“Beg me,” Gideon whispered to the research assistant. “Shed tears, Scott, and plead for mercy from the monster you helped to create.”
The horror intensified in the man’s eyes as his lips trembled with the knowledge of what was coming. His gaze centered on the scalpel and Gideon couldn’t help but smile.
“Shall I tell you what it feels like?” he asked, lowering his voice until it sounded gentle, reassuring. It was nothing less than horrifying to his victim.
Because he remembered. Sweet God, he remembered the agony, every day, every second of his life.
His abdomen tightened with the scalding sensations of the scalpel slicing into it as the remembrance tore through his senses.
He snarled in fury, causing Connelly to cry out in horror. His eyes widened, the certainty of death flashing in his gaze.
“Please, Gideon . . .” Scott choked on his own tears, gagging for a second as he fought for breath. “Please don’t do this. Just kill me. Just kill me now.”
Gideon knew what Scott felt in that moment. The way the stomach clenched and spasmed, recoiling in terror as he fought not to vomit. The struggle not to beg, because begging didn’t help.
Yet the terror had a mind of its own after a certain point, and the words spilled from the lips anyway.
“It feels like hell has descended to your guts,” Gideon told him with relish. “The agony begins with the first cut, and you believe it can get no worse.” He leaned close, reaching out with the scalpel to draw the tip along the graying curls that covered his victim’s chest. “But it can get worse, Scott. So much worse. And when the cold air meets the warmth of your insides, then you’ll swear a hundred scalpels are biting into your organs, tearing them apart with jagged steel and ripping your mind out along with it.”
“Please, Gideon!” Scott screamed hoarsely, the tears beginning to fall, the fear rising inside him with an acrid scent Gideon inhaled with heady satisfaction.
That scent was becoming addictive. Like a drug he couldn’t resist. Now he knew, he knew why Coyotes thirsted for blood. For its coppery sweet scent and the feel of it gliding like wet silk over the hands.
“Please,” Gideon repeated the plea. “Please, Scott. Scream for me in mindless pain. Please feel what I felt. Please beg as I begged. God, please, let me watch you die as you watched me each time you stopped my heart.”
Then Gideon chuckled and glanced down at the stream of wetness flowing from the man’s flaccid cock.
Scott was pissing himself.
The poor little coward.
It was something Gideon hadn’t done during the experiments until the chill of the air actually hit his guts. Until the pain had been worse than hell on earth, and his body had fought to die amid it.
And there was nothing he wanted more than to slice into the monster at that moment and allow him to feel that same agony. To watch his blood seep from his flesh as it parted. To see it run in bloodred streams along his chest and abdomen to pool into the creamy carpet beneath him.
But first, first, he needed information. He needed information more than he needed to smell his victim’s death.
At least, for the moment.
He could wait to kill him. He could wait until Scott gave the truths Gideon knew he held. The truths the man had so far hidden from his friends, coworkers and priest. The truth of the location of the one person Scott had shown any gentleness to in those labs. But he wouldn’t be able to wait for long.
“Unlike you and your scientist masters, I can be merciful. I don’t want to be, but I can be. If you cooperate.”
Scott’s lips quivered as he sobbed, snot dripping from his nose and running along the side of his cheek.
“Anything, Gideon,” he begged desperately. “Anything you want. I swear it.”
Gideon looked to the safe he had found earlier. Tucked into the wall across the room, and hidden, not very imaginatively, behind a framed print of Scott, his wife and two sons.
His sons didn’t look as pathetic and weak as Scott. Surprisingly, they more resembled their mother with her strong Nordic features and direct blue eyes.
How had Scott Connelly managed to find a wife of such strength when he was such a weak, pitiful excuse of a male? How had he bred sons whose scent was mixed with the sweat of hard work and whose palms were calloused with it? Men whose reputations for honesty and a hard day’s work were so well known in their small community that parents often held those sons up as examples to their own children?
Perhaps they weren’t his sons, Gideon mused before turning his attention back to Scott. Unfortunately, Gideon couldn’t be certain. Familial lines weren’t scents to which he was particularly sensitive. His primal strengths ran to other areas.
“The combination to the safe,” Gideon demanded, keeping his voice low. “I want it.”
The combination spilled from Scott’s lips as his teeth chattered in a cold Gideon had been created to ignore.
When he finished, Gideon nodded then smiled again. He knew the image he presented.
With the slash of the Bengal’s strip across his face, the sharp strength of his incisors and the icy mercilessness of his cold pale green eyes he appeared every bit the animal he had been created to be. That image and the chill of ice in his eyes assured the researcher that Gideon had every intention of causing him to suffer however possible.
Strangely, the primal stripe across his face was new to him. It hadn’t appeared until the first vivisection and transfusion of viral blood two years before. It had only grown darker with each horrific experiment he was forced to endure. With each transfusion of the only blood they had found that his system would accept after the feral fever had overtaken him twelve years before.
Her blood.
Only her blood was compatible. Only her blood could save his life and with each transfusion the insanity seemed to take a tighter grip on him.
Rising to his feet, Gideon moved to the safe, followed the directions and hummed in satisfaction as the steel door swung open.
Cash, jewels, bonds and several false identifications filled the interior, along with a laser-powered side arm.
It was the typical items anyone who worked with the Genetics Council kept on hand since the revelation of the Breeds and the horrific experimentations the Genetics Council had practiced.
No one who worked with the monsters responsible for the creation of the Breeds wanted anyone to learn they were aligned with them. At the moment, sentiment was with the Breeds, not with the Council.
Once such individuals were identified, it wasn’t unheard of for Breeds to descend upon them with the full fury of years of torture, blood and death. Very discreetly, of course.
“Very good, Scott,” Gideon murmured approvingly as he filled a bag with the very profitable find.
It was his best haul. Scott Connelly had been a bit more frugal than some with the proceeds he’d been given for his participating in the Breed research at Brandenmore Research.
Too bad. He was losing this little stash of it tonight. But then, dead men had no need for wealth, and if Gideon’s research was correct, then the wife’s family would protect her and her children from destitution.
Dropping the bag to a chair next to his victim, Gideon crouched down beside him once more and picked the scalpel back up.
“You promised,” Scott suddenly sobbed. “You promised not to hurt me.”
“No, I said I would be merciful,” Gideon reminded him patiently. “But we’re not finished yet. There are a few other things I need before I can be on my way.”
Scott would die, of that there was no doubt. There was no way Gideon’s conscience would allow him to let the bastard live, to continue on with his life unpunished for the crimes he had committed against every law nature possessed.
“Honor Christine Roberts,” he said the name slowly, clearly, watching Scott’s eyes the entire time. “How can I find her?”
Scott had been her main caretaker while she had been at the research center. He ha
d recorded the effects of the serum pumped into her. He had watched over her after her release to her father, a United States Army general aligned with the Council, and it had been Scott who had led the search for her after she had run away twelve years before.
She hadn’t been his favorite, but she had been his most important subject. The only one he’d known the Council would never risk killing.
Scott’s gaze flickered and the scent of fear thickened. There was more than fear there, though. Strangely, there was also the scent of—affection? Scott Connelly had felt something for somebody? Something he had evidently told no one else if the scent was anything to go by. But even more, he knew something. Gideon was certain of that now.
Gideon grinned at it. “What do you know, Scott? Tell me, my friend, so I can go away as silently as I arrived.”
Gideon ran the scalpel along the other man’s stomach, watching the thin trail of blood as it oozed from the deep scratch and heralded a pained cry from his victim. “Don’t bother lying to me. I can smell it. And it would just piss me off worse to have to ask you again.”
He let the tip of the scalpel press deeper into the vulnerable, soft flesh of the man’s pelvis. A bead of blood welled then slowly eased down along the side his inner thigh.
“No one knows where she is,” Scott blubbered pathetically, his voice high, terrified. “All the Coyotes working with Brandenmore could find out was that she may have been in contact with one of the other two children who were in the labs with her, just before she ran away.”
Gideon almost cursed. Fuck, he hadn’t expected that. Hadn’t heard the rumors that the Council or Brandenmore had suspected the other two were alive. He had suspected Scott knew, but Scott was the only one, and he hadn’t believed Scott would ever reveal that knowledge to any other living soul.
“The other two were terminated.” Gideon stated the story his other victims had related to him. The story they had believed.
Gideon let himself appear a little less threatening by pretending he was ignorant of their survival—it would encourage the former researcher to talk. If Scott thought it would save his pitiful little life, he would turn over his own family, let alone one little research project—as long as it wasn’t his favorite. As long as it wasn’t the only creature on the face of the earth for whom Scott Connelly seemed to have any warmth. But, there was nothing as important to Scott as his own life.
“No, no. They weren’t.” Scott sobbed. “They were supposed to be.” His voice hitched violently with fear. “They were being transported to the facility where they would have been. Then the Bengal kid managed to get free of his chains and attack the driver and the soldier transporting them. The van wrecked and the two kids escaped. No one knew where they went but they found evidence that there was someone else there.”
There was. Gideon had been there. But no one should have known that. Even after he had been recaptured weeks later, far from the area, weak and all but dead, they had never thought to question him about them. And Gideon had never used the information. Even when it would have eased the pain they inflicted, at least once.
Deception still edged Scott’s voice though. There was just a hint of it, and Gideon knew the researcher was hiding more.
Gideon allowed the scalpel to scrape along Scott’s hip bone, peeling the skin from raw flesh as he screamed in pain.
“What do you know, Scott?” Gideon lowered his voice, the tone a warning, dangerous rasp.
Scott was sobbing. Gideon knew how it felt to have the thin layer of skin peeled back from living flesh to feel the agonizing caress of cold air meeting it.
“It can hurt more,” he warned the research assistant. “Much, much more. I want everything Scott. Tell me everything you know.”
His lips trembled a second before he wailed in pain and fear. And fury. Gideon knew that inner, agonizing fury when the will breaks and the instinct to survive kicks in. “They’re with an old Indian. I didn’t know his name or who he was and I fucking didn’t care. He was looking for a girl kidnapped decades ago by the Council. Everyone knew he was searching for her. All I had was a contact e-mail. He was rabid about his identity. I e-mailed him their location and the approximate time they’d be there. But Brandenmore’s men found someone who saw this old Indian bring them into a café three days after their escape. They ate, then headed west. They were in Missouri. The waitress remembered them clearly despite all the years because the little girl seemed ill, and the boy had a broken arm.”
Headed west. And yes, the girl had been ill. With whatever illness she had infected Gideon with as well. That still infected him.
“And a team has been sent out?” Gideon asked.
“No. No.” Scott swallowed tightly. “The team is still in Missouri trying to identify the Indian. It’s been too many years. They have to find the Indian to find the kids now, because they’re adults. Because they had no idea what they would look like now.” He licked his lips nervously, hopefully. “I destroyed all the pictures of them. All the files because they were supposed to be terminated.”
Only Gideon had been recaptured. Because they had left him. Left him in the cold and the emptiness of the night after infecting him with her illness. After saving him when death had been rocking him in her gentle embrace.
“You were supposed to have escaped.” Scott sobbed again. “I gave you the means to do it. I helped you too.” Rage filled his eyes. “She made me.” Tears were pouring from his eyes, snot running in streams. “How else could you have slipped out so easily, Gideon, after so many years of failures? You and the boy. That was all she cared about, you that damned boy.
Gideon hadn’t known that.
The boy wasn’t exactly a boy, if Gideon remembered correctly. He would be in his midthirties. Like Gideon, he’d endured the research for years before the girls were added. The one who had been slated for termination had been a submissive little thing if Gideon remembered correctly, and he was certain he did.
Dark hair and big dark eyes. She had only been fourteen at the time of the escape, just as the Roberts girl had been. It was only weeks after the escape of the other two that she had run away from her home.
Honor Roberts had simply disappeared after leaving a short letter to her mother. That letter, as Gideon had read himself, was a good-bye, and the hope that she would understand. Although the mother had seemed as confused as anyone else that the girl had left.
Gideon wasn’t confused.
Honor Roberts had been too intelligent, even in the labs. And she had always seemed to know, and to hear, more than was good for her well-being.
He was betting his own life on the hunch that she had learned, or suspected, that the research scientists were trying to convince General Roberts to allow them to do more testing on her.
And he was betting, once again, his life that the other two had contacted her. They had been close in the labs, so there was no way in hell they had completely lost contact after the other two were free.
He only knew he had to find the other girl. The one with those big dark eyes and vulnerable expressions. The one he had held despite the punishment to come, after a particularly brutal experimental session with the drugs she was being pumped full of.
“Very good.” Gideon sighed at the useless memories. “What else did Wallace tell you?”
He had yet to catch up with Wallace, but he was on Gideon’s list. His time would come.
“They had a list,” Scott wheezed. “A list of names, of Indians who were known to be in the area at the time but didn’t live there. But I know that the person they’re looking for wasn’t on that list. When I heard it was an Indian, I knew who it was and I didn’t tell them. I figured it out over the years and I made certain his name never showed up.”