She looked at the forbidden drink. Her appetite was gone again, but she wasn’t feeling sick. She’d skipped a meal last night. Her concern wasn’t for herself. It was for Thomas. She had to eat. She lifted the mug to her lips. The aroma filled her senses. She closed her eyes as she took the first sip. As the brew washed down her throat, her arms broke out in goosebumps.
“Mm.” She licked her lips.
It was good coffee—strong, just the way she liked it. She gulped the rest down greedily, her body soaking up the caffeine boost. When she looked up again, Adam was studying her with an amused expression, and something else that bothered her.
“Do you fuck like you drink coffee?” he asked.
She choked. Her cheeks turned hot from the crude remark. She glanced at Margaret, but the woman didn’t even blink.
“You do,” he said slowly, as if it surprised him. “I can see why the Weatherman is so taken with you.”
Anger surged through her. “Don’t insult me. I don’t—”
She bit off her words. There was a fluttering in her womb stronger than what she’d experienced before. She left the mug on the table and placed a palm over her stomach. Thomas was moving. Only, he wasn’t just kicking, he was doing summersaults.
“What is it, Kat?” Adam asked with a smirk.
“Thomas…”
He lifted a brow. “The baby?”
“Oh, my God.”
She didn’t even care that Adam was basking in her concern. Her baby was kicking like hell. The coffee. Her baby was kicking and it was the first time she felt it as more than a flutter. Wonder spread through her, evicting her earlier anger. A smile she couldn’t suppress split her face in two, and then laughter bubbled from her lips.
Adam’s expression turned from enjoying her anguish to something darker.
“So,” he said in a cold tone, “what they say about caffeine is true.” He turned to Margaret. “No more coffee for her.”
Kat looked at him in confusion. “You just said your philosophy was different.”
“Angel, you’ll soon learn that everything I do, I do for a reason. You’ve just passed your first experiment.” He paused for the effect of his words to sink in. “I only needed to test the effect of caffeine on the baby.”
He was a cruel bastard. She’d never forget that.
Thomas settled again, the jabs inside her body quieting.
Adam got up. “By the way, his name won’t be Thomas. Godfrey’s got something different in mind.”
If his words were meant to upset her, he’d succeeded. He left the kitchen without as much as a backward glance, making a point of showing her how little her feelings mattered. She didn’t have an appetite for pancakes anymore. She pushed the plate away and took an apple from the fruit bowl instead.
Kat had promised herself she wouldn’t ask Adam for anything, but already by noon, she contemplated breaking that promise. She wanted a watch to know the time. There was no television or computer in the building on which she could see the time or date, at least not in the rooms she had access to. After lunch—a cooked meal served in the kitchen—she was bored. She’d walked the corridor up and down after Margaret had cleaned the kitchen and vacuumed. There was nowhere else she could wander.
By late afternoon, she even tried to draw the housekeeper into a conversation, but Margaret ignored her.
Adam returned what felt like hours later.
“Come,” he said when he entered her room, “time for the lab.”
His earlier ire was gone, but after his morning performance, she knew never to trust him. Adam was a first-class manipulator. She didn’t need a psychology degree to figure that out.
She got up from the bed where she was resting, and followed him to the end of the corridor. They stopped in front of one of the locked doors. Adam pushed his thumb on a fingerprint scanner to unlock the door, and ushered her into a medical consultation room.
He motioned to the bed. “Lie down here.”
She did as she was told while he opened another door at the end of the room with a similar scanner. The door clicked open to expose a dark hallway. The part she lived in was only a portion of a larger building that extended to the back. When Adam disappeared down the hallway, she lifted herself on her elbows to glimpse down the corridor, but she couldn’t see anything other than the darkness that stretched to the end.
A few seconds later, Adam manifested from the shadows with two people. From their build, she made out a man and a woman. The man, a head shorter than Adam, was limping. As they entered the light, she prevented herself just in time from gasping out loud.
A man with a deformed face entered the room. One side of his body seemed larger than the other, his left arm and leg longer. That explained the limp. He seemed to have no neck, his head connecting to his shoulders, and his skin was indented with crevices. One brown eye was drawn down and watery, while the other studied her with a crisp expression. His mouth drooped on one side. Thin, blond hair covered his scalp in uneven patches. Clutching a black notebook under his arm, he advanced slowly.