Fade To Midnight

Book 7: The McClouds & Friends

by Shannon McKenna

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Action & Adventure Romance; Romantic Suspense

Synopsis

Gone But Not Forgotten Davy. . .Connor. . .Sean. . . Three brothers who have conquered their demons, but they've never forgotten their long lost brother, Kev, whom they believed to be dead. When the McCloud brothers discover Kev is alive, they won't rest until they find him. . . Beaten and tortured almost to death, Kev Larsen was found eighteen years earlier in a warehouse alley. He survived his brutal ordeal, but his memories before that night were completely erased. When he nearly dies from trying to save someone from drowning, the brain surgery he has to save his life triggers fragmented, terrifying memories. With only these memories and the name of his torturer to guide him, Kev is determined to unlock the secrets to his past. Edie Parrish has always been good at not letting anyone get too close to her. If someone were to learn of her unusual gift, her life would be immediately jeopardized. But when Kev Larsen discovers who she really is, Edie has only one choice: to trust him. And soon, Edie can't resist her consuming desire for him--even though she knows she'll have to pay a price for it. Now Kev and Edie must race against time and place their faith in each other to stop a deadly legacy. . .

Release date: November 8, 2022

Publisher: Brava

Print pages: 497

Sample

1994, Portland, Oregon

Tony Ranieri sucked in smoke and fingered the tarnished dog tags in his hand. He had no patience for mysteries. Not in books, not on TV. Mind-squeezing, time-wasting bullshit. But there he was. In Tony’s face.

He watched the kid squirt disinfectant into the bucket and start in on the floor, staring at the ponytail of streaky, dirt-blond hair, the thick muscles of the kid’s shoulders, emerging from the sprung out tank top of Tony’s, two sizes too big for him. The flesh-creeping pattern of scars snaked and spiraled over the kid’s skin. Those wounds had still been oozing the night he found the unlucky son of a bitch, almost two years ago, now. He hadn’t dared to take the kid to a hospital. The guys who’d done for him would be watching.

Tony had braced himself to see those wounds go bad. There was internal bleeding, broken bones, too. And the kid’s face. Mother of God.

He’d steeled himself to have to hide the body, pretend he’d never found the kid. Like he didn’t have enough shit on his conscience.

But he hadn’t died. Tony sucked his cigarette, in defiance of the no smoking rule in the diner kitchen. His sister Rosa, colossal ballbreaker, was home, asleep. His young nephew Bruno had crashed hours ago upstairs. And the kid wasn’t going to rat him out. The kid couldn’t talk for shit. He could wash dishes, chop onions, scrape plates, and fight like a fucking demon from hell. But he couldn’t say a damn word.

He wasn’t a kid, really, either. He’d been twentyish when Tony found him, but Tony hadn’t gotten a good handle on him yet, so he’d just stuck with “the kid.” He offered no other satisfying defining characteristic, besides his silence, and his scars. The kid would be movie-star good looking, if not for the scars. He was lucky they hadn’t taken his eyes. But Tony’d bet his left nut that the torturer had been working up to the eyes, the balls. Tony knew what got that kind of guy off. He knew it all too well.

But something had interrupted the torture fest. The bastard had decided to finish the kid off. Just beat him to death and dump the body.

Who knew why. Mysteries. Fuck ’em.

The kid paused in his mopping, looked over his shoulder. He wanted to say something, wanted it bad. His green eyes burned with urgency. But nothing came out. The wires were cut. He was all fucked up. It hurt to look at him.

The kid’s shoulders slumped. He got back to work. Slop, dip, swab.

Tony’s fingers closed around the dog tags. He stubbed out the cigarette. He was a straight shooting guy. Kill or be killed, that was the kind of motto he could get behind. Ambiguity fucked with his digestion.

Tony wound the chain round his hand til it burned his fingers. He’d found the tags in the kid’s blood-soaked jeans pocket, the night he’d chased off the killer. Not the kid’s own, though that was Tony’s first assumption.

These tags were of an older soldier. Tony’s generation. Tony’s war.

Tony had nosed around, asked his Marine buddies, and heard stories to curdle a guy’s blood. The name on that tag struck fear into the hearts of battle-hardened men. Sniper, killer, monster. Accused of unspeakable atrocities. Disappeared after Nam, before they could court-martial him. Probably slitting throats for the criminal underworld.

He’d be Tony’s age, by now, with a team under him. Guys as badass as him, or worse. There was always worse.

Tony stared at that lost, fucked-up kid bent over his bucket, and renewed the decision he made every night. The kid was in no shape to deal with the people who had reduced him to this. They would squish him like a cockroach. He was better off scraping plates, swabbing floors. Tony stared, breathing smoke. Hating the sick feeling of doubt in his guts.

Eamon McCloud. What was he, to this kid? He cursed under his breath, in thick Calabrese dialect. He shoved the tags into his pocket.

The name on those dog tags could put the kid’s broken life together.

Or it could get him killed once and for all.

I am fucked.

The thought flicked through Kev’s head, calm and detached. The roar of icy water filled his ears. The current would pull him loose in counted seconds. Seconds measured by the pounding pulse of blood through his brain. Each throb hurt like a raving motherlover, but there was nothing like imminent death to take a guy’s mind off a headache.

His little angel’s face flashed through his mind. His dream companion, his spirit guide. Her big eyes looked sad, and scared.

He’d known since he got out of bed that today was going to be the day. He’d had that prickle, as if someone were looking at the back of his neck. Not surprising, since he’d set the day aside for high-adrenaline sports activities, his chief joy in what passed for his life. One would think, having gotten a clue from the Great Beyond that death lurked nearby, that a reasonable, sane person would spend the day on the couch, watching reruns. Cruising the mall bookstore, reading about mindfulness or voluntary simplicity. Lying low in a multiplex, watching a nature documentary. Sipping a green tea latte. Well out of sight.

Not him. The reasonable, sane parts of himself were out in space. Along with his memories and his normal and natural fear of death. Danger? Bring it the fuck on. He should be dead already anyway. Look at his face. Kids ran screaming to mommy when they saw his bad side.

Cold had numbed the pain. He no longer felt his hand, clamped around the boughs of the dead tree. He did not feel the compound fracture in his other arm. His injured limb flopped in the water, sucked by the current, a few yards from the head of the falls. His broken bone tented out the nylon of his jacket, pinkish with blood. But he doubted he’d be using that arm again, once the water flung him over the brink.

Whatever. He’d been smash totaled years ago. Living on borrowed time. Half a brain, half a life. No clue at all.

Don’t start with that. Just shut the fuck up. He did crazy shit like this for the express purpose of keeping himself too zapped with adrenaline to indulge in self-pity. That was why he hung off the edge of cliffs, hang-glided treacherous air currents, rafted badass rapids. When he was that close to death, he felt buzzing, connected. Almost alive.

Since Tony found him he’d had some mechanism functioning that damped his emotional volume way down. High enough for function, but no more. Probably caused by the trauma to his brain that had caused the amnesia, and rendered him speechless, back in the bad old days.

Whatever it was, he was bored with it. If he could, he’d join the military, fly fighter jets. Playing with toys like that, yeah. Talk about a coping mechanism. But the military wouldn’t want a guy with crossed wires, a questionable identity and a black hole in his mind to fly their hundred million dollar toys. They’d put him to work cleaning engines. If they took him at all. No, he had to make do with high-risk sports. They kicked his ass into high gear, and he liked that gear. The color, the noise. The buzz of being awake to it, aware of it. Giving a shit.

He’d gotten what he wanted. But he was going to pay big. He stared at the top of the falls. Clouds of vapor rose from the thundering tons of water crashing down, hundreds of feet below. How many hundreds? He tried to remember. Several. Well over three. Whoo hah.

Not that he was afraid of dying. At most, he was curious. Sorry he’d never unravel the great questions of his existence, at least not as a living man, and who knew what happened after? He’d never speculated. His present mortal existence was problem enough, for as long as he could remember. Roughly half of his life. He didn’t know how old he was. Tony put him around twenty when he’d saved Kev from the warehouse thug eighteen years ago. So he was fortyish. Give or take.

At least the boy was going to make it. Kev was immobilized by tons of rushing ice water, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw activity in the trees choking the cliffside shore. Rescue proceedings were underway. Other people besides Kev had been at the point when he’d put ashore, where he’d seen the kids spin past, oarless and out of control. Only a guy with a black hole in his brain would be suicidal enough to jump in after them at that point in the rapids, but he’d taken no time to ponder that implacable truth. He just went for it.

And then, a long, hopeless wrestle with nature while the water got wilder, the roar of the falls louder.

While death approached, smiling. Happy to see him. His old pal.

Maybe he’d subconsciously wanted it. Bruno threw that death wish crap in his face a lot, whenever he got cracked up doing daredevil sports. Could be. Not worth worrying about, though. Particularly now.

The kids had capsized by the time he caught up. Kev saw a bobbing head and scooped one out of the water by sheer, blind luck. Then they plunged into a trough, the raft flipped, and they were tossed like twigs, the boy flailing, choking. He’d clamped the kid against him, struggled, kicked. He’d wanted to save that kid. Wanted it ferociously. He was played out, now, though. In fact, he felt strangely serene.

The other boy was gone, over the falls. That was fucked, and he was sorry. Rescue was on the way for the other one, but the greedy way the water sucked at the tree told him the hard truth.

He was going down. Anytime.

He forced his head to turn, checked on the kid. Sixteen or so. A drowned rat, clinging to the lucky side of the rock that split the top of the falls into two long, thin tails, hence the name, Twin Tails Falls. The weight of rushing water pinned him against the bulwark of the rock. He couldn’t move if he wanted to. But he’d live. That was good.

It wasn’t strength or skill that had smacked them up against that jutting rock. Just chance. And then, just as fast, bam. That bastard came up so fast, he barely shoved the kid out of the way before the tree trunk snapped his arm, smashed God only knew what else in his thorax, knocked him loose—and then spun out perpendicular to the falls, catching on a rock across the torrent. It formed a barrier, trapping him against a temporary dam. But not for long.

Smashing him, then saving him. When it worked loose, it would fuck him again, definitively. He’d ride that bastard out over the cliff.

The story of his life. Something inside him laughed, with stony irony. Wasn’t it always the way. Like Tony, who’d dragged Kev out of his own rapids years ago, and kept him there, brain damaged, shambling and speechless. Washing dishes, mopping floors for room and board at the diner. Lying on a sagging cot, watching paint peel in the windowless mildewed room behind the diner where he’d slept. For fucking years.

The rope thrown out to save him. The same rope that he strangled himself on. It was almost funny. Except that it wasn’t.

The tree was about to go. The branches stuck on the rocks on the other side were wavering, wild water bending the flexible limbs, teasing them loose. The tree shuddered, rolled. The water sucked and insisted.

Any time now. He composed himself, tried to pay attention, to be present for it, to breathe. Difficult. So cold. So much water. The kid’s mouth gaped, begging Kev to do something. As if he could swim against that current, even if he weren’t fucked-up. He had as much strength left as a broken doll. A final swell shook the tree loose. The ponderous slow motion made those last moments of clinging stretch out, infinitely long.

He struggled to stay conscious. The last wild ride. He’d better enjoy it. He wondered if he’d know, once he was dead, who he’d been before. What he’d done, who he’d known. Who he’d loved.

Probably not. This was all he got. It would just have to do.

Whoosh, the river rolled him under the tree and spat him far out into vastness. Endless space, above, below. Turning, head over ass.

The angel flashed across his mind. Those big gray eyes, so achingly sweet. A sharp sting of regret that he didn’t understand. And another face, too, scowling his disapproval as the immutable laws of physics had their stern way with him. A face he saw in his dreams every night. A young guy. His face maddeningly familiar.

Kev had been having a dream argument with that guy, that very morning, he suddenly remembered. The man had been scolding him.

“Dying is easy. You told me that yourself,” the guy said. “It’s living that’s hard. Meathead. Hypocrite. You piss me off.”

So that was how he’d known today would be dangerous.

Part of his mind hooted and shrieked with unreasoning joy at the icy rush of air and water on his face. Whoa. This shit is fun. Another part pondered acceleration rates of falling objects, wind shear, probable force of impending impact on the rocks below. He calculated it down to ten digits after the decimal in that last, eternal instant—

And hurtled into a blank, white nothing.

 

Goddamnit to hell. Thick, stupid, useless cow.

Ava Cheung refocused her mind to a laser point. So much information streamed through the human nervous system to make a body move smoothly through space. So much of it was automatic. One couldn’t fathom how much until one tried to provide the impulses for someone else’s body, using one’s own will while simultaneously suppressing theirs. Mandy was responding poorly. Shuffling, clumsy. Ava could not get the girl to shut her mouth and keep it closed. The drooling was driving her crazy, and it was all the more grotesque with Mandy’s sexpot beauty, her heavily lashed blue eyes vacant behind the goggles, her pupils vastly dilated by the X-Cog prep drugs.

Ava fancied that X-Cog master-crowning required a skill level comparable to what it must take to play an instrument at a professional level. It required intense concentration to make the crowned person move and speak naturally. Unless you upped the doses, which lowered the subject’s resistance, but melted their brains in a scant hour. Not cost efficient. One had to be a virtuoso, like her, and Dr. O, of course.

This rendered the X-Cog interface less commercially feasible. How many people were willing to put in the hours to hone a new skill? People were lazy, contemptible slobs, as a rule. They needed things to be easy.

Ava was committed to finding a way to make X-Cog accessible to anyone with the money to pay for it, and Mandy was the umpteenth effort to that end. But a virtuoso needed a decent instrument to play. Not a thick, dull, unresponsive piece of shit.

Ava yanked off the master crown and flung it onto the table, more forcefully than she should have, considering how much it cost to develop and produce. The streamlined silver cap was very different from Dr. O’s heavy, clunky design, which had given her tension headaches. Dr. O hadn’t bothered with aesthetics. Dr. O had been a results man.

The new design was her own graceful innovation. Everything essential was there, but the end result was a light-as-air tangle of flexible wires and sensors on a light mesh cap. Both master and slave crowns were designed to be easily concealed beneath a hat, scarf, or wig.

Ava’s brilliance was wasted on Mandy. The dumb little bitch was going straight into the shredder. Mandy whimpered as Ava wrenched goggles and crown off the girl’s head, yanking out long blond hair. She whipped the master crown glasses off. Stupid, talentless cow. Crowning her was like trying to send nervous impulses through a lump of clay.

Ava smoothed glossy black hair back and stared at Mandy, who swayed on her feet, gaping. The girl was dressed in the silver spandex jog bra and shorts that Ava had mandated as a uniform for X-Cog test subjects. She liked her girls to look sexy and sharp. But Mandy looked anything but sharp, with drool trailing off her chin.

The look on the girl’s face disgusted her. She slapped Mandy. The girl stumbled against the table, looking vaguely confused.

Ava slapped her again, harder. And again. Smack. Smack. Blood trickled from Mandy’s nose, from her split lip. The girl’s hands crept up, tried to cover her face. Ava struck Mandy’s ears, whapped the back of her head, knocking her forward. Mandy thudded heavily to her knees.

“Back off, Av. That’s millions of dollars you’re kicking around.”

Ava spun around, and shot a poisonous look at the man who had just walked in. “Mind your own fucking business, Des.”

Desmond jerked his chin towards Mandy. “She is my business.”

“She’s a worthless piece of shit,” Ava hissed.

“Don’t take your frustration out on her.” Desmond’s arrogant, know-it-all tone made her want to put out one of his bright blue eyes. “You thought that upping the burn would give you more direct control with the crown at a lower dose of the drug. You were wrong. Too bad. Honest mistake. We won’t make it again. Grow up, Ava. Move on.”

“But the basic idea is sound! Next time, I’ll recalibrate the—”

“No.” The curt word cut her off. “We reached the point of diminishing returns weeks ago. No more cutting, no more burning.”

There was no arguing with Des when he got that tone. He was the one with the money, the contacts. He’d funded her whole show, since Dr. O bit the dust. But bumping up against the limits of her power over him made her bad tempered. She kicked Mandy’s buttock viciously. The girl lurched forward with a pathetic grunt. “Don’t lecture me,” she said, sulkily. “I’m the one who’s clubbing with the stinking masses to troll for test subjects! Wasting time I should spend on research, bumping and grinding with Ecstasy whores like her!” She kicked Mandy again, making her whimper. “I need to delegate this tedious shit!”

“I’m trying, babe, but I don’t understand why you’re so set on wiping them. I enjoy crowning the ones who aren’t burned or cut much better. It’s that inner resistance that makes it exciting, you know?”

Ava snorted. “It’s not about excitement. You’ve never tried to crown a subject into anything more complex than sucking on your dick. Try making one of them type a string of code, and see how far you get. You can compel a girl to blow you by putting a twenty dollar gun to her head. You don’t need a ten million dollar X-Cog crown. I want to market X-Cog to defense contractors. Understand? Are you with me here?”

“Fellatio is actually a pretty complex motor process.” Des sounded faintly hurt. “Particularly when you’re hung.”

Ava rolled her eyes. “Please. Leave the neuroscience to me.”

Des waved that away. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”

“I don’t want to hear the bad news,” she said pettishly.

“Then I’ll tell you the good news, first.” He nudged Mandy thoughtfully with his toe. “We need a steady supply of high quality, hand-selected lab rats. We also need someone to deal with our disposal issue. Remember Tom Bixby, from the Haven?”

Ava grimaced. Bixby had been one of Dr. O’s rich pets. One who’d survived and thrived after Dr. O’s Brain Potential Program. Off to Harvard with Dessie. She still remembered his hot eyes, his groping hands. “An arrogant prick, as I recall. That’s your brilliant idea?”

“He runs his own private military company. Bixby Enterprises. It’s gotten huge. I think X-Cog would be extremely interesting to him. And we would have multiple layers of security, since he’s Club O.”

Ava’s lip curled. “But he’s a dickhead.”

Des’s eyes rolled impatiently. “Don’t be a spoiled baby. Offering him a partnership would solve all our problems in one move.”

“And create a lot more,” she said.

Des’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve set up a demo. You will be good, Ava.”

Well, look at him. Throwing his weight around. Trying to whip her into line with his big dick. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Tell me the bad news,” she said. “Maybe it’ll cheer me up.”

Des stared at her, nostrils distended, cheeks reddening. Anger turned him on. A fact she often turned to her advantage. “I was at a Parrish Foundation board meeting today,” he said finally. “Parrish is taking over where his bitch of a wife left off. Getting rid of Linda distracted him for a while, but the party’s over, everybody out of the pool. He’s engaged a panel of financial forensics experts to examine every penny of Parrish Foundation money spent in the past three years. And to vet all future projects. No more cutting it close.”

“Oh, God,” Ava moaned. “I’m so close to a breakthrough!”

“I know, but what can you do. He’s as much of a pit bull as his ballbusting wife, may she burn in hell. The Morality Police don’t want anything naughty going down, after Dr. O’s big scandal.”

“Fucking hypocrites. ‘Helix was a victim, too,’” Ava mimicked.

Des looked at the moaning girl at his feet. “This shit does not look good, Av. Save it for when we can afford a more secret facility, and that won’t be until after we get control of the Foundation board.”

“It can’t wait! Besides, no one will miss her. She’s just a whore that I scraped off the bathroom floor of a dance club. No wonder she’s a dud.” She kicked Mandy in the kidney. “I need better raw material to work with.”

“We need reliable funding first.” Des’s voice was stern. “And someone to supply lab rats, and safely dispose of the garbage for us. The Parrish Foundation is watching like a hawk. It’s too risky.”

“Charles Parrish has been raking in hundreds of millions in medical patents for years,” Ava said bitterly. “Like he cared where the smell came from before his nose got rubbed in shit.”

“Thank God he’s retiring. I’m giving a fawning speech for that pompous tightass at the retirement banquet. Fucking bore.”

“Retiring? That’s good.”

“Not really. It just leaves him that much more time to be possessive and controlling about Parrish Foundation research money.”

Ava gave him a big, brilliant smile. “So let’s kill him.”

Des looked startled. “That wouldn’t solve our problem.”

“No? You’re on the board. You handpicked the last two board members after we got rid of Linda. If Parrish disappeared, the rest of them will do anything you want, for the 400K salaries, the skybox, the Lear jet. The paid luxury vacations. They’re sheep. It’s easy, Dessie.”

Des grunted. “Hardly. Don’t oversimplify.”

“But it is simple,” Ava said. “We create the perfect board. Eliminate the watchdogs. Create a perfect screen of bland, squeaky clean product development projects that they can all feel virtuous about. Siphon a percentage of the money back to the real stuff, like Dr. O did. Except we won’t fuck up, and let it explode in our faces.”

Des looked dubious, but he wasn’t rejecting it out of hand.

“Who inherits Parrish’s fortune when he dies?” Ava asked.

Des frowned thoughtfully. “His younger daughter, Ronnie. Ronnie’s thirteen. Edie, the older one, was at the Haven with us, remember? Glasses, braces. Woof, woof. The cognitive enhancement program bombed out bigtime on her, as I recall. She never got into Club O. Just didn’t have what it took.”

Ava nodded. She remembered the tongue-tied Edie. One of the privileged ones, like Des himself. Rich kids who did the soft core version of Dr. O’s dirty mind games, because Mommy and Daddy wanted better grades. Ava hated the pampered little cunt for that.

“Who inherits if Ronnie dies?” Her voice hardened.

“Av. Please,” Des grumbled. “We can’t kill everyone in sight.”

“Who?” she persisted.

He shrugged. “The Foundation, I guess. I know that Edie’s out of the will, because I overheard Dad and Charles talking about her. He’d cut off her personal funds. He was arranging to disinherit her. That was a few years ago.”

“What did she do? Drugs? Partying? Fucking the wrong men?”

Des shook his head. “No, she’s just weird. She embarrasses him. Charles can’t stand that. She had, ah, problems. You know…” He twirled his index finger in a circle at his temple. “Doesn’t surprise me, since she’s one of Dr. O’s duds. Most of them cracked up years ago.”

Ava tapped her lip. “Dr. O wanted to do an interface with Edie Parrish so bad, he was practically pissing himself,” she said. “She had the perfect test results for it, but she was Charles Parrish’s little baby girl. He had to keep her in bubblewrap. Stick with the standard cognitive enhancement program. It drove him crazy.”

She left the rest of the thought silent. How she, Ava, had borne the brunt of Dr. O’s frustration. He’d taken it out on her. She had good reason to hate that mealy-mouthed little Parrish princess bitch.

Des looked baffled. “What was it that he liked about her? What can you see from test results and MRI’s?”

Ava’s smile was bitter. Des was such an ignorant dickhead sometimes. “They were exactly like mine,” she said softly.

Des’s face was still blank. “Meaning?”

Ava sighed. “I was his best interface, Dessie. Besides Kev McCloud, of course. We were the only ones that didn’t die of brain bleed. Some lasted a few days, but only McCloud and I were genuinely reusable. That’s why I survived. That’s why I wasn’t flushed down the john with the rest of them.” She brushed her hair back with a swipe of her hand, preening. “And being pretty helped, too.”

Des looked vaguely uncomfortable. “Um. I see. I’m, ah, sorry.”

The insincere, pat words grated on her. “No, you’re not. You don’t give a shit, and we both prefer it that way,” she said crisply. “Kev McCloud was the cornerstone of Dr. O’s research. X-Cog wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for McCloud. So Dr. O was always looking for test results similar to his, and mine. And Edie Parrish had them. That’s all.”

Des let out a dubious grunt. “Kev McCloud managed to escape and practically fuck the whole project. Looks like that perfect interface had some pretty big fucking holes in it. And his twin, Sean, forced Dr. O to slit his own throat, remember? That should give you pause, Av.”

Pause, hah. It had given her sleepless nights for years. Wondering frantically how Sean McCloud had managed it. When she could not.

How? How the fuck had he done that? All those years of being Dr. O’s slave-crowned dollbaby. Used like a puppet, all the while dreaming of hammers crushing, knives gouging, axe blades hacking. Gouts of black arterial blood. Her hands began to shake, just thinking about it.

She locked the feelings down automatically, so that she could function. “The McClouds are freaks. Edie will be different. She’s female, artistic, creative. Shy, introverted personality. Probably emotionally crushed by her father, which is fine for our purposes. She’ll be a good little girl. She won’t slit my throat.”

Des’s blue eyes narrowed. “What is this? First you want to kill her. Then you want to crown her.”

“Crown first, kill later,” she said airily. “Waste not, want not.”

Des shot a speaking glance at Mandy, who was rocking on the ground, sucking on her thumb. “You don’t call that a waste?”

Ava’s teeth ground. “No. I call that a calculated risk. So what are we going to do about Parrish?”

Des looked irritated. “Shit,” he muttered. “I don’t know.”

Ava sighed. Des was so fucking slow sometimes. “Des. Honey. Brainstorm with me. He’s about to retire, right? Dangerous age for a man. Health problems, chronic pain? Grief, solitude? And he was bereaved last year, too. Poor Linda. He must be fragile. Depressed. And his daughter, with her mental problems? Oh, dear. So sad. Plus, he disinherited her. She must be so angry with him. She must feel betrayed. Maybe even…” Her voice sank to a whisper. “Murderous?”

Des’s face took on an expression of dawning discovery. “She might. Wouldn’t surprise anyone. He’s such a self-righteous, pompous tight ass. I’m surprised someone hasn’t beaten her to it.”

“So sad,” Ava said solemnly. “All those years of staunch service to the company, the community…and it has to end like this, at the hand of his own flesh and blood. It’s Shakespearean in scope.”

“But there’s Ronnie to consider, if you’re talking about the money,” Des said. “Ronnie would inherit the—”

“Edie must be so jealous of her little sister,” Ava cut in dreamily. “Daddo’s little favorite, right? I bet Edie lies awake nights contemplating how that complacent, self-satisfied little piece of shit deserves to die. So she offs the sister—and then kills herself. It’s awful. It’s epic.”

Des chuckled. “I love the way your mind works,” he said, with frank admiration. “Your twisted genius knows no bounds.”

“No bounds except for your pussy squeamishness, that is.” Ava kicked the girl curled on the floor in the back of her thigh. “Get rid of this trash for me. I’m sick of looking at her.”

Des’s smile vanished. “I don’t do wet work, Av,” he growled. “Even though I know it would turn you on.”

“So get us more money. That would turn me on, too. Think outside the box. Isn’t that what Dr. O trained us for?” She licked her glossy red lips, a move calculated to make him hard, and strolled to the chaise. “Break the chains that bind your brains, hmm? Like Dr. O said. Think about it. Complete control of the Parrish Foundation. Parrish’s personal fortune, too. All his billions, invested in X-Cog, giving us a thousand percent return. Wouldn’t that be just…perfect?”

His smile showed off his perfect teeth. Desmond Marr, future president of Helix. Harvard man. Pampered prince. Her personal slave.

Des had been one of Dr. O’s pets, too, but the Haven had been a very different place for the son of Raymond Marr, cofounder of Helix. Des had been a rich pet, a Persian cat with a diamond collar. Desmond had never experienced a slave crown interface in his life.

Ava had been in the other category of pets. The parentless, penniless, alley cat kind. Ava had worked for her keep, like the rest of the runaways, prostitutes, junkies, and punks. The ones Dr. O could fuck with and get measurable results. Helix was built upon their backs.

Or their bones, rather. They were all dead. All but her. And maybe Kev McCloud. Somewhere, out there.

Des had been her lover for years, ever since they’d met as teenagers at Dr. O’s oasis of depravity, the Haven. The spark was immediate. They had so much in common. But certain things Dessie could never understand. If you’d never been a slave, how could you truly know what it meant to dominate? A privileged boy with billions behind him could never get that. It was a gulf between them. Sad.

But look at her now. She hadn’t croaked from brain bleed like the rest of the lab rats. She was special, and Dr. O had realized it. From slave crowned zombie whore, she’d become Dr. O’s crowning achievement. She’d undergone the most intense and rigorous of Dr. O’s cognitive enhancement techniques. He’d trained her in X-Cog master-crowning technique. He’d arranged for her advanced studies, multiple degrees in neuroscience and bioengineering. With Dr. O’s mentoring, she’d developed nearly as many products for Helix’s bioscience and nanotechnology branch as Dr. O himself, over the years. He’d used her hard, but he had groomed her into something extraordinary.

Sometimes, she even missed that depraved, sadistic psychopathic prick. It was nice, to have someone be proud of you. To own you.

Even when it broke your bones, and hacked off your limbs and sucked your blood. Crushed you to dust. Burned you to fucking ashes.

Des caressed his erection, staring at her taut, curvy body, her nipples. He cast an uncertain glance at the girl moaning on the floor.

“Ignore her,” Ava commanded. “I’ll give her an injection after, and put her in the fridge, since you can’t soil your lily-white hands.”

His face reddened. Scolding him sharpened his lust, but going too far made the situation unmanageable. He was large, physically strong, extremely quick, and had a cruel streak that ran very deep and wide.

“No more cracks about the wet work,” he growled.

“Oh, Dessie.” Her voice was throaty. “I love it when you’re stern.”

“Do you? Turn around. I’ll show you stern.”

She hesitated, feeling the heavy pulse in the air. The timing had to be right. She turned, with deliberate slowness, positioning herself on the chaise. Her micro-mini barely shadowed the parts she kept shaved, perfumed, and pantiless. Ready for immediate use on demand. Old training died hard. She swayed, watching herself reflected in the shiny silver file cabinets opposite. Black hair swinging, red lips parted. She looked good, she concluded, pleased. Dangerous, unstable. Red hot.

Des undid his belt as he approached, jerked open his pants. Yanked out that horselike member of which he was so proud.

He shoved her skirt up over her ass, and parted her buttocks, fingering her pussy. She writhed and gasped with theatrical enthusiasm around his delving fingers. His ego was so big, he always bought her act, no matter how extravagantly she overplayed it. Men.

He thrust his hand deeper, growling. “You’re sopping wet.”

Actually, it was hitting Mandy that had excited her, but Ava saw no reason to deny him the credit. Besides, she could lube on command. She knew what nasty things to think about to get that hot rush.

“It’s you who does it to me.” She let her voice quaver, to hint at hidden vulnerability, calculated to puff him up, make him feel like the king of her world. Thinking he ruled her, with his throbbing scepter.

He grasped her ass cheeks, and drove inside. Ava whimpered as he started pumping. This was the tedious part. All that bucking and moaning. Des was relatively skilled, too, so the thrusting went on for a tiresomely long time before he allowed himself to squirt. Ironic, how personal politics dictated that she praise him for that quality when she would infinitely prefer it to be quick.

But she managed, defaulting to the familiar state of floating detachment where she always went to endure sex. Leaving just enough of herself there to keep the show convincing. The rest of her highly functioning mind was at work. Preparing the next X-Cog test.

Too bad the test subject couldn’t be Edie Parrish herself.

The thought triggered a rush of genuine sexual heat that took her by surprise. Wow. She’d gotten Des on her side, using his weakest point, and it turned her on, too. Bonus points. “Is she cute?” she asked.

“Who?” Des grunted, his hips thudding against her backside. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Edie Parrish. I haven’t seen her in years. Is she cute?”

His thrusting slowed. “I don’t know. All right, I guess. Tall, long hair, bad glasses. She hides. Nice tits, though. Why do you care?”

Ava twisted, to fix him with a hot, wild stare. “When we take her, I want to crown her. And fuck you. Through her.”

He was so taken aback, he stopped moving. “Huh?”

“She’ll be the best interface ever.” She rocked back, enveloping his cock once again. “Much better than all the others. I’ll make her into a red-hot nymphet. I’ll make her do things that you’ve never imagined.”

“I can imagine a whole hell of a lot,” he warned.

She turned her head, smiled. “Things I’d never do myself, with my own body,” she explained sweetly. “Wild, nasty, dirty things.”

Desmond rammed into her, so hard, she stifled a gasp of discomfort. “You are one depraved bitch,” he said, his voice admiring.

“Why, thank you.” She turned, bracing herself against each jolt, making keening, catlike wails. She’d gotten him. He’d do anything to make it happen now. But she realized, shocked, as the ride thundered to its roaring finish, that this fantasy of the X-Cog threesome compelling Edie Parrish was…oh, God…it was making her come.

Explosively.

 

He dripped blood as he ran. Shocked faces, their mouths horrified ‘O’s, stumbling back. No one stopped him on his desperate race toward the guy’s office. He had to tell them the truth. Make the killing stop.

But the man didn’t listen. He was disgusted, terrified. Kev had thought that the blood, the burns, would be a proof too strong to dispute.

Wrong. He’d scared them to death. His gore had blinded them. He was living proof that hell on earth existed. Something to deny, forget.

He fought, but he was weak from drugs, torture. He threw one of the guys through the window, but there were too many of them. They brought him down. Dragged him out. Then he saw the little angel.

So strange, to see an angel in hell. Small, perfect, clad in blazing white like a sunlit cloud. A halo of white crowned her hair. She saw him with her fearless, fathomless eyes. Not a monster from collective human nightmares. Just him. She retreated into the distance as they dragged him away. Her compassionate eyes followed as he craned desperately to keep her in his field of vision. He cried out, but she was too far—

He gasped for air, felt the jolt, from dream to waking, but the images lingered on. His small angel. Her deep, soft eyes. The man he had begged for help, yelling at him to shut up, to go away, leave him alone. The security staff that had dragged him away. And a name. Someone was screaming a name. The monster that had to be stopped.

Osta…Ostamen…?

Gone. Fuck. It slid out of his mind, like sand through his fingers.

He gasped for air, groped for the name. This felt like…fuck, it felt like a memory. Not a dream. A memory.

Excitement pumped through him. He tried to open his eyes. Light stabbed. The stench of disinfectant assaulted his nose. His head throbbed, his insides churned. Unintelligible sounds battered his skull.

He tried to open his eyes, turn his head. Nothing moved. His eyelids were weighted down. His body was lead. The effort to move unleashed…pain. Raw, burning pain that he hadn’t known since—

His mind flinched away, like he’d brushed up against a lethal live wire. A memory. He’d brushed up against a fucking memory. Oh, God. And it hurt. The memory hurt. He tried to calm himself. Breathe.

What the fuck? What was going on? He was shit scared. So intense, the sounds, the smells. He wanted to scream, writhe, cry. Hide.

He grasped, instinctively, for the image of his little angel. His magical talisman. Her gentle gray eyes regarded him calmly. Wise and kind. He clung to her, until the panic calmed. The little angel never let him down. She had led him through his confusion, through the speechless darkness all those years ago. Back to relative normality and function. He was starting to hear now. He could breathe again. Ah.

Voices. Audio cut in and out. He struggled to make it out.

“…no signs of previous physical trauma in his brain that would account for the amnesia,” said a male voice. “What was his diagnosis at the time? Where was he treated? I’d like to talk to his physician.”

There was a long pause. “He wasn’t,” said a low voice.

A voice he knew. He tried to open his eyes. No luck. Paralyzed.

Bruno. That was the guy’s name. Bruno. Bruno’s face, Bruno’s history, slid into place in his mind. It was an exquisite relief. Bruno Ranieri. His adopted brother. Tony’s great-nephew. Tony Ranieri. The diner. Rosa. OK. He had it. He knew who he was now. More or less.

Kev. Kev Larsen, that was what he was called, when someone cared to call him. He clung to his name, such as it was, like a lifeline.

“He…but he was obviously in some terrible…” The man’s voice trailed off, almost frightened. “What in God’s name happened to him?”

Another reluctant pause. “We don’t know.”

“Excuse me?” The man’s voice was incredulous.

“We don’t know.” Bruno’s voice was defensive. “My uncle found him that way. He’d been tortured, we don’t know by who, or why. He doesn’t either. Like I said. He couldn’t talk. For years afterwards.”

“And he doesn’t even know what—”

“No.” The guy cut him off, curtly. “He does not know diddly shit.”

“So his name…his identity, it’s only…?”

“Yeah. Made up. It’s only eighteen years old,” Bruno finished crisply. “His previous identity is unknown.”

There was a pause. “Ah…that’s incredible. Were inquiries made? I mean, to the police, private investigators?”

“At the time, my uncle didn’t want to go looking for the guys that fucked him up,” Bruno retorted. “I mean, look at him.”

“Well, yes, of course,” the other man muttered. “Terrible.”

Kev opened his eyes. Light sliced in, an agonizing red-hot blade straight into his brain. Pain, white. Bright lights, beeping machines.

Immobilized. In a rigor of burning agony. Fear built, as he hydroplaned through inner space, toward a memory that held a lethal charge. People touching him, making him flinch. Patting his cheek.

“…hear me? Kev? Can you hear us?”

“Hey, Kev!” Bruno, again. “Wake up, man, it’s me! You awake?”

Kev squinted up into the light. The babble of excited voices was hellishly loud, battering his head. The light hurt, it hurt…

Pat, pat, pat, on his cheek. The gentle, persistent slap made his head reverberate with sickening pain. He opened his eyes.

Young, good looking. Dark curly hair, close-set eyes, peering down at him. White lab coat. Smiling, pleased with himself. Pat, pat, pat.

Mad eyes, lit with hellfire. Wet red mouth, crazy smile, muscling inside his brain. Shoving, wrenching him. He cowered away from that shit-eating troll. Better to hide in a hole, to wither and die there, than to crawl out and be mind-raped again—by…by—

“Ost…er…man.” He forced the syllables out. Osterman.

Yes. Osterman would never hurt him again. Never.

“What’s that?” Osterman’s fanged mouth dripped blood, his hot breath sulphurous. “Did you say something? Try again! We’re listening.”

Kev exploded out of the bed with a scream of rage, ripping out tubes, IVs, leaping at the guy. He bore Osterman to the floor.

Screaming. Grabbing. Punching. Cold tile against his cheek. Hands held him, pulling him from his prey, and—oh, shit. The sting of a needle.

Back down into that hole, fast. Only place to hide, inside his own head, in the deepest, darkest place. Lights out. Shut down.

Shovelfuls of earth rained heavily down on top of his mental hiding place, until the blackness was absolute.

Edie Parrish scanned the entrance of the restaurant and the twilit street outside as she sipped her red wine. No sign of Dad’s upright figure striding, coat flapping around his legs. She deliberately released the tension in her chest, her face, her hands. Squeeze, release. Breathe, slow. In, out. This dinner would be fine. Dad himself had asked for her to meet him. She would take that as a gesture of peace. She had to.

Because she wanted to see Ronnie, desperately. She ached for it. Dad held the keys to that tower. It was his most effective instrument for controlling his uncontrollable daughter, and he used it mercilessly, punishing her for all perceived misbehaviors by keeping her away from her little sister. The strategy was brilliant in its simplicity.

God knows, if not for Ronnie, she’d have run away years ago.

She swallowed down the bitter gall of old anger. Maybe tonight she’d have some stroke of brilliance to persuade him. Maybe Dad would have a change of heart. She had to hope.

She sank down into her chair, glanced around to make sure she was unobserved, and gave into the guilty impulse, flipping through the pages of her smallest sketchbook until she found one with some space to fill. She shook hair over her face, for discretion’s sake, and resumed people watching. Her eyes softened, absorbing infinitesimal details that her conscious mind didn’t perceive as important enough to notice. This would get her into trouble for sure, but she couldn’t resist. When she watched people, her fingers itched for the pen, the pencil. She knew she’d pay for it, but there was a part of her that just didn’t care. And that part always, always won.

An obsession, her parents had called it. And so? What if it was?

Her eyes seized on the death-of-a-salesman type across the room, the stringy comb-over, the reddened nose, the eye bags. He was consuming his prime rib and baked potato with glum ferocity. Edie rendered him with a few swift pen strokes, and then tried again, trying to capture the set of his shoulders, the defeated look.

The weirdness started to happen, like it always did. Her brain kicked into a new gear. It felt like an eye, opening up deep inside her, seeing everything more deeply, more brightly. The world outside the focus of her eyes blurred. Her perception widened, deepened, softened. Her pen went by itself. Time ceased to move. God, she freaking loved it.

The sounds of the restaurant disappeared as she caught the dull anger in the broken veins across his nose, the aggression in his down-turned mouth, the heavy sadness of his hanging jowls.

He was avoiding home. Using work as an excuse to stay as far away as he could from the grandson he and his wife were raising. The child was violent, hyperactive, with learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder. His wife was exhausted, desperate, at her wit’s end. So angry at him for abandoning her to deal with it all alone. Again.

He fled that situation every day, just as he’d fled similar problems with the boy’s mother, his promiscuous, drugaddled daughter. He felt like shit about it, but he could not change. He didn’t have the strength.

Oh, God, how sad, how awful. Edie dragged her eyes away from the unlucky guy and stared out at the lights on the street, trying to get the taste of the man’s guilt and sour self-loathing out of her mind.

When she went into that place in her mind, she started picking up stuff from the airwaves. Whatever people were projecting. And there was no shutting it out. Not if she tried.

She looked around, for someone else to tune in to. Someone more upbeat, more hopeful. Like that cute couple across the aisle from her.

Yes, they looked promising. He was handsome, in a stiff, prosperous looking way. She looked sweet. Edie sketched her, smearing ink with her finger, trying to catch that glow, the shadows and curves, that unfocused, blurred look of shifting possibilities…oh, God.

Pregnant. That girl was pregnant. Just a few weeks along. It was still secret. Her dinner partner didn’t know. She was planning on telling him. Tonight. Nervous about it. Smiling until her mouth ached from it, but her guy was not responding to her smile. He looked preoccupied.

Edie drew the stern line of his Roman nose, his sealed, thin-lipped mouth. His eyes, deep-set, sharp, pinched looking. Energy was gathering inside him. A storm brewing. He intended to hold forth, say his piece, present some watertight argument. He would bolster himself with arrogance, condescension. He thought only of himself; his freedom, his future, his own best interests. They filled his mind so completely, he didn’t even really see the girl. How beautiful she was. How hopeful. The cliff she was poised upon. He was bored by her puppyish clinging. He felt suffocated. He was wondering if he could do better. Snag someone sexier, more interesting, more educated. Smarter. Richer.

He was about to to tell his girlfriend that he thought they should be seeing other people. Edie’s pen faltered, digging a hole in the paper.

Maybe she was projecting. Casting this guy as another Eric. An ex who had worn a similar hateful look on his face when he’d dropped that same bombshell on her. But probably not. She was never wrong in these things. Not even when she desperately wished that she were.

Ouch. She capped her pen, laid down the sketchbook. Threaded ink-stained fingers together. Studied her wineglass. She should stick to horse skulls, stuffed birds. Drawing real people was too dangerous.

So she defaulted to the next best thing. Fictional characters. She could draw them, have intense insights into their heads, and call it creativity, rather than delusional craziness. Or obscene invasion of personal privacy, depending on your mood.

She didn’t mean to do this, to anyone. She didn’t want to. It was just something that happened to her, since she was fourteen. Since the Haven, and Dr. Osterman’s cognitive enhancement techniques.

She’d been enhanced, all right. Practically into the mental ward.

But dwelling on that was not useful. She did some quick sketches of Fade Shadowseeker, the main character of her graphic novel, trying to catch the right pose for the part where Fade was holding the knife to the throat of the sex-trafficker villain of the fifth Fade Shadowseeker book. Demanding to know where the girls were, because his lover Mahlia was being held among them. His face was a taut mask of fear.

Drawing Fade made her think of the argument she’d had with Jamal that afternoon, while the kid was systematically inhaling everything in her fridge. Jamal was her eight-year-old upstairs neighbor and her very good buddy. He came down and slept on Edie’s couch when his mother was entertaining her clients in their two room-apartment, on the floor above Edie’s. Which was quite often.

The argument had come about because Jamal had been having problems separating fantasy and reality. Jamal was insisting that Fade Shadowseeker was real, and walking the streets of their neighborhood. Jamal claimed to know people who had seen Fade with their own eyes, people who’d been saved by him. Jamal knew of places to which Fade had given big wads of money that he’d taken from bad guys, after beating the shit out of them, of course. He had shown his Fade books to people who had seen this guy. They said yeah, it was him. He totally existed.

Jesus, what had she done? It gave her a wobble in her stomach. She was the one who had created Fade and put him into Jamal’s mind, so Jamal’s problem was partly of her own making. And it made her heart hurt, how intense Jamal’s need for escape must be. It wasn’t right. Reality should not have to be so bleak that the kid had to escape from it at all costs. But it felt hypocritical to scold him about it. After all, escape into fiction was one of her coping mechanisms, too. And it was a better one than most. Better than drugs, for sure.

It scared her, though, when Jamal’s fantasies strayed into the realm of actual delusion. Jamal’s mom was too busy with her clients and her own drug addiction to be bothered with the problem, so Edie wondered uneasily if she herself should track down Jamal’s social worker, or school psychologist. Someone ought to know. But who?

She spotted her father coming through the doors. The host pointed Charles Parrish her way. She popped up, waving. Smiling.

Her father jerked his chin, waving her down. His disapproving smile said, sit, Edith. Try not to make a spectacle of yourself.

She sank back down, trying to be decorous. Ever since she learned to talk, she’d been trying. Though come to think of it, when she’d learned to talk was more or less when the trouble began.

She shook away that unworthy thought as he walked toward her. Her cheeks ached with tension. They were both making an effort, and that was positive, right? Being defeatist or sulky would not help her get to see Ronnie. She was going to keep it together. Oh, so good, oh, so mellow, oh, so very normal and natural. No need for meds.

She got up when he reached the table, and they did the stiff, awkward kiss and half-body embrace. Always timing it wrong, jostling the eyeglasses, bumping chins, going for the wrong cheek and hitting a jawbone, or kissing an ear. Nervous, muttered apologies.

Finally, they were safely seated on opposite sides of the table. Searching for an entry point in the seamless marble wall between them.

Charles Parrish’s eyes fell on the pile of sketchbooks on the table, the pens scattered on the smudged tablecloth. Her blackened fingertips. She suppressed an urge to gather them up, mumbling apologies. She stopped herself. She was twenty-nine, a woman, a successful, well-known professional artist. Not a naughty child caught misbehaving.

The waiter arriving to bring water and take their order was a welcome distraction for a couple of minutes, but soon they were left alone, staring at each other. At a loss.

Her father made an unfriendly gesture with his hand toward the sketchbooks. “Hard at work?”

“As always. It’s going well.” She waited for him to ask for more details. In vain.

“Is it?” he murmured vaguely. “Is that so.”

The dismissal in his voice killed the urge to pull out the sheaf of reviews she’d printed up for him, for her latest graphic novel. They said things like “ground breaking,” “genre defining.” They referred to her, awkward, shy Edie Parr. . .