“Only if you let him,” Jen said softly, placing a hand of comfort on his biceps. “And you don’t strike me as a man in a hurry to die.”
“No, not particularly. But I’m not so certain I want to live forever either.”
Jena sighed. “He may be insane, but I have to admit, Paulson is a goddamn genius. In the lab all I was ever able to do was suspend cellular life for three weeks maximum. How he managed to do it infinitely I’m not sure I’ll ever know. I’m not certain even he knows. And I doubt I’ll be able to figure that out in the course of my regular lifetime. But what I can do is help you figure out a way to get Paulson. I think we both know how to coax him out of hiding. We use me as bait.”
Kin was nodding, ready to agree, but something inside of him began to balk at the idea with about as much power as he felt when he went into a rage or flung himself into his beastly passions.
No! We will not put our mate in danger!
We. Our. Christ, he had truly gone crazy if he was referring to himself in plurals. It seemed the further into this he went, the more distinctive the two halves of himself became. And from one minute to the next his other half was constantly shifting focus and desire. Not fifteen minutes ago he’d been using her without regard for her fragility or her humanity. Now, suddenly, he was protective of her? It didn’t make sense. It never seemed to make any sense.
“That’s not the smartest idea you’ve ever had, Doctor,” he said grimly. “You forget what you are dealing with here. Creatures that are more animal than human. And they aren’t afraid of dying, because, unlike you, they can’t die.”
“You’re assuming Paulson has changed himself into a Morphate.”
“His goal might have just been an extension of natural life, but once he saw he’d made us indestructible . . . hell yeah. Paulson already thought he was a god. He would only assume immortality was his due.”
Jena watched him as he frowned and wondered if he realized he was petting soft, circular patterns onto her bare midriff. It was the first act of true affection she’d ever seen from him. Strange that he should be doing it right then. Stranger that he should be showing her any affection at all. She tried not to read anything into it, but it was difficult because it felt so outlandishly good. His fingertips were wide and warm, smooth and hard. His nails were longer than what she might find on the average man. Probably because of the way his claws retracted and extended. But honestly, right now she couldn’t tell a damn bit of difference between him and a human male. Not at first blush, anyway. She imagined he was very much like he had been before he had been changed. Perhaps a bit more muscular or defined. She didn’t have the original to compare him to, so she couldn’t speak with any assuredness.
“I doubt it’s as much a matter of arrogance with Paulson as it is the traits of a psychopath or a sociopath. He knows his own brilliance, and he considers himself far and away above the rules of society. You might see that as godlike. He is more likely to see his brilliance as a means to the end. The end game has more value, in his mind, than the methods he has to take to get there.”
“Like war,” Kin said grimly. “As long as we win, what’s a few lives in the process?”
“Exactly.” Jen smiled at him, her head tilting as her eyes brightened a little. “Kincaid Gregory, you are far better at higher reasoning than you would have others believe.”
“Don’t let my good moments fool you,” he said wryly. “In some ways, I’m not so different from Paulson. Why else would I even be considering putting your life on the line?”
“Well . . .” Jen touched the tips of her fingers to the backs of his, stopping their play against her skin for a moment. “Whereas Paulson is into this for the single-minded achievement of his own science, you are looking at a different picture. You are trying to find a way to do damage control. The way any cop would. The perp is out in the world and wreaking havoc and must be stopped. Sometimes that means putting a confidential informant at risk. It’s done all the time.”
“Except a CI is usually a criminal themselves looking to cut a deal. It’s a matter of using a smaller fish in hopes of catching a bigger, more important one.”
Kin watched her look off to the side and a harsh protest kicked through his brain.
“You are not a criminal, Jenesis,” he bit out.
“Since when do you actually believe that?” she countered sharply. “You’ve held me responsible from the first moment I walked in your doors. No doubt for much longer than that.”
He opened his mouth to argue but couldn’t figure out what to say. If he contradicted her he would be admitting that he’d known she was innocent the entire time he’d been treating her like utter shit. What did that make him, exactly? Did it make him even worse that he wasn’t willing to own up to his own mistakes and flaws?
Was he able to blame that on being forced into becoming a Morphate? Or had he always been that way? Maybe his brother had better control over his Morphate self because Nick had always been a better man overall.
Not at all prepared for such soul searching, Kin backed away from her and flung himself off the bed and onto his feet. He straightened his jeans, zipping himself up and running an agitated hand back through his bristling hair.
Christ, Kincaid, when did you become such a douchebag? He had to ask himself that because he could see by her increasingly resolute expression that she was taking the weight for things that were honestly not her responsibility. He hadn’t been sure when he’d first hired her, but after hours and hours spent watching her work through those damn security cameras and nightly reports of her progress when she’d sounded too tired to even be on her feet, he’d come to understand she was guilty of nothing more than being too dedicated to her science. What she was doing she did in a methodical manner and with ethics firmly in mind. At least she did now. If she had been in need of a readjustment in values, she’d certainly found it over the past seven years.
“Let me think about this,” he said a little numbly. Somehow thinking didn’t come so clearly anymore. For the past seven years he’d had her perfectly pegged, had thought of nothing else but the moment when he would have her under his control, doing his bidding . . . paying his price. Now everything was so damn complicated. “I’m going to get you something to eat. You need more nutrition than a half-eaten box of Twinkies is going to provide.”
She was hungry and weak, so she didn’t argue the point. Neither did she fight with him about his avoidance of the topic at hand. She wasn’t exactly capable of heading out into the Dark City looking for all-night takeout. She wasn’t even sure if she could get past the Watch at this hour. And frankly, it was too much of a challenge for her exhausted brain and body to cope with.
She heard the door to her apartment shut, and for a long minute she rested with her eyes closed.
They suddenly snapped open and her heart began to race. Fighting nausea and weakness, she struggled out of bed and onto her feet. She lurched into the bedroom doorway and then from one wall to another until she had staggered weakly into the kitchen. She started jerking open cabinet doors, the empty shelves glaring back at her until she pulled open the pathetically empty pantry.
Empty except for a half-full box of Twinkies.
“Son of a bitch,” she said.
She turned around, ignoring the sway and list of the countertops, her keen eyes picking apart the bare, undecorated walls. Except for the delicate scrollwork clock that hung at the center of the trim running atop her cabinets.
“No, that’s too awkward an angle,” she muttered as she turned and began to map the kitchen out in her head in a series of ideal angles. After a moment she picked the angle most likely to give her a clear shot into the pantry, the angle she knew had been seen. With just a turn of her head she found herself staring straight into the microwave clock, the two dots separating hours from minutes blinking in half-second increments. She moved closer and looked past that distraction. Her movement made the lens behind the numbers autofocus.
“Son of a bitch!”
Every night. Every night that she’d been standing here in her kitchen calling him with her updates, doodling absently on her whiteboard, he’d been watching her! Making a bagel naked . . . singing the latest Aubrey song in her fucking panties!
And since she knew Kincaid Gregory wasn’t the type to do things halfway, she knew there would be cameras in all of the rooms of her home.
Lurching over to the butcher block, she grabbed for the biggest knife it held. Then she slid down to the floor and rested there, conserving her unreliable strength, and waited for Kin to return.
6
Kincaid reentered Jen’s condo about fifteen minutes later, having gathered a few groceries from his own home on the fifth floor, the bag full of them dangling from unconcerned fingertips as he glanced up and down the hall before shutting the door.
There was no explaining the sensation that crept across the back of his skull, warning him that danger was approaching him. He turned just fast enough to open his chest to what would have otherwise been a back stab.
She wasn’t very strong at that moment, and his muscles, ribs, and sternum had been pretty impressive even before his transformation into a Morphate. That was why the knife never made it past the first two inches. It certainly wasn’t for lack of fury or determination on her part. Instinct had him dropping the groceries and grabbing her by the throat, kicking her feet out from under her and following her all the way down to the floor as her back hit the tile. It also made him snarl viciously into her face as he reached to pull the knife out of his chest. Blood struck her face, splattering over her cheek, nose, and forehead. She cried out, the sound a combination of frustration, fury, and pain.
“Fuck you, you son of a bitch!”
She kicked at him, tried to rake his face with her nails, anything she could possibly manage as he threw the knife away hard, sending it four inches deep into the drywall across the room.
His reaction had no human component to it. He flipped her over, pushing her facedown into the floor, a deadly snap of fangs at her ear as he covered her body with his own. There was nothing human to the instant erection he felt shudder through his body, the incredible wave of arousal that was so powerful it made him weak in the knees. That was the reaction of an Alpha Morphate male getting bitch-slapped by his mate, just as a Morphate female would do to get his attention and force him to recognize he was supposed to be taking better care of her.
What was human was the part of him that kept him from fucking her to within an inch of her mortality, as an Alpha male might normally do to his female. But she was not Morphate, he forced himself to remember. She was fragile by any definition in his world, and even more so right now because of what he had put her through earlier. As he used a bloodied hand to pull her head back by her hair, he felt how limp she was. How quickly her strength was fading.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he shouted into her face, trying to blow off the kinetic fury of energy and craving clawing through him. “Are you trying to get me to kill you?” Because he knew she wasn’t trying to kill him. He knew she was well aware of how impossible that was. But perhaps that was the point. Perhaps she really was trying to get his attention, to smack him around and force him to pay closer attention.
“You’re a pig,” she said through her teeth. “A lying, spying, untrustworthy, voyeuristic swine!”
Ah, hell. She really was too smart for her own good. He now knew exactly what had changed between the moment he had left and the moment he had returned.
He rolled her over onto her back between the brace of his thighs, sitting back on his heels as they both panted hard. She glared at him angrily as she swiped at the blood on her face. He had already stopped bleeding, but there was still a long ribbon of red down his chest and belly. The stab wound was just to the left of his right nipple. But that wasn’t his main concern at the moment. He knew that it would heal rapidly and was of no consequence.
“It’s not just you,” he tried to explain to her. “All of the apartments . . . hell, every inch of this building is covered by cameras.”
“Well, clearly not for protection or I wouldn’t have claw marks down my back!”
He winced at that. He didn’t like the reaction. He didn’t like the feeling that he had failed her.
“I had to protect my project! I had to keep an eye out. Watch for suspicious activity. I need to keep this project from turning into another Phoenix Project!”
“It became another Phoenix Project the minute you chose to rob people of their basic human rights like privacy!”
“Not people, scientists,” he sneered at her. “Untrustworthy, scum-of-the-earth scientists whom I am forced to work with in order to understand myself!”
Her eyes went wide with disbelief as he flung the vicious insult right into her face. He realized his blunder a second after she reacted to it.
“Wait . . .”
“Get off of me and get out of my house! Get off!” She shoved at him with hard hands, proving herself to be much stronger than he had imagined her to be.
“You can’t take care of yourself,” he argued even as he did so, letting her struggle up into an upright position. “Look at you! You can barely move.”
“I’d rather drop dead naked in the middle of this floor than take one ounce of help from someone like you! I spent seven years putting distance between myself and Eric Paulson only to end up right back where I started! You have all your human subjects under watch, noting their every behavioral shift. What’s next? Are you going to start putting drugs in our food supply?”
“I’m not Eric Paulson!” he shouted at her with ferocity.
“No, you’re worse. You know what it’s like to be one of those dehumanized subjects, and yet here you are, willing to do it to someone else. You disgust me. Get out.”
“Don’t you get it?” he said hoarsely. “I don’t know who to trust! I trusted my brother to lead me out of that lab and into this City, but since then . . . I have nothing. Nowhere to put my faith. Nick has his own life. His own family. His own City. I can’t let him worry about me. I’m the older brother and he doesn’t need to be worrying about me.
“Everyone else in this place is subordinate to me because of some biological imperative, but that same biological imperative will tell them to take me out if I show an ounce of weakness, Jenesis. I feel like they are plotting it every damn second. I’m seething with paranoia because every time I think things are settling down, someone else wants to challenge me for Alpha. So what am I supposed to do? I don’t know where to turn, who to trust.... All I want is two seconds of goddamn stability, and I can’t even get that!”
Jenesis looked at him and for the first time saw the terrible vulnerability that was just beneath the surface of all his bravado. It went beyond his struggle with himself and his anger over the hand he had been dealt. He was truly alone.
Worse. He was lonely. There was a difference.
“Who is your Beta?” she asked softly. “In a social group there’s an Alpha, a Beta, a Delta, and an Omega. The Omega is the group’s weakest member, but the Beta should be your second hand. Your lieutenant. Devona . . . ?”
“She’s Nick’s Beta. Actually, I guess you’d call her Amara’s Beta. Amara and Nick just lent her out to me for the project because she has one of those egghead degrees that I need. I . . . I don’t have a Beta.”
“You mean you don’t trust anyone enough to choose one, because the Beta tends to be the second strongest in the group and the most likely to succeed the Alpha. You’re afraid choosing a Beta will give that Beta delusions of grandeur. There is that chance, yes, Kin, but if you choose right, your Beta will be a source of relief for you. The protection and trust you are looking for.”
Kincaid didn’t know how to respond. He didn’t know how to explain what it felt like to be in his position. The responsibility for an entire City’s well-being, the dependents looking to him for food, shelter, and the medical evolutions they needed to s
tabilize their futures. On top of all of that, he had to cope with humans who didn’t trust Morphates at all and a maniacal scientist who apparently wanted to regain control over his former test groups. Paulson’s threats to Jenesis earlier told him that. He could easily imagine where Paulson’s endgame was headed.
Jenesis could see the expressions warring over Kin’s face, anger, doubt, and mistrust. It reminded her just how difficult his life had been these past seven years. As hard as it had been for her, at least she hadn’t had to struggle with a volatile stranger inside of her the whole time. At least she hadn’t been forced to adapt to rules of a new social order that she didn’t understand. Or at least he didn’t think he understood them.
With a sigh, she sat to face him, crossing her legs and relaxing.
“It’s like when you were a cop. You need others you depend on to have your back, Kincaid. Do they want your job? Sure they do. There’s nothing wrong with ambition. But you have to find the ones who you know won’t try to go through you to get that job. They’ll wait until you retire out of it naturally or until you stop being effective in the role. Is that added pressure? I don’t think so. No more than there will always be. No more than there was when you were just a cop in charge.”
“Except this time if I screw up, a whole City suffers.”
“And cities didn’t suffer if you screwed up before? Of course, they did. Don’t make this harder on yourself than it needs to be.”
And it was at that moment that Kincaid finally realized why his Morphate self had chosen her as the perfect mate.
Because she was.
7
Kincaid was hovering around the lab again. Jenesis realized it might have been better if he’d gone back to watching her through those cameras of his. At least he wouldn’t be staring at her in that unnerving way he had, and glaring and growling at anyone who so much as bumped into her the wrong way. She tried to remind herself that he was unable to help himself and that he was trying to be protective. She supposed being protective was better than being hateful and obnoxious. Although it was a little obnoxious in its own right.