Chapter 9
It took several days for Jenesis to gain enough trust so that Paulson let her move more freely through the lab.
What she couldn’t plan was what she was going to do once she found Kincaid.
She had discovered she had access to the lab with the key card she’d been given, but her access ended at the dormitory level of her apartment. They would have to work that out later.
It was hard for her to be patient. Even harder for her to overcome the queasy fear she found welling up inside of herself over and over again.
Not to mention she hadn’t been feeling well physically since the drugging she’d suffered.
She had this incredible itching sensation underneath her skin.
It made it impossible to focus. So far she’d been able to forestall showing Paulson a technique that didn’t actually exist using excuses like getting used to the lab and not feeling well, combined with more savvy resistance like wanting assurances that he wouldn’t dispose of her as soon as she showed him what she knew.
He was, luckily, willing to wait until she could be lulled into a false sense of complacency or security.
Whatever. All she wanted was to find Kincaid.
This whole plan had blown up in their faces.
Yes, they had found Paulson, but at the worst of prices.
And every day that ticked by was a day that Kincaid was trapped like a lab rat once again, under Paulson’s power.
And Jena knew that was the worst thing imaginable for him.
She had to find him, and regardless of what happened to her, she had to free him.
Following the tracker, she turned a corner and came up against two guards protecting a hallway. She pulled her pad out of her pocket and began to jot down the most complex-looking formula she could think of and, keeping her head down, tried to brush past them.
“Excuse us, Doctor, this area is off-limits.”
She stopped and glared at them, tapping her pen to her pad in irritation.
“No shit, Sherlock,” she snapped at him.
“You see this?” She thrust the formula under his nose.
“This is what I’m going to be injecting into that Morphate you have down the hall.
Only I can’t do it until I run a specialized panel and do an exam.
The phlebotomist will be here directly. Send her down and try not to give her a hassle. ”
She pushed past them, leaving them looking after her and trading shrugs.
She couldn’t even cheer herself in her brain.
She just wanted to get to Kincaid. Everything in her was screaming the urgency of it.
The need was crawling under her skin in the most uncomfortable way.
A way that was making her more than a little reckless, she acknowledged.
There was only one door at the end of the hall and it was coded for a passkey. She pulled hers from her lanyard and hoped to hell it gave her access. She didn’t know what she would do if it didn’t. She’d been doing all of this by the seat of her pants. She was frankly amazed she’d made it so far.
The lock opened and she pushed into the room.
Kincaid turned with a snarl for the intruder, but realizing it was she, he slammed his whole essence forward against the titanium bars of the cage they had him in.
Not even a bed this time. No such illusions.
He was a rat in a cage. Four walls of bars, a toilet, and a sink, all centrally located in a room full of lab equipment and, usually, technicians.
Jenesis saw him and her eyes ran over him in stark, rapid appraisal. He was covered in raw, freshly healing scars, the nature of which she could easily imagine.
They had been killing him. Over and over again.
Every mortal injury they could come up with.
She saw evidence of it all over his body.
He hadn’t had enough time to fully heal, so the scars were bright and pink.
Tears jumped into her eyes as she threw herself against the bars, reaching to take his face in her hands and pulling his mouth to hers.
“I’m so sorry,” she wept.
But his hands felt so good, incredibly good as they caught her by the backs of her shoulders and held her up to him as well as he could with the cold gray impediment between them.
“There are cameras everywhere,” he rasped as he checked her over for changes. “We don’t have time.”
But even as she fumbled with her key card she felt him growling softly into her mouth. She responded in kind, the sound coming out of nowhere.
The cage lock beeped open as they both pulled back in surprise and stared at each other. Kincaid swung around the door threshold, his hands never leaving her. He bent quickly to sniff beneath her left ear.
“What?” She knew something was wrong. And she was too smart not to know what was happening.
But anxiety was blocking her comprehension.
She broke away from him except for his hand, pulling him toward the door.
“You have to go! There’re two guards at the end of the hall, and my card will take you up to the top dormitory level. But …”
“Jena.”
He stopped her, pulling her back toward him. He lifted her hand, the fingers that gripped his with painful fear, and touched his lips to them.
She shook her head, tears leaping into her eyes, her voice suddenly gone.
“What’d he do to you, babe?”
She shook her head again. “Nothing more than what I deserved,” she croaked.
How ironic this was, She thought. But it made sense, didn’t it?
Paulson found her to be the most precious of commodities.
He wouldn’t want anything to happen to his golden goose.
And there was only one way he could guarantee that.
She realized all of the itching under her skin had stopped the minute she’d come into contact with Kin.
It had changed into something else. A hunger.
A wild, unbelievable hunger. A hunger so extreme that her mouth began to ache.
It made her realize she’d hardly eaten a thing these past few days. It made her realize a lot of things.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said hastily, trying to push all that aside, trying again to pull him toward the door. “You have to go!”
“I have to go? And what about you?” he demanded.
“I don’t have the strength to keep up with you. I’ll stay behind as a distraction. If I go he’ll just tear up the world hunting me down again. It’s more important that you get free.”
“And you think I’ll do that? You think I’ll leave you here to suffer a lifetime of Paulson’s retributions? To suffer his tactics as he tries to force you to give up a technique you don’t have?”
“Actually, I already suspected she didn’t have it.”
They both jolted around to see Paulson standing in the doorway, and Jenesis felt her entire world bottom out.
Of course. Of course, she thought numbly.
Paulson was too thorough for it to make any sense that she would be able to get past guards and locks so easily.
But she hadn’t thought of that. She’d had a single-minded focus.
She’d needed to get to Kincaid. She needed him.
Even as she stood there, she felt her whole body burning with that need.
As he pulled her protectively against himself, she felt her body wriggling of its own accord to burrow against him.
Heat burned through her as she came into snug contact with him.
A heat like nothing she’d ever felt. She forgot all about Paulson.
Forgot all about their chances for escape evaporating into thin air.
“I knew that she couldn’t be trusted. I figured the best way of testing her loyalties and of finding out the truth was to change her.
We injected her when she was first taken.
My spies in your lab suspected you had a sexual connection.
It stood to reason she’d be even more driven to you if I used your protocol on her.
Whether she was aware of it or not, she would be impatiently driven to you.
The mating drive often impedes all logic.
And as brilliant as she is, I needed something quite powerful to impede her logic.
” Paulson turned to the two guards at his back.
“Lock them both in the cage. Maybe a few days of watching her mate suffer up close will make her more tractable. You see, she may not have found out the solution I want, but I know she is fully capable of it. Just as you knew it, Gregory.”
“You just decided you weren’t willing to wait for her to come to it on her own?
” Kincaid snapped and snarled when the guard came forward, reaching for Jenesis.
He jerked her behind him, even when she instinctively rumbled a threat of her own, gnashing her teeth at the guard.
She recoiled suddenly, her hand jerking up to her mouth.
He knew the pain she was in immediately.
It beat through him instinctively as well as with memory.
Her jaw would be hurting incredibly as her teeth made room for the fangs that wanted to explode free for the first time.
But he couldn’t spare her the attention and affection, the comforting he would have given to her under other circumstances.
Whatever else happened, he could not let them be locked up in that cage again.
As strong as a Morphate was, titanium was stronger.
Kincaid lurched toward the guards, growling fiercely at them. Both guards responded in kind.
All right. Three Morphates to two, and one of his two had no idea how to be a Morphate. Still, he’d fought worse odds.
“Big mistake,” Kincaid hissed through his fangs. “I’m not an Alpha for nothing. And being a Morphate doesn’t make you Alpha, Paulson.”
Jenesis felt Kincaid spring away from her and into the trio of men.
Her theory about the savagery an Alpha male must be capable of was nothing compared to what she was seeing.
Kin went for the guard on the right first, savagely ripping his head half from his shoulders.
The opposite guard pulled his weapon and began shooting wildly at Kincaid, forcing Paulson, who was in the way, to hit the deck or suffer being shot.
The first guard hit the floor in a bloody, twitching mess as Kincaid turned on the second man standing.
That was when she saw the first shot hit her mate’s body. It was a shoulder shot, entering the front left shoulder and blowing a hefty hole out the back.
Jenesis would remember very little of what happened next.
The sight of her mate being attacked triggered everything Morphate inside of her all at once.
Fangs and claws exploded in a fury, as did the vicious lunge of her body.
Before Kincaid could even move forward, she was on the second guard, biting his firing arm with all of her strength and ripping at it in a head-shaking motion like a dog with its favorite bone.
The torsion against the guard’s shoulder ripped his arm free of its socket. The Morphate guard screamed as muscle and sinew detached. He fell to the floor, leaving his arm between her jaws as she shook blood over herself and her mate.
Paulson saw the way of things and made haste for the door. He was only interested in more backup, and the alarm button was just outside.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Kincaid snapped, burying his claws into the man’s legs. Once he had hold of the doctor, he hauled him hard toward the cage. He missed the door by a few feet, allowing Paulson to rebound in full Morphate glory.
“I’m an Alpha in my own right,” he growled. “Did you think I wouldn’t make sure of that?”
Paulson ripped into Kincaid with vicious swipes of his claws.
Hauling all his weight forward instead of back, he made for Kincaid’s throat.
What he got for his trouble was a blindsiding headbutt from the left as Kincaid Gregory’s mate made her bid to help and protect him.
Paulson raked at her even as he fell to the ground from the power of her charge.
He caught her along the side of her face, tearing her from forehead to chin.
His most recent mistake in a lineup of many. Kincaid was on him in a heartbeat, teeth in his throat, compressing … rending.
Kincaid left Paulson much the same way Paulson had left him when he’d had him shot through the throat. He didn’t care. He didn’t even feel satisfaction over exacting some form of one-on-one revenge. The price of it had been too high. And he turned instantly to the one who had paid that price.
Adrenaline and Morphate mutation aside, she’d never been injured so badly before. She’d recoiled in shock. Kin went to her quickly, his arms wrapping tightly around her.
“I know it hurts, honey,” he soothed softly.
But just the same he had to force her up on her feet.
The hallway was empty beyond the open door, but for how long?
He wouldn’t have them doing to her what they had been doing to him for the past few days.
He bent to press his lips to hers in an encouraging kiss; then sweeping her blood from his lips with his tongue, he urged her into the hall.