My eyes darted to the girl with pink streaks in her hair who followed in after the guy with the gun on his hip. An overwhelming sense of… something… plowed into me. I shook my head trying to clear the fogginess, but all it did was send shards of pain through me. Pain. I’d been numb to it for years and I wanted that back. Cool. Numb. No memories. Just do what I was told to, but I couldn’t even remember that.
“It’s the withdrawal. Maybe he needs another pill?” Another girl stood in the doorway behind the girl with the pink streaks. “He looks like he’s burning with fever. He needs to be cooled down.”
“How the fuck can we do that?” the guy said. He crouched and rolled a water bottle toward me. Smart. My legs were free and I could easily break his neck if he came too close.
“Deck and Kai should be back soon and then we can give him a pill.” I had no idea who the girl was. Never seen her before.
But the name Deck…. Fuck, Deck. Deck. I shut my eyes and my stomach rolled as the memory tried to bust through the barrier in my mind. I growled low in my throat as it pounded and pounded, but nothing broke.
“You sure this is a good idea, Georgie?” the guy asked.
The girl with the pink streaks answered. “Nope, I’m not sure, cupcake. But if there’s a chance he’ll remember something of who he was…then it’s worth it.”
“He can’t have the pill then,” the other girl stated. “He has no idea what he’s doing when he takes it and he has no memory of what he did. As the drug wears off, he’ll start to remember the present and the past. Although, I don’t know if he will remember what he’s been doing for the years he’s been on it.”
“He could kill a few people and not even know it?” the guy asked.
The girl nodded. “Devil’s breath makes someone do whatever they’re told. But my feeling is he’s been conditioned to do whatever a particular someone tells him.”
“Kai’s mother, maybe? A goddamn deadly machine,” the guy said.
I watched pinkie move across the room and my body stilled. It was the way her shoulders were held, the way her hips swayed, the way her steps were quiet and careful. It was a combination of everything that sent the blunt agonizing lash down on me.
I fell to my knees, my one free hand holding my head. I growled a low, deep scream as my body fought against letting whatever it was in.
“Connor!” Footsteps ran toward me.
“Georgie. No.”
I glanced up as the pain faded and saw the guy grab her around the waist and haul her back.
She struggled in his arms, which pissed me off and I didn’t know why. I felt… protective of her.
“Tyler. London. Out,” a deep voice ordered from the doorway. “Georgie. I told you to stay the fuck out of here.”
The guy, Tyler, still had Georgie in his grasp, but he put his hands up and let her go then he and the other girl left, leaving the door ajar.
“Deck.”
I stiffened as she said his name. It was so familiar, yet it was like trying to lasso a dark cloud. My mind failed time and again to latch on to any reason why I’d know him. No, I did know him. I knew her, too. But my mind fought me every step.
She held out a small leather-bound book and my stomach cramped. I clenched my jaw as the memory of the sound of the pages turning flicked across my mind, but it wasn’t a gentle flicking. It was so loud I wanted to tear out my eardrums. A pen scribbling across the pages. My pen. My hand.
“We’ve found nothing in it, but maybe we weren’t meant to. Maybe it’s just what it is, his thoughts.” Her back was to me as she walked confidently toward Deck still in the doorway. “What if I read it to him?”
“He’s not even lucid, babe.”
She glanced at me and I glared back. “London says as the drug wears off, he should start to remember things from his past. It can’t hurt.”
I wasn’t so sure about that. I hurt with her being anywhere near me and I hurt hearing her voice and I hurt every second they kept me here.
The guy, Deck, stared at me and I stared back. I took several deep breaths and calmed the anger before I smiled. “I’m going to fuckin’ kill you.”
Georgie gasped.
Deck stepped toward her and wrapped his arm around her abdomen, dragging her back against his chest. My eyes narrowed as uneasiness shifted through me. Why did I give a shit whether he was holding her close to him?
Ice cream.
The clank of a spoon as it settled in the bowl before it slid across a table toward her. The girl. She sat with her legs crossed at a kitchen table and he was there, the commando guy, and he gave her the bowl of ice cream, a soft, gentle look in his eyes that didn’t match the commando who stood in the room now.