CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“He’s assimilating ‘Grade 2’ serum well, despite the rapid introduction into his system,” Dr. Chin reported, his patient lying in bed a few feet away.
Powell received this report with limited enthusiasm, regardless of the scientific progress that had modified the three-month transformation process and turned it into a few days. He’d watched 209 soldiers transform into GTECHs at Groom Lake before the White House forced him to pull back. But creation wasn’t his goal at this point. He’d proven he could create, and he’d stockpiled enough serum for another hundred soldiers, which the government had no idea he possessed. Alignment with the government had given him the men he needed, but it was Jocelyn who would give him the missing element that allowed him to use his new GTECHs—control.
“As it stands,” Chin continued, “he’s at 70 percent absorption. We should have—”
Suddenly, West jerked, his eyelids peeling back so wide it was as if needles threaded the lashes and stretched them outward.
It was a familiar look, one Powell had seen in the battlefield moments after a soldier was injured, seconds before death. He lifted an eyebrow at Chin.
“It’s an unavoidable side effect of the rapid change,” Chin explained.
“Oh my,” Jocelyn said and rushed to Brock’s side, reaching for the face mask on the portable table. “It must be the light.” She leaned over, and Brock jerked again.
“Holy hell, Jocelyn,” Powell cursed. “You’re going to get hurt.” Brock was tied down, but he was still wild. “You’re not a damn nurse.”
Powell cut Chin a warning look that demanded he act. Powell didn’t give a crap if West was in pain, but Jocelyn didn’t like to cause other people pain, contrary to what one would think about someone who built weapons of mass destruction. That company hadn’t been the same since her husband had died. She could kill indirectly, but couldn’t stomach it up close and personal, and it showed in financial performance. She was annoyingly female, but he humored her sensitivity simply because he didn’t need her doing any last-minute soul-searching, which would do nothing but complicate things.
“Put the damn mask on the man before he ends up hurting her.” Indignation flashed in Chin’s face that said he wasn’t a damn nurse either, but it only served to agitate Powell. “Do it.” The order was low, curt. Chin went into motion, placing the mask over Brock’s face. Instantly, he calmed.
Jocelyn’s brows furrowed with concern. “This is so painful to watch.”
“The cornea should fully adjust in the next few hours,” Chin assured her.
Jocelyn’s concern shifted into a hint of excitement as she pushed off the bed and quickly joined the two men. “Does that mean we can implement the Red Dart application in a few hours as well?” Jocelyn asked, clearly redirecting her sympathy for West into progress. As a scientist and weapons expert, there was no question she wanted to see her work succeed.
“The transformation is the serum’s super-powered effort to rid his body of all weakness,” Chin reminded them. “We have no idea how adaptable it is during that time. We don’t want to risk it building up immunity to the formula you’ve created. Let the transformation fully complete.”
“Cut to the chase, Chin.” Powell wasn’t in the mood for his long explanations. “How much time?”
“Twenty-four hours.”
“Make it twelve,” Powell stated.
Chin shifted uncomfortably. “There’s still a question—”
“Then go find the answer,” Powell sniped. “Now.” Chin nodded sharply and headed for the door.
Powell had provided all the resources that Chin had utilized at PMI, despite the size limitation of this facility, which was tucked beneath Jocelyn’s home and hidden with military-grade technology. A far cry from the state-of-the-art PMI facility, but it allotted a certain element of discretion he deemed necessary for Jocelyn’s involvement. He only involved those he knew he could control, those he’d gathered ammunition against. He’d certainly ensured he knew Jocelyn’s weaknesses. “Pull it shut behind you,” Powell ordered as Chin reached the door.
Powell had kept things all business with Jocelyn, entertaining his sexual appetites elsewhere, but he no longer found those outlets satisfactory. They shared something that reached beyond the Red Dart program. Michael Taylor had disgraced him—slept with his daughter, and damn near sliced his throat. The man had turned his back on his country as he had on his mother and his family years before. Yes. He and Jocelyn both hated Michael. It was a hatred that had become…arousing.
His gaze raked her curvy figure, traced the line of her hips, the swell of her breasts. He skimmed back to her heart-shaped face. “I do believe it’s time we opened that bottle of champagne we’ve been saving to toast our success.”
“I thought you didn’t consider us a success until Red Dart was implemented?”
He smiled his approval. “Then we will toast the years of brilliant collaboration it took to get us to this point.” He held out his hand. “What do you say?”
She hesitated an instant more, but the resistance slid away, her features softening with the promise of submission. Her lips parted, her eyes glossing over. She lifted her hand, her fingers sliding against his palm. Their eyes met, simmering with the familiar, shared attraction, deepened by the promise in the air—he would have her tonight.
Powell led her several feet away to a leather couch and chairs, a desk in the far corner. This was her workspace, and unlike the adjoining rooms down the hall, he’d taken care to add comfort here.
He urged her to sit on the couch. Tentatively, she sat on the edge, watching him with a heavy-lidded stare, her black slacks hugging slender thighs. He walked to the hutch against the wall and pulled out the bottle of champagne and two glasses, filling them. Joining her, he sat down beside her and offered her a glass.
“To us,” he murmured softly, and what his words did not say, he ensured that his eyes did.
Her lips parted, cheeks flushed. She touched her glass to his. “To us.”
They sipped the bubbly liquid, savoring it. He took her glass and set them both on the table. “Tell me, Jocelyn,” he said, boldly resting his hand on her leg. “Does saving the world turn you on as much as it does me?”
Brock floated into consciousness with the sound of voices in his head; heavy shadows blocking out the bright light were the last thing he remembered. When was that? Minutes ago? Hours? He blinked several times, tried to focus, felt the heaviness pressing against his face. A mask—he had on some sort of mask to cover his eyes.
He opened his mouth to speak, to call out, but his throat swelled with the effort. He dragged air into his lungs to prove that he could. Pushed it back out. He wasn’t dead. A familiar voice pierced the fog. No, they were moans. Female moans.
“General,” came the whisper. “Oh my, General.” More soft moans and pants. A guttural male growl.
Reality sliced through Brock’s mind, possessiveness coursing through his veins. He had no idea why—no understanding of the reason it had to be—but Jocelyn was his. He tried to sit up. Tried to scream out—Jocelyn!—but there was no sound.
Jocelyn’s voice carried through the darkness. “General, wait. General, stop.” Brock drew a breath and forced himself to calm, clinging to the shattered pieces of her voice. “General, wait!” she repeated. “Brock is awake. General, please stop! He’s awake.”
The General grunted. “I don’t give a damn right about now, Jocelyn.”
“We should check on him.”
“How about I make you come, and then you check on him?” The sound of kissing followed. “How about that?”
“He can hear us,” she whispered.
“Then he can get off when we do,” he said. Brock jerked at his armbands again, fighting through the pain thrusting its way up his arms.
The General silenced her with what sounded like more kissing. And more. The sighs and moans tortured Brock far more than the needles in his veins. Wildly, he fought the restraints, fought to break free and stop those moans and sighs until a sharp pain pierced his brow, and he could fight no more. He was forced to lie there and listen to Jocelyn cry out in pleasure, forced to listen to the slap of skin against skin. It went on for long, torturous minutes until finally, silence fell in the room, and Brock imagined with graphic explicitness that they were lying there naked, wrapped around each other. In that moment, he knew he would kill Powell, hunt him down, and make him pay for everything he had done to him. He wrapped his mind around that vow until a loud siren sounded and then turned off.
“Who would be at my front door at this time of night?” Jocelyn said, a scurry of activity following her words, as if she were dressing.
Door? That wasn’t a doorbell, Brock thought remotely. Where the hell were they?
“I’ll check the monitor,” Powell said. “You get dressed.”
The sound of a keyboard being punched…followed by Powell’s low curse.
“What?” Jocelyn said. “What is it?” She gasped, and Brock imagined she was looking at that monitor. “Oh, my God. My son is here. Michael is here.”
The minute his mother opened the door, the scent of sex lanced Michael’s nostrils, replacing the storm now fading into the distance. While his keen sense of smell had proven useful in battle, today it turned his stomach. Because there was more than sex mixed with that smell. There was something familiar he couldn’t quite identify. Something that screamed of menace and lies, a promise that this meeting was going to prove everything he expected it to be—that she was every bit as malicious as his father had ever been. That she would do whatever it took to be on top, including aligning herself with Adam.
“Hello, Mother.”
Jocelyn Taylor stared back at her son with the same crystal blue eyes he’d once possessed himself, with the kind of welcome reflected in their depths that one might give a tiger in the wild—a façade of regal indifference meant to show no fear that masked an underlying desire to bolt. He had no doubt that he looked like an angry tiger, ragged from battle, battered by the rain. But he’d come here with a feeling of urgency, out of some sense of obligation to her as her son to confirm whether she was guilty or not, before exposing her to the Renegades. The minute she appeared at the door, he already knew his answer—she was guilty. She’d always been just as guilty as his father.
“And here I thought you’d forgotten I existed,” she replied shortly.
“I’m sure you hoped as much,” he said dryly. “We need to talk.”
She tilted her head, studying him for several long seconds. The years had been kind to her, despite the demands of leading Taylor Industries—a task she’d begged Michael to undertake. But then, she had plenty of money to ease the effects of age.
“Come in,” she said finally, stepping back into the foyer to allow him entry. He entered the house he’d once called home—expensive Italian marble beneath his feet, etched, plate-glass windows lining high ceilings—and wished like hell he didn’t have to be there.
“This way,” she said.
He followed her down the hallway to the kitchen, a room he’d loved as a child, a place where cookies and milk had awaited him after school and holiday meals had been festive. But age had dispelled fairy tale families, and he’d discovered that his mother had been playing house at the expense of right and wrong, ignoring the immoral business practices of her husband, practices that had permitted that fantasy life. Apparently, she’d decided she was willing to take over where her husband had left off.
In a defensive posture, she placed the eight-foot, navy-blue, kitchen island between them. Neither of them bothered with a barstool.
Michael wasted no time getting down to business. He slapped the bullet on the tile counter. The color drained from her face.
“I see you finally managed to make Green Hornets market-worthy,” he said.
“Where did you get that?” she hissed.
“Dug it out of my rib cage,” he said. “I see you’re up to Dad’s old tricks, selling weapons to whoever will buy them regardless of consequence.”
“That’s impossible,” she countered.
“I promise you it’s not,” he said. “And I have friends, good men fighting for their country, who are now fighting for their lives because of those bullets. I want names. Who you sold them to, when, and in what quantities.” He wanted to know how the hell Zodius had even known that Green Hornets existed before they’d approached his mother. But then, Adam was always one to cover all his bases. He’d become like the mob—someone in every operation that might serve his needs.
She laughed without humor, crossed her arms in front of her chest. “That list is short. The U.S. Army. Period. There is no other customer. So if you’re shooting each other up with them, that’s not my problem.”
“You’re lying.” She could barely look him in the eye, but then, it had been a long time since she could—maybe all the way back to after-school cookies. She wasn’t that woman anymore—the perfect housewife and mother—if she ever had been.
She glared at him. “Don’t you dare come in here and pretend honor while you judge me, because we both know you’ve plenty to be judged on yourself. And your day is coming, Michael.”
“I want names,” he demanded, his tone dogmatic, harsh by design. “Who did you sell the Green Hornets to?”
“I’m not giving you anything,” she declared. “You certainly haven’t given a damn thing to me.”
“If even one more of these bullets ends up in one of our soldiers,” he said, “I promise you, I will make destroying you and Taylor Industries my life mission.”
That pale, plastic surgery-created face reddened. “What’s so pathetic,” she said, “is that I believe you. I believe my son would try and destroy me.”
“Your son died years ago,” he assured her. He’d come here for answers and hoped to find the loving mother he’d grown up with, not the enemy she’d become. Jesus Christ, he was a fool. He’d expected Cassandra to give up on her father, and yet he still hadn’t managed to do so with his mother. “Now. Let’s move past the talk. Let’s go to your computer.” He wasn’t about to take her word on anything.
Her eyes went wide. “Why would I do that?”
“Because I want more than the names of who you sold those bullets to. I want every last one stocked in your warehouses.” Alarm slid across her face, and she looked like she might refuse, so he added softly, “We can do this the easy way, Mother, or the hard way.”
She glowered, her gaze skittering to the gun and two knives strapped to his hips before she swallowed hard. Without looking at him, she turned on her heels and marched down the hall, turning to the office on the right that had once been his father’s.
He was behind her solid mahogany desk at the same moment she was, standing over her shoulder. She wasn’t doing anything he didn’t supervise. In fact, he reached over her shoulder and punched the HP notebook to life.
“Already logged in,” he scoffed. “I’m ashamed, Mother. You should be more careful.” He pointed to the visitor’s chair across from him. “Sit.” Her lips pursed, but she did as he said.
He pulled his gun and set it on the desk, reminding her how easily he could use it, and started typing. A second password screen pulled up the instant he typed in Green Hornets.
“What’s the password?”
“Michael,” she said, giving him a “go to hell” glare.
He didn’t miss the inference that she’d made those bullets to kill him and those like him. She hated him almost as much as he hated her. He typed in the password.
The information he needed quickly appeared on the screen, including storage location and past shipments, which indicated sales to only one buyer—the U.S. Army, just as she had said. Or those were the only sales documented.
He pushed the phone on her desk in her direction. “Call your security team. Clear Caleb Rain to pick up a shipment.”
“You won’t get away with this,” she vowed.
“Just dial,” he bit out.
The instant she hung up the phone, he snatched his cell and contacted the Renegade team. Purposely, he set it on the desk next to the gun.
“We’ll wait together while they retrieve the bullets,” he told her. “That way you can help me clear up any trouble they might run into.”
He typed in Red Dart, but came up with nothing. Tried several variations. Considered questioning her, but decided that would only make her bury Red Dart deeper before Sterling could find it. He popped in a backup drive. If she had anything on her computer, he’d get it. And he wanted the specs to manufacture those bullets for themselves.
His nostrils flared with the scent of sex again, and he narrowed his gaze on his mother. It was Powell; he could smell him. “Get up,” he said, grabbing the gun. If Powell was here, Michael was going to find him.