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  He tried to focus on the three screens before him and punched in a command.

  Of the Regent Black Guards, the most formidable and soulless were the Regents’ personal assassins, referred to in whispers as the Sicaria. They maintained visible facilities and grounds at the edges of the New Delphi grid and covert locations connected to the grid’s underbelly. The Sicaria’s point-of-no-return for their victims was the Pit, beneath the Justice Building. The irony of the site’s name and location wasn’t lost on any inhabitant of Down Below.

  Real-time images of all the Black Guard sites displayed across his screen. Enhanced personnel images flew past, his recognition metrics cataloging every face against a rendering of Aaron’s facial structure.

  Wherever they were holding Sicaria Squad 5, none of the team members had shown up outside the guard barracks above ground since their arrival a week ago at the helopad.

  The memory of shocked golden eyes, laced with thick coal lashes, interrupted his thought process.

  Damn it.

  He should contact Ty about her and be done with it. At least once Ty returned. Of course, then Clay would have to submit to whatever decision Ty reached about the woman’s fate. Truthfully, he would have a problem killing her. He would have a problem killing anyone anymore.

  His own forced labor for the Regents stuck in his craw, creating a sharp disconnect between the life he could now live and the one he couldn’t forget. His rescue by Ty only reinforced his need for a clearly justified termination of anyone’s life. While she had obviously followed Ty and had exposure to their information, Clay would have a problem torturing her for her secrets.

  He’d gone soft. Five years running covert missions and hiding behind technology in the Down Below of New Delphi had allowed him to shed the calloused exterior he’d needed to serve in the Regent Border Guard of the United Canadian Territories.

  With a grunt, he returned to the problem at hand. Realistically, Ty would never demand he kill her. However, the alternative of giving her up for someone else to interrogate caused him just as much heartburn.

  Focus on the mission. The cover over his eye retracted as he launched a map of New Delphi. The 3-D translucent streets and government buildings hung suspended in the air before him. Adding a quick overlay of the Regent guard complexes and subsidiary buildings in gold, he tapped along the delivery point of the landing strip to the guard barracks and several other locations he considered feasible for housing the squad.

  Lines of data: measurements, time schedules, guard rotations, ammunition deliveries—all flooded various frames of the screen. His ocular processor analyzed each nuance. Picking and choosing from the information, his eye cataloged pertinent data. Accordingly, he adjusted his rough outline of personnel and functional needs for the mission to the input. The overwhelming volume sucked his focus back to the task.

  They would need containment for Aaron. Violent missions, punitive treatment, and claustrophobic proximity to death didn’t make Sicaria Squad team members good candidates for release into the general populace. Then again, their arrival here was likely about debriefing, not rest and relaxation, making the extraction trickier.

  He didn’t like this scenario. The plan for extraction might as well be a fortune-telling exercise for the lack of significant details. Not that he didn’t have a wealth of experience pulling a plan out of nothing. With a frustrated exhale, he leaned back in his chair and pressed his palm over his normal eye. Difficult or not, he needed to lock on to several scenarios and identify skill sets so Ty could finalize the list of other team members.

  The ear-shattering scream almost dropped him out of his chair and on to his ass.

  ***

  Tiny prickles of discomfort worked along Esme’s skin, piercing her mental haze. She flexed her hands in the fastenings behind her back. The stiffness in her neck and sharp twinge between her shoulder blades didn’t concern her—not until she blinked and the darkness didn’t recede.

  Not again. Never again.

  Panic and fear gripped her as memories flooded her mind. Driven by instinct, she pulled her knees toward her chest as she wrestled to free herself.

  I have nothing to tell. I know nothing. Just kill me and be done with it.

  A guttural howl erupted from her throat as she thrashed against the concrete and the cold metal of her restraints. The wash of recall carried her back to useless struggles against bruising fingers, followed by sharp blows to her face and body—faceless voices shouting repetitious commands for information she didn’t have. The pricks of needles to make her talk, followed by more needles to make her lose her grip on reality. Every painful moment she had worked so hard to lock down now whipped, uncontrolled, through her mind in her prison of darkness.

  “Stop it.”

  The deep voice accompanied by a quick shake, one more real than the nightmares, cut through Esme’s fog.

  “Damn it, you’re going to hurt yourself.”

  She winced at the blindfold’s disappearance and following flood of light, then gulped in the air that had evaded her for the last several minutes. Not able to form words, she shook her head and glared at the man holding her on his lap. His metallic eye patch reflected the white of the overhead lights, the glare blending with the streaks of white, gold, and light brown in his hair.

  Not a Regent guard. She wasn’t being tortured again, but it was still the same routine. He had said he would kill her. What difference did more time make? She sagged in his arms, too tired to fight again.

  A faint click preceded a swoosh as he released his sidearm, shoved it across the floor, and pulled her against his chest.

  When his hand moved for the discarded blindfold, she lost control. “No. Please don’t put that on. Please. I can’t…I’m not…I won’t…please.” The last word strangled into a whisper as she bit the inside of her cheek and looked away to keep from crying. She had refused to cry for the guards and wouldn’t start now, no matter what it cost her.

  He tilted her chin until she couldn’t avoid eye contact with him, the frown between his brows deepening. Then he held up the blindfold, arched his brow, and shoved the cloth in his pocket. “Was only picking it up, Sugar.”

  She blinked at his term of endearment. A slip, not an indication he cared. Yet no one had ever called her anything but child, wife, or soldier, utilitarian names not meant to imply a bond. Ty’s brief use of her name didn’t count. After all, his betrayal had led her here. Despite her surprise at this man’s form of address, she didn’t mistake the lighthearted nickname from the underworld pirate as his attempt to bond with her. His words to her before the laser shot had promised retribution. However, the concern now in his one blue eye didn’t exactly fit with cold-blooded murder.

  “I’m going set you down and get you something to drink. Are you hungry?”

  She shook her head, then ducked to hide the heat in her cheeks while he moved her off his lap and settled her against the wall. Acting like a baby was a shameful waste of energy, but her body retained the phantom of fear too well. She’d been out of her mind enough that he’d picked her up to calm her without her awareness.

  The soft tread of his boots registered his movement toward the door. A warning she cataloged too late as the lock clicked and the overhead lights vanished. The darkness spiraled her back to madness in an instant, with a scream she couldn’t have stopped if she tried.

  The door rebounded off the wall, the lights flooded back, and his arms scooped her up again before Esme had time to regain control.

  “Sugar, you’re making me crazy here.”

  “The light. Please don’t leave me in the dark.” The worst things had come in the dark. Days spent at the bottom of a cold, wet tank infested with bugs, rodents, and heaven only knew what else. Days spent half-crazed from drugs, interrogated in murky gray by round after round of cold-blooded, callous guards.

  Sanity returned in small measures with gulps of air, and her focus on his large hand stroking her back. There was no way to retr
act her scream. However, the inflamed, raw abrasions on her wrist from tugging and the blossoming bruises over her hips and shoulder from her violent inch-worming across the floor—those she should probably have controlled.

  “Look. I’ll program the light to stay on, but you have to give a little here. Playing on my sympathy is only going to get you so far. Stop trying to wheedle your way free, whoever you are.”

  He deliberately moved her to arm’s length and gave her a stern look—or tried. The clench of his jaw and the tight lines around his mouth didn’t reach his eye as it assessed her. She was still hysterical enough she considered laughing at him. Fortunately, sanity stopped her. “Esme.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My name is Esme.” Wasn’t that the first rule? If they had your name, your interaction became personal, making it harder for someone to kill you. Oddly enough, she had never bothered to give the Regent guards her name.

  He shook his head. Evidently, he was familiar with the rule and her ploy. “Fine, Esme. Now sit here and try to keep it together.” He removed a small device from his pocket, pointed it at the lock mechanism, and then glanced up as he tested the door with both of them still in the room.

  The lights remained on. With a terse nod, he latched the door and left her alone.

  She glanced up at the irregularly shaped bumps dotting the ceiling. Small transmitters, probably. Forcing her mind to scrutinize the technology of the room and puzzle out the connections, she grappled for any way to keep her thoughts from regressing. He had heard her and probably seen her too, so it wasn’t a soundproof room.

  Somehow, that helped. She’d been in enough places where no one could hear her scream.

  ***

  “What the hell am I going to do with her?” Clay repeated under his breath with a snarl. He stalked toward his rations room, trying to dispel the image of rich tanned skin and soft light brown hair. No, not tanned. The dusky brown would never come off her body no matter how much he touched and tasted, no matter how long she lived in the darkness beneath New Delphi’s grid.

  Clay cursed and grabbed a canister of purified water, then rooted through his provisions, suddenly intent on finding something to tempt her appetite. She didn’t look emaciated, but with those dark rings under her gorgeous golden eyes, she didn’t look healthy or nourished. Yet in spite of her fear, her eyes had gleamed with fight. She had touched a long-dead part of him, freeing pain and tenderness he had hoped to keep locked away forever.

  Stuffing a packet of kelp wafers into his pants pocket, he grabbed a ripe apple from the basket Trace had left last week. He paused and glanced back at the locked door, then returned the apple with a sigh.

  If she was a spy, letting her know there was a supply line for healthy food outside the kelp distribution would put not only Trace and his small band of underground renegades at risk, but Ty as well. He couldn’t bring down a whole infrastructure just because he wanted to feed one woman an apple. Damn if he didn’t want to, though.

  Digging back in to his rations, he extracted a tin of hash. Granted it was the standard green kelp and smelled atrocious, but at least she’d have something nutritious.

  Then what are you going to do with her? He shoved the thought away. No doubt, Ty would tell him to let her go. However, what she had overheard and the risk to the latest mission couldn’t permit such leniency, even if he didn’t have a solid plan yet. Aaron’s name alone would be enough to target the young man for termination.

  As beautiful as she was, with all those soft, rounded curves, she could easily be a Regent spy planted to flush them out.

  He paused. The vivid image of her shaking in fear and her pupils dilated in shock bore into his brain. No. He shook his head. He wasn’t that much of a fool. Given the way she’d screamed and begged—hell, she probably didn’t even realize she’d spoken aloud. He had seen enough survivors to know a victim of the Black Guard’s interrogation techniques. Hardly a wonder she looked fragile.

  Though they could have bugged her, be using her now without her knowledge. Neither of those scenarios explained her following Ty. And he was certain the only way she could have entered his secure shipping storage was on Ty’s heels. He didn’t need the playback of his net images to confirm her stalking.

  For now, he would feed her and keep her locked up. She couldn’t get in to any trouble in the containment room.

  He would be fine as long as he didn’t think about her.

  Chapter 3

  “I’m not letting you out.”

  Esme gritted her teeth at Clay’s response and glared at her captor. He’d brought her blankets, escorted her to use the bathroom, and kept bringing her food as if she hadn’t eaten in weeks. Each food ration had been smelly, green, and fortunately bland. However, choking down the processed assortment of wafers and paste assured his presence by her side and staved off long, solitary hours. At least they felt long. She figured she’d been here for only two days, though it seemed like weeks.

  And while Clay—for she’d finally wheedled his name from him—talked tough, he made no move to harm her. In fact, he offered her more personal attention than any man she had ever encountered. If there was a cold-blooded killer inside his crusty shell, then he buried it deep when he was around her without much difficulty.

  The emotional façade of men driven to abuse remained branded in her memory. Their soullessness radiated from flat, cold eyes that never wavered no matter how much pain they inflicted. Until her stay in the Pit, she had considered her father and Ivan cold and heartless. The month of her captivity in the Regent’s maximum-security prison provided a new measure for comparison. Clayton Ebris fell nowhere in the spectrum of cold-blooded evil, no matter how much he wanted her to believe otherwise.

  “Just change the resolution on the window.” At Clay’s stare, Esme nodded to the crystal screen fronting as a wall. It had taken her only an hour, after she’d calmed down, to determine that the opaque surface with the cold texture was a programmed function of interactive electronics and matter. Unlike the steel walls that comprised the rest of the room. “You must have a way for it to distort transmissions and still show some image. All I would see is you and the outlines of whatever you have on the other side, nothing else. I’d at least know someone was here.”

  Arms crossed over his chest, Clay bowed his head, scowling. “You are one tiny mess of trouble. If you’re smart enough to figure out the screen, then you can probably work your way around gathering more dangerous details.”

  Frustrated with her failure as he turned to leave, she sank to her blankets on the floor. “I wouldn’t. I promise.”

  “Sugar, your word means nothing here.”

  Yeah, she got that. The door closed with a soft click. She flopped on her back and glared at the offensive wall. If she hadn’t been looking, she probably wouldn’t have noticed the screen’s shades of gray dim and images from the other side brighten as discrete outlines took shape. She scrambled to her feet and rushed to the wall, moving before the tall, dark image at the corner. Clay remained on the perimeter. He had adjusted the visual so she could see something, upgrading her from an isolated specimen to an animal in a box. Granted, her visibility out made the room a cage, but it was progress. She gave in to the instinct to place her hand on the screen before his shadow.

  He didn’t respond, though for long time, he didn’t move either.

  She swallowed back hope as he finally turned and walked to the far side of the room. If she remained standing, she could see him, but her legs finally wearied enough that she dragged her blanket before the wall and curled against the rigid liquid crystal wall. The solitary view of tables and equipment was sufficient to hold back the overwhelming sense of desolation—now she knew someone was on the other side. Hand resting against the wall, she closed her eyes.

  “Sugar.”

  A dream. The rich, deep timbre of Clay’s voice brought a sigh to her lips and tickled along her skin.

  “You can’t spend all your time in fro
nt of this screen.”

  She jerked awake, finally aware of Clay shaking her shoulder. “I’m not doing anything wrong. I can’t hurt anyone here. I’m not a spy.” And she desperately didn’t want to be alone. She had never been alone until her incarceration by the Regents. Her father had demanded her presence constantly, if only to produce more weapons and tools for him to sell. Ivan embraced the same work ethic. Even at Ty’s mansion, she looked forward to bickering with his other wives. There was always someone around, vid screens to watch, background chatter, even music at her disposal, mindless distractions to block out the memories.

  Discomfort and lack of attention didn’t bother her. Exile did. She’d had enough time alone with her own nightmares to last her a lifetime. “I could help you do something useful.”

  He raised a brow. “Like what, construct a comm device or a weapon from some innocuous item in the next room, betray my plans, and destroy people I respect?”

  She frowned, crossed her arms, and turned her face away. “I haven’t done anything to cause you to say that.”

  His finger pulled her chin around. “You’re kidding me, right? It was you I found in the trailer, right? After you followed…the other man inside.”

  “Vier. Go ahead and say his name. We both know that much.”

  “You heard a lot more than his name, Esme.”

  She swallowed hard and tilted her chin up higher. “If I can’t get out of here, then I’m no threat.”

  “Good try. I’m not taking you for dumb, so don’t take me for it either.”

  “You could chain me to the back of the room.”

  “Always trying to inch closer. I let you in the room, and next thing you’ll want a chair and a console.”

  “I’m very handy. You’d be surprised how helpful I could be.” She pursed her lips, irritated his refusal bothered her so much. Most people at least valued her expertise. It had been the only thing about her of interest to her father or Ivan.