Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games #2)(97)

“The place I woke up in.”

“Our room.”

I force myself not to react to the connotations of those two words and decide to go in a different direction.

“I know how much you like games and manipulation, so I know it amused you to watch me play into your hands. What I don’t understand is why now?”

He inclines his head, a kingly nod that indicates he approves of this question. “It took years to find this place. It took more years to prepare it. And during that time, I perfected our little project, the one we dreamed about in college. The thing all the experts said would never happen in our lifetime.”

A shiver of dread passes through me. Seeing my expression, he nods again. Then he glances at the wall of glass to my right with the rows of white server towers behind it.

Horror and fascination mix inside me to create an almost irresistible urge to run over to the servers and run my hands along their smooth flanks. I whisper, “A quantum computer?”

“One hundred million times faster than the average home PC, thirty-six hundred times faster than the fastest supercomputer in the world, built on a doped diamond crystal that’s easily scaled and functional at room temperature.”

There’s pride in his tone. Though it pains me to admit it, there should be.

A quantum computer is so complex, the algorithms so advanced, the machine can actually think for itself. And not only think.

It can learn.

“Yes,” says S?ren, watching me reel in amazement. “It’s a revolutionary technology that will change the entire world as we know it. I calculate that just its uses in artificial intelligence, robotics, defense, and cryptography are worth well over a trillion dollars.”

My voice is faint when I say, “You could win the Nobel prize for this.”

“Prizes don’t interest me.”

I tear my gaze from the servers. S?ren is looking at me in anticipation, knowing I’ll guess what does interest him. Knowing I’ll know.

The blood drains from my face so rapidly, I feel dizzy. “You’re going to tear the whole world apart. But first you’re going to make them pay you for it.”

“Not me. Us.”

“No,” I say, my voice turning hard. “I don’t want any part of this. Anarchy was never my thing. Hurting people was never my thing.”

He rises slowly, with complete grace. His eyes shine eerily in the light. “You wanted to set the world free once. Now we can. You and I, together. It’s what I’ve spent the last decade of my life working toward. It’s what we were born for, Tabitha. It’s our destiny.”

Fighting the onset of panic, I back up a step. S?ren follows.

“You know me better than that.”

“I know that within the last few years you developed an encryption cipher that lets you break into any protected system you want. I’ve been watching you do it too, dabbling in power. Flirting with it. You wouldn’t do that if some part of you didn’t crave it. The only difference between us is your denial.”

“You forgot murder.”

S?ren takes another step toward me. I take another step back.

“And yet if I put a loaded gun in your hand right now, you wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger, would you?”

“That’s different. That’s justice.”

“No, that’s revenge. And it would be wrong. You know it. Deep down, you know it. But you’re justifying your desire to spill my blood by calling it by a prettier name. You can put lipstick on a pig, Tabitha, but it’s still a pig. Murder is murder, no matter how well you try to dress it up.”

He takes another step forward. “So if you kill me, in effect you become me.”

There’s a gnawing in my stomach like I’ve swallowed rats. “Stop trying to mess with my head!”

“I’m not trying, I just am. Because you won’t accept the reality of who and what you really are. You put your entire life on pause because of your stubborn refusal to allow all that darkness inside you to come into the light. You knew what I was the second you met me. I never had you fooled like everyone else. And yet you allowed yourself to be drawn in.”

“I was seventeen! I had no one! You were my brother!”

He makes a soft tsk of disapproval. “I was your mirror. And still am. You should’ve seen the expression on your face when you looked at those servers. Shall I tell you what it looked like?” He prowls closer, growls, “Lust.”

“No.”

“Greed. Desire,” he adds, ignoring my interruption. “You want what I can give you. What no one else can give you but me. Our minds are the same. Our desires are the same. Our needs are exactly the same.”

He takes another step closer, and now he’s within reach. My fingers itch to poke out his eyeballs.

Juanita. Juanita. Juanita, I think, and then, my heart skipping a beat, But what if she’s already dead?

I have no control over what S?ren does, or who he hurts, or how this will end. And in all honestly, I really don’t know that he’ll keep his promise not to hurt anyone if I go along with whatever he wants. After all, the man is a psychopath. They’re not exactly known to be reliable.

The only thing I have control over is myself.

So I inhale a slow, grounding breath. I look S?ren in the eye and calmly say, “I disagree with everything you just said. But I do have another question.”