“You’re…” The most wanted man in Sententia. My situation had gone from bad to worse, and all I could do was blink. The room spun. I stumbled away from the wall, dropping to sit on my sofa as though I’d imbibed too much alcohol.
He moved before me and kneeled down, looking me in the eyes. I couldn’t retreat or gather my composure.
He knew he’d backed me into a corner. I could go no further, physically or emotionally. Adrenaline continued to flood my system, increasing the desire to put distance between us. I jerked my face away. Instead, I studied my door, looking anywhere but where I’d be forced to face the man before me. I wanted to pretend he didn’t exist inside my bubble.
He stood against everything I believed in. I’d seen his face on the billboards, declaring him a public enemy. The ultimate bad boy. I fallen into deep trouble, and a niggling in the back of my mind told me I only stood at the threshold to my house of pain. Things were about to get a lot worse. The next decision I made could very well change my life. I really didn’t want to think about what brought this man into my home and the domino effect his presence could trigger.
But he gave me no choice.
Eli reached up and cupped my chin, turning me back to face him. He studied me for a moment, the inspection so intense I felt nude under his scrutiny. “I need the codes, sweetheart.”
“I’m not your sweetheart.” Gravel invaded my voice as gritty words rasped past my lips. It didn’t sound like me, and for a second, it almost seemed like another woman had entered the conversation.
“Pity.” His thumb brushed my cheek, and he leaned in until our faces were inches apart. “You look like you could use a good hard toss on the mattress.”
Shove him away. The walls around us contracted, drawing closer, shrinking the space we sat in. My nipples pebbled into stones, and I didn’t dare to draw a breath for fear the fabric of my top would rub against the hard nubs. Every place our bodies made contact, my knees against his hips, his palm on my jaw, the pad of his damned thumb as he traced circles on my cheek, all of it burned. I swallowed as my throat constricted. “No.”
“No?”
My jaw pulsed against his palm, and the pounding of my heart accelerated to the point I wasn’t sure I could draw a breath. My heart slammed hard against my ribs, the force I could feel in my throat. In my belly, desire coiled, drawn tighter with each second. I would be considered a traitor to even feel an attraction to this man. And yet, I did. Something so intense it could only be declared treason. “You’re him.”
“I am.” He continued to hold my gaze—the most dangerous man in Sententia. Report on sight. I had to react, scream for Walter to call security, do anything but sit there. But I was too busy noticing his scent, the intense blue of his eyes, the way his voice moved through me like a seductive storm, saturating every inch of my body, bringing a heightened awareness of the primal masculinity he possessed in excessive quantities.
“So, you finally recognize me?” The corner of his mouth twitched, and he reached up and tugged one of my corkscrew curls.
Oh, like he couldn’t tell. Damn Frankenhair. “Yes.” My breath hitched. Run! Escape! I’d be a fool to continue to sit there. Yet, I did. The leader of the radicals kneeled inches from me, and I didn’t make a move to save myself. I’d lost my fucking mind, and I had a feeling he knew it.
“Iia Danner, I need your help.”
“I can’t help you,” I said, giving a slight shake of my head. I couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Everything I’d worked for would vanish, and for what. Delusions?
“You can’t, or won’t?”
“Both.”
“Then you leave me no choice but to prove I haven’t lied.”
“We can’t go out. It’s after curfew. They’ll…”
“Shoot us?”
“I don’t know. Nobody does.” But I did, and yes, I’d just about said it. We both knew it. His gaze didn’t lie.
“Sure you do—in your gut—but you’re not listening to it, or more likely ignoring it. You all wear the fear on your face. You think about what happens, but you don’t voice the fears. You wonder what they do with those they catch breaking curfew or to any who oppose them, but you won’t speak up and ask. It’s exactly how they want you to behave. A citizen’s duty is to question things, yet nobody on the islands wants to.”
“No.” Yes. I had a friend who the authorities dragged away, never to be seen again. I wanted to know, and would give almost anything for information on my lost friend. Almost anything. Bargaining with a rebel wasn’t on the table.
“Right.” He raised a brow and shrugged his pack off his shoulders. Reaching into it, he pulled out a blue, rubber ensemble identical to his and tossed it in my lap. “Change.” He rose to his feet and nodded at the garment. “We can’t stay here.”
“Oh, hell no.” I threw it back at him and stood.
“Suit yourself, but we’re traveling through the sewers. You might find you’ll come out cleaner wearing this.” He swiped it from me and stuffed it back in the bag.
I narrowed my eyes. Sewers? I’d been a fool to believe he wouldn’t consider it. Yes, the waste went to a decomposer and returned to the planet as a sterilized soil, free of diseases, but the path it took to get there wasn’t exactly clean. No way would I crawl through it. “No. I’m not going anywhere with you, and I’m especially not crawling through crap.”
He grabbed my arm. “This is non-negotiable.”
I yanked away. “I’m not negotiating. I said no.”
His com buzzed, and a voice crackled from it. “You have soldiers on the way up. You need to get out of there now.”
“There are more of you? I thought you were bluffing,” I said and furrowed my brow.
He put a finger up to silence me. “How many?”
“Fifteen. Armed. You have about five minutes before they’re at the door. We disabled the lift, but it won’t take them long to bring it back online. Your team will be there in one. You might want to set the charge because they’ve got all the conventional exits blocked.”
“Charge?” Explosives? “Wait a second. I’m not going with you. I’m not helping you blow anyone up.”
“The only casualty will be your window.” Eli strode over to the glass and dropped his pack, rifling through it. “It would be a good idea to get back. This stuff is home-cooked and not exactly stable.”
“You can’t blow my window.”
“Sorry, this is the only way out.”
“I don’t think you understand. It’s not a way out.” I shook my head and retreated several steps. I wanted to say there was no rope or cable long enough, but the words clogged my throat. No one would even consider jumping out a window on this floor as an option. Well, unless they were crazy.
“It is now.” He stuck a clump of something similar to red clay on my window, and then another and another, until he had a ring of about six. Pulling out a hand held laser pen from his bag, he drew a wide circle with the beam, connecting the dots on the glass before pushing a silver marble into the middle of each. With a quick scan of his work, he rose, snagged his pack, and backed up. “Get into cover.”
I didn’t move, doubting he could blow a hole in glass six inches thick designed to withstand a lava bomb. When I didn’t do as ordered, he clamped onto my arm and hauled me behind the wall connecting my kitchen to my living space. Before I could object, he pushed a button on the remote.
Boom! The walls shook and glass shards embedded in the entryway wall opposite my grand view. My ears rang, and the room whirled. I held my fingers up in front of my eyes and couldn’t focus on my hand, which blurred in and out of clarity.
Eli turned me to face him, mouthing something. I shook my head and blinked.
He held up a harness and pressed it into my hands.
I shook my head more vigorously. “No. Absolutely not.” I shoved the ensemble back at him.
He lifted the tranq gun and shot me in the neck. As I slumped to the floor, two more people joined us, a man and a woman. I didn’t get a good look at them before everything went dark.
I awoke to the sound of dripping water and a smell which could only be described as septic. Sniffing, I raised my hand to cup it over my nose and mouth. The stench was hard to describe, but if I were inclined to take a stab at it, I would say it mimicked a room full of geriatrics after a baked bean supper. The darkness made it impossible to see anything. If something were sitting on the tip of my nose, I couldn’t identify it. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t take a super-brain to know we were in the sewers under the city as my captor earlier suggested as a means of escape. I shifted my weight and sat up.
Eli spoke. “How are you feeling?”
I scraped my tongue against my front teeth, desperate to remove the antiseptic flavor coating every surface within my mouth. “What was in your tranq gun?”
“A natural sedative. I promise it won’t cause any permanent damage, even if it feels like it has.”
“You had no right.”
“I didn’t have time to talk you into putting the harness on.”
“You dropped me out a window one hundred and fifty stories up on a rope?”
“Not exactly. We jumped out the window and used gliders to drift to the ground. My friends brought them with them, as a plan B.”
“That’s not a plan. It’s a death wish.”
“You’re alive, aren’t you?”
Couldn’t argue with him. Still… The dizziness which had hit me when the bomb went off, returned. “You’re insane.” I rubbed my temples and closed my eyes, unable to see in the darkness anyway.
“I had to do it. They were coming for you.”
“They? You mean the police. They were doing their job. One of my neighbors must have spotted you and called them.”
“No, my people heard the call on the com long before we entered the complex. They couldn’t warn me, since they wanted to make sure I had you secure first. But you’re right, someone tipped them off, didn’t give us the chance to search for the codes, though I doubt they’re there. You said you didn’t have any heirlooms.”
“Kidnapping is illegal.”
“Add it to my file.”
“How many kidnappers do I have?”
“We’re not kidnappers. We extracted you to save your life.”
“And to collect information I don’t have.” I snorted and looked around, unable to see anything. But the stench was enough to knock anyone out. “Nice place.”
“It’s temporary, until we can get rid of your chip.”
I jumped to my feet and fell sideways, catching my balance against a wall. The effects of whatever drug he’d shot in my system was still present and annoying. “You are not touching my chip!”
“If we don’t, they will find you and you will be dead.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re too valuable to let die.”
“As long as you don’t have the codes I so clearly told you I don’t possess.”
“You have them, even if you don’t think so.” A hand dropped onto my shoulder. I jumped and spun around. The acoustics had me thinking he’d stood on the other side of the room. More than likely, I’d been yelling at a wall. This aggravated me further. I’d wasted good breath arguing with concrete, or whatever.
“Easy, I’m just getting my bearings. I didn’t want to use too much power and draw attention, so I kept it dark while you slept,” Eli said. “We’re in the sewers.”
“I gathered.”
A band on his wrist began to glow, illuminating his face in a blue light.
I sighed and took in the details of the chamber for the first time. “Why don’t we get out of here?”
“Not going to happen until we burn your chip. My people will be back with a removal device soon. Until then, we wait.”
“Oh, no, no, no. I told you, you’re not removing my chip. That’s my life, and I’ll be damned if you take it from me.”
“As we discussed before, you don’t have a choice.”
“I hate you.”
“Fine. Hate me, but I’m not going to allow anything to put you in danger, and that means losing the government tracking device in your hand. Down here, they can’t get a reading.” He pointed up. “Above, they’ll be on you in under a minute. I guarantee the rebels are the least of your problems. You don’t want the soldiers to find you. My team had to split up to lose them so I could get you down here. They risked a lot. I won’t let them do it again.”
“How do I know you’re not making all of this up?”
“When we go topside, you’ll see for yourself. Your face is on every digital billboard in the city. You’re a wanted criminal.”
“I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“They don’t care.” He tapped his com, and it grew brighter. “Sorry about the lack of light, but the authorities would zero in on any unusual draw on the power. A pull coming from the sewers would qualify as one. Even though this com doesn’t pull enough to show as a blip on their radar, I didn’t want to chance it while we slept. You have to believe me. You can’t trust them.”
“I trust them more than I do you.” I put my back to him, tired of talking.
“I told you, I don’t want to hurt you. We need your help.” His com crackled. “Either we can’t get a signal down here or they are jamming all communication channels. My friends should be here soon, but I can’t verify.” He fiddled a little longer with his com before giving up. “I guess we wait. We have no other choice.”
“I doubt they’re looking for me. It’s you they want. And for the record, none of this was my idea. Life was great before you came along.”
“You really believe that? You chose to keep your eyes closed, thinking you could live in your fantasy. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you this, but the government wants the same thing I do, but for a whole different purpose. You could be the most dangerous person on the islands right now. And they are more than aware of it now they know who you are.”
“I’m what now, a fugitive—wanted? Yeah, running from the law is so much better than trying to ignore a bunch of radicals stirring up trouble. I want to go back to living in my fantasy.”
“Look, I didn’t have a choice. I’m sorry I had to pull you out of your pipedream. People are going to die, and we couldn’t let you continue to skip around in ignorance, pretending our government isn’t up to something. Not when you’re the only person who can change it. You can’t deny something is up. They raided your flat last night. So, are you ready to listen?”
“No. I still don’t buy into your conspiracy theory. And how do I really know they raided my flat? I didn’t see anything.”
“No, but what does your gut tell you?”
The air heated to the point I couldn’t breathe. I clutched at the bottom of my shirt as my chest tightened. I knew something had been up with the bees, and also knew the government would take out any who opposed them. I’d witnessed it more times than I could count and had also lost a dear friend in one of their sweeps. Plus, my pedigree didn’t help. If what Eli said was true, I really could be public enemy number one. I’d destroyed the evidence because I’d felt threatened. Why couldn’t I let go of the possibility Eli could be wrong?
“You really have no idea how much danger you are in, do you?” he asked.
I turned to look at him. “I have a pretty good idea you and your people are a bigger threat. I’m done talking now. I’m going to rest.”
“You can’t ignore this, Iia.”
“I can ignore you.”
“Look, I haven’t lied to you about any of this. There are some bad people making money on our ignorance and love of technology. You are the only way we can shut down the power-net and keep it down, and those people don’t want that to happen. Without the Net, they can’t run their weapons and they cannot control us with things we need to survive. Until we turn off the grid, they have us where they want us. Right now, we’re codependent and unable to do anything about it if we value our lives. We can’t even leave these islands.”
“You really believe the bees are a weapon, we’re all a bunch of addicts to the power net, and I’m the answer to all your problems?”
“Yes, yes, and yes. I’m one hundred percent certain the people at the top won’t stop until you’re dead. If they find you, everyone on these islands will die. They won’t stop until they destroy the codes, the last possible way to shut down the grid.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You can bet they’ve been monitoring you for as long as you have lived in your apartment.”
I rubbed my arms. “Who else has been monitoring me? You perhaps?”
“Yes. But I told you, they were already headed to your home before I grabbed you in the parking garage—for the same reason I sought you out.”
“My neighbors?”
“Hard to say. We have enemies everywhere.”
“Why am I not surprised?”