Fatal Strike

Book 10: The McClouds & Friends

by Shannon McKenna

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

Synopsis

"Edgy, erotic, and breathtaking." --Maya Banks, New York Times bestselling author Man On A Mission When Lara Kirk was abducted months ago, Miles Davenport vowed he'd bring her home. But the mission failed. Now, finding her after all this time will be next to impossible. . . Lara Kirk lives in a shadowy world where reality and fantasy are blurred. Enslaved by her captors, Lara has formed a deep attachment to a man she's not even sure is real--until the six-foot-five-inch powerhouse bursts in to rescue her. . . Once freed, Lara has no choice but to trust Miles with her life as they run from enemies too twisted to imagine. But they're also fighting a dangerous attraction that could kill--or save--them both. Either way, it's going to be a hell of a ride. . . Praise for the Novels of Shannon McKenna. . . "McKenna tantalizes the reader." -- Publishers Weekly "McKenna blasts readers with a highly charged, action-adventure romance." -- Booklist "An erotic romance in a suspense vehicle on overdrive. . .sizzles!" -- RT Book Reviews

Release date: February 28, 2023

Publisher: Zebra Books

Print pages: 441

Sample

Stop thinking about her. Stop thinking at all.

Miles stared up at the volcanic granite that reared above him in the dim light of dawn, scanning for handholds, footholds. He channeled a surge of fresh energy into his mental shield. Thinking about Lara Kirk was not useful, but he’d never been good at suppressing unwanted thoughts, even before being reduced to his current suck-ass state.

And the dreams, holy God, what was up with that? White hot, thundering erotic dreams about her, every single night. What kind of scumbag dreamed nightly of nailing the girl that he’d failed to rescue? If he’d saved her, he’d be halfway entitled to his horndog fantasies. But as it was, no way.

Every night, as he prepared for sleep, he gave himself the stern pep talk. Tonight, he chose how he behaved in his dream. People could. He’d read about it. But it didn’t matter. When she came to him, his dream self did not give a fuck what his waking self wanted. His dream self wanted her, and wanted her bad. Deep, hard, every which way. When she showed up, he seized her, went at her like a maniac.

It was as disturbing as it was exciting.

He remembered every last detail when he woke, in laser sharp detail. No foggy dream lens, no fade-outs. Her sweet, salty taste, her satiny thick hair twisted into his fingers. Her body moving against his. Strong, slender. Hot and slick. He could feel it right now. He could practically smell her lube on his fingers. And, man, he’d done it again.

He contemplated his newly refreshed hard-on, dismayed. The guys with the white coats should just take him and his perpetual stiffie away before he hurt himself.

You tried to help. It didn’t work out. Climb the cliff. Don’t think about Lara Kirk. Don’t think at all.

He stared up, calculating the best ascent. Neutral data, crunched through algorithms. Conclusions organized into neat categories, rank and file. As long as his mind shield was up and running strong, he was chill. He had errant thoughts, but they did not play themselves out through his glands. They just flickered on the edge of his mind, like a TV screen he was barely following.

But if his mental shield wavered, man, it was blitzkrieg. Full on screaming stress flashbacks, of Rudd’s attack at Spruce Ridge.

He’d gotten better at keeping the shield strong, up here in the mountains. Weeks of constant, grinding practice had yielded him at least that much. He’d discovered the uses of rock climbing the second week. The tight mental focus it required pulled him together, somehow. Free climbing, of course, since climbing equipment hadn’t been on his supply list. That was okay. The harder the better, for his purposes.

He pulled off his boots. He needed monkey toes to climb that big bastard, but he’d make do with what God gave him. He studied the big overhang, the stretch where basaltic lava had formed long, crystalline striations, as if a huge beast had clawed violently downward. There were cracks and crannies, maybe big enough for fingertips, maybe not. He cataloged them all. His eyes were sharper than before Spruce Ridge, and his memory, too. Sharp, like all of him. Sharp like broken glass.

To counteract that dubious advantage, his headache throbbed nastily. A lingering hangover from Spruce Ridge, plus the effects of sleep deprivation. He was so damn ambivalent about sleep ever since those crazy erotic dream trysts with the ghost girl had started up.

Each night, the dream began with her creeping through a big mechanical wall. A big, steam-punk style thing, full of monstrous gears turning, ax-shaped pendulums swinging, a confusion of parts in constant motion, but somehow, she found hidden, Lara-shaped openings and slithered through them. Sinuous, practiced, like some sort of sexy pole dancer. A choreography she knew without thinking.

He forced the memory down, and squinted at the Fork, which towered against the dawn sky. Lara was a dangerous ghost. If he shorted out and lost the shield partway up, he was meat.

Not that he was afraid of death. He wasn’t, since Spruce Ridge. Rudd had driven him to a place where death was his friend. He’d never be afraid of it again. Even so, he wasn’t going looking for death. A guy had to give a shit, to plan his own suicide. Who had the energy.

His shield was solid, after some deep breathing. Okay. Good to go. He flexed his hands. The pine needles beneath his bare feet were fuzzed with frost, but his feet weren’t cold at all. His body seemed to be regulating temperature better than it used to. He focused his mind to a diamond sharp point . . .

. . . it washed over him, mixing into the data feed. Cougar.

Where? He looked around, neck prickling, keeping his mind blank to make space for the flash flood of sensory info. That was another souvenir from Spruce Ridge. Harold Rudd had mind-fucked Miles into a coma with his coercive psychic powers a few months ago. He’d survived the encounter—barely. But when he woke up, his brain was wired all wrong. He existed in a state of constant sensory overload. The world blared at him from all sides—no filters, no rest, no down time.

It knocked him flat. He’d hiked out here to the ass end of nowhere to try to jerry-rig himself back into functionality again. To learn how to at least fake normal. Not that he’d been so very normal before, but hey, everything was relative.

Oddly enough, the sensory overload had gotten somewhat better since the ghost girl started making her conjugal visits to his mental fortress. Surprise, surprise, life improved when a guy started getting laid. Even if it was only in the privacy of his own mind.

The animal was watching him from that stand of trees. How did he know the cougar was a she? By smell? Like he’d ever sniffed a cougar to determine its sex. Still, the summation of infinitesimal bits of information, each individually too small to perceive on its own, swirled up like a pixelated cloud in his mind, focusing into a potent, predatory her. Near-invisible in the trees, eyes gleaming with inscrutable feline calm. Her tail swished when she sensed him watching.

He stared, awestruck. He loved seeing the animals. These were the moments he was trolling for. Fleeting instants when his hyper-sensitivity was actually a gift, not just a huge pain in the ass.

Neither wanted to move until the other one did, but Miles finally surrendered, lifting his hands. “I’m not breakfast,” he told her.

Her tail swished. Her gaze was unwavering.

Miles took a swig of his water, stowed the flask and gave her a respectful nod. “Later, then,” he told her, and began his climb.

Long. Slow. Nearly impossible. Silence and solitude helped focus him, and so did muscle-bulging, sweat-dripping, eye-popping effort. Dangling a millimeter away from death for hours at a time was genuinely restful to him. If he kept the shield strong.

Strange, how he’d originally created the shield to protect himself from Rudd and his pet telepath, Anabel, for all the good it had done him. They hadn’t been able to read his mind, but Rudd had ground him into hamburger anyway. He’d made that wall to keep attackers out, but what he’d ultimately created was a bunker to keep his own self in.

Whatever it took. Since he woke up from the coma, he’d been faced with two possible modes of existence. Mode One: a shaking, sobbing nightmare of screaming stress flashbacks, reliving Rudd’s torture. Big barrel of laughs, that one. Mode Two: keep that mind shield up, constantly. It clamped down on the stress flashbacks. It also flatlined him emotionally.

Mode Two won, whatever the price. Cowering in a fortress worked for him. It was a no-brainer.

It changed him, though, to the vocal dismay of his family and friends. Nobody liked chill, flatlined Miles. He was too cold for them. No fun anymore. Tough shit. He was done rolling around like a puppy, panting for everyone’s approval. Anyone who cherished strong opinions about his coping mechanisms could go get stuffed.

Nothing moved him. Not maternal guilt, not the scolding of his friends; Aaro, Sean, or various other components of the McCloud Crowd, an opinionated group if there ever was one. To a man, they considered Miles to be their own personal creation, and as such, their personal property, too. It took a traumatic brain injury to jolt him free of that.

He’d always wondered how those McCloud guys, most notably Davy, Connor, and Kev, managed their strong, silent routines. Now he understood. They had shields in their heads, just like him.

Too bad the shield didn’t block out his sensory overload problem. But no, that torrential info dump ran on a different channel. With his senses ratcheted up like that, normal everyday life was torture. Perfume, cigarettes, and car exhaust made him gag. Intimate olfactory data about the hormonal and emotional states of the bodies of the people he encountered was embarrassing. Traffic was ear-splitting. Electric lights, God help him. Worst of all, the electromagnetic radiation of wi-fi generated a hot, prickly buzz in his head that turned the chronic headache into stomach-churning agony. And he was a computer geek by trade, for God’s sake. This was a game-changing professional handicap. There were drugs he could take, but to make a dent in a problem this big, he needed a dose so high, it turned him puddle-of-drool stupid.

Of course, things were a little different since the dream girl started her yummy therapeutic visits to his fortress. The head sex seemed to have increased his bandwidth, improving the info dump to a point he might almost define as bearable. But who knew if he could tolerate wi-fi, electrosmog? He had yet to put his laptop and router to the test. He had left them hidden under the body of his truck, in the woods, swathed and sealed in plastic.

He wasn’t sure if the sex fantasy-fueled improvement was a positive sign, or another symptom of impending insanity. It was problematic on so many levels. At least the shield made it easier to be stoic about head pain. He still felt it, it still sucked, but it didn’t make him panic. It was just pain. He breathed into it. It was easier, out in the woods. Sensory data still flooded in, but the data was clean, balanced. Nothing made his head explode. At first, he’d retreated to his own mountain property, but his friends kept coming up to nag. He had to retreat deeper to avoid them.

He’d sucked down some books on wilderness camping before he came up here, and packed up all the macho gear the McClouds had equipped him with over the years—guns, ammo, all-purpose belt knife, etc. The gear was all part of the McCloud guys’ ongoing quest to transform Miles from a basement-dwelling geek freak into a kick-ass battle-ready commando like them. They’d made some progress over the years, but those guys wouldn’t be satisfied until he was prepared to sew up his own bullet wounds with dental floss. As fucking if.

Thinking too much. Cut that shit out. Concentrate.

The rock face shifted back into focus. He felt the energetic pulse of every living thing near him, vibrating in a shimmering energy field. Lichen rasped beneath his fingertips. Every bird, every bug a bright spot on the 3-D grid in his mind. The cougar was a hot glow of pulsing energy. Staring up like she wanted something from him. Something he just couldn’t give.

That made him think of Lara. Bad idea, dangling from a cliff face. And then he wasn’t just thinking of her. He saw her. Actually saw her in his head, even though his eyes were fixed on the rock face, his hands. Sliding through those grinding gears, just like she did in his nightly sex dreams, as bright a spot on his sensory grid as the living, breathing cougar. Inside his inner sanctum now, looking around. Curious, expectant. Big dark eyes alight with fascination. He saw her so clearly.

The fear grew, penetrating his shield, vibrating in his stomach, his limbs. He was not guiding this image at all. It was unspooling on its own, but he wasn’t dreaming. He wasn’t even daydreaming. He was screamingly wide awake, hyperconscious, hanging onto a cliff.

Like, what the fuck?

His shield flickered, and shock of raw panic blasted through him, whiting him out—

He came to sliding rapidly down the wall. Barely caught himself on a narrow ledge of granite with a bone-jarring thud, fingers clawed—

Focus. Don’t look down. His feet dangled, swung, over nothing.

It took a few flailing, panicky moments, to find the frequency, get the shield back up. There it was. Hard as ice. Chill. Empty. No think.

He looked down at the jagged boulders hundreds of feet below, bare toes wiggling in the foreground as they searched for purchase. Blood, smeared on the rocks. He’d scraped all the skin off his fingertips.

It took many long, shaking, straining minutes before he found a jut of rock with his foot, and could lift himself enough to move, think straight enough to recalculate a fresh route.

He made it to the top somehow, limbs hollow and limp when he got there. He had named this rock formation “the Fork,” today’s destination being the top of the tallest, sharpest tine. He stood on the summit and took in the towering forest of conifers, the snow-dusted Cascades, the shreds of moving clouds above and below. Right now, he almost enjoyed the info flood, when every single piece of data was harmonious with the rest. Except for he himself. His fingertips oozed blood. And his cock was still hard, from that not-exactly-a-dream.

He pushed the thought away, and gnawed some jerked elk meat Davy had given him, a relic from their hunting trip last year. A thinly disguised campaign to force Miles to learn to shoot a rifle properly, a necessary rite of passage, according to Davy. Davy himself was a great sniper. Mostly, Miles surmised, because the guy could shut down his emotions at will. Miles had not been great at it. Too nervous, too twitchy. He couldn’t find that still place between the thoughts, breaths.

Well, he’d found it now. The new, chill Miles would be a good sniper. Technique, angles, wind drop, that shit was just math, and he was good at math. If he ever needed to waste somebody at two kilometers, he was all set.

He had no more misadventures on the long, slow way down, but he was exhausted by the time he got back to his rough campsite, which consisted of a tarp tied over his sleeping roll and pack, a fire pit, and a small gas burner. Too tired to cook. He built a fire, chomped a protein bar without enthusiasm. He’d get scurvy if he went on like this, but foraging for edible plants did not engage his brain in the excellent way that climbing did. And all that chewing, Jesus. It made his jaw sore.

He fed wood slowly into the fire, too zonked to think. Then he felt that hot, shivery tingle on his skin again. He rose, scanning the trees that circled his clearing.

Luminous cat eyes flashed eerily in the firelight. The sounds of the night swelled as his perceptions amplified. He felt no sense of menace, just a hushed, cautious awe, but he pulled the loaded Glock 23 out of his pack all the same. It was too small a caliber for a cougar, but it was better than nothing. He’d have to shoot her right through the brow or the eye if she came at him.

God forbid it should come to that. She was so damn beautiful.

He sat slowly down again, facing her, and fed twigs into the fire. Wind sighed and tossed the treetops, driving shifting swatches of cloud across the glittering smear of uncountable stars. His eyes wanted to close so badly, but the cougar’s presence gave him that persistent little zing of adrenaline that kept them open.

The big cat was fascinated with him. She wanted to figure him out, make sense out of him. Good luck with that.

They’d told him that depression was normal after a brain injury. God knows, PTSD flashbacks would drive anybody half bonkers. He had iron-clad excuses for everything that was happening to him. But the sex dreams in his sleep were hard enough for him to justify. If Lara started haunting him while he was awake, too . . . oh, Jesus.

That bumped him up to a whole new level of crazy.

He’d taken on the task of finding and rescuing Lara as soon as he’d been capable of functioning after the Spruce Ridge debacle. Lara was another victim of the psychic freak squad that had attacked Miles. It had been Lara’s own mother, Helga Kasyanov, who had developed psi-max, the psi-enhancing drug that augmented latent paranormal ability, thereby setting this whole mess in motion. Helga had been murdered by Rudd’s people. Miles had been the one to find the mutilated body of Joseph Kirk, Lara’s father. Chained up in his own basement.

So Lara had been orphaned, as well as abducted. It made him angry, sick, and sad, which touched off a useless but uncontrollable urge to save the princess. Too many video games in his egghead youth.

He’d tried to find Lara Kirk harder than he’d ever tried anything in his life. He’d found exactly squat. She had stayed stubbornly lost. No clues, no breaks, no hints. Just a smooth, obdurate brick wall.

It burned his ass. No one better than he knew what she’d been up against, what she might have suffered. How could a guy know that, and just take it easy, convalesce? Sorry lady, I need some R&R to get my brain swelling down before I can rescue you from the slobbering monsters.

And why did he still give a shit at all, with his shield up? He managed not to care about anything or anyone else.

Because everyone else is outside your shield, dickhead. She keeps sneaking inside. At which point you bone her brains out. What a prince.

That thought stank of schizo delusion. He refused to think it.

Sleep was like a hand, pressing down hard on his head. He fought it, which left him less willpower to withstand the impulse to grope in his jacket for the plastic envelope. It held a photo, a copy of the headshot on Lara’s website. She was a sculptor. Had been a sculptor. He knew every piece in her online catalog. He’d studied them. Pored over them.

He stared at her haunting dark eyes, and then started cursing, low and long, picking up steam. His tantrum culminated in tossing the photo at the fire. He choked it, of course. The picture fell short, landed at the edge of the embers. The plastic envelope began to melt and twist.

He plucked it out of the coals, defeated. Waved it until the plastic solidified. Stuck it in his jacket, defeated. So much for his hissy fit. Why did he even try.

He was keeping his eyes open by brute force of will alone when the images started again, just like it had while he was climbing. Like a dream, but he was not asleep, and he could not stop them. He just watched her, moving through the guts of the big machine that housed him. She wore that gauzy, impractical white thing, like a fairy-tale princess, pale, over-the-top froth. Her hair hung long, tousled. Long, slim legs. The dress swung and fluttered as she sidled through gnashing gears, arching, bending, ducking . . . and she was inside.

Of him. While he watched, wide awake. Holy shit. His muscles contracted. Oh, man. This was so weird. So bad. Crazy bad.

In his dream, or image, or whatever it was, she was in a control room, like the bridge of a futuristic spaceship. A relic of all his late nights with the sci-fi channel, no doubt. She drifted around in the room, twirling knobs, pushing buttons. She sat in a big swivel chair that looked suspiciously like a space captain’s chair, and began typing onto a terminal that took form before his eyes.

He started to sweat. She’d never spoken in the dreams. Not that he’d given her a chance, the way he came on. Conquering barbarian style. She hadn’t been able to do much more than whimper and gasp.

He’d left a message on his analogous mental computer only once. It had been for Nina, on that fateful night at Spruce Ridge. More a thought experiment than anything else, just to see if it would work, and he’d been privately appalled, at the time, to find that it had.

That had been his one glancing brush with practical telepathy, and he had not wanted to repeat the experience, not ever. He had enough problems. He didn’t want this to go any further. Oh please.

But the message glowed on the screen, beckoning.

where r u?

He shouldn’t answer it. He should not encourage a split-off part of his own fucked-up prefrontal cortex to talk to him. That played along with the fiction that it existed separate from his own consciousness, and it didn’t, goddamnit. It was just Miles Davenport and his own complicated baggage. No more, no less. But his response rattled out onto the screen anyway.

piss off i dont want 2 play

Lara’s eyes widened, in shock. She poised her fingers over the keyboard, typed. fck u 2 And she winked out. Pissed. Gone.

He realized three things at once. One, he had a massive hard-on, again. Two, he felt like shit for being rude to her. Bad sign. Three, without him noticing, the cougar had moved in on him. A lot closer.

He grabbed the Glock, jumped up and discharged it into the sky with a shout. The cougar leaped high, and vanished into the night.

The gun report was a hammer blow to his skull. He sank to his knees, let the gun slide from stiff, shaking fingers onto the pine needles. Hid his hot face in his hands. It was time for the meds. Jesus, look at him.

Trying to chase a fucking dream away by shooting it.

Lara’s eyes fluttered at the glare, stomach clenching.

Back in hell again. She wanted to go back to the Citadel, to her fantasy lover. Just thinking about him made her toes tighten with delight. He was the only good thing in the twisted smoking wreck of what passed for her life—and he had just slapped her away.

It hurt so much, she could barely breathe. Her dream lover had never run hot and cold on her before. He’d always been straight hot. Scalding, scorching hot, like she’d never imagined hot could be.

And now look at her, sniveling. Dissed by her own escapist sexual fantasy. How pathetic was that.

You have bigger problems, girl. She opened her eyes and grimly faced them. She was bound to the gurney with wrist and ankle restraints, straps buckled across chest and thigh. She used to fight them. She didn’t, anymore, but Hu had a lingering mark in the shape of her teeth on the meaty part of his thumb. He took no chances.

Their faces hung over her, distorted and nightmarish. Tears flashed out, ran into her sweaty hair. She hated crying in front of these hateful bastards. Not that they gave a shit. She was nothing to them, an inanimate thing to be exploited, but still, she hated her own lack of control. Hot teardrops tickled across her temples.

Breathe into it. Just a feeling. You’re big. It’s small. Breathe.

She willed herself to stillness. So difficult to be dignified when flat on one’s back, strapped to a cot, stoned off her gourd. And weeping.

Today it was Hu, and Anabel, the blond bitch telepath, her usual tormenters. Anabel was always there, to follow Lara’s mind wherever it ranged when they pumped her full of their junk. Hu was enhanced with psi, too, but his abilities were focused around the function of the drug itself, not upon her.

They were using her as a guinea pig, to develop a new drug formula. To what end she was not sure, and was afraid to speculate. The effects of the current formula were scary enough as it was. It kicked her loose of the world she knew, launching her into a foggy nightmare world of shifting visions. Usually she made no sense of the visions. Anabel or one of the other telepaths was always there with her, claws sunk deep. Hanging on like a tick. Usually Anabel.

Some of the visions were recurring. Like her mute, nameless friend, the little boy with the blond hair and the raggedy pajamas, for instance. He would have been a comforting figure if he weren’t so ghostly and forlorn. Still, she’d become fond of him. She needed to care about someone, and the little boy was always there when they launched her into the formless fog. He’d become her guide, running on ahead of her, beckoning her on, gesturing and pointing until she saw the Citadel looming out of the mist.

And then she found him. The Citadel’s incendiary occupant.

She’d been amazed, the first time, to find that Anabel and the others couldn’t follow her inside. She was safe from her tormenters in there. And he was there. Her dream lover.

Not that there was anything that comforting about him, that was for sure. Comforting was not the word for the Lord of the Citadel. Mind-blowing, super-deluxe, over-the-top sexual fantasy was more like it. The masterful intensity of his come-on and his lovemaking had terrified her, at first, but she’d taken to it pretty damn fast. She’d adjusted. Wow.

She’d puzzled at first, the hows and the whys and the whats of it all, but lately, she’d given up on that. It was a gift, and she’d just go with it, accept it, enjoy it.

Or rather, cling to it like a lifeline.

She’d gotten into the Citadel today, briefly, though she hadn’t encountered its amorous lord as she usually did. She’d found the room empty, until she typed in that stupid, ill-fated message.

And got his harsh response. Ouch. It still smarted.

She’d gotten in at this morning’s injection, too. Anabel was doubly furious, having been thwarted twice.

When Lara’s eyes focused, Anabel slapped her. Forehand, backhand. Whap, whap. “Where the fuck did you go, you sneaky bitch? Where did you learn to block? Who taught you? Helga?”

Lara shook her head, insofar as the strap on her forehead would allow. “Didn’t,” she croaked. “Don’t know how.”

And it was true. She had no idea how to create something like that incredible dream fortress. She had no idea what the hell she was doing when they sent her on those drug trips.

No, she was trespassing in the Citadel. Not that its smoking-hot sex god inhabitant had ever objected to her visits before today. On the contrary. He’d always been happy to see her. To say the least.

“I had her for a while.” Anabel directed the words at Hu. “We were making some progress. She saw that usual weird nightmare with the sleepwalkers, and then she saw the Tokyo bomb thing, and then she shook me off.” She hung over Lara. “Where did you go?” Spittle flew, spattering Lara’s cheeks. “How the fuck do you do that?”

“Don’t remember,” Lara lied, and gasped at the stab of pain as Anabel dug savagely into her mind and raked through her memories.

“What do you get?” Hu asked. “Where was she?”

Anabel closed her eyes, brow furrowed. After a moment, she shook her head. “Usually, it feels like she’s been fucking somebody after she skips off and hides, the dirty little whore.” Whack. Another head-rocking slap. “But not today. Where’s your fuck buddy today, cunt? Did he blow you off?” Lara tried not to whimper as she felt Anabel tug the thought thread out, and unravel it. “Ah! I nailed it! He hurt your poor little feelings! Aw, boo hoo for you!”

Lara breathed slowly, trying to keep her mind soft, unfocused. If she stayed very detached, giving no emotional charge at all to her thoughts, Anabel couldn’t tell which threads were important enough to pick up and follow. It worked sometimes. When she was zen enough.

They said that Mother had developed this junk. A drug that enhanced a person’s psi. It was plausible. Mother had been a brilliant pharmacologist, and she’d had a deep interest in parapsychology.

But they said a lot of crazy things. That Mother had died only a couple of months ago, for instance. That her death in that fire at the research facility years ago had been faked. That she’d been alive, all these long three endless years that Lara had been mourning her.

That Dad had been murdered, too. Tortured. Cut to pieces.

Until proven contrary, she would make the blanket assumption that they were all vicious lies. Or try to, anyway.

She would not think about it. Would. Not.

What they wanted from her, she couldn’t imagine. She was just an artist. Working with images on wood and clay and metal, minding her own goddamn business. She’d never bothered anyone in her life.

These people said she had psi. She had to, or she’d be dead, they told her when she’d regained her wits, after that first terrifying episode. That was how the drug worked. It enhanced you, or it killed you.

At this point, after months in the rat hole, she was wishing it had killed her. She’d made a little over two hundred scratches on the wall for what she assumed were days, but who knew, with no clock or natural light for reference? At first, lights had switched on and off in what she assumed were twelve-hour cycles, with three small, wretched meals spaced throughout the light cycle. But when they started dosing her, they started playing with the light and food cycles, leaving her in the dark for what felt like days, or fasting until her stomach was twisted into knots. She didn’t even have a menstrual cycle for reference. After the first weeks, she hadn’t been able to choke enough food down to support that bodily process. Though her appetite had picked up quite a bit since she found the Citadel. And her mysterious sex god.

Too bad the food still sucked. When they provided it at all.

“The boss is not going to be happy,” Hu scolded. “You said you’d have her in hand by the next time he checked up on us. But her shielding is getting better. He’s going to crush us like cockroaches.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Anabel hissed back.

They talked as if she were a doll, never speaking to her directly, other than to torment or threaten. The rest of her time she spent alone in the rat hole, fighting for her sani