Wicked Attraction (The Protector) Read online

  “I don’t get it, how can you not be pinpointing him? Isn’t that the point of the chip?” Ewan threw out both hands, then faced the wall comm. As it turned out, the long string of letters and numbers that Katrinka had given him in order to track Jordie had needed to go through an additional set of decoding before it could even begin to be tracked. The delay had him on edge. Pacing. “C’mon, guys, you have to give me something I can use.”

  “It’s harder than we expected. The system wasn’t so hard to crack into, but the information in it hasn’t been updated in years. We can only get locations when the chip connects to the system, and since most of the receiving centers were shut down and even destroyed, well . . . we only get a piece of the picture. We’re working on some triangulations now.” Barney had been part of Ewan’s sec team for the past five years and had never let him down; he looked devastated to be doing so, now. “We’re going to get you a location, Mr. Donahue. I promise.”

  “Thanks, Barney. Ping me the second you have something.” Ewan disconnected and turned to find Al staring at him with narrowed eyes. “What?”

  “They’ll figure it out. We should have a plan for when they do.”

  “Yeah. Of course. The plan is, we go there together, and you kick all their asses and we get her back,” Ewan said.

  “What about the kid?”

  Ewan shook his head. “I don’t care about Jordie Dev. If we get Nina back, he can be left behind to deal with whoever he made his deals with.”

  “You don’t want to see him arrested? He’ll go to prison for sure.”

  “Katrinka Dev has enough money to keep her son out of prison.” Ewan rolled his neck on his shoulders with a wince at the strain in his muscles. It had been little more than a day since Nina had walked out of here on her way to see her sister, but it seemed like years. All this wasted time was driving him insane.

  “You really do love her, huh?”

  He turned to face Al. “Yeah. I do.”

  “Not trying to rustle your jimmies, Mr. Billions,” Al said quickly, holding up her hands in gesture of surrender. “I think it’s hyper icy to see you two crazy kids cooing over each other. But it makes you stupid, and I don’t aim to get in the way of stupid. Shiny fine? We need to actually discuss what’s going to happen when you get that kid’s location and we go there. You’ve clearly decided not to bother with the regular authorities—”

  “I hired you,” Ewan bit out, “because I thought you’d be the best option.”

  Again, Al held up her hands. “I get it. The police would be too slow, and there’d be the legal ramifications of involving them. Whatever. You got me, instead. So let’s make sure we are on the same page. I’m gonna need an understanding between us.”

  “Shiny fine. What?” Ewan’s comm hadn’t pinged, but he looked at it anyway. Blank screen. With a muttered curse, he kept himself from throwing it at a wall.

  “What I say, goes,” Al said as though she hadn’t heard him calling the comm an evil name. “If we go into a situation where I need to protect you, you have to be sure you’re listening to me. You listening?”

  She was waiting for him to answer her, Ewan realized. When he looked up, Al’s pale green eyes blazed in a hard expression. “Yeah. I’m listening.”

  “Good. Because if I’m taking you on, that means you’re my responsibility. I’ll do my best for you, but if there’s any signs at all that it’s going bad and you’re going to get hurt, I’ll haul you out of there so fast you’ll think you got sent back in time.”

  “Do they give you guys a class in this, or what?” Ewan said with a frown, reminded too strongly of Nina’s When you’re mine, you’re mine all the way.

  “They do, actually,” Al said solemnly. “ProtectCorps is really strict about training. We all had to pass a test. Leona says she has a reputation for a reason, and it ain’t because her people let clients get killed. Will you promise to listen to me?”

  Ewan nodded after a hesitation, setting aside his anger and worry for a few seconds as he gave Al his attention. “Yes. Of course I will.”

  “Because it seems likely that whoever this Jordie kid’s working for will have some security, probably a lot of security. It’s not going to be easy to get to her, even when you do find him. And what are you going to do if she’s not where he is?”

  “I will leave it up to you to make sure he tells you where she is.”

  Al grinned. “Maybe I’ll get to pop him one, huh?”

  “Yeah. I’m guessing you will.”

  Ewan’s comm pinged. He swiped to look at the message and the coordinates. He looked up at Al with a grim smile.

  “They got him.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “You’ll be all right. Let me take care of that pain for you. Relax. I will make you feel better.”

  The voice, soothing and somehow metallic, spoke like a person, but Nina knew it belonged to a medtech unit designed to provide solace to patients so injured they weren’t supposed to know they were almost dead. She’d been in this place before, however, and so she blinked away the haze from the drugs that were meant to ease her agony.

  She couldn’t figure out the source of her pain, but dull aches ran up and down her limbs, and a sharper pain twisted itself at the base of her spine. The left side of her head had been shaved bare, but there didn’t seem to be any wounds there. She wasn’t bound by bandages, didn’t feel any stitches, and could see no bruises. Even so, she hurt in more places than she did not, but she didn’t mind.

  She preferred the pain.

  It kept her grounded. Focused. It kept her aware of not only where she was, but who.

  She didn’t struggle against the needle in her arm or the medicine coursing into her, even as a cold heat ran along her veins and churned her stomach. She simply settled her body into the effort of keeping the drugs from working. It was harder than she remembered it being, an actual conscious effort rather than an automatic response.

  Not impossible, though. She concentrated. She pushed away the haze every time it came back. Several times, red tinged the edges of her vision and threatened to become black, but Nina breathed slowly, deeply, steadily. She focused and concentrated, and every time, her vision cleared. She’d have laughed in triumph, if she hadn’t needed that energy to keep defeating the drugs’ efforts at sending her back to unconsciousness.

  The medtech unit beeped in dismay, perhaps because it had dispersed all of the contents it had been determined to inject into her. Nina waited for someone to come and refill it, but she remained alone. She got out of bed and used the bathroom. Desperate for a drink, she put her mouth to the faucet but nothing came out but a slow hiss of air.

  Back in the bedroom, Nina looked out the window at the gray sky. Had there been a window there before? She couldn’t recall. It didn’t seem like there had been. This one didn’t have bars or wire mesh on it. Why would it? she asked herself, wondering why she’d be surprised. The rain coursing down the glass reminded her of something, but she couldn’t think of what. There were lots of little holes like that. Pinpricks in the fabric of her recollections. She would never get used to that feeling, like a tongue probing a sore tooth over and over, only to discover an empty spot in her jaw.

  Nina knew what had happened to her, even if she couldn’t remember the details. She’d taken a job. It had been sensitive; she’d been exposed to information she wasn’t supposed to retain. At the end of it, the client had reset her, wiping her short-term memories using the tech embedded in her skull. Maybe something bad had happened along the way—her injuries certainly made that clear. She would never know, probably, the extent of what had occurred.

  She didn’t really want to.

  For now, it was enough to allow herself to feel the pain in her wounds and go through the lists she kept in her head of all the things she did remember. Her name. Where she’d grown up. Her sisters, her parents, the name of her first pet. When she reached a blank place, Nina didn’t try to fill it. She moved on. In a fe