Middlemist Red saw to it that Camellia hadn’t put out a fragrance to give her away when she went into phantom mode. Camellia didn’t know why Red hadn’t protected Jonas from her in the same way. He had also been in phantom mode. She had been unable to see him, but she’d caught the faint scent of those trees, one for certain not in her garden.
“The moment I actually saw you, my first thought was, ‘She’s the one you’ve been waiting for. The one you didn’t think existed.’ I don’t know why that thought slipped into my mind, but it did. There were no pheromones involved, and it wasn’t just the genetic pairing. I’d been in your garden and saw and felt the security network you set up, and I was in awe of your capabilities.” He pushed his fingers through his hair. “You didn’t have a team around you. You’d done it yourself. I knew you had. You were a force to be reckoned with.”
There was open admiration in his voice. He couldn’t fake that. A knot the size of her fist formed in her stomach, low and aching, responding to the blatant honesty in him. The way he made himself vulnerable. He might be a dominant male with aggressive, violent tendencies when it came to battle, but there was also something intrinsically honest, even noble about him. He possessed a core of decency and honor that all of Whitney’s scheming and experiments hadn’t tarnished. She couldn’t help but react to that in him.
“Thank you, Jonas.” She didn’t know what else to say. The response seemed inadequate since he was laying himself out there, and she had retreated so far and wasn’t willing to inch back.
“You were explaining how the mycelium network works. I think I understand now. All along, I’ve had that advantage and I didn’t even know it. How are you able to tap into it whenever you want to?”
Again, he deliberately took the spotlight off the personal. He had done that for her more than once, and Camellia was grateful.
She pushed her hair behind her shoulder, trying not to look too closely at Jonas’s golden, very focused eyes. “I’d read everything I could about mycelium prior to discovering I was connected to it. Fortunately, I’m good at retaining what I read. So once I realized what was happening, I would visualize this huge system, like theInternet but connected to my own body, and I’d send messages along my pathways to it, trying to find how and where we were actually connected. I knew there had to be a way to strengthen the link between us. I’d already made a point of practicing every skill I had, so I just began to practice strengthening that one as well.”
Jonas nodded, his gaze never leaving her face. “That’s the kind of thing I do. Sometimes, though, strengthening particular skills turns out to be a mistake. More than once, I’ve honed a particular talent only to realize it amplifies a need for violence, which is the last thing I want.”
Camellia understood. He wasn’t certain what having the connection to the mycelium would do to him. She knew why he would be wary of any new talent that cropped up. She had studied Whitney and his cruelties up close.
“Are you going to tell me the real reason you didn’t go down to either of the compounds and let the women know you were up here, Camellia?” Jonas asked softly. “Especially Marigold. You had to know she was there once you stumbled on the homes. She was your friend. You don’t have to tell me, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense that you didn’t want anything to do with the teams. You could have visited with the women and then walked away. No one could have held you if you didn’t want to be held. You’re too good at what you do not to have studied both places for their security. You didn’t just have a look and then make a run for it. That’s not your personality at all.” He looked around the garden. “You plan out every move. Your backup plan has backup plans.”
Jonas had slipped that question in there when she was feeling relaxed with him. Now the tension coiled in her like a tight spring. She moistened her lips. He was too much like her, even though she’d cut herself off from him. He thought the way she did. What difference did it make if he said something to the others? She didn’t think he would. Marigold wasn’t married to a member of histeam. Even if she had been, Jonas struck her as a man who kept things to himself unless he thought he needed to provide details for security.
Camellia sighed, stood up and half turned away from him, pacing across the porch toward the very edge so her face was nearly completely hidden from him. “It was a long time ago, or it seems like it now. We planned our escape as best we could, but we knew the chances of getting free of Whitney’s compound were slim. He’d put us in his breeding program, and we were fighting off his chosen supersoldiers, the ones he thought had great genetics. We all wanted out of there. Whitney had gone to another base, and one of our teams of soldiers was assigned to protect Senator Freeman and his wife, Violet, from a possible assassination attempt.”
She was well aware Jonas had to know about the incident. The GhostWalkers had been involved. “Marigold was friends with all the soldiers. She’d been part of their command at one time. She talked them into letting her go with them. Her goal was to talk with Violet and Senator Freeman about what was going on at the laboratory. We hoped the senator would come and put a stop to it. We didn’t realize Violet was willing to sell us down the river for her own ambitions. She was raised with us, so we thought she was one of us.”
“So,” Jonas said, “a huge break in trust.”
Camellia nodded her head slowly. “We were in dire straits. Rose was already pregnant. We had to get free. Some of the younger ones were talking about suicide. I have to admit, I was going to fight until one of them killed me. I was never going to allow Whitney to force a man on me and then take my child from me. Marigold felt the same way, so we started looking for ways to get all the women out at the same time. If Marigold could get Freeman to come to the laboratory and help us, that was one way; otherwise, we would have to overpower the guards and make a break for it. That would be risky. Our best bet was Mari.”
Camellia turned to face Jonas again, pushing back against the support column, her fingers biting into the wood. Jonas listened intently, those golden eyes never leaving her face, making her feel as if everything she said was important to him—making her feel as ifshewas important to him.
“It was a huge risk for Marigold to go with the soldiers on their mission to protect Senator Freeman and Violet, but she went. There was what they thought was an assassination attempt. Mari was shot and taken prisoner. Apparently, another GhostWalker team had also been assigned to protect the senator. But it was a setup. Freeman was supposed to die. In any case, Mari was taken prisoner by Team Two, Norton’s team. She fell in love with Ken Norton. Whitney’s team, of course, was frantic to get her back. She wasn’t supposed to have been out of the laboratory. The team found her, but apparently that was because the GhostWalker team allowed them to find her. She was determined to get back to us. Whitney always threatened that if one of us escaped, he would kill one of those left behind.”
Just cracking that door open elevated Camellia’s heart rate. The blood began to pound through her veins. She suddenly felt as if she couldn’t breathe. She wasn’t a grown woman, totally confident in her ability to defend herself. She was back to being that young girl, just finding herself, just becoming a woman, just learning about her skills and talents. She was filled with fire and defiance against a dictator who continually tore the girls down and used them cruelly.
Middlemist Red dipped its branches, and the blossoms smoothed over her face and along her arms to soothe her. Red had been her only friend, and the touch on her skin reminded her that it had been far too long since she’d felt the touch of another human. That want—or maybe need—was growing in her, and she had to push it down ruthlessly. Dredging up her past relationships would help, would be a reminder that friendships were illusions. The only person she could count on was herself.
She didn’t want those eyes of Jonas’s to look so closely into her. She felt exposed now, but she’d gone this far. Cracked the door open and let her secrets start spilling out.
“You know Whitney through his experiments, but we lived through them and his sadistic cruelties every day of our lives. He gave us pets to love and care for and then had them ripped to shreds in front of us as a lesson. They were all killed because we failed to teach them survival skills in a fighting ring. We didn’t even know something like that existed.”
Camellia pressed her fingers to her lips and found she was trembling. She couldn’t look at Jonas anymore. “There were a couple of nurses who stayed with us throughout all the experiments and accompanied us to Whitney’s various bases and laboratories. One of them, Beverly, was with us as long as I can remember. I loved her. We all did. It wasn’t as if she was overly affectionate, but she was always there for us, no matter how much Whitney frowned at her when she picked us up off the floor when we were toddlers or instructed us when we needed to know things about growing up as females. He intimidated every caretaker he ever had for us until they quit, or he fired them because they were too nice to us. In addition to Beverly, the only other long-term nurses were Shirley and Rosa. Rosa mostly cared exclusively for Lily, although she looked after all of us when she could.”
“Why would one nurse be assigned exclusively to one child?” Jonas asked.
“Lily received special treatment. Eventually, Whitney took her away from us, and Rosa went with her. The rest of us had always been put into groups. Each group was assigned a nurse. Beverly was the nurse assigned to my group, and she ended up staying throughout our childhood and teenage years when so many of the others left.”
Camellia could hear herself screaming not to give too muchaway. Jonas was too connected to her through the enhancements Whitney had given the two of them—and he was intelligent. She had no doubt he observed everything, from body language to every psychic emotional leak she gave off. She suspected that very little ever escaped him, and he was specifically tuned to her.
She desperately needed someone to talk to. To bounce her ideas off of. At the same time, she didn’t want to know the answers. She couldn’t shred that last piece of her heart. She just couldn’t take it. She wanted to turn away from him, but she could feel his gaze on her, compelling her to continue. She needed to talk aloud. To say something to him. To give some explanation.
“Whitney did so many horrible things. I can’t even begin to explain just how bad he could get. He tortured Flame over and over, making her sick, uncaring of whether she lived or died, as long as he could record her reactions.” She was repeating herself. She couldn’t stop and Jonas didn’t interrupt her. He just let her babble on. “We went on countless missions, but if one of us didn’t come back, one of the other girls was punished. Later, as we got older, he infected us with a virus, and we needed the antidote in order to survive, so we had to return. If one of us escaped, he said he would kill one of the remaining girls.”
Her throat closed. Her lungs seized. She couldn’t breathe. It took discipline to force air through her body. It was really difficult not to look at him. She felt his reaction. Middlemist Red absorbed his emotions. Breathing in and out, accumulating his rage and letting it go into the soothing peace of the garden. That was Red, always finding a way to make things right when their world was filled with violence and rage.
She was sweating, little beads on her forehead. “I’m jumping around in my history here. Going back to when I was younger, before all of us banded together to try to get out all at once. I planned my escape. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I knew itcouldn’t be while I was on a mission because I couldn’t go with a virus in me. I was so careful. I studied the guards. He changed them often, and if we were on a regular military base, he made sure all the assigned guards were kept away from us. When I decided to make my move, we were on private property in an underground laboratory. He’d held us there for a while. We were brought to the surface to exercise and whenever we were needed to plan for missions. I’m extremely good at holding information in my mind, so I knew my way around the lab’s maze of tunnels.”
She doubted if she was giving him too much information about herself. He most likely had the same gifts she did. Whitney had enhanced him with fungi and Middlemist Red. He knew now about the mycelium, but not Red. Red’s gifts would have allowed him to cope with the terrible amount of aggressive genetic coding Whitney had hardwired into Jonas. Without that, Jonas would probably already be dead or, worse, have gone insane.
