, like there were little needles inside me pushing on the inside of my skin. I needed to get out of here. I needed to live. I was
alive
. Griffin and I weren’t dead. I wouldn’t let us...

I moved his knees wider apart, settling in between them. I reached for his zipper.

“What are you doing?” Griffin tried to push me away.

I didn’t let him. I unzipped his pants. I unbuttoned them. “I’m going down on you. We didn’t get to do it. Not yet. And I don’t want to die until I...” I yanked his clothes out of the way. “Besides she was wrong. You don’t belong to her. You belong to
me
.”

Griffin looked at me with terror in his eyes. “Leigh, that’s crazy.”

He wasn’t hard. He was lying soft against his leg, but he wasn’t covering himself either.

“You said they couldn’t see us or hear us,” I said.

“Yeah, but doll...” He swallowed.

I pulled my shirt over my head. I tugged off my bra. He liked to look at me. “If we’re crazy enough, then we’re alive, Griffin. Dead people don’t do things like this.”

The sight of my bare flesh was arousing him. I could see him lengthening. I put my hand on him, wrapping my hand around him, stroking him.