It was a test, he had explained, as if it were perfectly normal. Sent on a bogus errand to carry a message to one of the gate guards, Michael was attacked by a strange man as he passed the building’s edge. He was pinned against the wall with a knife to his throat. He had told me that if he’d had time to think, things might have turned out differently. But there was no time, only instinct, and instinct took no prisoners.
The man died. With Michael’s hand spread on his chest, his heart stuttered, then burst like overripe fruit. It was a test . . . just a test. Jericho liked to see how his subjects performed in a variety of conditions. It accounted for the confusing reaction I’d received from Michael when we’d first rescued him. He kept asking if it was a test. He thought he had failed because he hadn’t hurt me.
It also explained what had happened when I’d tended to his cut feet. Not used to that kind of attention, he’d kept his hand hovering over my head. He had been ready to protect himself. It was lucky for me that I hadn’t made any sudden moves. Michael wouldn’t have killed me, I knew that. He wasn’t a killer no matter what Jericho had manipulated him into doing in the past. But he could’ve easily injured me in self-defense.
With just a touch.
“Um, Stefan? How long are we going to sit here?”
Jerking my attention back to the present, I grimaced. “Sorry.” Putting the car in gear, I pulled out of the parking lot. “It’s a lot for me to process. Things like this don’t happen in the real world.” The dark blue mark on my wrist mocked me. “I mean, sure, they can make designer fish that glow and splice jellyfish genes into a monkey, but this is people we’re talking about. Kids.” I’d seen that room in the basement and for all I knew it was one among many, but it was still hard to conceive. It was science fiction with a barbwire twist of horror. “How did that bastard do it?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged, but I could see it was a question he’d thought about endlessly. “They were careful not to mention the science of it around us. I do know that they would take us downstairs. We’d lie on the bed and they would give us a shot or sometimes gas.” Closing his eyes, he shook his head. “I never remembered anything after that . . . just waking up in my room. And I’d be cold. Freezing for hours.”
I had to consciously relax my fingers clenched on the wheel. “How often?” It came out roughly and I cleared my throat. “How often did they take you down there?”
“Often enough I’ve lost count.” The sun struggled through the clouds and made a halo of blond hair. “Once I woke up with an incision.” Leaning forward, he touched the small of his back. “Here. But that was the only time.”
The only time, as if its happening just once made it better. I tried to find something to focus on, something normal in a world that so unexpectedly was anything but. “My name.” That was something and a good something at that. “You said my name.”
Eyebrows now several shades darker than his hair winged skyward. “And?”
“It’s a first,” I grumbled. “Let me revel, all right?”
“You’re awfully easy to please.” He pulled at the bottom of his new shirt bearing the logo of a popular sports team. We’d purchased the purple and gold long sleeve jersey at the drugstore. He’d given me the same dubious look then that he was giving me now. “Are you sure you’re a mobster?”
“Ex-mobster.” It bore repeating, so I repeated it. “Ex.”
“Where are we going then, Mr. Ex-mobster sir?”
Where were we going? It was a good question.
I was rapidly racing down my list of options. The first had been to get away scot-free. That was profoundly optimistic, I know, but one can hope, right?
Wrong.
The second possibility was one that had been lurking in the back of my mind well before we raided the compound. And I’d exercised it the night before last by calling Dmitri with the intention of finding a place to hide. He could’ve steered me to a safe house. Michael and I would have disappeared in the hairy bosom of the family for as long as it took. Konstantin, however, had managed to bring that plan to a crashing halt. Even dead, the man had the ability to bust the balls of everyone around him.
“There’s a house,” I said slowly, turning over the thought in my mind. “It’s in North Carolina. It belonged to a friend of Babushka.” A gentleman friend as our grandmother Lena had said with pursed and moral lips, I remembered with wry affection. “He left it to her when he died. Nobody knows about it now but Anatoly and me. I think that’s our best bet.”
“I bow to your superior judgment,” he offered with suspicious blandness.