Chapter Ten #4
With a very gentle touch, he reached to catch her face in his hand, her chin cradled in the web between his thumb and forefinger as his fingers fanned out over her cheek. He could hear himself breathing too hard, but he was beyond regulating it.
Then the gentle touch tightened to a point just shy of hurting her.
“Axe you going to tell me that you spent years locked away in this cold, sterile room all alone for day—no, wait, knowing you, it was for weeks at a time, right? Just for this?” He gestured back and around himself.
“You spent this enormous block of your immortality a prisoner to this room for the sake of bringing … what did you call it … balance to the world of humans and Morphates?”
He stepped much closer, towering over her, so tensed with rampant emotion that he fairly quivered with it.
“You tell me, Devon, and don’t you dare fucking lie to me this time, or so help me God, you won’t like the consequences.
You tell me why you did this.” The truth!
Tell me why you buried yourself in this obsession.
What drove you into these cold, windowless rooms, day after goddamn day, when you knew it was a path to being utterly ostracized, not to mention a certain death wish. ”
Liam was looking down into her eyes, his nose barely three inches from her own. As he poured those acidic words and emotions over her, it stripped open the old wounds until she was raw and shaking.
“I d-didn’t lie to you,” she stammered, her hand instinctively pressing against him to hold him at bay.
She could struggle with him and free herself, but that would get them nowhere.
He was so clever, so much more astute than he first appeared.
How many people would walk into a room and see it the way he was seeing it? See the truth?
“I distinctly remember asking you over and over again why you chose to embark on this particular task. Omitting, is as good as lying, sweetheart, and I refuse to hang my ass out for you if you are going to blow smoke up it!”
“Liam, please, you don’t understand! I can’t—”
“If you can’t, then I can’t.” He let go of her roughly and did a sharp about-face. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to risk my life and the lives of my crew on ‘I can’t’ when what you really mean is you won’t,” he threw back over his shoulder as he left the room.
Devon moved, her preternatural speed bursting out as she overtook him in a mere heartbeat, slammed the outer vault door shut and spun the tumbler. She turned to face him, breathing hard not from exertion but from raw fury. It burned in her eyes and clenched tight in her fists and muscles.
Liam had drawn up short in total surprise at what had to be the very first real display of her Morphate abilities.
It was strange how it made him feel, seeing the stark, albeit brief, display of what she really was.
It made him realize that she had been hiding among humans for quite some time in order to have become so very good at blending in with them.
At suppressing what ought to have come naturally for her.
“What the hell is it you think you’re doing?” he growled, his hands fisting as he stalked up to her. “If you think you can trap me and try to coerce me into changing my mind, lady, you are looking for a frigid day in hell.”
“Always so cocksure, aren’t you?” she hissed in retaliation. “Always so right!”
“You bet your sweet ass I am!”
“Well, let me tell you a few things you don’t know.
A few things you’ve got very, very wrong, Mr. Nash,” she spat out, her flushed face and bottle green eyes radiating her incredible anger.
He was not surprised. He’d stepped into that lab and within moments he’d realized that here was a woman who felt fury with an unquenchable passion.
Just like she felt lust, he recalled all too vividly.
He suppressed an involuntary shudder when he found himself contemplating what unquenchable lust of this magnitude would be like.
Devon wasn’t even thinking any longer. She was only feeling. It was pain, rage, and frustration, renewed betrayal and old abandonment.
“I had a family,” she rasped, her voice rough from emotion and shouting.
“I had a life and they stole me away from it. Eric Paulson and his experimenters stole hundreds of us, from asylums, from workhouses, and right from the streets of the Dark Cities and anywhere else they thought no one would ever miss us. If you had the misfortune of crossing Paulson in the slightest way, say, perhaps, refusing his job offer once you finally realized what that job entailed, well, he couldn’t have you running off to report his unethical behavior now, could he?
Did they tell you that in your little Morphate 101 classes at the Secret Service? Hmm?”
No. Not all of it. Those, he knew, were the sordid details that didn’t matter when it came to how to fight and defend against a Morphate. Who cared who or what they had once been? What mattered was what they were, what they were capable of, and how nearly impossible they could be to stop.
But this answered a question for him. She was one of the original lots of Morphates.
She had lived life on this planet for at least fifty years as a Morphate, almost twice as long as she had ever been human.
He didn’t know how old she had been to begin with, but she didn’t look a day over thirty. She would never look a day over thirty.
And with that horrendous over-ninety-percent mortality rate Paulson’s lab rats had suffered, it was a wonder she had survived at all. It was a wonder any of them had. How could he begrudge her a single day of her life when she had come so close to losing it?
“How old were you?” he asked, his own voice now hoarse with conflicting emotions. A huge part of him wanted to hold her tight and run a soothing hand down the wild mass of her espresso hair, to be gentler than he had been so far as he coaxed his answers from her.
“Thirty-one. Old enough to remember and to mourn. To feel so much fear and betrayal and anger I sometimes thought I would choke on it!” She was shaking so hard, her fists clenched so tight, she looked as though she would do just that.
Liam stepped closer to her on instinct and, although she jerked at the movement, she didn’t step away.
She did watch him warily though, looking unsure as to whether she wanted him that near her.
Looking for the first time like the dangerous animal so many of his kind liked to accuse her kind of being.
He supposed that made it easier for humans to take away their rights and not feel guilt about it.
But he’d never been the sort to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Even when he’d been pinned to the wall of a lab very similar to this one, Morphate claws skewering him through his chest and his vulnerable human principal, the President of the Federated States, cowering under a table with the bodies of his dead Secret Service contingent bleeding out all around him, Liam had known that particular Morphate was not a representative of the Morphate people as a whole.
“Tell me what this has to do with that room inside,” Liam coaxed, the demand gentled by the look in his softened amber eyes. Devon saw the empathy there and tried to ignore it.
“I’m making a point, Liam,” she told him, her tone clipped.
“There are so many things you don’t know about the Phoenix Project.
So many things you don’t know about the Morphates.
And how much information do you have, really, on what happened after we liberated ourselves and entered this world as aliens?
Or rather, reentered.” She shook her head and ran frustrated hands through her thick hair, mussing it into even wilder disarray than his own hands had created only minutes earlier.
“And then the new tragedies began. The hate and bigotry, the supercilious superiority, people treating people like things. And there was nothing that could stop it. There was nothing I could do to stop it.”
“Devon.” Liam closed the space between then, grabbing her wrists where her hands were fisted in her hair as though she would rip it out of her scalp. “What in the world did you think you could do to stop all of that?”
“I could_have killed Eric Paulson!”
There it was. Decades of frustration and guilt tumbling out. What she thought she ought to have done to save them all. To prevent an unpreventable madness.
And what she had on her agenda still.
“When he was still mortal. Sitting across from me at dinner like a civilized monster, offering me fame, glory, and money … and me so eager to accept all of the above. So thrilled to be in his lauded presence.” She all but spat the words.
And light suddenly dawned on Liam.
This was why she had done all of this. This was why she had gone underground in human society, why she had taken on this task so many of her kind would look on as traitorous.
She was gunning for the man who had started it all, determined to do what no other had been able to do in the fifty years since the Phoenix Project had come to light.
Liam was very well aware of the rumors that, upon his escape, Dr. Paulson had chosen one of his own protocols and had changed himself into a Morphate.
That he was still alive and crazy out there somewhere, with God knows what motivations driving him.
And for some reason she felt it was her responsibility to put an end to him.
And now he understood so much more about Devon.
He finally could see why she was so driven.
She carried around elephantine guilt that was weighing her spirit down.
There was no way he could possibly undo so many years of damage with simple words, so he wouldn’t even try.
But he could try and ease her burden just a little.
“Okay,” he said, drawing in a deep breath and exhaling it slow and loud on purpose as he drew her against himself with a hand at the back of her head, cradling her against his chest as he breathed again.
She picked up on the third breath, following him perfectly through a fourth until he felt the tension unwind slightly from her frame.
Enough to let her sink more softly against him.
“Okay,” he said again. It was simple, accepting if not quite agreeing.
He understood her passion. Her fever. He had once been filled with a similar fever.
When he had been young, Colin’s age, he’d wanted nothing more than to use his training to bring justice to those who deserved it.
He had been fortunate, however, to have had the right hands to guide him, to shape him.
Hands that had taught him the best ways to funnel his furies and his frustrations.
Considering who she was at her core, considering the wild nature of the creature she was harboring inside of herself, it was a wonder she hadn’t burned down half the world in her fever to find and destroy Paulson.
But there was much more to her than that.
She was too exquisite and too refined, too intelligent to lose herself so utterly and blindly.
So completely. So she had saved the obsession for her moments in this lab.
Channeled it here. Alone? Had there been no one for her?
What of her fellow Morphates? Which City had she been released to?
Had she made no connections among them? Bad enough to be so ostracized, but to be ostracized and alone?
Liam tilted her head back between his hands, lifting her chin between his thumbs as he raised her eyes to his.
“It’s late. It’s been a long day,” he told her softly. “After all of this time, I think one more day won’t make a difference.”
It took a moment for his meaning to sink in, and when it did, he could see the tears burning wetly across her eyes.
She made a sound, like a sad, wounded little creature, and then hitched in her breath.
Watching this proud, strong woman dissolve into tears was more painful to him then he could possibly have expected.
It took his breath away, the way it affected him.
He didn’t have the opportunity to examine the feelings or worry about himself and the integrity of his own perspective.
He was far more focused on what she so clearly needed in that moment.
He didn’t rush her to the door, because he knew she wouldn’t want to be seen by anyone in such a state.
She would probably be wishing he wasn’t seeing her either, but there was nothing he could do about that …
nothing he would want to do about that. As far as he could see, she had been on her own, stoic and burning beneath the surface, for far too long as it was.
And with what, that jackass Carter as her only touchstone?
He rather surprised himself with his instincts to hold her and calm her. The closest thing he’d ever had to a sister was Veronica and he’d never invested much in his relationships with women. His was not the sort of career meant to foster those kinds of things.
Regardless, he’d learned enough along the way to keep from making a mess into a disaster. Enough to help her find calm after a few minutes and feel proud of himself for managing it. He helped dry her cheeks with his thick fingertips and somehow managed to get her to leave the vault.
As he brought her to her rooms, he very abruptly realized that he was in over his head. That all his principles were in jeopardy. All the rules he was so comfortable adhering to were quickly dissolving.
He was incredibly screwed.