Page 31

Everything in her ached, and none of it was physical. No, what was making her so sad was that she had a gut feeling what she’d said to Kendra and Benny had been on the mark, or at least in the right vein.

From what little they understood about the nanites—which wasn’t much—they homed in on a trauma site and repaired it, extraordinarily quickly. But they didn’t have a brain, didn’t even really have a mission beyond heal. If Benny’s brain had been exhibiting signs that something was wrong, would they have gone there too? Tried to fix what they perceived as a wound?

In doing so, had they damaged or erased his memories in the process?

They might never know. Neuroscience wasn’t advanced enough to explain everything the human brain did, much less what experimental nanotechnology might do to it.

Even as part of her railed against the injustice of what'd happened to all of them, the practical applications were staggering. As a cop, she’d seen more than her share of battlefield injuries. Before she’d been assigned to the Ravens she’d been deployed all over the world, mostly to places where people were shooting at you. Having a tool like the nanites would be a game changer for battlefield trauma. Would save countless lives. But at what cost? She suspected even the people who’d tortured Benny and had been monitoring the rest of them, didn’t know the implications of long-term exposure to the tiny little machines.

Their team had been an experiment, albeit an unintended one, and the results were astonishing. And dangerous to them in a way Jordan didn’t think they’d fully thought through. Because while the two people mentioned in the memo that Davenport had leaked, Hayes and Overlander, thought Benny was dead, they were still watching the rest of them to see what transpired. Because with one test subject dead, what was to stop them from acquiring another?

Regardless, the team had never discussed what they were going to do about the duo who were even now still running surveillance with Davenport as their lackey. Cali had surmised the whole thing was being run by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Jordan figured that made as much sense as anything else.

She wasn’t naive enough to believe they were the first people the government had experimented on. History had already proven otherwise. The twenty-year experiment at Edgewood Arsenal had been a textbook example of how badly institutions could abuse people when secrecy and power overrode ethics.

Now these same people had technology that could apparently bring the dead back to life. There was no way this was going to end well for any of them. The government knew how to disappear people quite effectively. For the first time she thought that maybe the spotlight that’d been on them since the shootout wasn’t all bad.

From what Benny and Devin had said about Davenport, Jordan got the impression he was close to being done with all of this, but since he held all the cards, she hoped like hell he had some sort of an exit strategy he hadn’t shared with them yet.

It felt like he’d been part of their lives forever, but in reality, it had only been less than two months. And everything had changed in that short span.

She was still turning those thoughts over in her head when she heard a moan from Benny’s room. Since he was halfway across the house, it had to be loud for her to hear it, so she stood, displacing Spot and headed his way.

When she opened the door, Benny thrashed beneath the covers, obviously caught in a nightmare.

“No,” he muttered. His head whipped against the pillow. “No. No. No.”

It broke her damn heart. She moved beside the bed and laid a hand on his shoulder.

He jerked away, then reversed direction so fast she barely registered the movement before he grabbed her arm and rolled, pulling her onto the mattress and covering her with his body.

“Got you now, bitch,” he growled against her ear. “You’ll never hurt me again.”

Jordan went completely still beneath him rather than struggle. “Benny, it’s Jordan,” she said quietly. “You’re safe. You’re with me. Spot is right here.”

The cat had jumped onto the bed and was staring at them with an expression that was about as perturbed as a cat could get.

“I won’t fall for that again.” The anger and bitterness in his voice were caustic. “I won’t let you give me hope again.” Tears began streaking down his face.

Jordan’s heart cracked. “Benito,” she said softly, forcing herself to use her bedroom voice.

She’d been the only one who called him that, and only when they were intimate. She’d slipped and used it when she first saw him yesterday, but since then had been careful. Now she used it to their mutual advantage, or so she hoped.

“Remember when we went to the county fair? You were mad because I put you into a spin in the bumper cars so many times. Then you beat me at that goofy darts game and won me that giant pink teddy bear. I still have it in my room.”

Some of the rigidity left his body, so she kept talking.

“Remember when we borrowed Cali’s Jeep to go camping? You were so damn proud of all your survival training, and then we couldn’t get the stupid camp stove started, so we ate cold corn flakes instead.” She swallowed around the emotion clogging her throat. “Then we made love under the stars.”

His breath hitched against her ear. “Is it really you, Jordan?”

“It’s really me.” She forced a hint of amusement into her voice. “But if you doubt it, reach to your right. Spot’s there. I can guarantee those assholes didn’t even know we had a cat, so they couldn’t use it against you.”

His hand darted sideways and found Spot’s soft fur. He swept his hand down the cat’s back and released a great, gusty breath, and everything in him seemed to deflate.

But as it did, Jordan became acutely aware of the warm, familiar weight of the only man she’d ever loved pinning her to the bed.

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