True: 11 (New Species) Read online

  He ran the pad of his thumb over the side of her hand. “Just you. The two males with you were dead.”

  Her gut twisted at the memory of having to kill them but she refused to fall apart. Instead she focused on the fact that everyone had used the emergency exits to escape. “Shit. They all got away?”

  “Yes.”

  “But they didn’t take any New Species with them, right? All of them were accounted for? They survived?” She gave him a headcount of New Species at Cornas.

  He nodded. “Our teams had to blast open their doors with low-level explosives. Evidence was left that Security attempted to reach them but failed. There were scars on the doors from bullet strikes and it appeared as if they’d used one of the emergency axes to try to pry loose the hinges on a door. They failed.”

  Relief was immense. “Thank goodness.”

  “You disabled an entire floor of locks with a stun gun. What made you think to do that?”

  “I saw an electric door lock malfunction at the hematology lab.”

  “Hematology lab?”

  “It’s where they processed all the blood tests. I took a sample there once and found two of the technical support guys working on the door. One of the security officers was doing rounds and reached for his identification card to swipe and accidentally hit the on button for his stun gun on his belt. His other hand was touching the keypad. The jolt he got was enough to reach the pad and fried the circuits inside. It took them half an hour to replace the lock and get the door open.” She paused. “I realized I could use a stun gun to disable the doors if the need ever arose, and it did.”

  True continued to caress her. “You need to be completely honest with me, Jeanie. I won’t hate you or be angry if you were aware of more than you’ve claimed. I know money, to humans, is very important and you may have reasons for needing to withhold the location of Species to get the NSO to pay you. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me the absolute truth. The human task force will find out everything, they always do, and this is the time to be honest.”

  He slid off the bed to his knees, putting them at eye level. “No matter how bad you think it is, even if you believe I’ll be enraged by the details, I will protect you. Do you understand?” He lifted the hand holding hers and brought it to his lips. The kiss he brushed against the side of her thumb was featherlight. “I’ll forgive you. Just confess anything bad you’ve done now. I give you my word I won’t allow anyone to take you to prison.”

  “I’m not lying to you, True,” she said each word with care. It hurt being questioned again after being intimate but she understood why he’d have doubts. It was even touching that he’d make the offer if she had been neck-deep in the horrific things done to him and other New Species. “Everything I’ve done since discovering what Drackwood was really doing in those sublevels has been to get New Species free. It was never about money.”

  “Okay.”

  “I really thought I was working for someone who represented the NSO. I had no idea he wasn’t who he claimed to be. I trusted him because he had a badge and everything he told me seemed reasonable at the time.”

  He settled her hand on the bed, releasing it. “I’m going to get you paper and I want you to write down all the names of the humans you can remember at Cornas. I also need a description of the so-called agent. We are going to find him and learn if he knows the location of other Species. Did he tell you about another job he had for you? A new place? Ever mention other medical facilities where Species were being held?”

  She shook her head. “Just Cornas after Drackwood was taken down.”

  “I’ll be right back.” He rose to his feet and exited the room.

  Jeanie missed the warmth of his touch. It didn’t take him more than a minute to return with a notebook and a pen. He passed them over. She mumbled, “Thanks,” and opened the cover to begin writing.

  “I’m going to make some calls. I’ll just be in the next room. A few arrangements need to be made.”

  She nodded, not looking up from the list she printed neatly to make certain it was legible to anyone he gave it to. Her mind wandered as she wrote, thinking of one action she’d taken that caused guilty feelings. She wasn’t sure if True would have a problem with what she’d done to help New Species at Cornas Research. The more she thought about it, the more she decided to tell him. He wanted her to totally come clean about anything bad she’d done. It had been unavoidable.

  The sound of his voice could be heard from the living room but she couldn’t make out the words. The list was finished and a written description of Agent Brice outlined when he returned to the room. She closed the notebook and held it out with the pen.

  “Here you go.”

  He accepted it. “I’ll go pass this off to Flame. He’s stationed outside my door.”

  “To make sure I don’t make a run for it?”

  He hesitated. “The door doesn’t close all the way. No one will enter my home.”

  Jeanie figured the New Species in the hallway pulled double duty and True just didn’t want to admit they believed she’d try to escape. “You know how you told me to tell you about anything I’ve done that might have been wrong?”

  He’d turned away and taken a few steps before she’d spoken. He halted, his shoulders stiffened, and he slowly turned. The expression on his face wasn’t a happy one. “What did you do?”

  “I’m not really proud of it but I had no choice.”

  He approached. Her heart rate accelerated when he crouched down, dropping the notebook and pen on the floor to brace his hands on each side of the bed next to her hips. “Tell me.”

  “I didn’t have access to the room with the mainframe computer. It was above my security clearance. I also knew I had to get a stun gun. Only security guards carried them.” She kept looking into his eyes, hating seeing the anger and suspicion there. She didn’t glance away, though, because she wanted him to know she wasn’t lying. “I barely slept the night before the raid. I learned it was going to go down after I’d already left work because they’d kept me there that day longer than normal. I got home around eight thirty, changed my clothes to go for my jog, and got the text around nine.”

  “Go on.”

  She bit her lip and sighed. “The guards watch the monitors so they’d spot me on the cameras in a section I wasn’t allowed to be. Protocol would have sent them running to question me for being there, preventing me from doing what I had to do. That morning when I arrived I told them I saw a suspicious white van passing slowly by and that I thought I’d seen it before. I knew they’d want to review all the outside security feeds to check it out. They couldn’t watch the hallways and look at old feeds at the same time. There were only four monitors.”

  His features relaxed a little. “The lie was necessary. I understand.”

  “That’s not it. I’m getting to the part you might not like.”

  His mouth twisted downward but he didn’t say anything.

  “They had this kid working Security. He was barely out of high school and we didn’t really have lives working there. I mean, it wasn’t as if we could complain if they kept us fourteen hours instead of a standard eight-hour shift. We all lived in fear of pissing someone off by saying no. It meant that our social life suffered and the only other people we spent time around were other employees. I told Security I was a little freaked out and this kid liked me since he sure didn’t have time to meet girls his own age. He had what I needed.” She hated the tears that filled her eyes and she blinked them back.

  “You killed him to get his stun gun?”

  “No!” It shocked her that he thought her capable of committing premeditated murder. It quickly dulled though when reality set in. She had killed two security guards. Part of her mind kept attempting to shield her from allowing that to sink in. “I just fooled him into thinking I liked him to get close enough to grab his stun gun and I knocked him out to steal it and his card.”

  “That’s everything?”

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