Hitting the Target Read online

  “Let her go you fucking bastard or I’ll kill you where you stand!”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Mia gasped and the Commandant made a strangled sound of surprise at the interruption. His hand loosened its grip on her and she took the opportunity to yank her head away from him. His fist tightened convulsively at the last moment, but all he got were a few of her long, black hairs.

  Mia looked at them hanging from his fist and knew it should have hurt when he ripped them out, just as it had hurt when he first grabbed her…but somehow she hadn’t felt much of anything. Maybe she was just numb with shock.

  “Well, don’t you look like an idiot standing there with your dick out?” Trey rumbled.

  For it was Trey—somehow the big Kindred had come for her! He was wearing an ill-fitting EYE uniform, obviously taken from one of the guards who wasn’t quite his size and there was blood on one shoulder where he had been wounded but he was here—here to take her home!

  Mia felt a surge of joy and disbelief. How had he known where to find her? How had he managed to get past the Great Barrier and get into the headquarters of The EYE?

  But she would have to wait to ask him questions later. For now he was motioning her over and she went quickly, making sure to stay well out of the Commandant’s reach.

  “Come here, little one,” Trey murmured, never taking his eyes from the Commandant, who did present a rather comical sight, standing there with a wilted member in his hand.

  Trey was holding some Kindred weapon in his fist—an alien-looking thing Mia had never seen before. It was silver and sleek and deadly-looking and he aimed it at the Commandant as though he knew how to use it.

  But though the Commandant was definitely at a disadvantage, he never quite lost his composure.

  “So, Kindred—you’re more resourceful than we thought,” he said genially, as though he and Trey were just making polite conversation at a party.

  “And you’re even more of a bastard than I thought,” the big Kindred growled.

  “I don’t know how you managed to get in here, but I assume you came to rescue sweet little Mia there?” The Commandant smirked at him. “You might like to know, though, that she’s a spy. I placed her with you, Kindred. You were nothing to her but a target. Every word she spoke to you…every kiss…every embrace…every time she spread her legs for you, it was all because I told her to.”

  Mia wanted to cry she was so ashamed. It was as though the Commandant had stabbed her directly in the heart with an icicle.

  “No,” she whispered but her voice came out so soft she was sure the big Kindred wouldn’t hear it. “Please, Trey…”

  But to her surprise, the dirty secrets the Commandant was spilling didn’t seem to surprise Trey at all.

  “I know all that,” he said matter-of-factly. “And I don’t care.”

  For the first time, the Commandant almost looked at a loss. But his face smoothed back into its usual smug expression quickly.

  “Is that right, Kindred? And did you know she poisoned you as well?”

  “I know you tried to make her poison me,” Trey shot back. “She didn’t do it though.” He cast a side glance at Mia. “You couldn’t, could you little one?”

  Mia shook her head, feeling the tears rise to her eyes.

  “What?” The Commandant glared from Trey to Mia and back again. “But we received the signal! The biometric sensors are never wrong—the poison was implanted.” He narrowed his eyes at Mia. “Who did you poison if not that big bastard, you stupid little bitch?” he demanded, jerking his head at Trey.

  Trey frowned in apparent confusion but then he shook his head.

  “Never mind about that—it doesn’t matter,” he said coolly. “What matters is that Mia and I are going now and your time of raping and abusing females and controlling everyone around you is over.”

  His finger tightened on the trigger of the weapon he held but the Commandant shouted, “Wait!” and waved his hands.

  “Why should I?” Trey growled.

  “Because if you kill me, you’ll never get out of here alive!” He spoke quickly, his black eyes wide, as though he was finally grasping the danger he was in.

  “I doubt that. I got in without too much trouble,” Trey remarked, a hard smile playing around the corners of his mouth.

  “Every guard in this place is under my control and there’s a life sensor attached to my heart that’s directly connected to an alarm downstairs!” the Commandant said in rush. “If you kill me, a silent alarm will go off and every single guard down there will be on alert, coming to kill you.”

  “Hmm, well that would be a problem,” Trey admitted. A slow smile curved his lips. “If I hadn’t already killed all of them.”

  The Commandant’s eyes narrowed. “You’re bluffing.”

  “Where do you think I got the uniform?” Trey asked, raising an eyebrow. “As a healer, I usually try to save life, not take it. But I’m willing to bet that every guard in this place has had a turn working in the torture rooms you keep in your basement. So my conscience is clear—and it will still be clear after shooting you, you raping bastard.”

  The Commandant nodded, as though accepting his fate but there was something in his eyes that Mia didn’t like.

  “Well, healer Treygar, before you shoot me, let me share one more thing about this little slut you came to rescue,” he spat. “You seem to think she’s so innocent and pure—so sweet and kind she couldn’t poison you and wouldn’t hurt a fly. Let me just disabuse you of that notion right now—look!”

  He spoke a rapid series of commands and the vid which had been playing on the wall that served as a screen—the one of Trey tasting Mia—suddenly changed. Instead of the two of them together, Mia suddenly saw herself wearing Care Center togs and walking down a familiar looking corridor. She was looking over her shoulder nervously, as though to make sure no one saw her as she entered a room at the very end—room 517.

  It was the hallway in her old Care Center, Mia realized, and she recognized the room that her image was slipping into. It was the room of the patient the Commandant had first “recruited” her to deal with.

  Sure enough, the vid showed her shutting the door and going to the bed where a youngish man with dark hair was lying inert, clearly in a drugged sleep. She watched with horror as Mia-in-the-vid drew out a large, empty syringe with a long needle. She drew back on the plunger, filling the syringe with air—100 ccs of it.

  “You’d think, as a healer’s aide, that our sweet little Mia here would have a healthy respect for life,” the Commandant said, in a conversational tone of voice. “I mean, don’t the lot of you take some kind of vow to protect your patients and never harm them?”

  As he spoke, Mia watched herself fit the needle of the air-filled syringe into the IV line flowing into the patient’s vein. Slowly but steadily, she depressed the plunger, injecting the entire 100 cc bolus of air directly into his line.

  “Dear me…” The Commandant shook his head and made a tsking sound. “Won’t that much air cause and embolus and kill a patient? Oh yes, I think it will,” he continued as Mia-in-the-vid turned off the alarm that sounded on the patient’s IV box and then slipped out of his room as quickly and quietly as she had gone in. “And unfortunately, I don’t think this particular patient made it, did he, my dear?” he asked, turning to Mia.

  Mia wanted to die. Had she been upset earlier when the Commandant had revealed she was a spy? Now she wished she could sink completely through the floor and disappear from Trey’s sight forever. What would he think of her now that he had seen her murder one of her patients? He would never want her to assist him in surgery as they had talked about. In fact, he wouldn’t want her near him at all—she would sicken and disgust him, Mia was sure.

  “Mia?” His deep voice forced her to look up at him and the expression on his face was uncertain. “Is this some kind of a trick? He doctored the vid, didn’t he?” he asked and it was clear he wanted her desperately to say yes.