"Not yet," he said finally. "I don't want my brothers to get a whiff of this. I will speak to him in the laboratory."
"He might be problematic," Rami said. "Even potentially dangerous. We know how the first immortals who wereexperimented on reacted, and they were unstable. He might be a liability to the program instead of being an asset."
Losham nodded. "There's another concern. If Dimitri can enhance himself, what's to stop him from enhancing other humans? The workers, the servants, the support staff. There are thousands of humans on this island. What if he could have them all enhanced to match immortal speed and strength? Then again, the drugs can't replicate everything. Increased speed and strength, perhaps even aggression, but not the rapid healing and near immortality. Those come from our genetics, not from any chemical compound. Enhanced humans would still be fragile. They'd still die from wounds that we heal from in no time."
"Still." Rami didn't look reassured. "We don't want an army of enhanced humans, even fragile ones. We need them to serve us, not fight us."
Losham turned to look out the window. "You raise a valid point. We can't allow the scientist to distribute the drugs to other humans. I'll speak to both of them. In the meantime, I want more scrutiny on the lab. Put someone we can trust in the monitoring room and have him report to us who comes and goes, and what supplies are delivered."
After Rami left, Losham returned to his drink and his thoughts. The situation was more complicated than he'd realized. The enhanced soldiers were supposed to be a tool—a weapon he could point at problems and have them disappear. But they were also becoming a liability, a point of contention that his brothers could use against him.
And now the scientist was apparently enhancing himself, which was another variable, another complication, and another potential threat to Losham's control.
28
MATTIE
Pain woke Mattie before anything else.
It wasn't the sharp, jagged agony from yesterday, the kind that made her vision swim, and her stomach heave. It was a deep throb that pulsed in time with her heartbeat, radiating from her right hand up through her wrist and into her forearm. The pills had worn off sometime during the night, and the pain had crept back in.
She kept her eyes closed and breathed through it, the way she'd learned to breathe through the cramping in her scarred legs on bad days.
Slow inhale, slow exhale. Don't fight it. Let it wash through you and recede.
It didn't recede, but it became manageable.
She opened her eyes.
Warm light slanted through the window, falling across the foot of her bed in a bright rectangle. Not the tentative glow of early morning but the full, unapologetic blaze of mid-morning sun.She'd slept for hours. Twelve, maybe more, given that she'd taken the pain pills before the sky had turned dark.
Dimitri was asleep on the bed next to hers, which was no longer pushed flush against the one she was on.
At some point during the night, he'd separated them, pulling his mattress about a foot away and leaving a gap between them like a narrow moat, probably afraid of jostling her in his sleep, or rolling over and bumping her injured hand.
It was such a Dimitri thing to do. Thoughtful, practical, and heart-achingly endearing.
Mattie watched him sleep. His face was relaxed, the worry lines smoothed away, his dark hair falling across his forehead. Even in the soft light, she could see the changes that the transition was working on him. The sharper angles of his jaw, the broader set of his shoulders, the subtle thickening of muscle that was not the result of training with weights but the immortal genes rewriting his body from the inside out.
He was becoming something extraordinary, and she was still just Mattie.
Stop.
She wasn't going to spiral into that dark place again.
She needed to focus on all that she had to be thankful for.
Months ago, she'd been kidnapped and dragged onto this island, but miraculously had been saved from having to endure the unimaginable in the brothel. Instead, she'd cleaned rooms and then served drinks in a bar full of immortal soldiers who'd looked at her like she was either furniture or prey, and she'd somehow survived that by pretending to be invisible.
Now she had Dimitri.
She had love. It was real, all-consuming, and terrifying. It was the kind of love that she'd never expected to find anywhere, let alone in a place like this. Love that made her feel alive in a way she hadn't felt since before the fire that had destroyed her legs and her childhood in one terrible night.
But it was a love under siege. Surrounded by enemies, trapped on an island they couldn't leave, with Dimitri's secret growing harder to hide by the day.
Mattie tried to flex the fingers of her right hand just to test if they were at all functional, but they didn't respond. The splints held them rigid beneath the bandage, but the effort sent a fresh bolt of pain shooting up her arm, making her suck air through her teeth.
That was stupid.Don't do it again.
