Chapter Two
***
Reid stared out hisoffice window at the flyer sitting at the back of the parking lot. He plucked at his lips with his thumb and pointer finger.
The vehicle had arrived two hours ago, passed through all of the facility’s security, and obtained a visitor's pass. The occupant had been fingerprinted, eye-scanned, given contracts to sign, placed in holding while the flyer was checked over, and eventually, after all the trouble it took to gain access to the front door, decided to sit her old metal hulk down and not move.
At first he’d been annoyed, but now he was intrigued.
The visitor’s information sat open on his console, a holographic image of a face projected before him. Reid had memorized it—unwillingly—and captured it so it would remain in his head, behind his eyelids, and in his personal hard drives forever until he either died or deleted it.
Clara Anne Warren.
The name simply represented the next woman he’d have to turn away from the program.
She’d be one of many in a long list of hopefuls: infertile couples looking for a fix, women—sometimes men—who wanted to indulge their Cyborg fetish once and for all, single-women homeless and poor looking for a place to stay and get medical care. The last group stabbed at his cold and bloodless metal heart.
Reid wasn’t a saint but neither was he callous. Those women always left with a recommendation from him for the nearest medical plaza, where they would be treated and taken care of with their expenses paid for by the facility.
They never came back. They never needed to.
He clasped his hands behind his back, stretching his suit tight over his chest; its restraints cut into his freedom. He was different, not because he was a shifter Cyborg, but because he had a tendency to shift into his beast... and never want to shift back.
Reid checked his watch. Fifteen hundred hours. Clara had still yet to leave her vehicle. The projected image of her face burned a hole into his back.
She was a thirty-one-year-old female, unattached, but made a handful of bad choices in her past. She had an ex who had recently been released from prison, a series of venue cancellations, a disturbing history of medical issues and surgeries, and barely a penny left to her name.
Reid tilted his head. There was movement beyond the glare of the vehicle’s windshield. Clara wasjustwhat he needed: another woman knocking on his door, another pair of sad eyes to turn away.
He sighed, straightened, and peeled out of his blazer, meticulously smoothing any wrinkles and hanging it behind his office door. He loosened his shirt and unbuttoned the first two clasps at his throat before he cracked his neck and stretched out his fingers.
All this he did while refusing to look at the image of the woman on his wall. He wouldn’t get distracted by soft curves, plush lips twitched up into a smile he could only describe as coy, and big, thickly framed violet eyes.
Violet eyes the color of a downtown metropolis at happy hour. The color of an Elyrian three sunset, each star blending a different purple into the horizon, violet and bottomless, and powerful enough to bring a man to his knees.
He had never seen the like. But he wasn’t a man; he was a Cyborg, and one with a heart encased in steel, frozen by his choice of career. A frozen heart couldn’t beat. At least that’s what he told himself to get through the day. A pair of unusual eyes meant nothing to him.
He chose to ignore that they were plastered on his wall, and returned to his post by the window, knowing that even if Clara Warren were looking straight at him, she wouldn’t be able to see him through the darkly shielded glass.
The land-flyer’s door opened. His finger twitched.You have one more warning, Clara dear. One more.
She stepped out of the vehicle and he loosened another button on his shirt. Reid squinted, honing in on the woman who slowly emerged from the beat-up metal, his scope tech zooming in. His view of her was unhindered except for the hair that breezed across her face.
He wanted to catch a glimpse of her irises. He told himself it wasn’t for their color, or that he cared, but to see if hers were tinged with sadness like the rest.
But her head was bowed low and she’d tugged a pair of sunglasses down her face. She lifted her head as her hair wisped around her cheeks and turned full circle before she faced the facility again, and as she made her way toward him, she kept looking behind her.
Reid trailed her progress. Her skin glistened with a sheen of sweat, and her pulse fluttered like a frightened sparrow.
What’re you looking for, Clara?It made him scan the grounds despite already knowing nothing was there.
Her face tilted up and looked directly at his window. He stiffened regardless of the fact that she couldn’t see him.
One more warning.
She picked up her pace and continued approaching the facility, the flops of her sandals easily heard through the cement and metal barrier between them. His ears pricked despite his carefully feigned indifference, an indifference and cold demeanor that had taken him years to cultivate. He’d frozen his instincts, burying them so deep into his coding it would take an exceptionally skilled hacker to find them.
