Warrior Reborn (23 page)

Then she disappeared into space, right in front of his eyes.

***

“Not damn possible,” Jason spat out. He pitched his tuxedo coat onto the chair in the corner of his bedroom and headed into the bathroom. The ride home hadn’t calmed him down. If anything, he was more incensed than when she’d left him.

He splashed water on his face. Nothing washed away the image of Briet there one second and vanished into thin air the next. The woman was insane. He was insane.

He grasped the counter and looked at himself in the mirror, seeing only spots of Briet’s blood marked across the pristine white of his dress shirt.

At least she bleeds. Was that a good sign or was he just being a sick SOB? Absolutely, sick. He’d spent the last few weeks of his life with a woman who either had serious mental issues or super powers. A sane man did not fall in love with either one of those options. Then why couldn’t he get her out of his head? It didn’t seem to matter whether she brought a new meaning to baggage.

Damn it. Ripping off his shirt, he wadded it into a ball and snapped it toward the trash. He turned back to grip the counter, letting his head hang down. More blood to the brain didn’t change anything.

The rest of his tuxedo he left on the floor of the closet. All the bits and pieces in his pockets, he piled on the dresser and then pulled out a sweatshirt and jeans. He glanced at the mark over his hip and for the hundredth time that week and rubbed at it, gritting his teeth in frustration. The mark remained. The skin around it was now pink with irritation. Nothing eased the deep craving welling in his balls. He could almost taste her.

A damn mark and super vision. He could not
possibly
take her seriously. He needed a way to figure out this mess. Too wound up to sleep, too wound up to even think, he headed back into the living room and stood before the lit fireplace. In addition to Briet’s accusations, something else bothered him about the night’s attack. Aside from the mugging and bullets. It was like an itch he couldn’t quite reach.

The size, the stance of the mugger. Jason was good at assessing people, mentally and physically. Sports had refined his instincts to assess an opponent, on the field and off. He hadn’t been honest with Briet. His childhood had crossed over serious lines of violence and threat several times. Only through careful monitoring and evasion had he and his mother usually avoided his father’s violent outbursts. The few times they’d miscalculated remained emblazoned in his memory. Always after the latest foster child left. Never with other witnesses.

The images of his mother’s slow, bruised shuffle, swollen cheek, or busted lip would never diminish. His own flesh no longer held the brutal memories, but he could conjure the sound of his father’s belt with crystal clarity. The click of the belt un-buckling. The hiss as it stripped loose from the loops. The sound as it whipped through the air.

He and his mother had learned to gauge a look, tension in the face and shoulder muscles, a strange twist in the sound of his father’s voice—all in the matter of seconds. Just in case they couldn’t defuse a bad situation, they knew when to run and hide. Anger could turn some people into dangerous animals without warning. It became second nature for Jason to gauge the level of threat by posture and stance. Fight or flight was ingrained a long time ago. His deepest fear was that the violent attack response was ingrained there as well.

He blinked and shook his head. Tonight’s attack had triggered those old instincts, holding the critical details just out of reach.

He sank onto the couch with a brief glance to the opened letters in the black rattan basket on the coffee table. He’d gone through each letter over the last week. Read Frank’s account of the last altercation with Jason’s father, understood in painful detail Frank’s logic and his plea for Jason to contact him. Part of him had felt relief; part of him felt guilt. He’d always blamed Frank for leaving.

He hadn’t understood. He hadn’t really had enough time and distance, until now. The process of reading each letter had been less painful than the events of twenty years before, but the wound felt just as raw and fresh.

He could blame Briet for dredging up the past. Yet, while she cracked open the doors, she also grounded him against the fallout.

He stretched his neck, closed his eyes, then opened them and looked at the ceiling. No answers were there in the endless white.

The issues with Frank held a glimmer of hope. Briet knew things about people like that. She operated on instinct and compassion. She hadn’t pushed him. Much. She’d left Frank’s last letter on the table, the car keys he’d left for her on top. She held her peace, somehow sucking all the pain and angst out of him in subtle bits, with what seemed like little effort.

Now, he suspected it had taken a good deal of her effort. She’d held out on him. More like held in her pain for him, at least based on her level of upset before she’d disappeared. Quite the list of holdbacks, too.

Where had she gone and how
? He squeezed his eyes shut. It didn’t matter. Wherever she was, she didn’t want to talk to him and it was probably for the best. They both needed some time to decompress.

He rubbed his hands over his face, seeing today’s mail stacked on the coffee table.

Normal.
Just give me something normal
, he thought, as he reached for the mail, sifting trash and bills and miscellaneous into piles. No new letter from Frank.

One envelope with a strange return logo rested at the bottom of the pile. He ripped the edge and slid out a one-page note and a check.

Excellent work on the delivery of the newest Welson Corp product.

His bonus check? Hauer Gault’s look had implied a large sum but Jason froze as he read the amount of the check. What the fuck had he done to warrant three hundred thousand dollars? It had to be a mistake.

You’ve done a good job keeping us abreast of problems, Jason.

The only problem he’d worked had been Briet’s issues.

Dr. Hyden will be taken care of.

Then it clicked. The stance of the attacker from the reception rippled through his memory. Couldn’t be. But the height and build were spot-on. The movement and play of muscles synched. The mugger had attacked, deflecting Jason’s right cross because he was ready for the move. The same move Jason had used at the reception.

The man had come prepared. Given the foreknowledge, the attacker hadn’t lasted long. Unless he hadn’t planned to? He’d maneuvered Jason into the wall, leaving all the valuables and cash untouched, his body not even scratched. Jason had been lucky he’d had the instinct to rebound from the wall when the SUV came into play. His position had allowed him to grab Briet, getting them both out of the line of fire.

Dr. Hyden will be taken care of.

Jason looked at the check in his hand. A cold, sick feeling spread like ice under his skin and into his bones. The image of Briet’s bloodied shoulder framed in his mind.

He hadn’t been the target of the mugger any more than he had been the target of the SUV. They had been trying to kill
her
. The mugger had actually pushed Jason out of the way for the clear shot at her from the vehicle.

There were no brake marks for the truck.

Jason clenched his hand as he stared into the fire. He’d known Dr. Arnault’s death in Briet’s car was no coincidence. The connection of the dots back to Welson made his stomach revolt.

Gault’s expression had been cold when Briet left the fundraiser. But Jason didn’t see him as the puppet master behind this increasingly complicated game. Even with money and power, Welson Labs wasn’t the top of the corporate food chain. They had little to gain from one doctor’s death. His gut told him there was someone else, someone higher, and someone with special interest in Briet.

Jason closed his eyes and considered who had been so surprised to see her alive. Sanyu, definitely. He had much to gain with Gault’s endorsement. Max? Jason couldn’t credit him with the greed or malice to back such an action. Company man or not, he didn’t like to get his hands dirty, though he would have looked the other way if it were in his best interest. None of those men had sufficient stakes in profit, gain or power to warrant murder. Frowning, he realized some missing piece was blocking his view of the big picture.

He looked back at the check and dropped it to the coffee table. He didn’t want to believe Welson Labs was paying him for setting up a doctor on the team. Those kinds of things didn’t really happen. Yet his realistic view of his position in the Welson fish bowl said he didn’t warrant three hundred grand for a small project delivery.

My loving you won’t fix our problems if you refuse to see what’s in front of you.

Moving away from the table, he ran a hand through his hair and cringed with the ugly realization this had become an all-or-nothing scenario. Either he believed Briet was a target
and
Welson was involved
and
he acknowledged her bizarre claims, despite the logic physics dictated.

Or he discounted everything.

Briet being a target only made sense if someone knew she had more information than the other doctors did on the team. If what she had told him was true, and she could see the DNA, as he could, then her ability allowed her to recognize the changes in all of the patients. The engineer of the DNA design would have seen her request for additional samples and more thorough evaluation of the patients as a red flag, a potential threat.

Her abilities and her insistence for more samples allowed someone to make the connection early on. Thanks to him.

The attack tonight on Briet had been coordinated, not a clumsy one-off, like the attempt at the reception. Tonight required several people hired to work in concert. That much effort didn’t stop at failure.

He grabbed the phone from his pocket and ran back to his bedroom. Grabbing items from the dresser, he bit back a curse and dropped to the floor of his closet, searching through all of the pockets of the tuxedo.

Damn it
.

He punched buttons on his phone, trying to process the minutes before he’d left for the fundraiser. Yes, he’d definitely had his badge in his pocket.

No answer at her apartment.

No answer on the cell phone. That woman needed to have her cell phone glued to her. He exhaled and tried another number, but there was no answer at her desk in the lab either.

Another option. He needed another option.

He glanced at the time and dialed the lab security desk as he headed for the door. The phone picked up on the tenth ring. Stellar security coverage.

“This is Jason Ballard with Welson Labs. Is anyone there working on our lab floors tonight?”

Confirmation. Briet had badged in an hour ago, the only one there because of the benefit. She must have gone there directly from the event. He pulled the loaner car out of the parking garage and headed toward the lab facilities. Wiping one hand over his face, he took a deep breath.
Please let her be okay
.

Cold, dank fear crawled down his spine. He could almost hear his father’s voice calling to him, to his mother, as they hid in the dark.

Jason gritted his teeth and pressed on the accelerator. What would he do? First, he’d throw her over his shoulder and get her the hell out of the middle of this. Ansgar had been right.

He paused for a red light and closed his eyes from a minute. She’d be okay. They wouldn’t try anything in the lab. It would bring more attention, not less. With her weird skills, she might be able to disappear or fend them off. Hadn’t helped her at the reception and wouldn’t have helped her tonight, but he’d been with her both times.

Convincing her to leave with him was key. He would be lucky if she gave him the time of day after their fight. He’d called her insane. Now, it turned out, his company was trying to kill her.

If he could just get her to let him explain everything, he stood a fifty-fifty chance of getting her out of there. He gunned through the green and only gave slow-down attention to the next red light and empty intersection.

If he couldn't get her to listen to reason, then he’d haul her ass out of there.

CHAPTER 21

She’d
folded
to her lab. After the disaster of the evening, the last thing she wanted was to go back to the Sanctum and more of Ansgar’s questions. She refused to lay out her issues with Jason like a bad movie clip.

Instead, she sat in her evening gown, high heels, and lab coat in an empty office in the middle of the night. No one around to talk to except the night security guard. Having just finished his rounds, he wouldn’t be back for another two hours. Briet shrugged away the chill of the empty room. The compulsion to check her pages of notes on Annie’s samples for an answer filled her thoughts, providing distraction.

The DNA showed no change. Nothing. All the cultures and counts looked disturbingly normal.

Damn
. She was getting nowhere by herself. She needed Jason here to consider what she’d missed. Briet let out a long breath, bringing her full circle. Reason argued that one fight didn’t mean the end of the world, but emotion countered with finality and heartache.

Either way, Jason knew the truth now.
Even if the disclosure had lacked subtlety and grace
, she remembered with a wince. She’d spit out the details like a wood chipper. Granted, he had to find out sooner or later, but her delivery left a lot to be desired. Whether he would ever believe her was another issue.

Living for more than two centuries and only knowing Jason for several weeks, it should feel foreign to experience such doubt and need. Yet, what she desperately wanted was him here, holding her in his arms, telling her everything was going to be all right.

Instead, she sat alone, puzzling out a problem that refused explanation.

She shifted on the stool and reached for her purse and ridiculous phone, the impulse strong to call him. The need to talk through their problems was overwhelming; in spite of the way they’d parted an hour ago.