Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1)(75)

I found it. I paid for it. And the price was very high. Her words echoed in his mind.

He shoved his guilt aside. Sneaky bitch, flashing her tits at him, and he’d panted and wagged like a hopeful hound. Fury at his own stupidity made his arm sweep out at the knife block. The contact would have broken a normal man’s arm. Not his reinforced bones, not his super-toughened muscle fibers. The block hit the ceramic floor tiles, shattering a few into a spiderweb of cracks and fragments.

Knives slid out, skittering over the tiles, through glittering shards of glass and ceramic. Another sweep caught the big fruit bowl, piled high.

It crashed to the floor. Apples, oranges, grapefruits bounced and rolled.

His eyes streamed, his chest hitched. He hated this. Hated it. He groped again for a shred of rationality, stabbing out into the hot red darkness, searching for it.

His eyes, his eyes, his f*cking eyes. Take care of the eyes. He should flush them with water. A soothing eye wash. Bathroom. Medicine cabinet. Yeah.

His head throbbed. Anger flared, hot and murderous, as he touched the lump on his scalp where she’d clocked him with one of his own fancy-ass candlesticks. Fucking brilliant. He had an extremely high pain threshold, and quick recovery to trauma was vectored into his genome, but the injury triggered memories that flooded out, full force.

They raged through him now as if it was all happening right now.

Twelve boys in the room. The first lucky punks to get Braxton’s Mr. Muscle and Bones of Steel gene cocktail. Flailing in their restraints as they burned with fever, choking on snot and vomit, leaking from every hole. Just a few of the side effects of the hollowed-out flu virus that carried improved genes right into the cell nucleus and into the genome itself. The first change that would make them a beacon of hope for goddamn humanity.

Five boys died that day alone. One right next to him. He still saw blood streaming out of the kid’s nose as he croaked. His cells overwhelmed with waste toxins.

He barely made it to the downstairs bathroom before he lost what was in his stomach. He watched it swirl down the toilet, disgusted. With all his optimized cerebral function, he still hadn’t come up with a better solution than this stupid shitstorm.

He held his streaming eyes open for a long squirt of eye wash, hissing as the stuff made contact with the blistered whites. His eyes looked like stoplights, but already his rapid healing was at work. The huge sickening whanga-whanga caused by the candlestick to the extra-hard bone tissue in his skull had subsided to a throbbing ache that synchronized with each heartbeat.

He put the eye wash back in the medicine cabinet, and saw the flash drive in there. Zade had left it for him, and flushed a plastic contact lens case instead.

He’d signaled for Zade to stage the scene, never thinking things would get so out of hand. No way in hell would any of them have destroyed that flash drive. They needed to study and analyze that footage.

But Caro hadn’t know that. He grabbed the flash drive. Shoved it in his pocket.

He was in control again, but the anger raged on, running on a separate track from his rational brain. It lit his mind with a hot red haze.

One thing was simple. Retrieve Caro. Stick to her like glue. Keep her safe, and keep his people safe from revenge on her part. Be smarter than he’d been so far.

The trick would consist of not morphing into a one-man barbarian invasion and scaring Caro out of her mind. Anger and sex were wound too closely in that knot in his head. Those hack neuroscientists had crossed his wires backwards and upside down, just to see what would happen. They’d already written him off, so why not just f*ck around, get more useful data to crunch before they pulled the plug?

He’d learned to walk that tightrope using the analog dives, meditation. He’d fooled himself into thinking he was normal enough to get married, have kids, and live like a normal man. He’d been able to have great sex without being emotionally engaged in what he was doing, and he’d considered that to be a step in the right direction, a sign that he had a hope of being civilized. Sex was just a physiological need that he fulfilled, for pleasure, entertainment, and optimal health and function.

Guilty as charged. Brand him with a big red M for Man.

But he couldn’t cut himself off from Caro. And the red-tinged images writhing in his unhinged imagination were all of frenzied, conquering-warrior-style f*cking.

Caro would not welcome that vibe from him in her present mood.

He touched the lump again. His fingers came away gummy with drying blood. His hair stuck up, blood-stiffened. He looked like shit, and he wasn’t going to be able to tolerate the shield lenses on his inflamed eyes for a while. He’d have to rely on shield specs alone, which was too much light exposure. The light that came in the sides would keep the AVP combat program revved to screaming, wild-sex-or-pitched battle levels. Just to keep things interesting.

The other option was to call his people, have them bring Caro in for him. Safer for everyone. Except that he would be likely to burst a blood vessel, if he were waiting at home like an *.

Caro would just have to deal with the problematic thing that he actually was. He staggered around, looking in vain for the Porsche keys until he remembered with a fresh surge of fury that Caro had taken them.

He dug out the keys for his Mercedes SUV. Stopped for a moment to plug the flash drive into his laptop to copy the video file for future study. It went back into his pocket, and he sped out the door.

Caro had awakened the beast. He’d bent over backwards to be a perfect gentleman for her, and it hadn’t worked out. He couldn’t keep the mask up any longer. He had nothing left to hide behind. And this naked, jacked up, deformed thing that he was, both more and less than human . . . here it was. In your face, girl. Good luck with it.