Vengeful (Villains #2)(113)

“Where do you think you’re going?” demanded Green Eyes.

“To take a shower,” said Eli. “I need to be presentable.”

The soldiers looked to Stell, who stared at Eli for a long moment before nodding. “Sweep it,” he ordered.

Eli waited while the soldiers secured the bathroom, making sure there was no way out, removing anything that might be even vaguely construed as a weapon. As if Eli himself weren’t the weapon of choice today.

When the soldiers were satisfied, he unhooked the garment bag from the bathroom door and stepped inside. He was pulling it shut when one of the soldiers caught the door. “Leave it open.”

“Suit yourself,” said Eli.

He left a foot of clearance, for modesty. Hung up the borrowed suit, and turned on the shower.

With his back to the open door, Eli freed the stolen pen from the cuff of his EON-issued jacket and held it between his teeth as he stripped off the clothes, let them pool around his feet.

He stepped into the shower, the frosted glass door falling shut behind him. He ran his fingers over the surface of the steel collar, searching for a weakness, a groove or clasp. But he found none. Eli hissed in annoyance.

The collar, then, would have to wait.

He removed the stolen pen from his mouth, and under the static of the water’s spray, snapped it in two.

It was hardly ideal, but it was the closest thing to a knife he was likely to get.

Eli closed his eyes, and summoned the pages from the black folder. He’d studied them thoroughly, memorized the photos and scans that had accompanied each of Haverty’s experiments.

The record had been gruesome but revealing.

The first time Eli had noticed the shadow on an image of his forearm, he’d taken it for a swatch, just one of those markers used to signal direction on an X-ray. But then it showed up again on an MRI. A small metal rectangle, the faint impression of a grid.

And he knew exactly what it was.

Eli found the same mark on a scan of his lower spine. At his left hip. The base of his skull. Between his ribs. Disgust had welled like blood as Eli realized—every time Haverty had cut or pried or pinned him open, the doctor had left a tracking device behind. Each one small enough so that Eli’s body, instead of rejecting the objects, simply healed around them.

It was time they came out.

Eli brought his makeshift scalpel to his forearm and pressed down. The skin split, blood rising instantly along the jagged edge, and an old voice in his head noted that the heat and moisture would act as anticoagulants, before he reminded that voice that his healing power rendered the fact irrelevant.

He clenched his teeth as he drove the plastic deeper.

Haverty had never bothered with shallow wounds. When he opened Eli up, he did it down to bone. The static of the spray would have provided a buffer, but Eli didn’t make a sound.

Still, as his fingers slipped and slid, and blood ran down the drain, Eli felt a tremor of residual panic pass through him. The only kind of mark left by Haverty’s work. Invisible, but insidious.

At last, the tracker came free, a sliver of dark metal clutched between stained fingers. Eli set it in the soap dish with a shaky breath.

One down.

Four to go.

THE KINGSLEY

MITCH rolled over, and spit a mouthful of blood onto the hardwood floor.

One eye was swelling shut, and he couldn’t breathe through his broken nose, but he was alive. He could move. He could think.

For now, that would have to be enough.

The apartment was empty. The soldiers were gone.

They’d left Mitch behind.

Human.

That one word—a judgment, a sentence—had saved his life. The EON soldiers lacked either the time or the energy to deal with someone so tangential to their pursuit.

Mitch forced himself to his hands and knees with a groan. He had a muddled memory of movement, grasping at consciousness as the soldiers spoke.

We’ve got him.

It took a long time for the words to sink into Mitch’s bruised skull.

Victor.

He got, haltingly, to his feet and looked around, taking in the trashed apartment, the bloodstained floor, the dog lying on the floor nearby.

“Sorry, boy,” he murmured, wishing he could do more for Dol. But only Sydney could have helped him now, and Mitch had no idea where she was. He stood there, amid the carnage, torn between the need to wait for her and the need to go find Victor, and for a second the two forces seemed to pull him physically, painfully apart.

But Mitch couldn’t do both, and he knew it, so he asked himself, what would Victor do? What would Syd? And when the answers were the same, he knew.

Mitch had to leave.

The question was where to go.

The soldiers had taken his laptop, and he had crushed his primary cell, but Mitch crouched—which turned out to hurt just as much as standing up—and felt under the lip of the sofa, dislodging the small black box and the burner smartphone that it was feeding into.

His butler.

In the old black-and-white movies he’d always loved, a good butler was neither seen nor heard, not until they were needed. And yet they were always there, tucked innocently into the background, and always seemed to know the comings and goings of the house.

The concept behind Mitch’s device was the same.

He booted the phone and watched as the data from the soldiers’ electronic tracking streamed in. Calls. Texts. Locations.