give her a wink. “Drinks?”
“You know that’s not allowed.” Without looking at him, Samantha scanned through the security feeds on the camera, searching for any sign that her replacement was at least in the elevator.
“Hey. I’m talking to you.” He went so far as to put his hand over the top of the desk and tried to grab her shoulder.
She pulled away before he could touch her, one hand going up automatically to grip his wrist and break it, before she stopped herself. She did not smile. “I’m not interested in getting fired, Clement.”
“Yeah, that pussy isn’t worth it, anyway,” he said derisively, his mouth twisting. In the next second, he was choking, coughing, doubled over so that she had to stand and look over the edge of the desk to see what the hell was going on. The fit lasted only another few seconds, but when he stood his face was red, eyes streaming tears. He muttered a low curse and backed away from her with a scowl.
A dozen retorts leaped to her lips, but as with almost every other action she ever wanted to take while on this job, Samantha held it back. She gave Clement her patented blank smile and enjoyed the way it made him flinch. The hall door opened, letting in the nurse who’d be taking over, and Samantha pushed past him without so much as a look at his face.
The scent of lavender stayed with her the entire way home.
It was a rare day when Persephone didn’t have anything going on. No repairs to make or schedule for the building. No appointments with the small but consistent stable of men who paid her to be the woman of their dreams...or sometimes, nightmares, depending. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d woken feeling semi-rested, without even a tinge of anxiety following her around.
It wouldn’t last, she thought as she headed out into the morning, taking the concrete steps at the front of the building two at a time so she could get to the bodega on the corner for a cup of coffee and a candy bar. Caffeine and chocolate in hand, she was already tearing open the plastic when she bumped head-on, literally, into a man as solid as brick. She hit him hard enough to bounce off, stumbling back.
“Watch it,” she muttered, preparing to push past him.
The guy snagged the sleeve of her sweatshirt, turning her to face him. Persephone was already working, shifting, smoothing the lines and curves of her face to look like someone else. Dark hair instead of bright red-gold. Big tits. Tight top. His eyes went right there, and even if she hadn’t masked her face he’d have barely paid attention, so taken was he by the sight of her knockers.
Men, she thought with a sneer. So predictable.
“I’m looking for someone,” he said. “You seen her?”
The picture he pulled up on his phone was blurred, but definitely her. Thank god she’d automatically put on the glamour for him. The question was, why did he have a picture of her in the first place?
“Nope. Never,” Persephone said. “What’d she do?”
She thought he might say she owed him, or someone he was working for, money. That she was part of a scam. That she’d been caught up in a kinky prostitution ring, and he was part of the sting operation.
“Nothing.” Something in his cold, dead eyes left her shivering. “Just looking for her.”
Then he backed up and kept walking, leaving her behind. She watched him go, knowing that if he turned to glance back, she would still look like someone else. Uncertain if, in the end, it would matter. If a man like that was on her trail, she might be in trouble sooner rather than later.
He was from Wyrmwood. She felt it. He wasn’t one of the soldier guys who’d raided Collins Creek; they were drones that followed orders. This guy was the advance scout, sniffing around to see if he could catch wind of her anywhere.
And if he found out where she really was, Persephone thought, then the other men would come.
Then, they would try to take her away.
Jed would have liked to really put down that guard who’d been harassing Samantha all the way to the ground, his lungs blowing up, heart bursting from his chest. He’d settled instead for squeezing the asshole from the inside out, just enough to get the guy to back off from Samantha, and even that effort had nearly put Jed onto his hands and knees. There wasn’t any blood, though. Whatever damage he’d done to the guard’s brain hadn’t been bad enough for that.
Ever since he was twelve years old, Jed had discovered the joys of hurting people, especially when the rewards bore merit—video games, chocolate cake, comic books. All he had to do was let Dr. Ransom open the window blinds into the other room and show him the man or the woman in the chair, then he’d have to think really hard and later, not quite as hard and then not hard at all, to make them scream and writhe in agony.
It had taken him only another year to understand that hurting people did not make him feel good. It left him with a sick stomach and an aching head, worse than finishing the puzzles or reading the word cards in the box or any of the other dozens of things they had him do. Hurting people took effort; getting them to behave like his puppet took even more. More than once it left his nose bleeding.
One terrible time, it left him blind.
His sight came back. So did the tests. So did his anger, bigger now than anything else. No more rewards for doing what they wanted. Now he suffered the punishments for refusing. Starvation. Electric shock therapy. When they realized he could no longer be controlled by any of those methods, the drugs began.
At seventeen, he killed a man, but not the one they wanted him to kill. After that, the people at Wyrmwood started to be afraid of him.
Now, at twenty-five, he should still be terrifying them, but he’d spent the last eight years doing his best to convince them that they had nothing to fear.
The testing tonight during his session with Dr. Ransom had been unexpectedly brutal. After years of proving to them he was no longer capable of doing what they wanted, years of taunting them into just disposing of him already, Jed had almost forgotten what it was like when the doctor was convinced he could get a reaction from his patient. Almost, but not quite. His body remembered, anyway, the sting and burn of electricity. The pungent horror of the chemicals they dripped into his veins to make him compliant. There’d been times over the years when it would’ve taken so little to tip him into death, but they’d pulled him back. So many times he’d have let them—but that had changed when Samantha started working there.
She was not the first person to look him in the eyes, but she was the first to at least try to connect with him as a human being. Small things, nothing that would get either of them in trouble. A gentle squeeze of his shoulder when she took his vitals. A smile. A compassionate laugh at his lame jokes.
He felt it when she left the hospital. If he tried a little harder, he’d be able to feel her wherever she went, but doing that would surely rip something inside his head, so he eased back the small tendrils of thought that had connected him to her in the first place. She’d be back tomorrow, he thought just before he passed out on the hard cot, her face
