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"Then make it fast."
When Rowan took off in a flash of movement, Chase grabbed the pistol from its shoulder holster. With his other hand, he took Tavia's arm and hauled her up from the chair at the desk. "You need to get out of here. Now."
She looked back at the printer, still churning out paper from her clinic records. "Wait! I don't have my files. And what if there are more like me still out there somewhere? I need to know. I have to search more of these files."
"Fuck the files. Fuck the others," Chase growled, taking her with him bodily into the hallway. "The only thing I care about right now is making sure you get out of here alive."
He brought her around to the waiting room where the broken window yawned open into the chill night. Chase stopped short. Tavia did too, her lungs freezing in the center of her chest. A huge male form stood in front of them, garbed from head to toe in body-hugging black, like some kind of ninja on steroids. A knit skullcap covered the male's head and half his face, leaving only cold dark eyes visible.
He was Breed; Tavia knew it to the depths of her marrow.
And he was there to deliver death on Dragos's command.
CHAPTER TWENTY
IN THE SCANT SECONDS it took Mathias Rowan to reach the server room at the other end of the clinic, he realized he was too late.
Someone was already inside.
He crept toward the partially open door, making no sound at all as he drew his Agency pistol and peered into the dimly lit data center.
Crouched on the floor near the racks of servers was a human dressed in a security guard uniform and thick winter parka. A shoe box - size container lined in cushioned foam lay open near the man's boots. The rectangular center of the foam was hollowed out, emptied of its contents.
What the ...?
Rowan moved closer. The human had affixed a small digital keypad to the wall of servers and was entering a sequence of numbers. A fast beep-beep-beep followed an instant later, then a countdown clock appeared on the digital face of the device.>Chase leaned down nearer to her, his big hands braced on the edge of the desk. "That sequence had to be about a dozen characters long."
"Thirteen, actually."
He grunted, eyebrows quirking. "And you remembered it perfectly all this time?"
"I only have to see something once to remember it. That's just how my mind works."
"Impressive." He gave her a devastating grin that made her pulse kick into a higher gear. She wasn't used to having feelings of attraction, but it was impossible not to notice how close he stood to her now. How she could hear him breathing, could practically feel the steady, rhythmic pound of his heartbeat. Or how the thick bulk of his powerful biceps was brushing against her shoulder, each soft friction seeming to enter her bloodstream like an electrical current, as she brought up a login screen for the clinic's records program.
Another password prompt appeared, and this one she fumbled at first, too busy trying to ignore the warmth of Chase's body beside her and the heated weight of his attentive gaze. She tried the code again. "We're in. This is the patient database. I've seen it in use probably a thousand times."
Chase nodded. "Let's find your file."
She typed her name into the search field and held her breath as the screen began to fill with dates and records of her treatments. The data went back the full twenty-seven years of her life. Her entire existence, condensed into several thousands of line item entries stored as bits and bytes on a cold computer hard drive.
All the betrayals, waiting to be discovered with just a click of the mouse.
"Hey." His deep voice was quiet beside her. He rested his large palm over the top of her fisted hand in a gesture that made her feel both comforted and unsettled. "You gonna be okay with this?"
She swallowed. Gave him a shaky nod. "Yeah. I'm fine. I want to know."
Before she could think better of it and change her mind, Tavia clicked to open the most recent record. It was her visit from earlier that week. "I had an appointment with Dr. Lewis about recurring migraines. He treated me for a couple of hours here in the clinic and sent me home with new meds."
Chase eyed the record on the monitor. "Just a few days ago."
Tavia nodded. "And later that night, I was brought into the police station to identify you as the shooter from Senator Clarence's party." It seemed impossible that it was less than a week ago that her world was turned upside down. Less than a week ago that this man standing next to her had entered her life so abruptly. So strangely, darkly unexpected. "Nothing's been the same for me since that night. It won't be the same for me ever again."
Chase's stormy blue eyes fixed on her for a long moment, sober, remorseful. She realized only then that his hand was still resting on top of hers. His pulse beat in his fingertips, and in the heated center of his strong palm. "You wish you'd never met me. Trust me, I get it. I wish that for you too, Tavia."
"No, I don't wish that at all," she said, surprised by how deeply she meant it. True, her life had been thrown into chaos from the first moment she laid eyes on him - when he'd stood in the gallery balcony of the senator's house with a gun trained on a crowd of innocent party guests. She'd thought him unhinged and dangerous, and maybe he was both even now, but she couldn't blame him for any of the mess that was her life currently.
Because of him, she'd had to question her own reality. He'd opened her eyes, and just because she didn't want to see the things in front of her, didn't mean he was at fault. If anything, this deadly, terrifyingly brutal man had saved her life.
