Codename: Nightshade (Deadly Seven Strike Force) (34 page)

My mind is above average, and my training prepared me for anything he can throw at me. “You can’t break me.”

“I find myself lucky. Many of my colleagues can no longer appreciate the concept of humor.” He takes two steps, and I imagine him standing in front of me as he says, “Perhaps they just haven’t worked with such… funny subjects as I.”

“You think I’m joking?”

“Oh, I know that you believe your words, Miss Vincent. I know that there is a place deep inside of you that somehow clings to a universal truth that was once taught to you. But on the matter of whether or not you can prevent me from getting inside your head and controlling you…” He takes a few breaths for dramatic impact. “Well, that is the joke, Miss Vincent.”

I close my eyes. “Laugh it up, ugly. It’s only the last laugh that matters, anyway.”

“Where did you go, Miss Vincent? I have to admit, my curiosity is on the edge of its seat to know.”

I don’t want to give him an inch. He’ll make it a mile that I’ll have to backtrack from. “You tell me,” I say. “I was unconscious. I have no idea where we are.”

“Where are my manners?” He claps once, and the light shuts off. Another clap, and the room is illuminated by light shining up through the white panels of the floor.

I blink a few times, glancing around. There’s no leak in the corner, but I see the speaker that emits the sound of one. The chemical smell deepens, and I taste the traces of bleach and ammonia along with the chlorine. The room is sterile, white empty walls surround me, beaming with the light from beneath me.

“Do you not remember this place, Miss Vincent?”

Remember it?
Other than thinking I’m stuck in a bad Alien autopsy flick, I can’t imagine ever coming to this place.

Heinrich holds a neutral expression on his face, but his eyes are betraying that humor he talked about. “You have been here before, Miss Vincent. Many times.”

He’s playing me, pushing ideas into my head to get under my skin.

“You can’t break me.”

This time, he laughs. He looks young when he does it, barely in his twenties. “Fight it all you want, Miss Vincent, but you
have
been here before. I have been training you longer than General Zolkov.
I
broke your mind before you started building your pathetic attempts to shield it.”

Not possible.

“Fuck off,” I say.

That makes him downright giddy. “Where did you go?”

This shit again. I clench my teeth together.

“Let me clarify,” he says. “I know you prefer clarification.” That side comment unsettles me. I’m a literal person. Any psych eval of me probably indicates that about my personality. I
do
prefer to have things spelled out for me. But he hits my nail on the head with his first swing. I shouldn’t let it get to me. I can’t let it get to me. “When you woke up just now, where did you think you were while you slept?”

You can’t break me
. The words are on the tip of my tongue, but instead I say, “Recruit training.”

“
Interesting
.”

He says it like I’m a chemical reaction that just turned hot pink in the test tube or something.

“How old were you?”

I look down, staring at the lit floor. I’m not giving him any more information.

Heinrich waits three seconds then sighs. “You can cooperate, or I can get information from you my own way, Miss Vincent. It is, as it always is, your choice.”

As it always is.
He says it casually like we’ve done this a hundred times before. I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it.

I’ve never been in this room before.

“Fuck off,” I say, cutting my eyes back to his face.

“Your choice.” He looks over me, and I hear a door open and close. “Have you ever heard of SP-117, Miss Vincent?”

SP-117 was an urban legend out of KGB bio labs back in the Soviet era. It was rumored that the stuff loosened lips and had no traceable properties.

I laugh without humor. “Truth serum? You call my words a joke, and you come at me with truth serum?”

He drapes my hair over my left shoulder. I smell alcohol as I feel something cold touch the right side of my neck.

“You might find what happens next hilarious, Miss Vincent. We shall see.”

A pinch stings the same spot on my neck. Something heavy flows into my vein. It’s like lead as it slowly moves down across my chest. He moves away, and by the time he stands in front of me again, I’m highly aware of the weight coursing through my system.

He’s fucking with me, giving me the suggestion of thinking whatever this is with force the truth out of me.
It’s classic torture 101. The power of an idea is more effective than the actual act.

“Look, if you just put some thousand island dressing in me, I feel I should let you know I prefer ranch.”

He sneers. “I assure you, Miss Vincent, it is not salad dressing I just injected into your body. You’re feeling it now, yes? The heaviness. Your shoulders are so heavy. Just relax them. Give in to the weight.”

I want to laugh again, but I can’t deny my shoulders really do feel heavy. It’s like Nikolai is standing on them. I slouch forward against my will. I don’t want to give in. I don’t.

But it’s so heavy.

“That’s it, Miss Vincent.”

I want to remind him of my rank, but more than that I want him to stop saying anything. I’m tired of my own name. Tired of hearing his voice. I just want the pressure to go away from my skin.

“It will feel better if you just give in,” he says. “Just let go of the fight and open up to me, Miss Vincent.”

“Fuck off,” I say. Or, well, I
hope
it’s what I say. My lips are floppy, and my tongue is swollen.

“Now, Miss Vincent, there’s no need to be so angry. I’m here to help you. I like to help you. I’ve always been here to help you.”

That’s a lie.

Isn’t it?

I don’t remember when I first met him. My thoughts are all boulders piling on top of each other, building a mountain I’m too tired to climb.

“Fuck off.”

“What’s your name?” Heinrich asks.

I want to say something sarcastic. He knows my name. I know he knows it. I want to say, “Marilyn Monroe.” My brain tells my mouth to say it. But the words are too heavy. They drag my lips and tongue down.

“What is your name?”

Just say Penelope.
Just thinking my name lightens everything around me. “Penelope.” Yeah, that helps the clear the heaviness. I take a full breath.

“What is your mission?”

Again, I tell myself to lie. I’m not currently on a mission. I bite the inside of my cheek.

Just tell him the truth.

My shoulders are bricks. Sweat drips down my forehead.

Just tell him the truth… tell him you don’t have a mission right now.
The voice in my head promises this elephant on my back will go away if I just tell him the truth.

I lock my teeth together.

“You fight too hard, Penelope,” Heinrich says. “Your struggle is difficult… heavy.” My body bows forward when he says it. “Lighten the load. Tell me what your mission is. You can rest once you tell me.”

What’s your prime objective when taken hostage?
Nikolai’s memory asks me.

Keep your secrets secure.

I bite down on my lip until it bleeds.

“You don’t have to tell me everything you know,” Heinrich says. “I know all the details.” That’s not possible. “I just want you to confirm what your mission is.”

He can’t know anything about my missions.

Can he?

He touches me—his hand cradles my chin as he lifts my head up. I don’t want to look at him. Looking at him makes the pressure intensify.

I’ve never felt more compelled to do something than I am right now.

“What is your mission, Penelope?”

I don’t want to give in. I don’t want to keep fighting.

I just want to rest.

I want King Kong to stop sitting on my shoulders.

“I don’t have one. I’m in between orders, on medical leave due to the attack.”

Relief washes over me, and my lungs sting as I breathe too quickly.

I hear the door behind me open and close, and Heinrich steps away from me. Another relief.

“You should be proud of her, Subject A,” Heinrich says.

Nikolai is in the room.

“She lasted longer than you did.”

I count his steps as he circles around me. Ten of his long strides are all it takes to stand in front of me.

I look up, feeling failure seize me. This man taught me how to fight what I just rolled over for. He busted his ass…
my
ass… to make me strong. And I just bent over and took it up that ass from the Devil.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I say before I can stop myself. Right now, he’s not my General, and he doesn’t think I’m really me.

But I am sorry I’ve failed him.

His cheek twitches, but otherwise, he shows no sign that he even heard me.

“I have business to attend to,” Heinrich says. “Do you have everything that you need, Subject A?”

Everything he needs for what?

Nikolai’s eyes shrink to two black slits. His skin is paler than I remember it being in the hotel. He’s back in his black leather gear, contempt rolling off of him like a scent in the air.

He’s the ghost again.

He’s here to torture me.

He cracks his knuckles, just like he did the day I met him. “Yes, I do.”

I come to with a rush of sights and sounds, screaming as I sit up.

“Calm down, calm down,” a voice keeps saying. “Look at me, Recruit Vincent. Deep breaths.”

I stare into his black eyes, matching my breathing to his instructions.

“What happened?” I stammer. I remember being taken. I remember throwing up. I remember being terrified out of my mind.

“You had a seizure.”

A seizure?
He didn’t just say that. I couldn’t have had a seizure. “I’m not epileptic.”

“I know you’re not,” General Zolkov says. I’m a child he’s scolding, and I don’t know why. “You were scared to the brink of losing control, so your body seized.”

Scared to the brink of losing control.
“What happened? Did you catch the guys who—?”

My question trails off as I look at him. He’s telling me with his eyes and the set of his lips that it was just a drill.

A test.

I failed.

“Are you really ready for this?”

I don’t know how to answer that question. I think I know what he’s asking, but I don’t know what to say. “You guys made it sound like I would be cracking codes and breaking into computer systems.”

“You can’t crack the kind of codes we’ll need you to crack if you can’t stay alive long enough to crack them.”

“Then I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

The room we’re in is quiet other than this continuous beep from a monitor over my head. I don’t know if I’m in a hospital or just the base infirmary. I don’t care. If this is the shit he expects me to put up with then I need to leave.

I knew this was deep shit I was stepping in when I agreed to join the super-secret spy club, but I hadn’t anticipated this.

Zolkov leans his elbows on his knees and stares at me. He reminds me of this hawk that used sit on the lamppost outside my mother’s apartment building. It sat there, day in and day out, watching, waiting. I never saw it catch whatever it was stalking, and sometimes, I wondered if it was waiting for me.

Now he stares through me, slicing down to the part of me he wants me to prove is there. “Can you handle this?”

My defenses go up. I want to slap him. I want to crawl under the bed and hide. For twenty-four hours, I thought I was badass, but now I feel like a dumb kid. “I don’t know.”

“Figure it out,” he says. “Now.”

I throw my hands up in frustration. “What the hell is there to figure out?”

“You wanted a challenge, Recruit Vincent.” I feel like a toddler being asked if she can’t handle going to school or if she should stay in daycare, eating crayons.

It pisses me off. “I don’t know.” I enunciate each word with so much anger I’m shaking.

“That tonight,” he says, waving toward the door. “That was
nothing
. That was just a taste. So I need to know… can you handle it?”

I clench my hands into fists. I can still taste bile in my mouth. I remember how insane I felt when I woke up with that cover over my head. “Obviously not.”

It’s a pathetic confession. I hang my head.

“Give me a goddamn break.”

I look up as he stands. He starts pacing between the door and the bed, glaring at me with each pass.

“What?” I ask, genuinely confused by his reaction.

“Not too many people can really tick me off,” he says, his voice little more than a growl. “But it seems you have natural knack for it.”

Is he for real? “I’m sorry. My body can’t handle it. I’m too afraid—”

“That’s bullshit,” he shouts, stopping with a finger pointed at me. “Fear is something you can control. Your
body
is something you can control.”

Why is he being such an asshole? “Why are you being such an asshole?”