Strangers of the Night. Megan Hart
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Название: Strangers of the Night
Автор: Megan Hart
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Эротическая литература
Серия: Mills & Boon Nocturne
isbn: 9781474063456
isbn:
Now, at twenty-five, he should still be terrifying them, but he’d spent the last eight years doing his best to convince them that they had nothing to fear.
The testing tonight during his session with Dr. Ransom had been unexpectedly brutal. After years of proving to them he was no longer capable of doing what they wanted, years of taunting them into just disposing of him already, Jed had almost forgotten what it was like when the doctor was convinced he could get a reaction from his patient. Almost, but not quite. His body remembered, anyway, the sting and burn of electricity. The pungent horror of the chemicals they dripped into his veins to make him compliant. There’d been times over the years when it would’ve taken so little to tip him into death, but they’d pulled him back. So many times he’d have let them—but that had changed when Samantha started working there.
She was not the first person to look him in the eyes, but she was the first to at least try to connect with him as a human being. Small things, nothing that would get either of them in trouble. A gentle squeeze of his shoulder when she took his vitals. A smile. A compassionate laugh at his lame jokes.
He felt it when she left the hospital. If he tried a little harder, he’d be able to feel her wherever she went, but doing that would surely rip something inside his head, so he eased back the small tendrils of thought that had connected him to her in the first place. She’d be back tomorrow, he thought just before he passed out on the hard cot, her face the last coherent thought he had.
Samantha could not stop thinking about him.
After escaping from the hospital that was a prison, she went home only long enough to change into her workout gear. She hit the street as dawn pinked the sky, and though her body cried for sleep, the only way she’d get any was to exhaust herself. She set off on a route that would take her through the park, where she could test herself on soft dirt paths and boulders, then along the riverfront and back home before the early-morning-rush traffic started.
Since starting at Wyrmwood, she’d shared perhaps a couple dozen conversations with Jed that weren’t related to his medication or treatment. The training and rules had been explicit and strict about having as little contact with the patients as possible. She’d rarely bent the rules and never enough to get any disciplinary action. There was no denying that she felt closer to him than she did any of the others, but she’d always chalked it up to the fact she’d been hired to save his life when the time came. Something like that would naturally lead her to be more...affectionate was not the right word, not even close. Concerned. Protective. Aware?
She ran harder, leaping a park bench with one foot on the seat and pushing off with the other on the back, then hitting the grass with her fingertips digging into the soft earth before she leaped again. It was ridiculous to think Jed had done anything to the guard. Though there’d been plenty of documentation about what he’d been capable of when he was younger, all the reports Vadim had given her said that Jed’s abilities had begun fading in late adolescence, becoming completely extinct over time.
It had happened with other members of the commune where he’d been born. Children born with psychokinetic or telepathic talents had been taken away from the Collins Creek farm under the guise of child protective services, but they’d been sent to places like Wyrmwood, not foster care. They’d been held, tested. Of those that had been released in adulthood, none of them had been reported as maintaining their abilities. Most of the ones the Crew had been able to track had suffered from the years of institutionalization. High rates of suicide and crime had followed. Jed was one of the last of the Collins Creek kids the Crew had been able to find.
She jumped up to grab a low-hanging tree limb and swung out, arching her back. Landing hard. She no longer smelled lavender, but the memory of it wouldn’t leave her. There’d been more than a few times when she’d thought she sensed Jed’s presence while she was at the desk, always looking up, expecting to see him there but finding only empty space. Sometimes, a joke would tickle its way into her head until she laughed aloud.
Maybe all of that had been Jed. He had come to her defense, not that she’d needed him to, with that moron Clement. Which meant that despite all the information Wyrmwood had been collecting on him, he wasn’t telekinetically dead.
But he was going to be physically dead if he didn’t reveal that truth to the Wyrmwood team, or if Samantha wasn’t able to get him out of there when Vadim gave the go-ahead. It would have to be soon, she thought, thinking of how drained Jed had looked when they’d brought him back to the room.
On the way home, she picked up a burner phone and sent off a text to the number she’d memorized.
How long?
Then she tossed the phone into a Dumpster and continued on home. She didn’t worry about how Vadim was going to answer her. He always found a way.
Persephone had stopped dreaming about Collins Creek a long time ago. If she did think about her childhood, it was only in a series of flashing memories she did her best to shove aside. She and her twin brother, Phoenix, had managed to escape when Wyrmwood attacked and took most of the children away. The two of them had grown up on the streets, running constantly from Wyrmwood’s scouts who’d found other survivors and made them disappear. The rumors about what was done to the Collins Creek children had circulated. Phoenix and Persephone had always managed to stay a few steps ahead of them, and in many ways the memories of the things they’d done to survive had been much worse than anything she could truly remember from her first ten years on the farm.
Now, though, she couldn’t stop herself from looking over her shoulder everywhere she went. She couldn’t prove the guy from this morning had been from Wyrmwood.
Twenty years had passed since the raid. Why would they suddenly be looking so hard now? Turning over in her bed, she thought of calling Vadim. He’d offered her and Phoenix sanctuary, but her brother had refused, not willing to throw in his lot with a group that, to him, seemed as likely to turn out to be as awful as Wyrmwood. Persephone had not been quite as convinced of that. She had, in fact, done a job or two for Vadim over the years. Never anything serious or long-term. The money was fantastic, but like her brother, she’d never wanted to commit to it.
Vadim would know if there was anything new going on with Wyrmwood, though. Restless, Persephone got out of bed and paced through her apartment, checking as always the exits. One door in, one door out. The only window a single transom on the alley side of the building. She could get through it if she had to, but her real escape was the service elevator, a dumbwaiter, in a closet off the kitchen.
Running through her escape plan calmed her a little, but she was still not going to sleep. She needed something else, and she knew exactly where to find it. She dialed a familiar number.
“Leila? Girl, what are you up to?”
Leila was up to going out and causing trouble, as she almost always was. Persephone didn’t hang out with her very often for just that reason—any kind of trouble Leila wanted to get into usually ended up bad. She didn’t have the sense of self-preservation that Persephone had, or even Phoenix, who admittedly could be way less worried about keeping his ass out of the fire. Leila’s skill was in counting. Her brain was an abnormally brilliant calculator that could figure the most complex equations with little СКАЧАТЬ