Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 107720 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 539(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107720 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 539(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
The longer he stared at me with that tight little smile, the more I felt useless and vulnerable and...human.
“Wh-What did you do to us?” I coughed, clearing my throat from the dregs of pain. “Where are we? Who are you?”
“Goodness.” Pushing off from the doorway, he dropped his arms and came toward me. “Three questions in one. Nosy little thing, aren’t you? But I suppose I can oblige.” He stopped next to my chair and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
My skin crawled. I cringed away, but the buckles and straps kept me pinned.
“There, there.” He smirked. “I’m not going to hurt you. After all, you’re both rather precious.” Dropping his hand, he shrugged. “My answers are...we didn’t do anything to you...yet.” He smirked wider at that. “Second, you’re in my own personal home after the unfortunate destruction of our much-loved headquarters. And three, my name is Roy Swift.”
Swift...
Something about that name...
Narrowing my eyes, I studied him. I’d never met him before but something about him seemed similar. The shape of his mouth, the sweep of his eyebrows. Pushing sixty or so, he wore a black suit and haughty arrogance that I’d seen elsewhere. But where?
He let me study him. “Any other questions before we begin?”
“Begin? Begin what exactly?”
“The extraction, of course.” His entire face lit up as if today was a happy day for him. “You have no idea how patient we’ve been since Lucien escaped. We’ve had the most terrible time trying to get the reactors to work without his blood. Not counting the financial disaster he caused to his own company, he also has an untold number of deaths on his hands.”
“Deaths?”
“The others that rely on regular transfusions of his blood to stay stable.”
I shot a horrified look at Lucien. Just how many men had been drinking his blood over the years? No wonder they took so much from him and left him weak and hurting all the damn time.
Glowering at Roy Swift, I spat, “You don’t have to do this. Marcus is dead. Stop taking orders from a dead man and let us go.”
He chuckled softly. “Do you honestly think a company of this size and a project as life changing as this could be overseen just by one person? Silly girl. There’s twenty-four of us. Well, there was. You’re right that our numbers have dwindled. Which actually works in your favour, seeing as we won’t have to take nearly as much blood to service us all. Which leads me back to rebuilding our stock so nothing like this has to happen again.”
I ignored the twisting in my chest. “What stock?”
“The ones we created with Lucien’s blood of course.” He strolled around the room, his hands linked behind his back. “Twenty-seven men and women we’d painstakingly created all dropped like flies when Lucien escaped. Without his blood to sustain the change in their DNA, their hearts stopped. None of them survived because he selfishly decided to leave.”
“Are you seriously trying to blame that on Lucien? You were the ones who hurt them. You tortured—”
“Not all,” he cut in with a snarl. “Some were rather happy when offered money. The ones we could trust lived a life outside a cage—going about their chosen lives—”
“And what about those poor people in China?” I spat. “All those people trapped in that cave and imprisoned by a frequency net?”
“Those?” He laughed quietly. “Those were rejects. They couldn’t handle the changes, even with the smallest amounts. We allowed them to live on the off chance they might breed something stronger, but...they were worthless.”
“You’re a monster.”
“Now, now.” He grinned. “We were getting along so well. No need to ruin it. After all, we’ll be working together for a very long time to come.”
“I will never work with you.”
“You’re wrong, little girl.” Stopping his pacing, his face turned cold. “Up until now, Lucien has been the sole key in creating watered down versions of himself.” Lifting up his arm, he splayed his fingers. The smallest shadow pooled in his palm, dancing around his hand like a black ribbon. “For decades, we didn’t know how to extract the power that was inside him. We merely had to make do with earning a fortune off his company, but then we figured out how to extract the R gene from his harvested blood and inject it into others. A lot of them died but those who survived gradually grew stronger with each transfusion. Strong enough to grant us powers in return.”
Walking around me, he trailed his shadowy fingers over my hair. “We had a good little supply going on down in the basement. Enough for all of us to fight aging and grant us some fun little gifts.”
He sent the shadow looping around my neck, slithering like a slimy snake. “Every board member benefited.” He chuckled. “Call it a perk of the job but we’ve gotten used to being just a little more than human, and when our supplies started dying, well...” He came back to face me, his eyes narrowing into slits. “You can imagine we got a little angry.”