Chapter 13
Amara did not envy Nick’s position in the least.
He was sitting at the head of the conference room table, his hands gripping tightly to the arms of his chair with the tension that had been locked into his big body ever since he’d heard that a man named Kincaid was missing.
His partner? she wondered. He’d implied he worked rogue.
A close friend? It disturbed Amara that she didn’t know.
She frowned, wondering why it should matter so much to her.
He was upset and that was enough; it was all she needed to know … wasn’t it?
Nick had also just told all of his closest friends and coworkers that he had been turned into a genetically mutated being, by a mad scientist, and that there was a secret compound full of others just like him.
Silence reigned, and Amara tried to will Nick’s eyes to hers.
She wanted to be there for him, but he wouldn’t allow it.
He was sitting stark and alone, as if she could do nothing for him.
As if no one could. All of his fire and determination had evaporated when he’d heard about Kincaid. Now he was on autopilot.
It made his story unconvincing.
So Amara wasn’t surprised when one of the men busted out laughing.
“Oh, man. Nicky! You’ve told some hot shit in your time, but that has to take the cake.
Why can’t you just admit that you ran off with your little chickie here and fucked like bunnies for a month and lost track of time?
” His laughter spread around the table in masculine chuckles.
Amara wondered why there were no women there, and then shrugged it off as unimportant at the moment.
Male, female, or otherwise, they needed to make these men act quickly, and that meant convincing them fast. Since Nick seemed to be paralyzed in his own mind at the moment, that meant she had to do something.
Amara used every new reflex she had to grab the sidearm Nick’s manager had holstered onto his hip, and even as the whole table was reacting in surprise, she disengaged the safety and shot herself through her palm.
“Amara!”
Nick exploded out of his chair.
“Jesus flicking Christ!” Jamie exclaimed.
“Shit!” the laughing man cried, no longer laughing.
Amara slammed the gun down on the tabletop and held out her dripping, bloody hand even as Nick rounded the table and went to grab hold of her.
She warned him off with a look and a primitive sound, which he responded to just as savagely—his way of telling her she wasn’t to boss him around.
“Jeez, Mara,” Nick complained, “you could have just flashed some fang.”
“I don’t know how to do it on command like you do,” she said with a shrug.
“I’m getting a medic,” Jamie said urgently.
“No! Wait. Watch,” she commanded them all, her tone brooking no argument. The room was full of tough, lethal men who didn’t take orders from much of anybody, but at her bidding they all sat back in their seats and watched her bleed.
Clearly, Nick couldn’t bear to see her injured.
Certainly not after seeing her shot to death before his very eyes.
He could also help her show what she was trying to show a little faster.
He touched her shoulder and slowly, with the tenderest of caresses, he ran his fingers down her arm and cupped her injured hand into his.
He brought her palm to his lips and, his eyes fixed only onto hers, he slowly lapped at the raw, ugly gunshot wound.
Someone at the table made a sound of revulsion, but they both ignored that.
Nick turned her hand and licked the exit wound closed, sealing it with a sweetly romantic kiss.
Then he turned to his gaping peers and showed them her rapidly healing hand.
“No friggin’ way.”
“It’s a trick!”
“You think I carry dummy bullets in my sidearm, Agent?” Jamie snapped irritably. He pointed to the carpeting where the slug had punctured it. “See?”
“You’re a fucking ghoul,” the no-longer-laughing man spat as he surged out of his seat and drew his sidearm.
“Carl!”
“Carl, no!”
“Agent Jackson, put that weapon down,” Jamie barked.
“Don’t you get it?” Carl hissed. “They’re vampires or something! They are unnatural … things! He lapped up her blood like it was flavored body oil, for fuck’s sake! Look at him. He’s got a goddamn erection. He got off on it!”
Amara glanced down Nick’s body. The surgical scrubs left no mystery to the state of Nick’s arousal. She met his wry gaze and smiled.
“Men,” she sighed with an amused roll of her eyes. “Were you thinking of flashing that for proof?”
Nick’s boss choked on a laugh; so did a couple of other men. Carl Jackson, however, grew furious and thumbed off the safety of his weapon.
Ten seconds later, the handgun lay next to Jamie’s on the tabletop and Amara was giving Carl a fanged grin as she held the burly man a foot off the floor by his throat with a single clawed hand.
“There are easily over two thousand people in that compound,” she informed on a deceptive little purr.
“They might be human, and they might be Morphate. Whoever or whatever they are, none of them asked to be illegally kidnapped and turned into guinea pigs. Your job is to uphold the law and protect the citizens of this country. Nowhere in our constitution does it say ‘these rights apply to everyone except Morphates.’”
“That’s because there weren’t freaks when it was signed!” Carl gurgled.
“Babe, let go,” Nick said calmly from behind her, that always gentle touch stroking softly into the small of her back.
She frowned, frustrated by the time this was taking, but she let Carl drop like a stone.
Amara crossed her arms defensively under her breasts and faced the stares of the other agents.
“I’ve grown up in gangland, been sold by my mother for her daily fix, and nearly starved to death waiting for a spot in the workhouse to open up for me.
Never, in all of that human existence, did I ever ask a cop for anything because I always thought cops wouldn’t give a shit about the likes of me,” Amara said quietly, slowly meeting the eyes of every man in the room, including Carl’s hostile glare. “Don’t you dare prove me right.”
Amara urgently needed to leave the room. If she had to listen to them waste time debating whether her fellow captives deserved saving, she would completely lose her cool. Since that wouldn’t help any of them, she left them to Nick and hurried into the corridor.
She hadn’t even realized they’d drawn a crowd of others, the gunshot and shouting having attracted everyone in hearing range.
At some point the conference room doors had been opened and any possibility of secreting this situation with a sweep under the rug had been completely dissolved. Good, she thought angrily.
Amara didn’t even care how everyone jerked back away from her and made a wide path for her to pass through. She was used to being treated like one of the many untouchables of their society. Still …
As horrible as their captivity had been, it had been incredibly equalizing.
She’d never formed friendships with intelligent, normal women like Mina, Rachael, and Devona before.
Not with anyone, really. They’d always been a cut above someone like her, or just incomprehensible.
It wasn’t until she’d had nothing to do all day but talk with them that she’d slowed down to realize station in life didn’t make all that much difference in how damn difficult things could be.
Without them, she’d never have been able to appreciate the trust, companionship, and loyalty of friendship.
If it hadn’t been for that pathway being built first, the encounter between her and Nick could have turned into something dreadfully different.
Amara repressed a shudder when she realized she actually had to be grateful to Paulson for that. For Nick.
What of Nick? When this was all over and they were free, what would happen to them? Could this damage to their genetics be reversed? Would Nick eagerly seek a cure and a way out of this forced bond between them?
Amara found herself running, rushing until she was bursting out into the cool, open air outside.
She found a cut of the building to hide herself behind and slowly sank down against the rough, scraping brick until her knees were under her chin, her arms squeezing around her shins as she hugged her thighs against her chest. She closed her eyes tight.
They were freaks and monsters. Everyone would know.
Most, she knew, would react just like Carl had.
People had no tolerance for differences, especially horrifying ones like blood drinking, fangs, and claws.
The immortality part would scare the living piss out of some, and attract all the wrong kinds of others.
This was a society that, instead of solving the violence of gangs, had simply walled them all up and hoped they’d all kill one another eventually as they fought over what little territory there was.
They hadn’t cared that not everyone they’d walled up with them had anything to do with gangs.
They’d written it off and waited for it to get better.
Just how were they going to respond to thousands of immortal killers, most of whom had been sucked out of the lost populaces of the Dark Cities or the impoverished areas that surrounded it?
How should they respond? She’d been in captivity with some of these maniacs for months.
The idea of a rapist or serial killer who couldn’t be stopped or killed, set free to run loose in the world was sickening.
And would the general public be able to see the difference between a Morphate like that and ones like her and Nick?
She knew with rock-solid dread of surety that they would not. She realized that, perhaps, they should not. Morphates, by the looks of things, were the only ones who would ever be able to police their own.
By the time Nick came to find her over an hour later, she only needed to look into his face to see that she wasn’t the only one beginning to come to these conclusions.
“Oh, Nick,” she whispered as dread sank into her every cell, “we have to do something.”