Forbidden Stranger Read online

  Public outcry, led by Ewan himself, had forced the enhanced soldiers out of the army and made any further use of the tech illegal. He’d been determined that nobody should have their mind and memories deliberately stolen from them. As with any kind of tech, however, it had begun to degrade, leaving the original fifteen enhanced soldiers with deteriorating mental faculties and increasing physical problems. It had taken getting to know Nina and falling in love with her to show Ewan he’d been wrong to deny the enhanced any upgrades to the tech. He’d worked nonstop since then to not only reverse the legislation making it illegal to upgrade the tech, but also to program and provide the actual upgrades.

  What nobody had known was that the enhanced had been given additional software that did more than allow their memories to be reset. With a different set of triggers, the soldiers could be forced to self-terminate to protect classified information from being extracted or accessed. Wanda Crosson had been behind that part of it all, and the bastards who’d taken Nina had exploited that function to delete any possible recovery of information that would identify them. There was no way to know what memories or experiences her captors had tied to that programming, and the only person who could possibly have made a guess was no longer able to reveal any secrets.

  Jordie Dev had been, illegally and presumably against his will, fitted with the enhancement tech as well as the same memory-altering software. Under arrest for his part in Nina’s kidnapping, Jordie had warned his interrogators about the secret self-termination programming and what it could do. Their questioning had activated the previously unknown function, and he’d suffered such severe mental dysfunction that he’d been institutionalized in a facility for the criminally insane.

  There was no way Ewan was going to risk Nina suffering the same fate. She’d barely survived the surgery to implant the upgrades for her existing tech. Ewan had programmed it to provide all of the enhanced with better long-term quality of life, but there’d been no way to safely delete the self-termination functions. He had teams working on it to crack the coding Wanda Crosson had written. Since she could not be trusted to provide new programming that would work, not even in return for a lesser sentence, it was taking longer to find a solution than Ewan had wanted. He hoped to have the next set of upgrades coded to include a total removal of anything that would ever allow any of them to have their memories destroyed, but so far there’d been too many errors in the feedback to risk attempting actual use.

  In the meantime, he had to keep Nina safe from trying to destroy herself.

  Ewan had paid to upgrade the security on this island retreat, keeping away everyone. He’d paid even more money to throttle the ’net and limit access to the outside world to further protect her. Aggie and Jerome had both previously pulled long careers in private security, and while neither was enhanced, both had combat and med training. Aggie kept the house and Jerome maintained the grounds, including the security systems, but both were also trained to keep Nina from hurting herself. They monitored her when Ewan couldn’t be on the island by syncing the citizen identity chip implanted in her wrist. They could know where she was at all times, not that she could go very far on the small island. They made sure to watch for any signs that the fatal programming had kicked in.

  It had already, once. In the beginning, shortly after Nina had regained consciousness and managed to stay awake longer than an hour or so. Jordie Dev had not yet spilled the information about what had been done to him and all the others, so Ewan and the team of docs he’d hired to take care of Nina had not known they had to be careful about what they told her. She had asked him where she was, and why, and Ewan had told her.

  Nina had broken free of hospital-grade restraints and knocked him down to get out of her room. Ewan had run after her. She’d beat him to the island’s cliffs and thrown herself over the edge. No hesitation, not a single second of it. She’d run toward the edge and kept going. Ewan would never forget the horror of watching her determination, of being helpless to stop her.

  Nina had missed the water by only a few inches. She’d been saved from drowning, but her injuries had been severe. Ewan had fought fiercely against the use of the tech to “reset” the enhanced, but that had been the only solution to keep her from responding to the self-termination commands. They’d had to reset her three times before she’d stopped struggling and returned to a baseline docility that was so unlike the Nina Ewan had first met that he feared she’d been permanently impaired, not in her mental functions, but in her personality. Her soul, not that he believed in such a thing.

  If she was not the same woman he’d first met, the one who’d had no problem putting him in his place and keeping him on his toes, she was still the woman he loved more than anything else the world. Her enhancements helped her to heal faster, but they wouldn’t be able to bring her back from death. Ewan had determined there would be nothing to provoke another attempt. No matter what he had to do.

  The airtranspo settled onto the scourged stone clifftop. Its bland metallic voice announced that he’d arrived, and moments later, the door opened so he could hop out. Transpo vehicles were mostly government owned and operated, but this one belonged to him, so it wouldn’t be going anywhere until he ordered it. Ewan had spent close to a hundred thousand credits for the privilege and considered it worth every penny for contributing to his privacy.

  Too bad money couldn’t buy any guarantee of Nina’s complete recovery. It could not promise she would ever be the woman she’d been before. The best his insanely enormous bank account could do was to keep her in comfort in this place on the island, where it was possible her memories could eventually return to her safely, without tempting her to kill herself.

  Ewan traveled light, having already shipped everything he needed to the island house, so when Jerome came out to greet him, all Ewan had for him to grab was a handshake. “Jerome. Good to see you.”

  “G’day, Mr. Donahue, sir,” Jerome said as he gave Ewan’s fingers a hearty squeeze. The tall, gray-haired man was stronger than he looked.

  Ewan didn’t bother to correct or remind the groundskeeper to call him by his first name. Jerome had always insisted on formality. “How’s life been here?”

  “The same. Cold. Rain. Dark. Other than that, uneventful, which I’d say is what we like best.” Jerome shrugged. “No bags?”

  Ewan laughed and shook his head. “Not this time. I think I finally have everything I need right here.”

  Clothes, food . . . Nina. Onegod, he was so looking forward to seeing her again. It had been a couple weeks since his last visit, and he hated being away for even a day. It had taken a few months to get his business in order enough that he could spent all of his time dealing with it remotely, but finally everything had settled into place. He should rarely have to leave the island again. He could devote his time and life to being with the woman he loved, for at least as long as she allowed him to.

  Nina might never remember who she’d been or what had happened. She might never remember him from before, or what they’d been to each other. In time, it was likely she’d want to leave the island, and him behind.

  Ewan wasn’t going to think about that right now.

  Jerome led the way over the rocky cliff toward the patches of sparse grass that bled into slightly better-kept grounds. Beyond that, the house. It wasn’t old, but it looked it. Weathered by the fierce winds and rains that frequently scourged the island, the house’s white paint was shabby. The roof shingles had faded to a dark gray from the original black. The front door had been painted crimson, and even that had faded to a dull rose red. The door opened as they approached the house, and Ewan strained to see who was welcoming them.

  It was Aggie. She wore her familiar uniform of dark gray trousers and a matching sweater, with a full apron over it that she used now to wipe her hands. She waved at him and Jerome with a broad grin. He couldn’t smell anything from here, but Ewan knew the house would be redolent with the delicious odors of cooking from Aggie’s kitchen. She w