Page 56 of The Enforcers: KANE

Kane set his jaw. He was pretty sure “we” didn’t refer to the two of them. “And by ‘we’ you mean…”

Rachelle bit her lips.

“Don’t lie to me,” Kane said. His hands flexed, and his claws came out and retracted. Wolf’s growl had become a constant snarl. “If you’re working for those filthy assholes who are experimenting on shifters…”

“No!” she said. She looked away. “I mean, I don’t think so.”

“And what the fuck does that mean?” he snarled.

“Sometimes I work for an organization headed up by the scientists that broke away from Gen-X,” she said. “They’re also doing shifter research, but not genetic manipulation. It’s more studying the abilities of the different species, trying to see if they can enhance their natural abilities by artificial means.”

“Drugs,” Kane said. He shook his head, his stomach burning with nausea. “Do they experiment on unwilling subjects?” he asked.

She was silent.

“Damn it, Rachelle!”

“I don’t know!” she said. “For a long time I thought they didn’t. That they were better than the others. They saved me.”

She sighed. “After I left you, I survived on my own for a while,” she said. “But not very well. Part of my enhancement is that I can feel the emotions of everyone around me. They seep into me.” She gave him a sideways glance. “Which doesn’t sound so bad, until you remember how much evil and misery is out there on the streets.”

She took a deep breath. “I could always do it,” she said. “But when I hit puberty, not long after you left, it was so much worse. I couldn’t handle it. I started to go crazy.”

She huffed a laugh. “Crazy gen-altered shifter, right?”

Despite himself, guilt attacked him. “And I wasn’t there for you.”

She shook her head. “I ended up in a mental hospital,” she said. “Luckily my shifting was inhibited, so I didn’t give myself away. And when I was locked up, I found out…that the emotions can go the other way.”

Kane furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?”

“I can heal people,” she said. “Sometimes. If they have certain kinds of problems with their brain or their emotions, sometimes I can heal them.”

Kane huffed out a breath. That sounded more like the Rachelle he knew, doing good wherever she was. He hoped she wasn’t lying. “So you did that in the mental institution?”

She nodded. “The Agency was monitoring medical reports all over the country. They heard about me and got me out.”

She added, “Some of them are okay—I know my handler doesn’t like everything they’re doing. But they keep the other side in check, when they can. Most of what they’re doing is creating cures to offset what Gen-X is inventing.”

Great. A gen-alt Cold War. And she put herself right in the middle.

“So you think you owe them?” he asked.

“They owned me,” she said. “They knew my secret. It took me years to gather enough leverage to get out from under.”

And she still thought they were the good guys? Kane shook his head.

“But you didn’t.”

“I did for a while,” she said. “But they still come to me with jobs that need my special expertise.”

Kane gazed at her out of hooded eyes. “‘No’ is a good word,” he said. “Especially useful when douchebags want you to do something morally questionable.”

“Says the guy who was a minion to Selina.”

Kane froze, feeling like she’d stabbed him. “That was a low blow,” he said.

She dropped her eyes. “Sorry.”