“Like I threatened you?”
She set aside the yogurt and put her hands on the table because she needed balance. This would be easier if Owen were here in the room with her, but she had to forget about him in a comfort role. She was certain all his talk was about keeping her under control. Pleasing her sexually had worked well once. He was simply going back to a familiar tactic. “Yes, you threatened me. You scared me so badly that I ran and I didn’t look back. It was the only time I ever left a job.”
“What did I threaten to do?” He seemed to brace himself as well, his shoulders squaring and spine straightening.
He was a lovely man. He always had been, but there had been a hardness to the old Steven Reasor, a sneer that seemed to dominate his every expression. There was none of that on this man’s face. He seemed younger than Reasor. Despite the doctor’s youthful age, he’d always seemed so much older than she was. Not so the man in front of her.
Maybe she needed to start thinking of him as a patient. If this man had walked in with a degenerative brain disease and had wanted to call himself Tucker, she would let him do that. She would allow him to do anything that made him comfortable.
And she would have had someone confront him with events that might spark his memory.
“You threatened to kill me.” She was happy with how even her tone was. “Not before you’d sampled the goods, as you put it, but you promised that after you’d figured out what made me tick, you were going to kill me. I believed you.”
“I threatened to rape you?” He looked sick at the thought.
“Not in so many words, but that was the gist.” She needed to know a few things. Faith had talked about what had happened to her husband, but only in vague terms. “McDonald was there the last few days I spent at the Kronberg lab. You and she were fighting about something. I don’t know what because she refused to acknowledge that anything was wrong.”
McDonald had smiled, a gesture that didn’t reach her eyes, and sent her back to work. Nothing to worry about. She would handle everything, and could Becca bring her the latest results on the primary testing?
“In her journal she talked about dealing with Reasor if she had to. She didn’t say why, but she said if he continued to cause problems, she knew how to handle him.” His eyes became steady, focused utterly on her. “Did I rape you?”
“No.” She sighed. “I don’t think so.”
His breath hitched and he stood up, panic plain in every movement of his body. This was killing him, and she didn’t think he was faking it.
“I don’t think you did anything to me physically, but I had a dream the night before I left.” It was past time to figure this out. “It was weird. I had dinner and I felt sick. That was the last thing I remembered. I woke up in one of the patient beds, and someone had given me IV fluids. The nurse on duty told me I’d had a terrible stomach flu and I’d passed out. She said it happened to a couple of us who ate in the cafeteria.”
He shook his head as though the blows just kept coming. “You think I poisoned you?”
“I had dreams that night. The worst dreams I’ve ever had. They were so vivid. It felt like weeks passed and you were there. You tortured me.”
“In your dreams.”
She nodded. “And when I got back to my room, that was when you confronted me. You were angry because Dr. McDonald was talking about bringing me on full time. I was supposed to go on a trip to Argentina with her the week after, and you’d just found out. I guess you wanted to be the one to go.”
His eyes narrowed. “Rebecca, Argentina was where her secret lab was located. That was where she held Theo. If she was taking you there, she would have kept you there, too. She likely wanted you to solve her Theo problem.”
A chill went through her.
“Do you remember who was around you at dinner?” Tucker asked.
She shook her head. “Honestly, I don’t remember much. I remember walking into the cafeteria and then waking up. They told me there was something bad in the salad.”
“Or someone dosed you. We know she’d worked on the time dilation drug by that point. Tennessee Smith knows what that feels like.” Tucker started to pace. “I don’t understand why she would have done it if she was planning on taking you.” He stopped. “I did it. I did it to get rid of you. I did it to keep my place.”
It was easier to talk to him now that she could see a bit past who he’d been. The old Reasor never paced. He’d been almost preternaturally still. It had been unnerving. “You don’t know that. The only way to know that is to uncover the memories.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to. I know the others are hoping there’s some kind of cure out there, but not me. I won’t take it. I won’t go back to who I used to be. Would you? Would you unlock your Mr. Hyde?”
“Knowing what you did for McDonald could help the others,” she said, her doctor brain working on how she would do it. She would need scans and blood work. If McDonald had used Becca’s own research to perfect her treatments, then she should be able to do something about it. “Have you tried hypnosis? The human body will always attempt to heal itself, and it can be shocking how much it can do given time and rest.”
“Yeah, Ari’s tried that with all of us. Some of the others get flashes sometimes. I get feelings. Like I should be doing something. Like I left something undone. I don’t know why but I think about old-looking places. Places that look like London, but they’re not.”
She nodded. “That’s because she can’t erase your mind. She could potentially destroy the sections that deal with memory, but that would be a delicate procedure and one that would as likely hurt the parts she wanted to function as not. She needed to break down specific communication between brain synapses, and do it in a way no one has before. Not that anyone who isn’t psychotic would want to. I’m trying to do the opposite. I’m trying to find a way to break down the plaque that cuts off…damn it. She found a way to build it up and very quickly. In a targeted way.”
She could work with that. Especially if she had a lab. She needed those damn notes. McDonald wouldn’t have gotten rid of them and she would have had a failsafe.
“I’m sorry.” Tucker sounded tired.
The words burst through the momentary excitement of discovery, and guilt swelled inside her again. These men had been broken utterly and she was excited about a new project.
Because if McDonald figured out how to build up walls around sections of the memory center, then she had also known how to break them down. The key was here. She knew it was. It was held in these men and that research.
But the man in front of her was real, and she was shocked by the tears that ran down his face. Everything else about him was controlled, but those tears…
“You aren’t the same man you were.” That particular truth hit her soundly as she stared at him, unsure what to do. “You have nothing to apologize for because you aren’t the one who did it to me.”
“I don’t know who I was, what I did. I meet people and I wonder how I hurt them. I don’t ever want to know. I don’t want to lose this me. I don’t have any right to ask you this, but can you help me stay me?” His jaw tightened and he was obviously on the edge. “Please. I have to stay me or I need to…I can’t go back.”
She could walk away from him. She didn’t have to promise this man anything.
Except he was giving her a chance to choose. If it had really been Steven Reasor standing in front of her, she could have walked away, but this was a man named Tucker and he wanted to be good. She had no idea what forces had molded Reasor into a man they called Razor, but this man was different.
And he was in pain.