Sweat popped up on her spine and between her breasts. If he knew that, he was too close to knowing too much. And she was going to have a much harder time getting away from him than she’d thought.
“I recognize the signs of your power,” he said, ignoring her comment, “because the members of the firefighting team I was telling you about all have powers. They have powers because your chemicals from DARPA—”
“They weren’t my chemicals.”
“—were stored secretly in a warehouse that caught fire and blew them all to hell.”
Halina didn’t catch her gasp before it slipped out. The rasp sounded loud in the dark car. She closed her eyes, her stomach clenching around a hard ball of dread.
She’d known the risk of holding back the information that would have exposed Schaeffer. Known it would leave him out there with the possibility of harming others. But at that time, she’d been choosing between the possibility of strangers being harmed and the absolute reality of Mitch being killed.
“Is that how you found me?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said simply, no elaboration before going on. “Every member suffered critical injuries. One firefighter was killed.”
Halina kept her gaze locked out the window, but saw nothing shining in the headlights. She steeled her stomach muscles against the blows and clenched her teeth.
“They healed with miraculous speed and developed paranormal abilities like yours afterward. So, don’t try to tell me you don’t have powers. Don’t try to tell me you didn’t work with those chemicals.”
Halina said nothing even though a million questions now battered her throbbing brain.
“To keep a long story semi-short,” he said, “since then, efforts by the team to uncover what really happened at the warehouse and what they’d been exposed to and why the chemicals were there caused Schaeffer to unleash a shit storm of roadblocks.
“They’ve been followed and watched every day since. They’ve been threatened. One member was falsely imprisoned for murder. Another was held in a lab and used as an experiment for years. Two others were poisoned and nearly died. Another had family kidnapped and his wife killed—”
Oh my God. She couldn’t take it anymore. “What’s your point?”
He didn’t immediately speak. “You don’t sound shocked, Halina. I expected . . . I don’t know, maybe a little more horror on your part.”
“I know what kind of man Schaeffer is.”
“And you didn’t think anyone else needed to know about it?”
The judgment in his voice sliced into the open wounds created by his information. She lowered her voice when she repeated, “I know what kind of man Schaeffer is.”
Mitch let out a breath before continuing. “We’ve spent the last year tracing the chemicals the team was exposed to back to DoD. To DARPA, specifically. To Rostov and Gorin. To the same project you worked on with them—the elite soldier of the future.”
“That wasn’t my project.” She turned on him, glaring. “I am—was—a genetic scientist.”
“A genetic scientist using the chemicals—”
“No. I was not using the chemicals.” Frustration boiled over.
“What’s the bottom line here, Mitch? What exactly do you want from me?”
“There is no exactly, Halina.” He met her gaze a long moment before returning his eyes to the road. His jaw muscle flexed beneath a cheek heavy with stubble. “We need every scrap of evidence you can give us. We need to know everything you know. And I want to know how you implicated me in this. I want to know how it is that six years after our relationship ended, my family, my friends, and I are tangled up to our eyeballs with Schaeffer.”
Halina’s mind flicked to Alyssa and the skin below her left eye twitched. She still missed Mitch’s sister. She was the kind of woman Halina would have remained friends with for life had this situation not separated them. And even though they’d only been close for several months while she and Mitch were dating, they’d still manage to develop a tight bond. Similar to the way Halina and Mitch had grown so close, so fast.
Halina had always believed that keeping Mitch safe extended in many ways to keeping Alyssa safe. The twins were so close. She’d always known one would be lost if something happened to the other.
The thought reinforced her determination.
“I don’t understand how you think I can help you.” She started ticking off her fingers. “I didn’t work on the project. I didn’t know about the project. I can only reproduce my research if given at least six months and a state-of-the-art lab. Everything within DARPA is confidential. Even if I did tell you something, there would be no way to back it up. I could confess that the DoD knows Russia is secretly inhabited with aliens and there would be no way to prove it.”
Mitch flicked his wrist carelessly. “Everyone already knows about Russia.”
She made a supremely frustrated noise in her throat. “God, you make me want to strangle you.”
“I always did resort to the strangest things just to get your hands on me.”
“Mitch! Dammit.”
She turned away from him, angry with herself for letting him piss her off. Angry with him for using his humor to infuriate her. She searched for something she could tell him, give him, to satisfy his need for information without exposing too much, tipping him off to what she really knew. Her mind skipped and jumped and ricocheted. When she couldn’t, she decided on diversion instead.
“How is Alyssa involved in this?”
“She’s married to one of the firefighters, which is how I got involved and why I stayed involved. Now they’re all more like brothers and sisters than friends, because, you know, you pick your friends. Brothers and sisters are forced on you, whether you like them or not. And this group . . . definitely forced on me.”
A huff of laughter slipped out, but Halina didn’t feel the humor his joke would have normally produced. She couldn’t feel anything but the smothering guilt. And self-hatred for not being able to do more. Not being able to make it all go away.
Mitch raked his free hand through his hair, pulling his nails along his scalp to keep him awake as he drove. Halina had drifted off and he’d let her. He wasn’t sure if she was truly as confused as she seemed, if her head wound was creating that confusion or if she was just a good actress.
He’d have to find a place to stop soon or he’d fall asleep at the wheel. Alyssa’s house was still one hell of a long drive. They couldn’t take a commercial flight now, but he could charter a jet. . .
Oh, hell, he should have thought about that earlier. Though, he cringed thinking about the fight Halina would give him when he tried to put her on a private jet. He definitely needed sleep before he faced that.
He picked up his phone to search for the nearest hotel and it vibrated in his hand. The screen read PITA X, short for Pain In The Ass, Extraordinaire, which meant it was Kai calling him back.
Since Halina was still dozing, he put the phone to his ear instead of taking it on the speaker. “Hey,” he answered. “Tell me something that will keep me awake so I don’t drive myself into a post.”
Kai started singing “Rock-a-bye Baby.”
“Hilarious.”
“Especially at three a.m., right?” Kai’s voice made the smile cutting across his face visible even across seven hundred miles and a cell phone connection.
“No wonder you don’t have a woman.”
“Care to toss any of your extras my way?”
He glanced at Halina, her pale, battered face stark against the dark patchwork of Dex’s fur. All of them except this one was the first thing that came to mind. He forced his gaze out the windshield and the stupid thought from his mind. Stupid, stupid thought.