Turning her head slowly, she saw that she lay under a heavily embroidered velvet crazy quilt on the comfortably pillowy cushions of an oversize love seat or daybed. Her feet were bare, and someone had also removed her jacket, but otherwise she was still dressed. Some of her hair fell around her face as she levered herself onto one elbow.
A door opened, and before Jessa could think better of it she looked toward the sound. A very tall teenager wearing a ragged gray sweatshirt and worn, stained jeans walked toward her, a wooden tray in her hands.
“Too late to fake it,” she said as Jessa dropped back down and closed her eyes. “I already saw the baby blues. Hopefully you like grilled cheese and tomato soup.”
Jessa stayed where she was and watched as the girl placed the tray on a table by the daybed. “Where am I?”
“Safe. Welcome to the Freak Protection Program.” She straightened and tugged her sleeves down, covering the black swirls of the tattoos on her forearms. “Eat something.”
Jessa checked the tray, but the only utensil on it was a plastic spoon. The sandwich had been put on a paper plate, and the bottle of iced tea was also plastic.
Nothing I can use as a weapon. “I want to talk to the man who brought me here.” She had to concentrate for a moment to recall his name. “Matthias.”
“Do you.” The girl smiled, a vicious show of dazzling white teeth. “Well, Queenie, I’m not your fucking gofer.” She walked out.
Jessa rolled off the daybed and went after her, expecting to find the door locked. It wasn’t. She looked down at her bare feet; if she had to run, she needed shoes. Luckily she spotted her pumps sitting under the table by the daybed, and put them on before she slipped out.
Outside the room she saw no sign of the girl. Two long walls of old, cracked, whitewashed concrete interspersed by closed wooden doors formed a long, windowless corridor. The low, rounded ceiling, heavy-duty shop lights wired above the doors, and old bricked floor made her realize she was not standing in a hallway but some sort of underground tunnel.
Underground where?
Jessa had worked with enough people from New York City to recognize the girl’s Brooklyn accent, and considered the odds of that being where she was. It would take most of a day to drive to New York, but the clock in the library room had shown the time to be seven fourteen. At the same time, she didn’t know if that was the morning or evening hour. Had Matthias drugged her? How long had she been unconscious?
She walked past the doors to one end of the corridor, keeping her footsteps as quiet as she could, only to discover it turned off into another pair of tunnels. She took the right, which stretched out for two hundred feet before it split in two. There she went left, and then right again, until she stopped. Wherever she was, the place was a labyrinth, with no exit signs or any indication of what lay behind the twenty-two doors she’d already passed.
Jessa walked up to the nearest door, braced herself, opened it, and stared into a shallow closet filled with small, brand-new kitchen appliances. The top shelf was packed with can openers, the next a row of coffeemakers, and the third an assortment of blenders. All of them were neatly arranged, still in their boxes, but they didn’t make sense. Who needed eleven can openers, or nine coffeemakers?
She moved down to the next door, but it proved to be another closet, this one packed with long bolts of designer drapery fabric standing on end and arranged by color.
There was enough material to dress the windows of a dozen houses.
She looked up and saw at least fifty spools of satin cord and clear plastic bags filled with a variety of hanging tassels.
Confusion piled on top of her anxiety. She’d expected to see guns, men huddled together around a phone, or at least some scowling guard to grab her and march her at gunpoint back to the library room—not Martha Stewart’s spring window-treatment collection.
The sound of stone scraping against stone came from the end of the hall where she stood, drawing her attention. She closed the closet and followed the noise to the last door before the next intersection. This one stood partially open, and she pressed herself against the wall beside it before she glanced around the corner.
From where she stood she could see almost half of the room. Candlelight and a working fireplace filled the interior with a warm, shifting amber glow, and cast shadows over what appeared to be neatly stacked short columns of smooth stone disks. She would have thought them to be garden pavers or stepping-stones, except they each had a notched hole in the center, through which stood a four-foot wooden pole. Bundles of wide leather straps sat on top of some of the stacked disks, along with long lengths that resembled belts with odd hanging loops. The floors and wall were empty except for a layer of fine white sand.
She listened but heard only the scraping sound, and carefully eased the door in another inch.
A barefoot man dressed in a pair of old, loose khakis stood to one side of the room, his back facing her, his arms outstretched. Around each hand he had looped one of the wider straps, from which dangled two of the stone disks. Slowly he brought his hands up over his head, causing the stones to scrape against each other with the movement. He lowered them again, just as slowly, but this time in a diagonal direction, forming a vee with his arms. After several similar movements it became clear that he was working out with the stones as if they were weights.
It wasn’t the first time he’d used them, either, Jessa guessed, mesmerized by the powerful lines of his upper body. She’d seen a lot of men who worked out, but never one like this. He seemed built out of pure, perfect muscle, not simply developed but brutally beautiful, thick and smooth, with every contour in absolute balance.
Unwelcome heat crept up her neck, tightening in her throat and sharpening her field of vision. Her body reacted to the sight of all that masculine beauty like a brainless bimbo’s would, all shivering nerves and surging blood. Intellectually she knew she couldn’t touch him, not after what had happened to her in the car, but her senses didn’t seem to care. They were in full-blown lust now, eyeing and measuring him, speculating on how it would feel to be held in those magnificent arms and petted by those strong hands. He’d be a hard lover, thorough and demanding, the sort of man who had sex the way soldiers went into battle: Breach the defenses, break through the lines, and claim whatever was on the other side.
She’d never had a lover like that. Would never, she reminded herself.
The uncertain light reflected off the gleaming sweat on his skin, added the intense aura of primal male, but it also revealed here and there the corded scars of old wounds. Too many to have been inflicted all at once and for him to survive. However he had been hurt, the man showed no physical sign of impairment.
Jessa knew what the scar of a gunshot wound looked like and how difficult they were to remove, even with dermal laser treatments. The scars this man carried were straight and jagged, and of varying lengths, and seemed to be from the sort of injuries a wide, heavy blade would inflict. If he had been stabbed that many times …
He can’t be one of the Takyn, she thought, drawing back a little.
“Do you mean to stand there for the rest of the night?” he asked without looking at her.
She knew that voice, but stayed where she was. “You’re Matthias.”
“I am.” He finished his lift before lowering his arms and moving toward one wall, where he hung the straps on two pegs. He took a towel from a third and rubbed it over his face before he turned around. “How do you feel?”
She decided to be blunt. “I feel kidnapped.”
He tossed the towel over his shoulder and went to a wrought-iron stand that held a large, shallow porcelain bowl filled with water. He splashed his face with the water several times before using the towel again.
The fact that he wasn’t running after her nor did he even seem worried that she would escape gave Jessa enough confidence to step into the room.
“Where am I? Why did you bring me here?”
“GenHance lured you to the restaurant in order to take you.” He took a shirt hanging from the basin stand and pulled it on. “I can protect you better here.”
“Why would they do that?”
“GenHance wants your ability.” He walked toward her. “To have it, they must harvest it from your body. That would kill you.”
She had thought from the way he spoke in the car that he was disturbed, possibly temporarily unbalanced by the attack in the restaurant. Now she was convinced he was permanently delusional. “So you brought me here to keep GenHance from killing me.”
He stopped and looked down at her. “I did.”
“Are you going to keep me here so they don’t try to kill me again?” she asked, very carefully.
“I will protect you, Jessa Bellamy.” He reached out to her, and frowned as she avoided his hand. “I told you in the car, I will not harm you.”
“I remember you telling me that after you threw me in that car and restrained me.”
“There was no time to explain,” he said. “I had to move quickly or they would have taken both of us.”
The way he kept saying “taken” bothered her. “There’s time now. Why don’t we go to the police together? You can tell them what you know, and they can arrest Lawson and whoever else was trying to hurt me.”
He began buttoning his shirt. “Will you tell them what you saw when you touched the waiter’s hand?”
She forced out a sigh. “I told you in the car, I didn’t see anything. I tasted the drugs in the wine.”
“We know what you can do, Jessa. So do they.” He walked past her and left her there.
She should start looking for a way out, but something told her it would take hours, and even if she did find an exit, it would probably be locked. She had no money, no identification, and no idea where she was. She might still be in Atlanta. She could be in New York—or New Zealand.
All she knew for certain was that Matthias had brought her here, and since he knew the way in, he had to know the way out.
Matthias had already disappeared around a corner by the time she moved to follow him, but he didn’t vanish like the girl who had brought her food. She caught up with him in the next tunnel, and kept her distance while sorting out how she might convince him that she didn’t need protection and to let her leave.
