Chapter 16 #2
While it was too dark for her to tell, it felt like his gaze met hers, and she felt that promise.
He was coming for her. He’d find her, and he’d save her.
Save them both, and then he’d donate lifesaving bone marrow to their daughter and save her again.
That she believed without a shadow of a doubt, because Leo could do anything.
Not because he had been injected with an experimental drug that gave him enhancements, but because he was her Leo.
The boy she’d loved when they were kids and the man she’d given her body, heart, and soul to when she was eighteen.
The man who had given her the most precious gift, their beautiful daughter, and the man who had ripped out both their hearts in a somewhat misguided attempt to save them all.
Her Leo would fight for them until his dying breath, and he had no intention of dying, not while she and their daughter weren't safe.
It might be stupid to believe that Leo could defy odds like that, cheat death, but Kate knew deep down in her soul that he was coming for her.
The helicopter kept moving, and she could no longer make out the spot where she’d seen Leo and the others, so Kate reluctantly shifted her gaze back to the woman watching her with shrewd green eyes.
She knew what her job was. It was to stay alive, protect their daughter, and wait.
If she could get a little intel from River Gardner in the meantime, she wouldn't hesitate to gather it.
“Do you want them dead or alive?” Kate asked, deciding she may as well get straight to the point. River had said she would have been willing to kill everyone, but she had to know if that was the woman’s goal or if it was just a worst-case scenario.
River studied her for a moment. “You still love him. I hazard a guess you never stopped.”
“My love life is really that important to you?”
“You haven’t had a love life as far as I can tell for the last decade. Was he your first?”
“He’s my only,” Kate said simply. There had never been a time when she had been able to look at another man and imagine his hands on her body.
It had always been Leo. It was why she’d held onto her virginity through high school, letting any of those boys touch her felt wrong.
Even after he’d dumped her, she hadn't been able to allow another man to touch her. It was silly, but it was true, she was Leo’s, and he was hers. Nothing could change that.
“I admire that level of commitment, of love, of connection. Too bad I didn't find a partner who loved me with that same level of devotion that even when we were apart, he was still mine.”
“I don’t know what that means,” she said. From what she knew about Rose’s family history, her parents had been scientists and survivalists, who lived in a small cabin that was blown up one Christmas, killing them and some extended family, but leaving Rose and Ridge alive.
Obviously, that wasn't the case since River Gardner was sitting opposite her right now.
Rose had only been four when her parents supposedly died.
She didn't have many memories of them, or knowledge of what their marriage had been like, but River was making it sound like it hadn't been a happy one. Did that mean that Rose’s father was really dead?
Or was he wherever River was taking them?
“To answer your question, I do not want to kill your Leo or the rest of his team. I do want to study them, but not in the same way that my son did. My son … well, he served his purpose, didn't he?”
Again, Kate had no idea what that meant.
She’d never met Ridge Gardner, but from what she knew of the man, he was a sadistic psychopath, with delusions of grandeur, and an ego the size of all the oceans of the world put together.
The man had kept a sex slave, tortured his sister from childhood, and had no qualms about dragging innocents into the mess that was his life.
He’d hunted Leo and the others for the last seven years, intending to lock them up in a cage, and he’d been deliberately cruel to Indigo in how he studied her ability to not feel pain.
The man was no loss to society, and none of them were mourning him, but it didn't seem like his mother was either.
Who the hell was this woman, and what role had she played in her son’s machinations?
“You had people watching me for the last ten years. Somehow, you found out that I was connected to Leo.”
“From the moment they signed up for the program, every one of our test subjects was followed closely. It was reported to me what he said to you that day. That should have been the end of it, but I had a hunch.”
“A hunch?”
“That I might be looking at something I didn't think existed.”
“Which was what?”
“True love.” There was a slight wistfulness in the older woman’s voice, and Kate had trouble reconciling the woman who seemed to have been unhappy in her marriage and wanted a man who loved her with his entire soul, and the woman who had casually mentioned blowing up Leo and the others, and could watch dispassionately as armed men forced her and her daughter onto a helicopter.
Frustrated that the woman wouldn't give straight answers, and already feeling more out of the loop than any of the others would have because she’d only learned of this whole mess a mere five days earlier, Kate glared at the woman.
Probably a stupid thing to do since River’s armed men were sitting in the helicopter with them and there was nothing stopping them from shooting her or her daughter, but she didn't care. In these last five days, her entire world had shifted. Everything she’d lost was within her grasp again, and some crazy old lady wasn't going to take it away from her.
“I won't let you hurt my daughter,” she warned, drawing her daughter further into her embrace. “She’s just a little girl, and she has nothing to do with this.”
“On the contrary, I think she has everything to do with this.”
“I don’t know what that means.” Kate huffed again, irritation washing away some of her fear. She was still afraid, but mama bear mode meant she could shove it all away and focus on being prepared to do anything she needed to protect her child.
“You will.”
“Playing games is annoying.”
Instead of getting angry at the insult, River merely chuckled.
“I promise you that soon you will know everything.
But not until everyone is gathered together.
One thing I can assure you of is that your sweet little girl might be the answer to everything I've been working toward since I was just a young college student.”
“I thought you and your son wanted an army of super soldiers. What does my nine-year-old have to do with that?”
“Ridge wanted super soldiers,” River corrected. “I want something different. What I want, what I've always wanted, is immortality. I let my son have his fun, take the focus off me, and let him do his own thing while I worked behind the scenes creating my own versions of the drugs.”
Hope sparked in Kate’s chest.
That sounded like maybe River Gardner really might have drugs that increased Ariella’s chances of surviving the bone marrow transplant.
Maybe she wouldn't lose her sweet little girl.
But if River intended to keep the guys to study and run tests on them, and Ariella became part of those tests, then while her daughter might live, she’d be locked up, nothing more than a lab rat, her only purpose to be experimented on.
Was that the life she wanted for her daughter?
If freedom was never on the cards, maybe it would be better if Ariella didn't survive.