Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Symphath. That was what his kind were called.
With a grunt, Daniel pushed himself up on the pillows, and as he swept his hand over his head, it was a familiar gesture that reminded her of when he’d had such thick, beautiful hair.
“I would do it if I could—”
“Do what.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “You already said there’ll be no evidence at Gus’s—”
“—so Blade is where we have to go. My former boss is—”
“Totally untrustworthy. You said that yourself—”
“I tried calling him.” He nodded at the door as if he weren’t hearing her at all. “When you walked the medical types out and talked to them in the hall. He didn’t answer—maybe he killed that number.”
She thought about being in that cave up on the mountain, where Blade had been recovering after he’d been shot. The memory of Daniel walking in on them was not a good one.
“Lydia, if we want to help Gus, we need him.”
“Even if I could find that male, what makes you think he’ll help us—”
“He’s in love with you. He’ll do anything you ask him to.” As she opened her mouth, Daniel put his palm up and continued in a bleak tone. “I’m still sorry I was such an asshole when I saw the two of you together. I was wrong. Utterly wrong. And as for how dangerous he is, I know you can take care of yourself, especially up there with all those wolves protecting you. If there was another way… but we need everything we’ve got right now.”
Daniel’s defeat was in the lines of his face, the grooves at the sides of his mouth making him seem closer to eighty than twenty.
“I would do it myself, Lydia. If I could.”
“If C.P. Phalen’s squadron of guards can’t find anything, what makes you think Blade can?”
“I have a lead. I found it when I back-doored into the FBG server after that guard was killed on the front lawn here. Maybe it isn’t anything, but Blade will know. The bastard knows more than even I do about the hidden labs in this country—and who the fuck else would take someone like Gus.”
FBG. The Federal Bureau of Genetics. A supposed covert arm of the U.S. government tasked with protecting and defending the integrity of the human genome. Daniel’s former “employer.” Which in actuality had just been a front so Blade could go around bombing the underground labs that were just like C.P. Phalen’s.
Daniel had lied to her when he had first come into her life. But she had lied to him, too. And yes, two wrongs didn’t make a right, however they’d both had their reasons.
Lydia went over to the tall windows that overlooked the field that went all the way back to a forest line. Underneath her skin, the wolf in her stalked its cage of DNA, ready to run. Demanding freedom.
Daniel’s mission had been to destroy C.P. Phalen’s secret facility, but instead of getting to that goal, he had become a patient in it—and, for a time, the first person intended to test Vita-12b. But after so many conventional treatments had failed? Who needed another medication gauntlet, especially one that had never been in a human before.
Gus St. Claire had understood that, even better than Lydia had. The man had devoted his life’s work to trying to help patients like Daniel, as well as family members and loved ones like her, who were suffering alongside.
There was nothing she wouldn’t do for him.
“If there was something, anything else,” Daniel muttered, “I’d be pursuing it. Especially because Gus may already be dead. But that man believed in miracles, and there are times you have to engineer your own.”
Lydia looked over her shoulder. Her man seemed so frail as he lay there, his heavy-lidded eyes bloodshot, those too-bright cheeks now making her worried he had a fever—except surely all those medical degrees in white coats had checked that?
Had she seen them take his temperature?
God, she was tired of playing nurse.
On that note, if she left Daniel to go on some wild-goose chase, and he had an acute event—which they had been warned could happen at any moment either because of all the treatments he’d had or because of the fucking cancer—she would never forgive herself.
But if she didn’t go up the mountain and try to find Blade, she’d feel responsible for Gus’s death. Or at least complicit in it. And she would never forgive herself.
As she teetered, she heard Gus’s voice:
Call me anytime, my phone is always on.
The words came to her through the dualities of her exhaustion and panic—she couldn’t count the number of times he’d said that to them. And he’d meant it, too. The other thing that he’d always said?
Why didn’t you call me if you were this worried?
He had always put his patients first—