“I want—” I whipped around, eyeballing the guard breathing down my neck. “Seriously, dude, you need to back the hell up.”
The guy was half a head shorter than me and nowhere in my league of extraordinary ass-kicking abilities, but he didn’t back down. “Keep. Walking.”
I stiffened. “And if I don’t?”
“Daemon,” Nancy called, her voice laced with impatience. “All you’re doing is delaying what you want.”
As much as I hated to admit it, she had a point. Sending the punk one last promising look, I turned and followed the woman down the hall. Everything was white with the exception of the black dots in the wall and ceilings.
I didn’t recall much about the inside of the buildings from when I’d been here as a kid, but I did remember there were very few places we’d been able to go. Most of the time we’d been kept to a community floor until we had assimilated and been set free.
Being back here didn’t sit well with me for a multitude of reasons.
Nancy stepped in front of a door and leaned down. A red light clicked on and shone in her right eye. The light on the panel turned green and the door unlocked. That was going to prove tricky, and I wondered whether, if I took on Nancy’s form, the systems had been prepped to recognize that. Then again, I felt as drained as the desert floor from whatever this building was outfitted with, so I wasn’t sure what I could actually pull off.
Inside the small circular room, there were several monitors manned by men in uniform. Each of the screens showed a different room, hall, or floor.
“Leave us,” she announced.
The men stood up from their stations and hastily exited the room, leaving Nancy and me with the tool who had come in with us.
“What did you want to show me?” I asked. “EuroCup?”
Her lips pursed. “This is one of many security control rooms stationed throughout the buildings. From here, we can monitor everything in Paradise Ranch.”
“Paradise Ranch?” I laughed bitterly. “Is that what you’re calling it now?”
She shrugged and then turned to one of the stations, her fingers flying over the keyboard. “All of the rooms are recorded. That helps us monitor activity for various reasons.”
I ran a hand over the scruff growing on my cheek. “Okay.”
“One of our concerns whenever we bring in new hybrids is to make sure they are not a danger to themselves or others,” she began, folding her arms. “It’s a process we take very seriously, and we go through several rounds of testing to ensure that they are viable.”
I really did not like where this was heading if it had anything to do with Kat.
“Katy has proven to have some issues and can become very dangerous.”
I ground down on my teeth so hard I was surprised they didn’t crack. “If she’s done anything, it’s because she was provoked.”
“Really?” Nancy punched a button on the keyboard, and the screen above her to the left flickered on.
Kat.
All the air went out of my lungs. My heart stopped and then sped up.
Kat was on the screen, sitting down with her back pressed against a wall. The image was grainy, but it was her—it was her. She was in the clothes she’d worn the night she was captured at Mount Weather, and that had to be weeks ago. Confusion rose swiftly. When was this taken? It couldn’t be a live feed.
Her hair hung down on the sides, shielding her beautiful face. I started to tell her to look up but realized at the last minute that would make me look like an imbecile.
“As you can see, no one is near her,” Nancy said. “That is Sergeant Dasher in the room with her. He is doing the initial interview.”
Suddenly, Kat’s chin jerked up, and she sprang to her feet, racing around a tall man in a military uniform. The next second, she hit the floor. I stared in open horror as Kat withered, and then one of the men unhooked a water hose from the wall.
Nancy flicked a button, and there was a different image. It took me a second to recover from the last scene and get what was going on now, but when I did, pure, red-hot rage lit me up.
On the screen were Kat and freaking Blake, squaring off. She whirled, grabbing for a lamp, but he darted in front, blocking her. When she swung on him, pride swelled in me. That was my Kitten, claws and all.
But the next thing had me searching for a way out of the room. Blake had intercepted her punch, twisted her arm, and swung her around. Pain registered on Kat’s face, and then he had her down on her back, pinned to the bed.
I saw red.
“This isn’t happening now,” Nancy said calmly. “This was a while ago, when she first arrived. It’s muted.”
Breathing heavily, I turned back to the TV. They were struggling, and Blake had obviously overpowered her. She was still fighting, though, her back bowing and her body twisting under his. Violence rose in me, powered by potent rage and a level of helplessness I’d never felt before, and it tasted like Blake’s blood. My hands formed fists, and I wanted to smash them in the monitor, since his face wasn’t in front of me.
When he had pulled her off the bed, and I saw him dragging her across the floor and off the screen, I spun toward Nancy. “What happened? Where did he take her?”
“Into the bathroom, where there are no cameras. We do believe in some sort of privacy.” She clicked something and the video fast-forwarded a couple of minutes, and Blake entered from the right. He sat on the bed—her bed—and Kat appeared a few seconds later, absolutely soaked.
I stepped forward, exhaling out of my nose. Words were exchanged between them, and then Kat whirled, opened a dresser, and grabbed clothes. She disappeared back into the bathroom.
Blake dropped his head into his hands.
“I’m going to fucking kill him,” I promised to no one in particular, but it was one I was going to keep. He would pay for this—all of this—one way or another.
The soldier cleared his throat. “Blake isn’t an issue anymore.”
I faced him, breathing raggedly. “Care to tell me why?”
He pressed his lips together. “Blake’s dead.”
“What?”
“He’s dead,” the guy repeated. “Katy killed him two days ago.”
The floor felt like it dropped out from underneath me. My first response was to deny it, because I didn’t want to believe that Kat would have had to do something like that—that she had to go through it.
The monitor was turned off, and Nancy watched me. “The reason I’m showing you this isn’t to upset you or to make you mad. You need to see with your own eyes that Katy has proven to be dangerous.”
“I have no doubt in my mind that if Kat really did do that, she had a reason.” My heart thudded in my chest. I needed to see her. If she had done this… I couldn’t bear to think about what she had to be going through. “And I would’ve done it, too, if I were in her shoes.”
Nancy tsked softly, and I added her to my Going to Die Painfully list. “I hate to think of you as being unstable, too,” she said.
“Kat isn’t unstable. All these videos show is her defending herself, or that she was scared.”
Nancy made a sound of disagreement. “Hybrids can be so unpredictable.”
I met her gaze and held it. “So can Luxen.”
Chapter 10
Daemon
They let me clean up in an empty communal area. At first I didn’t want to waste the time. I needed to get to Kat, but they weren’t giving me much of a choice, which turned out to be a good thing because I looked like something straight out of the mountains. The growth on my face was out of control. After a shave and a quick shower, I put on the black sweats and white shirt that had been left behind. Same standard uniform they had used years ago. Nothing like dressing everyone the same to make them feel like a nameless face in a crowd of nameless faces.