Danger That Is Damion (36 page)

“A sniper can put a Green Hornet between Lara’s eyes from a distance.”

Damion ground his teeth. “Thank you for that ice-cold drink of reality.”

“Hey, man,” Michael said. “I’m trying to keep her alive. And your pain-in-the-ass self along with her, I might add.”

“This is Powell we’re talking about,” Caleb said. “She’s GTECH. They’ll try to save her and brainwash her again.”

“That’s what I think too,” Lara agreed, speaking to the group and then glancing at Damion. “I have to let them capture me if I’m going to get inside their facility and destroy it.”

Damion wanted to object, to say no, but he’d vowed to do this with her. “Then I’m damn sure getting captured right along with you.”

The room was silent a few long seconds, before Caleb said, “Then first and foremost, we need to teach Lara to use her mental shields. She can’t use them until after she’s captured, or they’re liable to suspect her Lifebonding.”

Damion’s gaze lingered on Lara’s a long moment, before he turned to the group. “I’ll teach her.”

“Becca and I are available to help, if you need additional training, Lara,” Caleb offered.

From there, planning continued for a good hour, before Caleb ended the meeting, by fixing Damion and Lara in a somber stare. “Stay alive, you two.”

The group adjourned, and Michael came up to Lara. “Don’t get brainwashed again. I like you how you are.”

She grimaced at him. “Don’t worry. I won’t forget how much I adore your cranky ass either.”

Michael let out a rare chuckle and headed for the door. Damion smiled. “Ah, the magic of that tongue of yours. Glad to see the return of your memories didn’t steal that away.”

She turned to him and traced his jaw with her fingers. “I’m glad they didn’t steal you away either.”

“Nothing is going to do that,” he assured her, running his hand over her back and molding her close. “I promise.”

“Except death,” she said grimly.

“I guess you didn’t get the memo. We die together. That means when you go, I go. And wherever you go, I’m going too.”

Her expression softened, the grimness slipping away. “How about I show you Virginia and my old hometown?”

“I’d like very much to see where you grew up.” He wanted to protect and love this woman. He’d go to the moon with her, if it made her happy. But he knew this trip to Virginia wasn’t about happiness. It was about the pain of loss, and that was the one thing he couldn’t save her from.

***

After they’d changed into jeans and T-shirts so as not to bring attention to themselves, with Damion by her side, Lara appeared behind a house to conceal their wind walk. They moved to the sidewalk of ‘Summer’ street, standing across from the house where she’d lived with Skywalker. She stood there, frozen in place, unable to breathe for the knot in her chest.

Damion stepped behind her, his hands on her waist, his strength and warmth radiating into her, comforting her. “That one?” he asked of the red brick beachfront, two-story house.

She nodded, unable to speak. Her mind went to the day Skywalker had died. She remembered pushing open the door of the house and walking inside, like it was just any other night. She remembered the warm summer air rushing in behind her, the salt from the nearby sea on her tongue as it was now.

“Hello, hello!” she called out and set the plate of cookies in her hand on the hall table. She kicked the door shut, setting down her purse and key.

She remembered pausing to look at photos on the wall, hearing the news coming from the living room television the moment she’d started walking toward it.

“Ms. Smith wanted to thank you for teaching last night’s self-defense class.” She cut around the corner. “She baked you cookies, though I have a sneaking suspicion this is her way of flirting.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, knowing what came next, hearing Skywalker scream.

“Run Lara!”

Her eyes flashed open, and she took a step into the street, toward the house.

“Lara!” Damion grabbed her and yanked her back as a truck flew by, an inch from her body. “Easy sweetheart.” He enclosed her in his hold.

“I need to see if he’s there,” she said, trying to dart forward, only to have him pull her back again.

“He’s not there,” he said. “He’s not there, but I am. Right here with you, and I know what you’re feeling. You know I know.”

Her eyes prickled, and she held onto his arms where they wrapped her. “Yes.” He knew because he’d felt loss, and he’d felt the guilt eating her alive right then. “Maybe if I would have—”

He turned her in his arms. “Don’t do that to yourself.”

“It’s hard, Damion. It hurts.”

“I know, baby.”

At the sound of a car door behind her, she turned to find a van parked in front of her house, Skywalker’s house, with a young couple and a child around ten years old climbing out. In animation they walked and talked and then disappeared through the front door. Gone. Like Skywalker.

She forced herself to turn away, rotating to face Damion. “There’s someplace else I need to go.”

“Take me there,” he said.

Lara grabbed the wind, ignoring the chance of being seen, but Damion didn’t complain. Seconds later, they appeared at the back of The Walker House.

***

“Show me,” Sabrina ordered, standing beside Logan inside a tech booth—one of many inside the Serenity compound. She was speaking to the human tech guy sitting beneath a wall where a huge screen displayed twenty-four windows, all with various real time shots of the Serenity perimeters, as well as surveillance sites. He’d called her and Logan there with the promise that Lara was on radar. Zach or Trey or something like that—she didn’t know the human’s name and didn’t care what his name was.

The human punched a few buttons and one of the windows moved to center screen, expanding to full-size with the image of a familiar house—the house where they’d made Luke Walker a thing of the past. The human rolled his mouse, and the screen enlarged further, the view expanding to show two people standing on a sidewalk.

“That’s not real time,” the human said, rolling his chair so that he gave them a look. “That’s five minutes ago.” He punched a button without looking away from Sabrina and Logan. “And that’s where she is now.”

Sabrina’s eye narrowed on the equally familiar location before she turned to Logan. “Be ready. This won’t take long.”

Logan gave her a lazy look. “I think we’ve established I’m always ready.”

Indeed, Sabrina thought. “Don’t choose now to let that change.” She was taking a big gamble on Logan against her best judgment. She was going to bring Lara back, reprogram her, and send her to the Renegades to destroy them. That was the best way to save Serenity. Make Powell and the program look like everything the government wanted and more—to seal her role as a leader of the most elite army of the world. That was the plan. Of course, it also included forcefully keeping Lara’s mouth shut. If Sabrina failed to make that happen—well, she’d just kill the bitch.

Lara stood in the front yard of The Walker House for Girls, the shelter that had been renamed when Skywalker had donated money on her behalf, with not another house for several miles. Space that Lara had planned to use for recreational facilities one day. Wind gusted around her from the ocean that was practically a part of the backyard, once enjoyed by the many girls who’d found hope here. But the shelter was vacant now, run down to the point of broken windows and even some graffiti markings.

Protectively, Damion stepped close by her side, already having expressed his concerns about the wind masking an attack, especially since he’d only started teaching her to use her mental shield before they’d left Sunrise. But she didn’t want to think about that now, not in this tiny window of time. There was a war she’d fight in only a few short hours—and fight it to win, she would.

“This was where I went to escape my stepfather’s beatings,” she told him, without turning to look at him. “It was my lifeline. So much so that when I graduated from college, I took over as the house mistress.” She turned to him then. “Skywalker taught self-defense classes for me. I was going to renovate it with his help. It was going to be an amazing place.”

“It sounds like it already was.”

“It was, and they destroyed it.”

“They were wiping away your history, making sure no one could track you down.”

She looked back at the building. “When I heard about the Wardens, I was immediately in awe of what Cassandra and the other women are doing. I think on some level, my mind was remembering this place, even in the absence of my memories.”

He motioned to the porch. “Take me on a tour. Tell me what it was like, and what you had planned. If you want to, that is.”

She smiled sadly at him. “Yes. I want to.”

They walked up the steps, hand in hand, and found the door unlocked. Lara led Damion from empty room to empty room, telling him stories of her time there—of Rebecca, who’d quite possibly saved her life by taking her in and getting her off the streets. It was somehow the salve to her wounds that she’d needed—this man, her past, the hope of a future that he gave her.

They ended up in the kitchen, leaning on the island counter. “If this place is where your heart is, we’ll rebuild it. We’ll make it matter again. We’ll remodel it and make Skywalker proud.”

His words, spoken with such conviction and tenderness, touched her deeply. “I think… the past is the past. Not that I’m big on destiny and fate, but I think that maybe this place is gone because the Wardens are my future.”

Damion’s cell phone rang. “Caleb,” he told her, looking at the ID.

She nodded and walked to the back door, stepping onto the porch and walking to the balcony, the wind whisking viciously around her as she stared at the choppy surf the way she had so many times in the past. She’d had to come back here to be able to leave it behind, but it would always be a part of her.

“Lara, sweetheart. You shouldn’t be out there alone.”

She smiled at his protectiveness—a real smile this time—and turned to face him. At the same instant, someone grabbed her from behind, and she felt a sharp bite on both sides of her neck.

In what could have been only seconds, Lara found herself face down on hard ground, that pinching feeling in her neck. Oh God. It was a collar, a thick steel collar with something sharp digging into her skin, and she could feel blood seeping down her neck.

A foot slammed into her back, and then Sabrina’s face was pressed near her cheek. “Every time you so much as speak, the remote control in my hand will pierce you with needles. If you really piss me off, the collar comes equipped with blades. One press of a button and the collar will slice your throat, peel you open like a nice, ripe peach, right to the core. So I might not be able to sedate you, but I damn sure can hurt and even kill you. And I’ll keep you alive just because I enjoy causing the pain.” Sabrina jerked Lara back to her knees with a chain attached to the collar. “Get up and walk.”

Anger roared through Lara, and she shoved herself to her feet, noting the exterior of a mountain that was all too familiar. She was at the site the Renegades had discovered. Suddenly, she realized she’d left her mental shield in place. She dropped it—or hoped she did, considering how new this was to her, praying Damion would find her through his tracking skills, but certain he’d look for her here no matter what. Even if he did not, she’d indulge in tears. Now, she was ready to fight. “You better hope I never get this collar off, because if I do—” Pins dug into her neck.

“Shut up,” Sabrina said. “Just shut up and walk.”

She’d shut up and walk, all right, walk right inside where she was going to destroy “Project Serenity” no matter what she had to do to make that happen. She straightened, and Sabrina shoved her forward. Lara ground her teeth.
Just
wait, Sabrina, just wait.

A few minutes later she was inside the high-tech underground world of Serenity once again, a world far more developed than she’d ever known. Then she was being shoved through a laboratory door.

“Well, hello there, Lara.” The greeting came from “Doc Logan,” as she’d called him since joining Serenity.

He patted a leather chair that resembled what you might see in the dentist’s office. She’d never seen the chair before, or maybe she had and didn’t remember. “Come pay me a visit, Lara.”

Lara narrowed her gaze on him. She’d liked Logan, thought him brilliant and efficient. Apparently he was also a snake in the same grass as Sabrina. The brain wave machine sitting by the chair set her pulse racing, a bad feeling slithering through her. They were going to brainwash her again. They were going to steal the new life she was building, and as a pin jabbed into her throat, as surely as knives could as well, she knew she had to let them. She had to let them and then pray Damion could bring her back from wherever they took her, whatever they made her.

***

Lara had been gone for twelve hours, and Damion was climbing the walls of Sunrise City. Nightfall and the opportunity to rescue Lara came far too slowly. The moment when Sabrina had dragged Lara into the wind replayed in his head over and over, as he kicked himself for leaving her alone outside. It had been, and would forever be, one of the worst moments of Damion’s life. So would watching the Renegades’ satellite feed of Lara wearing a damn collar like an animal, while being forced inside the Serenity cavern.