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SHE WOKE IN a bright room—too bright. Her head hurt like hell, and when she tried to move it, a wave of nausea accompanied the burning in her neck. Willing her eyes to focus, she noticed the bleach-white tiles of the ceiling, then of the walls. Looking down, she recognized the starched sheets and plastic frame of a hospital bed.
“You’re awake,” someone said. “Just in time.”
Something snapped inside her, some panicked thing that had always been kept at bay beneath her stoic acceptance of the cards she’d been dealt, and it leapt from her. This, Leo had to fight.
A man in a white lab coat approached her, holding some device with one hand, and Leo swung her fist into his face. He staggered backwards, dropping the device, and she whipped the sheets off to throw herself out of the bed. Vertigo overwhelmed her for a second, and she blinked like she was wasted before managing to focus on the other end of the room. A sliding glass door served as her exit, and she barreled toward it, her shoes squeaking on the tile.
“Carter,” the man shouted. “I need you in here.”
Leo was almost to the door, and then a short blond man with a pitiful excuse for a mustache appeared on the other side. They stared at each other for a brief second before he slid the door open and took a step inside.
She felt the words burning in her chest, rising up out of her throat with more urgency than she’d ever used them. When her fists didn’t do the job, her words always did, and she pulled every bit of force she could muster behind her beat. “You need to let me go, now.” The words flowed slowly, giving her time to notice the tiny flesh-colored implant in the blond man’s ear.
“Nice try,” he said, giving her what looked like a grimace of pity. “Sorry.”
The sting hit the muscle of her shoulder just barely before she saw the needle in his hand. She blinked again, overwhelmed by another wave of warm, swimming nausea, and then her legs gave way beneath her.
––––––––
It seemed she was destined to repeat the episode when she woke again, but there was no voice to greet her and no man to punch in the face. The room was empty. Leo swallowed in a bitingly dry throat and tried to push herself up again. The soft clink of metal stopped her as much as the rather tight grip of restraints around her wrists chained to the sides of the bed. She tried to call out, but her throat felt too dry, and when she jerked automatically in protest, she found her ankles bound as well. Then she noticed her bare feet, the loose, white pants she wore, and kicked furiously. The motherfuckers had undressed her, taken her clothes, and who knew what the hell else.
She didn’t know if that pissed her off more than the fact that she’d let herself get caught, but she knew she had to get out. That was more important than finding out where the fuck she was and who these assholes were. At this point, she didn’t think it mattered. Shouting and struggling, she called out for someone to come and fucking let her out. While sweat beaded on her brow and her ankles chafed against the straps, she thought she was going to have to scream her throat raw—which she’d never done before—in order for anyone to notice.
But then someone in a white coat walked down the hall toward the glass door and slid it open—the man with the blond mustache.
“Fuck you,” Leo spat.
“That’s understandable.” He closed the door behind him and pulled a tablet from the front pocket of his lab coat. “I might have given you too large a dose.” Stopping to tap something into his tablet, he looked back up at her as if she’d asked a question. “Just a sedative. You were out longer than I expected.”
“What the hell do you want?” Leo pulled harshly at the straps around her wrists, trying in vain to loosen them.
“To show you what exactly it is we’re doing here. I’m Dr. Carter—”
“I don’t care who the fuck you are.” The words burned up through her throat of their own accord, and though Leo knew the man had the implants, that her beat wouldn’t work through that technology, she couldn’t stop it. “You need to untie me and let me out.”
Dr. Carter tilted his head with the same pitying expression. “I thought you’d already figured out that that won’t work here.” Then he blinked rapidly, looking nervous and more than a little uncomfortable. “I’d hoped I’d be able to introduce you to everything here quickly and easily, but you really didn’t give me much choice.” He closed his eyes, frowning, as if making some vital decision, then stepped closer. “You’re making my job harder than it has to be, and I know you’re a lot more uncomfortable now than you have to be. Can we agree to be more civil to each other moving forward? You don’t freak out again, and I won’t sedate you. We’re running a little short on time, and we haven’t even started.”
Leo hated his brown eyes, wanted to pluck them from his head. He wanted to talk to her like she had a choice in the matter, while the asshole had her strapped down to a hospital bed like a mental patient? “Let me the fuck out of here,” she said, straining against the restraints and raising her head toward him. “I’m not doing anything for you.” She jerked again, tugging and rattling the chains connected to the bed.
“This isn’t how I wanted—”
Leo screamed, cutting him off and feeling her face grow hot. She’d never been trapped like this, had never been in a situation where her beat didn’t work at all. Every time, she’d managed to talk and walk her way out of whatever trouble she got herself into, and this felt like the most blaring dead-end in the history of dead-ends. What the fuck was she supposed to do? That thought struck home, and her anger toward the man turned to panic. Screaming again, this time she felt hot tears prick at the corners of her eyes, and breathing felt oddly difficult.
“I tried,” Dr. Carter mumbled, typing something into his tablet again and flinching. Then he turned without another word and left the room.
She tugged and pulled at the straps, feeling her wrists chafing against the thick material, feeling her stomach churning with fear and frustration. What the fuck was this place? What did these people want from her? Leo tried to pull some explanation from her memory. The only thing she could think of was that the people who had chased them from the mountain house had caught up with them somehow, holding her here. But those men at Brad and Mirela’s had shot at her—at them all—and seemed to hardly care who they hit. The men who had burst into the warehouse hadn’t raised a gun to anyone.
That made her think of Shannon then, and she seethed. If she didn’t know any better, she would have said Shannon was the one who had sold them out, who had told these people where they were all hiding. At this point, Leo didn’t think she knew any better at all. Someone had already sold Sleepwater out once, and it seemed the fucking woman with the stupid dreadlocks had done the same. Or maybe it had been her the whole time.
And now Leo lay here, on a hospital bed in what was obviously not a hospital, chained up and without a clue as to what they wanted from her—without a clue as to how to get the fuck out.
Muffled voices came from the direction of the hallway; she couldn’t see anything through the glass door but the opposite wall just outside. The voices grew louder, and she struggled again, jerking against the bed and letting out a string of curses. No matter how many needles that blond fucker decided to stick in her arm, she wouldn’t go down without a fight.
But the person who rounded the corner to slowly slide open the glass door wasn’t Dr. Carter.
Leo froze, thinking with some small, objective part of her brain that this was the only person in the world who could make her stop fighting. If only for that moment.
The blue eyes were unchanged, though her blond hair was pulled back in a tight bun, making her face strikingly angular. The smile, though—that was all wrong. Nothing like the boundless, joyous expression from so many years ago, this was more like what Dr. Carter had offered. This smile was made of empathy, curiosity, and more than a little pity. This smile said, I knew you once, and now I have no idea who you are.
“Hi,” Alex said. It came out just barely louder than a whisper.
Leo felt her chest rising and falling, felt like a caged animal staring down the barrel of a shotgun, and all she could do for a second was swallow again in her dry, sticky throat. Her eyes bounced around in her head, taking in every part of the room, of the hallway outside, of the bright floor tiles, and it seemed impossible to focus on the woman standing before her. Alex was gone, a ghost from a different life, and looking at her now would make this more real than Leo had been willing to accept. So she finally closed her eyes and cleared her throat with a weak cough.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, hating how dried-out her voice sounded.
“What am I doing here?” She thought she heard Alex trying not to laugh. “You don’t even know what you’re doing here.”
The glass door slid shut with a rustle and a click, and when Leo opened her eyes, she found them focused on the pair of plain, practical sneakers now standing beside her bed. They seemed oddly out of place here. “Then tell me.” Maybe if she spoke normally, pretended like this was anyone else, it wouldn’t turn out to be as shitty as it felt.
“To start,” Alex said, making eye contact with the strap around Leo’s wrist, “you’re in a research facility. And we... need your help.”
“Who’s we?” What Leo really wanted to ask was how the fuck she could help anybody, chained up like this—and why the hell they’d think she’d cooperate at this point.
“That’s not something I can talk about with you right now.”
When Leo looked up, she met Alex’s gaze and that odd expression of discomfort. What had everybody so bent out of shape? Then she realized that even though Alex looked the same, even though they recognized each other, this was not the same person. Alex wasn’t here out of love, or nostalgia, or a need to prove something. She only worked here and apparently had a job to do. That only made it worse, but Leo had seen the same implant in Alex’s ear and knew that using her beat would remain absolutely pointless. At least Alex wasn’t Dr. Carter.
“Just tell me what the hell’s going on,” she said, recognizing the sound of defeat in her own voice, though she tried to hide it.
“Like I said, this is a research facility. We’re looking at the effects of a variety of drugs, both on and off the market.”
Goddamnit, she sounded like a fucking machine. And she still wouldn’t meet Leo’s gaze. “And you want me to be your guinea pig?” The whole human experimentation thing was going a bit too far. There was no way in hell Leo would willingly give herself over to whatever science this was—especially science so fucked up they had to kidnap people.
“No, definitely not.” Alex finally looked at her, taking a deep breath. “You can offer us a unique perspective on our test subjects, which would be invaluable.”
“Did somebody give you a script to memorize?” The words came rushing out all at once—maybe she hadn’t meant to say it out loud at all. But this didn’t sound like Alex in any way. This sounded like someone she’d never met. Alex stared at her, wide-eyed, and gave a barely perceptible shake of her head. Leo grimaced. “Why do I have such a unique perspective?”
“Because you’re like them.”
Leo didn’t even have to ask what that meant. She’d planned to but was beaten to it by the sound of a man screaming from somewhere down the hall. Then it came back to her—having seen only one twin escape through the back of the warehouse; Brad fighting off Mirela’s attacker; Kaylee being carried away by three of the men in uniform.
“Where are they?” she hissed, jerking once against the restraints.
“They’re here. They’re safe,” Alex replied with a frown. Another scream seemed to directly contradict her assurances.
“The fuck they are! What the hell is this place? What are you doing?” Her mind flashed immediately to the image of Louis sitting in his back room at the Purple Lion, haughty-looking and partially amused. Karl had told her that some fucking government experiment had taken Louis’ beat from him—had left him nothing more than a regular guy, surrounding himself with the one thing he wished to be again. Was that what this was? “Take these off me.” She pulled again at the cuffs on her wrists.
“Leo—”
“I swear to God, if you say my name one more fucking time—”
“This isn’t how I wanted to start things off.” Alex looked like she wanted to reach out and touch Leo, to somehow make her feel better.
“You’ve got me chained up,” Leo spat. “Was that part of how you wanted things?” The sliding glass door opened again, and Leo watched Alex avert her gaze nervously to the ceiling before glancing to see who had stepped inside the room.
The woman wore a slimming pantsuit of dark gray, her black heels clicking against the tile floor. Dark hair lightly framed her face around brown eyes and a quietly reserved smile. Something about her seemed far too familiar and painfully foreign all at once, and Leo found herself unable to look away. “Leona Tieffler,” the woman said.
The sound of her voice sent an uncomfortable warmth through Leo’s limbs, adding to the beads of sweat she felt forming at her hairline. Anger and longing battled themselves within her, and she couldn’t figure out why.
“Ms. Dunn,” the woman continued, staring at Leo, “please remove those restraints.”
Alex jerked into motion, as if she’d been caught daydreaming, and approached the bed. The three or four keys on the keyring she pulled out of her pocket jangled as she moved, and she deftly released the lock on each of the four straps holding Leo down.
Leo instinctively grabbed her wrists and rubbed the sore, chaffed skin, glaring at the woman. It seemed a bit too convenient that this lady in the pantsuit knew her name, knew what she could do, had known where to find her. Leo didn’t have bank accounts, credit cards, cell phone payments—or any bills, for that matter. She’d disappeared off the radar the year her father had died; she’d ceased to exist as far as the rest of the world was concerned. The only common denominator here was Alex, and it seemed more probable by the second that the blond ghost from her past—the girl who used to be everything to her—had been the one to make this happen. How the hell had Alex found her? Leo wanted to believe that Alex’s intentions ran deeper than just keeping whatever job she seemed to have here, but there was no reason that would be more likely than the reality.
“Follow me, please,” the woman said, then turned and stepped out into the hall.
Slowly, Leo slid from the bed, her bare feet hot against the cold tile floor, and glared at Alex. “What did you tell her about me?” she asked, her voice low, accusatory. Alex just shut her eyes, as if the question alone hurt enough, and shook her head. Leo sneered and headed toward the door; she was right. There wasn’t any other reason for Alex being here than to offer information no one else had. It had nothing to do with what they’d been through.
“You’re the one who left,” Alex finally said, and Leo stopped before the open door at the sound of her voice. “You don’t get to be angry.”
She wanted to turn around, to have something to say that would make this worth it, but she had nothing. Part of what Alex said was right—Leo had left her, along with everything else she’d hated about her life six years ago. She’d been terrified of what would happen if she stayed, of what else the world would be able to take from her. And she’d gotten the hell over it. Now, finding out what the hell was going on in this place was far more important than reminiscing with someone who obviously didn’t care that much about her. How much could someone care if they worked for the same people who’d had Leo kidnapped, drugged, and chained up in a room? So she turned into the hallway and kept walking.