Chapter Ten

The helicopter dropped them at the private airport on the Russian side of the border. Its blades never stopped, and it barely touched asphalt for the few minutes before it was gone. During the short flight, the noise inside the craft had been so loud it prohibited conversation, which had been a relief. Ky spent the time disregarding his body’s complaints. Vivi sat as close and tight against him as possible throughout the flight, which served as a welcome distraction. While he stared out into the dark night rushing past, having her pressed into his side felt like heaven instead of the whole world against him. They were both alive and free of that prison. Banged up as hell. But, all in all, things could’ve been a lot worse.

Roman led the group into a small hangar and smiled when he viewed his plane. He loved the midsize jet. It served to hide their movement and helped them avoid large airports. Flynn used his hacking skills to mask their flights in databases. He also found it best from a security standpoint to use the plane as a place to set up mobile tech command for missions when he wasn’t needed in the action. Here, Flynn could hack into systems and do surveillance. If humans gave pushback on them parking or flying, the brothers used mental persuasion. Plus, there weren’t girls to sidetrack Flynn. When on missions, he tended to get in trouble with distracting women.

Roman pointed at Ky. “You and I. We need to talk in private.” He gestured him to follow into a small office.

Vivi nibbled on her lower lip, which was adorable.

“You’ll be fine with Flynn for a little while. If he drives you nuts, you know what to do.” Ky winked and envisioned her threatening Flynn with strangling him with his own dick.

Her luminous eyes searched his as a small smile crested her lips. “If you find out why the vampires helped us, let me know.”

“Come on.” Flynn grinned in an attempt to charm her. “Let’s go see what kind of food I can hook you up with on board.”

Vivi followed Flynn up the plane’s stairs onto Roman’s jet. Arguably the craft was all of theirs, since they’d pooled funds to buy it a few years ago. It wasn’t England’s or the Crown’s. It was theirs, but the master pilot was Roman. He loved the plane on a level that was almost disturbing but, in a way, Ky understood. They were allowed so little happiness in their lives. If a plane did it for Roman, then so be it.

Vivi paused at the top to find him.

Ky waved.

Flynn said to her before they boarded the jet, “It’s brother stuff. They’ll be here in a few.” He yelled down. “I got her, Ky. No worries.”

Ky called out, “It’s what she might do to you that concerns me.”

She gave him a subtle nod as if to say you better get your ass up here as soon as possible before she disappeared inside the plane.

Ky shut the office door behind him, preparing for Roman’s lecture on going renegade. With arms crossed, he waited. Something about the cold, sparse room sent his mind spiraling into a flashback of the prison. He’d freed himself from the torture table finally. Helped that they left him alone for periods of time, thinking him too drugged to care. He dove for the remote on the side table. Got to get this fucking collar off. His body twitched with electricity from a taser as his fingers wrapped the small rectangular box. Just needed to figure out which button… Direct dart strike to his side. The world went woozy as he jabbed at buttons. He felt the collar unlock and the world went dark.

Ky pushed the memory into the back of his mind.

Roman massaged his neck and glanced upward but didn’t start into him.

“I know I should’ve told you where I was going,” Ky began. “In my defense, I was ordered not to. Was told it had to be a secret solo mission.”

Roman’s eyebrows squished together. He rubbed one of them. “I’m sure you regretted going it alone about an hour in. But I also know the curse would’ve hurt you if you did otherwise. Sit. You look like a gentle breeze would knock you over, and you just zoned out on me for a few seconds. I get that your head’s messed up, but it’s hard seeing you like this.” He pointed at a chair. “Seriously. Please, sit.” Once Ky complied, Roman fisted his hands and paced.

“If you’re not going to yell at me, what’s wrong?”

“How’s your arm?” Roman asked.

Ky rotated it. “Healing. Hurts. We’ve all been shot before. Nothing new. What happened while I was gone?”

“This is complicated, Ky. So complicated.” He shook his head as he paced. Abruptly, he stopped. “Vivi shouldn’t come with us. I entirely understand ethically why we can’t leave her, since she’s alone. If we’re smart, we ask her to go her own way from here. I don’t want—”

“I’m not leaving her. We’re too close to the border. She could get caught again.”

“True.” Roman pinched his nose. “Tell me the honest truth. How long was she in there?”

“A few years. Two, I think.”

“Two years? That’s a long time.” He stared at the floor and kicked at imaginary dirt. “She’s a risk. A big risk.” Roman’s lips thinned. He paused and glanced up. “They found one of Galen Sigge’s notebooks at one of the incarceration sites, a different one from the place you were in. We were lured there with intel that you were there. Then they tried to kill us with a bomb when we arrived. I don’t understand why they would capture you and do things to you but turn around and try to kill Flynn and me.”

“Mad Sigge?” Ky’s mind churned circles. The Swede had perfected brainwashing techniques on humans, Winter-Soldier style, with use of trigger words to turn the captive into a programmed warrior. Someone was now using his techniques on lycans? Did it work? “We eliminated him decades ago. In the seventies.”

“Did we? We thought we did. Vivi has probably not been kept around this long in as good a condition as she’s in for nothing. Something had to have been done to make her behave beyond a collar. Is her memory intact?”

Ky shook his head. “Neither is mine, but I remember someone tried to do something to mentally control me, not that it worked. I blamed it on our curse. We’re allowed to be controlled by only one person.”

“Why do you think they wanted you, then?”

“I think they did experiments to find weaknesses, but primarily it’s a breeding program.” His stomach cramped, and he felt unsure what might’ve happened, what he couldn’t remember.

Roman flinched. “Thought so. You’re sure you didn’t…”

“Pretty sure. I don’t perform on command, even if she is…well, all that.” He waited for Roman to agree she was exceptional, but he didn’t. Now Ky felt twitchy, and his muscles tensed to fight.

“We have to believe she’s been programmed. To do what, who knows? But she’s a big risk. Maybe she’s programmed to kill us at the right time. Or maybe she’s using us to get near another target like Mom or the monarch. Maybe she’s programmed to seduce you, since they realized simply being locked in a cell on full-moon night wasn’t going to work, so they’re trying a different tactic?”

“That’s twisted. She was a prisoner like me.”

Roman pulled a second metal chair close to Ky to sit. Its scrape on the concrete floor hurt his ears. “She was in there for two years. She’s in good shape, unlike you. You think she willingly takes care of herself? Everything about this is messed up. We got in there way too easy. Got out, too.”

“What about the Curmsun Disc?”

“Reeks of someone on the inside setting us up. What better way to destroy those who’re involved and us, too, than to give them that artifact? That thing might give big power, but it also destroys whoever uses it. There wasn’t a lot of security in the building. I got what I could off the computers and implanted Flynn’s virus into their system, but I have a suspicion the information we got won’t be helpful. There’s something bigger, more dangerous going on. Felt to me like they wanted us to get you two out.” He resumed pacing and muttering. He froze. “We should dump her somewhere. Let her find her own way.”

He forced his fisted hands to relax and tried to think through this. This wasn’t typical for how Roman operated. The three of them, especially his big brother, inherently felt bound to protect victims like her. “She needs our help. Maybe we can undo whatever shit they did inside her head. What’s really going on here? This… This isn’t how you work.”

“I’m worried about her, too. She’s by herself and confused. Mad Sigge used trigger words to activate his soldiers. She might have those embedded in her brain. Someone says them in passing to her, over the phone or wherever, and then she’s activated. The problem is we won’t know what she’s been ordered to do or who her target may be until she goes robot killer on us. Or she gets pregnant and disappears.”

“I won’t sleep with her. Already avoided it so far.”

“You have it real bad for her.” Roman rubbed the back of his neck without making eye contact. Tightness gripped his face. “You’ll resist for only so long. Trust me, I know. If what you have is more than a connection from being cellmates, you’ll give in. I think she might have some level of commitment to you, because it’s full moon, and she hasn’t so much as checked out me or Flynn in that way.”

She better not have.

Ky said, “She’s searching for her sister, a lycan named Nova who is registered in their computer system as terminated by the Crown’s Wolves. Did you and Flynn kill her? If so, that’s going to be a problem at some point in the future.”

“Vivi is her sister?” Roman blinked.

Ky nodded.

“Shit.”

“I didn’t tell her we’re the Crown’s Wolves or that you guys killed her, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Roman ran a shaky hand through his hair and released a long hiss of air. “We didn’t kill Nova.”

“What? She’s registered as dead in the computer system at the lab. Were you ordered—”

“Yes, the newly crowned king ordered we kill her. He considered her a threat. It’s complicated, but she died and then was brought back by an angel.”

“An angel brought her back? Why?”

“It’s a long story. The bottom line is that she has to stay dead in the eyes of those who care about her existence. Good to know your kidnappers still consider her eliminated. She got out, erased her entire memory, and… In essence, she did die in so far as her use to them is concerned. The king agreed she was dead, and the kill order was therefore fulfilled.”

“Does that mean if we escape via a fake death, we’re free of the curse?”

“I don’t know. Hers wasn’t a fake death. The curse knew the truth. She did die, at least for a few minutes. The bigger problem for us right now is someone high up shared information about us and our missions, perhaps the monarch himself. Someone is trying to breed lycans and control them through brain triggers.”

A slow intake of uneven breath didn’t clear the welling dread. The logical person to be involved in this was their handler. “You think Gerard turned on us?”

“He gave us Sigge’s notebook. Why give us that if he was the one on the inside?”

“Maybe he’s cocky and thinks we won’t catch him?”

“Sigge? Balls, I thought we killed that bastard.” Roman scrubbed a hand through his hair. “His kind of mental programming didn’t work in fiction but seems to work in reality. I think it worked on Nova. She chose to erase her memories of the past on purpose to also forget those triggers.”

“Who helped her escape?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s great about Nova. Let’s get the sisters together and send them on their way.”

“Complicated,” Roman muttered. “Nova can’t remember anything from before we met.”

“I have memory gaps, too. It’s from the drug they injected us with when they needed to control us.” Ky’s head thundered as he tried to access memories that wouldn’t emerge. When his right eye became blurry from loss of vision, he cradled his head with his eyes closed. Helped.

“This goes way beyond memory gaps from a tranquilizer. She’d been brainwashed and programmed into becoming an assassin. They triggered her and sent her to kill people. To stop the cycle, her only option was to forget everything. To start a new life. She was a blank when I found her, which was caused by her injecting some experimental amnesia drug. She won’t remember Vivi. I can’t run the risk that seeing her sister might activate some dormant memory that might wake up those triggers.”

“What’s the problem? Maybe they can help each other.” He leaned back, but light from the overhead burned to the point he had to squint to make out Roman’s face.

“Until we’re ordered to kill both of them.” Roman’s lips shifted as skepticism lit his eyes. “You’d let Vivi waltz out of your life and happily go kill her when she goes into psycho-assassin mode?”

“That might be tough. Not going to lie. But it’s not like we’re bonded or anything.”

Roman snorted. “Uh-huh. She checked out your ass about as many times as you stared at her chest.”

“We’re not like that. We were cellmates. Nothing happened. Are you and… Oh, shit. You and Nova?”

Roman stalked to him, leaned in, and lowered his voice. “Yes, something happened between Nova and me. Something real. She’s with me now. As in permanent. And she’s not getting within a hundred fucking miles of Vivi. Ever.” He rubbed a finger over one eye as if trying to relieve a headache, stood, and stalked away muttering. Ky picked up some words about difficulty keeping her away.

“You’re kidding.” He swallowed hard. “You bonded with a lycan? You’re not worried the monarchy will kill her like they did…”

“Of course I’m worried, but they already killed Nova once.” He did air quotes. “They think she’s dead. Can you imagine what will happen if Vivi reports to whoever is her handler that her sister lives?”

“Nova will want to meet her sister,” Ky pointed out.

“You think?” he said sarcastically. “We have to keep them apart as long as possible. I don’t want Nova to remember or be at risk of someone else controlling her again.”

“Where is Nova?”

“Supposed to be with Mom. She agreed it was too dangerous to get near what she already escaped once.”

“I can’t believe you got… Congrats. Seriously. Kinda jealous you figured out how to make it work. I’m worried for you about them finding out she lives and making us try to kill her again. You think the new monarch is involved in this?”

Roman shrugged. “He’s a part of FenCor. He wears one of their rings on his pinky finger.”

The secretive organization had its tentacles into governments across the world. “You think they’re involved in trying to train lycans to work for them?”

“Did you see any evidence of FenCor inside?”

“No. But honestly…” He dropped his head and scratched a hand through his hair, which felt dirtier than normal, stiff and noncompliant. “I don’t remember a lot.”

“We have to figure this out. Maybe we can use Vivi as bait to find out who’s the mole in our midst.”

“No. We’re not going to put Vivi up as bait.” The metal chair screeched as it dragged backward on the concrete from the force of Ky jolting to a stand.

Roman sighed the kind of aggravated noise that meant he had a plan.

Ky’s head pounded, and vertigo spun the room. But he paced toward Roman. “We just got her out. We’re not going to risk them capturing her again.”

“Stand down. I’m not going to tie her to a chair and call them to come get her or anything like that. We’ll figure it out. Time to go to Vienna.”

“Vienna? The mage?”

“He may be the only one to help us find out what happened during the times you can’t remember.”