Navy SEAL Noel. Liz Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ “Try not to start a war, son.”

      “Yes, sir. I’ll try.”

      But no promises. If it took a war to save Jess, he’d start and end it.

      * * *

      When three sharp cracks broke the air on the opposite side of the lush courtyard, Jessalynn McCoy fell to the lawn, dropping the box she’d been carrying and covering her head with both hands.

      “Up! Up!” The man with the large black gun slung across his chest, dressed head to toe in green camouflage, dug the tip of his boot into her ribs. She cringed, curling into the pain, her already labored breaths coming out in quick puffs. He hadn’t fired the warning shots, but she didn’t doubt that he was willing to shoot at anything. Even her.

      Pushing shaking hands beneath her, she glared up into the shadowed face of her guard, Manuel. He was charged with keeping her inside the compound and lugging a myriad of outdated scientific equipment to the room they’d deemed a laboratory. He frowned and spit toward her, barely missing her shoulder. She glared at him, jerking away from the spot next to her hand where the disgusting stream had landed.

      Manuel grunted, kicked her foot and pointed his gun at the broken beakers and hot plates scattered at her side. They didn’t need to speak the same language for her to understand what he wanted. When she didn’t move immediately, he wrapped his hand around her arm. Jess jerked it away, her skin crawling under the touch of his callused fingers.

      Why couldn’t they just leave her alone?

      Every morning they insisted on marching her from her cell of a room to the kitchen for a spicy breakfast and then pushing her from the storage shed to the lab and back, carrying supplies that had probably been upgraded about the time Louis Pasteur started studying biology.

      She didn’t bother voicing her complaints. What good would it do? She wasn’t a guest. She was a prisoner. And so she kept her mouth shut and her eyes on the exits, dreaming up wildly improbable escape plans.

      Realistically, she knew she’d never be able to get away on her own. She didn’t even know what country she was in. Even if she could scale an outside security wall and scramble over the loops of barbed wire and shards of glass without getting snagged, she had no idea what she’d face on the other side, or how she would get to help.

      She was stuck inside this steaming, muddy compound—with or without a personal escort.

      At least until she could figure out a plausible plan.

      Or until her dad sent help.

      Manuel shoved her shoulder, and she whispered, “God, please let him send help soon.”

      “Qué?” Manuel shook his dark hair off his forehead, his eyes boring into her.

      Jess swallowed and blinked, fighting the urge to look away. “Nothing.” She didn’t wait for him to push her again, but stooped to collect the scattered debris.

      The weight of the full box in her arms made each step through the dewy grass twice as hard, three times as slow. She was losing strength, her energy reserves depleting quickly from too much manual labor and too many nights with not enough sleep.

      She wasn’t about to risk more than just the essential catnaps at night.

      Someone had been poking around outside her room the night before.

      She wasn’t going to be asleep if they managed to make it in.

      Exhaustion was wearing her down, but she didn’t have a choice about setting up her lab, as ordered. Manuel seemed far too eager to use his gun, taking every opportunity to butt the barrel against her. Like a teenager given his first car, Manuel couldn’t wait to take it for a test drive.

      When they reached one of the nondescript gray, cinder block buildings that seemed to multiply within the compound, Manuel went to work on the large, padlocked metal door. It squealed as he pushed it open and motioned for her to follow him in.

      Jess stumbled over the four-inch step, her legs like overcooked fettuccine. With a clinking of glass, the box she’d been carrying landed on one of four black tables evenly spaced in the middle of the room. The table’s wooden legs slid on the cement floor as Jess fell against it.

      Manuel grumbled and motioned for her to rearrange the furniture.

      If they’d spoken the same language, she’d have told him that this high school chemistry class replica— complete with two full walls of counter space and one measly window—was more likely to cause them all to be killed than keep the Morsyni toxin safe until it was released.

      At least, she assumed that’s what they wanted her to do. Really, it was all a guess at this point. Manuel’s monosyllabic grunts and broken English had barely hinted at why she’d been attacked, drugged and dragged to...wherever this was. But it wasn’t a far jump to guess that it had everything to do with her research on the Morsyni toxin. Before three men in black ski masks had abducted her from the Southern California State University lab, they’d forced her to retrieve her sample vial of the powder. She had just one gram of the ultrafine substance, but it contained more than a trillion lethal spores.

      Which was enough to kill fifty million people. Or more.

      Jess’s stomach lurched at the very thought. Her research had all been targeted at better understanding the Morsyni, hoping to one day find a cure. Or at least a way to minimize its effects. But whoever had brought her here just wanted to twist her expertise and use it against... Well, she didn’t know who. But someone was a target, and she had been set up to be the arrow.

      Suddenly the humidity wasn’t the only thing making it hard to breathe. She pushed past Manuel and out the door, hoping that the narrow alley along the back of the cinder block barrack would provide enough air to lift the band around her chest.

      They could have only one reason for taking her, too. They needed someone who knew how to release the toxin without killing everyone inside the compound.

      Manuel shoved her shoulder, gesturing her back to the storage shed to get more supplies. “Move.” He locked the door and then resumed breathing on her neck. She shuddered at the stale odor, praying once again to be anywhere but confined by these compound walls with this man as her tail.

      She’d nearly worn the winding path to the shed into a muddy trench, but she kept her head down as she trudged toward their destination.

      They emerged into the courtyard, the afternoon sun steaming her skin through her cotton shirt. They had to be near the equator. Or possibly on the sun.

      Jess was nearly all the way across the courtyard when her foot disappeared into a mud puddle, and she lurched to the ground, landing on all fours.

      Manuel yelled at her, and she glared over her shoulder at him.

      “Ocho días.” He rolled his eyes in a universal sign of displeasure. “Sólo ocho días.”

      Eight days. Only eight days.

      Even she, who’d passed high school Spanish only because of her best friend, could translate that. Manuel expected to have to put up with her for only eight more days. It was too much to hope that he’d simply be replaced by a different guard at the end of that time or that she’d be СКАЧАТЬ