CHAPTER14
Leo kept his mind active,because that’s all he could seem to do. The rest of his body felt like it was dead, already too cold for him to feel his hands or feet. Or maybe it was the drugs.
Benzodiazepine.
He’d seen enough of those medical commercials to be able to recognize the pieces of the word.
A depressant. And given how heavy handed Helena was in her explanations, she would have been as heavy handed with the injection as she was with her words.
He had to get up and get moving, but his body was heavy.
Managing to look around with his eyes and his peripheral vision, he found his memories coming back. He’d been headstrong, bullish. He’d followed Helena and had been surprised that she actually showed him a way out.
He’d been ready to drag her back to their room and get her to tell them what was going on, but his need to find out a safe way of getting Cygny out of the house and to a place where they could signal one of the other teams overrode his other instinct.
Helena had lured him outside and then she’d drugged him.
Injected.
He was glad he couldn’t remember that part.
But it made sense.
She wasn’t tall enough to crack him over the back of his head.
Tazing him would have brought him to his knees, but wouldn’t have incapacitated him like he’d been. Yes, she could have injected him afterwards, he would have been on the ground but still cognizant enough to remember that.
It must have been a quick injection that dropped him into the snow.
The snow.
Fuck.
He was going to freeze to death if he didn’t get up.
And get back inside.
Get back to Cygny.
Without him, she was by herself.
And with the kind of hate Helena had for her, there was no telling what was happening inside.
He had to get inside.
Leo closed his eyes and took in as deep of a breath as he could.
On the count of three he was going to put everything he had into moving.
It didn’t matter if he got all the way up, or even half way.
He had to get moving.
If he laid there much longer he wasn’t going to get up at all.
* * *
Cygny feltlike her ears were ringing. It was crazy, right?
She thought she was finally crawling out of the hell that was her past. Finally getting a new start.
And here she was, standing in front of the man who had framed Leo for espionage, but he’d used her to do it.
Used her as if she would turn her back on her duty and not fix the mess he’s made.
He had something to learn about her.
“You were in custody.” She took a chance on the words. He didn’t like to have his skill questioned or his failures brought up. In his mind, he never failed. “You were in lock down at a federal facility.”
A flicker of rage registered on his face but it was gone as quickly as she saw it appear. “I am guaranteed a swift trial.”
“The last I heard they were still dealing with a bunch of motions from your attorney.”
He shrugged. “Time, I needed time. And while he was filing and arguing his motions before the judge, I was making my own plans.”
No one had contacted her. No one had told her that Nicholas had escaped the federal prison.
At first she wanted to argue that he was lying. But was he really?
When she approached his boss with the evidence that her supervisor had broken the law in numerous ways and sold national secrets to foreign powers, they’d fought her.
She had to be wrong. Her boss was well-liked and well connected in the government. There was no way he’d abuse his position!
And yet, she’d found proof.
Electronic recordings. A trail of bread crumbs through both the internet and the dark net.
Having left her job, she had devoted her time and the grief that she’d felt making an ironclad case against Nicholas. The prosecutor from the Department of Justice had gone so far as to call her work ‘over kill.’
She didn’t want overkill.