3
“You’re still here,” Reaper said in a deadly calm voice even though his insides rocked with an earthquake of memories. He still dreamed about Dr. Winters. Dreamed about her plunging a needle into his arm. About her expressionless face as she stared at him through the glass and recorded every seizure, every twitch, every scream of agony. She had also been the one to pronounce Dawson dead after his body had been unable to handle the rigorous dosing. Cause of death—brain hemorrhage.
Even now the pain of losing his teammate was a fresh bleeding wound, and it took all his control not to contract his finger and put a bullet in Dr. Winters’s forehead.
She arched one blonde brow, as if to ask where else she would be. “And so are you.”
Reaper advanced, stopping only when the tip of his weapon hovered inches from her nose. “So I am. You don’t seem surprised to see me.”
“I’m not,” she said.
The tiniest bit of frustration began to wind its way around him. She had always been so self-assured and completely unafraid of him or his team, even after witnessing the results of their changes. “I don’t have time for more of your mind games. What did you do with the rest of the serum?”
Her arched brow fell and her expression flatlined. “I didn’t do anything with it.”
“Then where is it?”
“It’s gone. Almost every single ounce was used up.”
He watched every minute expression on her face, listened to the slow steady heart rate pounding in her chest without the slightest acceleration. There wasn’t the least bit of worry in her tone, indicating with almost a hundred percent accuracy that she was telling the truth. “You’re lying.”
“We’ve come under new management in your absence,” she said coolly, completely unruffled by his threatening tone. “He’s quite a bit more demanding than the previous owner of this project.”
“The general,” Reaper said.
“He’s cut the incubation period in half and doubled the amount of test subjects, like doing more of the same thing will produce different results.” Dr. Winters narrowed her empty gray eyes in the first show of frustration—or any real emotion—Reaper had ever seen her express.
“You know my men need their doses, Doctor.”
“Yes, I do. I’ve been expecting one of you to show up. In fact, I saved a little unreported extra dosage for you.” Dr. Winters reached into the pocket of her lab coat and pulled out a flat blue pouch, an unmistakable row of needles strapped inside. “There’s enough here to tide over your entire team for one more month, so they don’t have to come in. They’ll have to come back to me if they want to live beyond that.”
Reaper stared at the flat pouch with shock and fury. She was producing their lifeblood, but only in a severely limited amount. There was no way in hell he was leading his team back here. He didn’t want them anywhere near the insidious grasp of Gen. Rainier.
Reaper grabbed for the dosages, but Dr. Winters kept them just out of his reach, brows arched, mouth pursed in a straight line. It was the look a reproving parent would give to a child, and one that Reaper had seen often enough in his imprisonment in this hellhole.
“You need to know that I never intended to harm any person on your team. I accepted this experiment under false pretenses. Like you, I thought it was a simple manipulation of steroids, not altering the human gene sequence. I am just as much of a victim as you were.”
Reaper let out a snarl and ripped the packet from her hand, pressing the end of his pistol into her head. “Youwere a victim? I didn’t see you falling down with seizures or nosebleeds. I didn’t hear you screaming in agony.”
Dr. Winters’s cool façade didn’t break. “I never wanted to cause you pain.”
Fury barely in check now, Reaper growled out, “You never wanted to, but you did. Every fucking day for an entire year. Excuse me, but I don’t feel sympathetic to your plight.”
“I didn’t expect that you would, but it needed to be said all the same. Regardless, that doesn’t change the fact that your men will have to return to me if they want to live. You can’t kill me. No matter how much you want to.”
Fuck. Her cool, reasonable tone set his teeth on edge. If this truly was the last of the serum, then she was right. He could not take her out. As far as he knew, she was the only one who knew how to produce it.
“How very scientific of you to use our lives as leverage for yours.”
“Not scientific, Reaper, just the will to survive.”
He twitched; his brain short-circuited. He couldn’t let her live, not after what she’d done to them. To so many others. She could’ve set them free in the very beginning, but he’d seen the sick fascination inside her every time she’d stood on the other side of that Plexiglas, staring at him like he was an insect.
There had to be another way. The long rows of fluorescent lighting flashed overhead, bright and dark and bright. He could feel his neurons triggering, sharp knives of pain slicing along his brain. Not now. He couldn’t lose it now.
Fingers trembling, he shoved the serum samples into his pants pocket and forced Dr. Winters back a step. And then another, steering her with his gun into the test room behind her.
“What are you doing?”
