Dominance Never Dies (Masters and Mercenaries #11)(116)

If he woke up.

What if they’d killed him?

“You just went pale,” Santos observed. “Are you just now realizing how precarious your position is? You’re going to be in a foreign country with no one but me to protect you. My partner can be a bit unstable at times. Maybe it’s best if you stick close to me.”

Eww. “No, I wasn’t worried about myself and don’t expect me to play the wounded doe. If you come at me expect to get your balls handed to you because I’m not about to trade my body for protection. So let’s call it what it is. Rape. You going to get rapey on me, Santos? Because if you do, you better kill me afterward. I won’t keep quiet and my family might be so happy to have me back alive and whole that they concentrate on me, but if I’m damaged in any way, they won’t stop hunting your ass down. Do I make myself clear?”

“As crystal.” He shrugged it off as though it was no big deal. “No romance then. Tell me something—are you involved with both Taggart and Kent?”

“Kent?”

He waved a hand. “Sorry, I believe you know the man as Ezra Fain. He’s a CIA agent. I recognized him because I worked briefly with him on an operation in Indonesia. Kent preferred to work alone. Mostly because he’s one of those idiots who tends to feel a bit ashamed of his crimes. He shouldn’t. He’s an excellent killer. Clean and precise. He was an assassin for a while before the Agency decided to see if he was smart enough to turn into a real field agent. Smart man, but he couldn’t quite stop that conscience of his.”

She was going to have a long talk with Ezra when she got back home. “Sounds like a good thing to have.”

“Not when you’re a spy, pretty girl. When you’re a spy it tends to get in the way of the job. But I remember how much the man enjoyed the kill. It’s why I didn’t take you on the beach that day. I saw him. I think he let me see him. That was when I realized I had to try to get you to the clinic. You were the real target. The hacker was a bonus. We didn’t have one of those. When it became apparent you had no idea who he was, I realized Kent was playing an angle. You were his pawn. Now I have the queen and I intend to get paid.”

“So you’re going to ransom me back to my brother?”

“Of course. And I’ll attempt to keep you intact. I suspect getting in a war with your brother could be tricky. I don’t want to have to slit his throat in the middle of the night. He’s too high profile a target. But he knows the game. He’ll pay and then we’ll be done.”

“Until the next time you need a little cash.”

He shrugged slightly, not denying the accusation at all. “Hopefully we won’t. The doctor believes she’s almost at a breakthrough. The new drug has completely wiped Victor’s mind and he no longer requires daily doses. Only Theo seems to be holding out. Once he no longer reverts to form, we’ll be ready to sell. Then we’ll never need money again.”

“I suspect you’ll need a good lawyer at some point.”

“There’s no FDA out here, and once we’ve sold the protocols and formula we’ll all disappear completely.”

“What about Theo and the others? What happens to them when you and the fine doctor ride off into the sunset? And what do you mean by reverting? How does Theo revert to form?”

Santos glanced down at his watch as though checking to ensure he was on time. “We’ve still got a bit of time to kill and I suspect Dr. McDonald will erase your memories of this incident anyway, so why not talk? Theo was her first experiment and he’s proven to be her most difficult subject. If he goes off the meds for more than a few days, his memories begin to surface. Dr. McDonald believes she’s handled the problem. You see, after the incident in Colombia, she realized she had to break him or kill him. She refined the drug and the protocols involving young Taggart. She’d been too easy with him. She preferred to attempt simple psychological manipulations. I knew that wouldn’t work so I gave him pain, indescribable amounts of pain. The drug made it seem longer, worse than it was, though you should know it was bad enough without the drugs.”

He was a monster. “You hurt him. What did that prove?”

“Effective is what it proved to be. Once the subject realized he would die if he didn’t submit, his episodes of rebellion became less and he’s able to go for longer without the drug. Dr. McDonald gave him a massive dose two months ago and he’s had no issues since. His memory is wiped clean. Who he was is completely gone and he will be who we train him to be.”

She felt sick and it wasn’t because the plane was shuddering. How could a person’s memories be lost? They couldn’t be completely lost. There had to be a way to bring him back. When she’d mentioned the SEALs, he’d had a reaction. That had to mean something. “So he’ll go with you when you head for the hills, so to speak?”

“If by ‘hill’ you mean my own private island, then yes. We’ll need guards we can trust and they also serve as examples of how our product works. You would be surprised at how effective a killing machine a man can be when his humanity is utterly erased. Another issue we have with Taggart. We still have issues with that pesky conscience. He was the one to cover you up and watched over you to ensure no one touched you while you were drugged. He was quite insistent. And I thought we’d been doing so well. The minute a female who isn’t the doctor enters the scene, Taggart struggles to remember who he is. Robert as well. He has some of the same issues as Taggart. I’ve tried sex therapy with all three of our boys, attempted to get them to view women as a sexual outlet and nothing more. It hasn’t gone well, though at least with Robert sex seems to ease some of his discontent. Our problem with him is entirely different. Robert wants to keep all the prostitutes we bring in like they’re teddy bears or something.”