Chapter 7
Kincaid was hovering around the lab again.
Jenesis realized it might have been better if he’d gone back to watching her through those cameras of his.
At least he wouldn’t be staring at her in that unnerving way he had, and glaring and growling at anyone who so much as bumped into her the wrong way.
She tried to remind herself that he was unable to help himself and that he was trying to be protective.
She supposed being protective was better than being hateful and obnoxious.
Although it was a little obnoxious in its own right.
“All right, this isn’t working for me,” Jenesis snapped, shutting down the centrifuge she was using and turning to face him when he tried to take a heavy microscope out of her hands.
“You’re still weak,” he said on a low breath, his blue eyes tracking the ridge of her shoulder, reminding her of the sore wound.
The bite had been much deeper than she had initially realized.
It was fascinating, really. If it had been just about finding a blood source, there were places where a much shallower bite would have served the purpose.
But it hadn’t been just about that. It was more like the way a chimpanzee or canine might bite to mark a member of its group, mark dominance or mark a mate.
Those bites were nice and deep so they stuck around for a while.
Jen didn’t know how she felt about that overall, but at the moment she was tired of being the fire hydrant he kept pissing on in order to tell everyone she was his. Especially when he really didn’t feel that strongly about her.
“You need to stop breathing down my neck like a stalker, Kincaid. I can’t work this way, and I honestly don’t know how much more of it I can take before I punch you in the damn nose!”
Jenesis pulled her samples from the centrifuge with an irritated jerk, pulled an injection gun, and loaded the freshly made product into the injection chamber.
“I’m just trying—” he started.
“You’re trying to irritate the crap out of me!” she bit out. Then she stormed past him, injection gun in hand, heading for the privacy of her office.
Jenesis closed the door to the office with a little too hard a slam, smacked the injector down on the table, and shrugged out of her jacket with heated temper even as she hit the button to activate the smart glass with her elbow.
She was in the process of rolling up her sleeve as the door opened and shut to let in the storm that was Kincaid, the smart glass flashing clear and then clouding again as the connection was broken and then reengaged.
He opened his mouth to lambaste her, no doubt about it, but his words froze on his lips as the fact that she was giving herself an injection sank into his awareness. He watched the needle break her skin, watched her compress the injector.
“What is that?” he wanted to know.
“B12,” she said dryly.
“You don’t take B12 intravenously,” he snapped.
She shrugged as she dropped the injector in the waste collector.
“Fine, since there’s no way for you to argue with me about it.
It’s a tracer.” She went to her laptop and turned the screen toward him; with a few taps she activated the tracing program, making sure to show him slowly how to do it.
The shape of a body appeared, a warm red area slowly showing up around its inner right elbow.
“In a few hours the red areas will have grown and spread throughout my body and the program. I used the same cellular tag Paulson did to attach nanobyte technology to my cells. The nanobytes are dormant, passive, and harmless. They have one purpose: They give off a GPS signal. That way if, for whatever reason, I should suddenly disappear, you are going to be able to use this laptop to track me down. This is the only tracking program I know of that is capable of doing this,” she lied briefly, “so whatever you do, don’t drop the damn laptop. ”
Kincaid was genuinely gape-mouthed as he stared at her and the tracing program alternately.
“You …” He couldn’t seem to put together cohesive sentences.
The implications of her actions were enormous.
She had dedicated herself to the Morphate cause with that one injection.
She had just acknowledged that she knew she was the bait Paulson wanted, and that she was willing to put herself on the line in order to help the Morphates finally track down their maker and …
and do with them what they would. Exact revenge, extract information …
whatever it was they wanted. “Jenesis, you are mortal,” he found himself saying softly, for some reason that sentence being the only one he could manage.
But when he thought about it, it really was the only one that mattered.
“If you put yourself out there for him, he could kill you before we even have a chance to find you with this.”
But Jena saw the way his big fingers were brushing over the pads of the laptop’s unibody; the reverence and delicacy of the touch and the slight tremble in his big hands telling her just how badly he wanted this advantage, and just how much it meant to him.
But she had known that already. It was why she had done it in the first place.
It was only one of many ways she would use her brain and her science to help these people.
“Paulson doesn’t want me dead. He wants my solutions.
And once the nanobytes replicate far enough, they will remain in my body and working even if I am cut.
I will bleed a trail of nanobytes with that tracer on them.
Even if they do kill me, the trace won’t die with me.
You’ll find me, and very likely you’ll find him. ”
He smiled grimly. Not really a smile at all when she took in the sudden fury broiling in his eyes.
“And you think that’s a fair solution? To give your life in exchange for tracking down Paulson?”
“I think that’s as fair as it’s going to get in this world,” she said fatalistically.
He moved around the desk and grabbed hold of her in the span of a brief breath, her arms enclosed within his hands.
“I don’t like it. It’s unacceptable,” he growled as his face burrowed into her hair, his breath coasting swift and hot against her ear. “It is beyond unacceptable to me.”
Jena couldn’t resist the smile breaking over her lips. She knew this was the closest she would ever get to hearing him express concern for her. It felt ridiculously good for some reason.
“Nevertheless, it’s done. Now all that’s left is for us to put on a very convincing performance in the lab that will snag the attention of any of Paulson’s spies and make him believe we have the solution he is looking for.”
“And you think it could work that simply? That quickly?” he wanted to know.
“Paulson will want to snag the solution fast, in its earliest stages, before we have a chance to refine it and turn it into some kind of handheld defense weapon.” She sighed. “It’s what any brilliant psychopath would do. Steal it before you can use it against him.”
Kincaid knew she was right. As he stood there with his face pressed against her ear, his senses absorbing the feel and aroma of her and how thoroughly she stimulated his entire being just by being that close to him, he felt torn violently in two directions.
As usual. But in this case, it was the logical brain that agreed with her suggestion of taking the darker road while the beast within him wanted nothing to do with any of this plan and wanted only to protect her and keep her safe.
He wanted to grab the laptop and smash it to bits, ending this insane plan right then and there.
“I don’t want this,” he gritted out from between tight teeth.
“You want nothing more than this,” she countered softly.
He drew in a deep, quick breath, presumably to argue with her. But then it held. Ticktock. Ticktock. Just a few crucial beats of time. And to his credit, she could feel the energy of his internal struggle like a storm swirling against her body in powerful, turbulent waves.
“What do you suggest?” he asked finally on a rough exhale of breath, as if it took everything inside of him to make himself say the words.
Again, it was the closest she imagined she would ever get to having him admit he cared about her.
But in the end, she knew his passion for getting hold of Paulson meant far more.
She didn’t blame him. It was a top priority on her list as well.
She would never be safe from the good doctor without the strength of Kincaid and the Morphates to protect her from him.
They both had their reasons for using each other.
And they would always be using each other. As long as she was the scientist he needed and he was the Morphate she’d had a hand in creating, they could only ever use each other.
“I’ll need a volunteer to die. The rest will be left to the imagination.”
He lifted his head then, finally meeting her eyes, the blue of his gaze a turbulent storm of emotion and curiosity.
“A volunteer to die?”
“For all intents and purposes,” she said. “It will be up to us to make it look real and to the volunteer to carry through the pretense. It has to be someone you trust, Kincaid. Who do you trust to disappear until Paulson takes the bait? It could be for a day … or it could be months.”
“I don’t know of anyone. Devona is the only one I trust …”
“But she’s too important to your lab. And too close to you to make Paulson believe we’d choose to kill her. We’d pick someone lower in rank.”
“Who would you pick, Jen? In the end, it would be … If it were for real, Jenesis, who would you pick as a sacrifice to prove you had a method to kill a Morphate?”