“Try harder.”
“I don’t know him.”
“What about Janet Montihan?”
“Who?” Hector asked as a completely different burst of emotion slammed into him. Warmth flushed through his body, his muscles, his groin, and he remembered why he knew that flowery scent wafting from Nightheart. It belonged toher. Hector inhaled it again, and this time, he let it remain in his systems. He clenched his hands and unraveled them each time her name replayed in his skull.Janet. Janet…
Janet.
Imagines of long, flaxen hair that was always partially tangled emerged next. He could recall the silken feel of it sliding through his fingers. It felt like water.Water.An endless ocean on a faraway planet, and eyes as blue as the sea. Sunkissed skin that made his mouth water and his heart pound.
Hector jerked against the bands holding him captive as a deep-seated need overcame him.I know her.
God,doI know her.
He blinked, hard. “Janet. How?”
“Hmm…” Nightheart cocked his head. “So you recall her but not Zeph?”
“Who is she?” A need built inside him to find this Janet and be near her, to consume her, and to stay and relish the high his body had just experienced by the mere thought of her. If just a memory could affect him so much—making his shaft rigid in want, even in front of another man who held him in bonds—being in her presence must be ecstasy.
Nightheart studied his reaction before he turned back to his console in the corner. “Someone who’s caused a lot of problems for me.”
“Is she the reason why I’m here?” Hector had to know. He needed more. His body demanded it.
“Why are all my Retrievers finding mates suddenly?” Nightheart sighed. “You’re the reason why you’re here.”
Mate?Hector shook his head and realized it, too, was attached to the contraption Nightheart had bound him to.I’m plugged in?What the fuck?“Let me go. I need to find her.”
“We were once allies, Hector,” Nightheart said, ignoring his demand, typing something on a screen he couldn’t see. “We once fought together, worked together, killed together. But I should’ve known, even back then, that chameleons are, well, they become things they’re not. They blend in, take on new personas, change their looks, even their personalities. They can hide in plain sight. It’s a defense mechanism. It’s what makes you so unpredictable.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because of what I’m about to do.”
He didn’t have a chance to ask before his body seized. His head was thrown back as a powerful electrical current zapped him straight to the very heart of his cybernetic being, deep within the recesses of his head, and the endless, countless hours of knowledge and memories he had stored there. His muscles bulged and fought against his restraints, but they held tight. Hector tried to stop the overwhelming charge flooding his wires when everything suddenly came back.
First, he remembered his death at Mr. Heartface’s hands, and then he was back in the asteroid field with…
Zeph.
“He’s not real,” Hector snapped, his frame vibrating, his eyes lighting up the room. More memories crashed into him, all of themwrong.
Nightheart was standing in front of him just as the last of the pieces fell into place.
“There was very little of you left to recover when I found you after the attack in the field. You were nothing but expensive pieces of metal and strings of data. I had to improvise to keep you alive. With my knowledge and the resources at my disposal here at the EPED, I found a replacement body and built you anew.”
Hector’s voice darkened. “What did you do to me?”
“I rebuilt you with the parts of a cybernetic being that malfunctioned after his creation.”
“You put my conscience into a fucking corpse?”
“I put your head, and what was left of your mind on a perfectly intact body.”
“Why?” He hissed. “Why didn’t you just kill me?”
“I won’t kill my own kind, despite what you may think of me. If I killed every ill being I come across, everything in this universe and the next would be dead. Killing Zeph was merely curing you.”
