My body didn’t request it.
It just took it.
Knocking me out until I slumped in my chair, leaving me a jumbled doll just waiting to be snatched up and played with again.
I woke with a jolt as the false sense of stability was interrupted as tyres hit tarmac and the plane landed.
The mercenaries shifted behind me as I sat taller in my seat, rubbing away sleep and trying to focus outside. An airport with Arabic script welcomed us, the private plane taxiing to a private hangar away from the main hub.
Dubai.
As the engines cut off, the pilots came over the intercom. “Please stay in your seats. We’re just refuelling and will continue our flight to Geneva.”
Geneva?
What the hell is in Geneva?
Chapter Four
I ROLLED MY WRIST in the new dawn, sunlight streaming in through the airplane windows.
A Hawk diamond sparkled in my cufflink. My charcoal cashmere suit was pressed and perfect. My black shirt deliberately chosen to hide bloodstains.
To the twenty lethal mercenaries behind me, I looked like I always did. A magistrate of my empire, a man no one dared tango with, an untouchable scoundrel who’d left the public eye of pharmaceuticals and cloistered upon a hidden island.
Just as my islands hid what I truly was, my suit hid my wounds.
The skin around my wrist glistened in the sun. Parts of the bloody mess from struggling in Drake’s handcuffs had scabbed and dried, and others continued to crack and ooze platelets. My body, with its myriad of injuries, had focused on different areas to repair.
The only difference was, I felt none of it.
I rolled my wrist again, marvelling at my deadened senses.
One dose of Tritec had helped mute the inconceivable agony of a harpoon hole and acid burns on my chest. It’d allowed my system to accept the never-ending burn in my chemically doused eyes, to hear past the chilli that’d been shoved into my eardrums, to function on a level that’d allowed me to kill men, rescue Jinx, and then fuck her away from deaths’ greedy claws.
I’d thought the injection had been a godsend then.
But now…
After a second dose?
I didn’t know if I’d created a compound even more valuable than elixir…or something a hundred times more devastating. A drug like this could create robots out of men. It could march wounded soldiers back into battle. It could cultivate a taskforce of terrifying, agony-immune individuals.
The second dose hadn’t just numbed my every pain, it’d granted razor-sharp focus, whip-quick conclusions, and the ability to operate at a level most men only dreamed of.
I was in survival mode.
Every part of me that wasn’t essential to survival had shut down. My appetite. My lethargy. My panic over Eleanor’s fate. Those were things that would detract from my single-mindedness. From my triumph.
Eleanor would soon be mine again.
I was only an hour or so behind.
My private plane had taken off with my hired staff whose skills lay in knife play and gunshots, and my pilots had followed the jet stream of my brother.
It also helped I had someone from air traffic control on my payroll. Someone who fed me Drake’s intended location and his flight manifest.
Geneva.
Out of the five estates our parents had left him, that was the most populated. A regal manor house built by one of the founding businessmen in 1814. It’d been the crown in my parents’ portfolio for its connection to the first apothecary and subsequent base for the successful hub of pharmaceuticals within the Swiss country.
They’d likened themselves to pharmacists who’d tramped jungles and tested exotic plants to find cures no one had ever considered. They were pompous enough to claim ties to such prestige and purchased the house to be their second residence after their one in the States.
It was fitting that Drake had taken Eleanor there.
Fitting because, in that house, Drake had poured gallons of petrol into the private pond, killing every fish, frog, and swan. Why? Just because he could. He’d killed innocence there. He thought he could kill Eleanor.
He’s wrong.
Dropping my arm, no longer intrigued by the empty sensation of a body that ought to pound with pain, I snatched up my phone. It wasn’t my usual one. That one I’d left on the sandy pathway while I’d carried an elixir-high Eleanor to the ocean to make our escape.
This one was a clone—complete with all my apps but empty of historical data.
I couldn’t call Eleanor to tell her to hold on.
So…I called the only other person I trusted.
“Nice of you to fly off without me, you bastard,” Cal muttered on the second ring.
“You’re a hindrance in your current state.”
“Campbell told me about your broken pieces. At this point, I’m guessing I’d be more helpful than you.”
I smiled, enjoying the ice in my veins, embracing the coolness of my strangely anesthetized skin. “I’m operating at full capacity. Possibly even better.”