AllFreeNovel
Share Us
This had to be some kind of nightmare. It simply could not be real.
Rose began to feel lightheaded, her heart beating so fast that her chest ached. Far below, she could just make out Joe running, crying out her name.
Then everything started to go dark, and she felt herself falling… from twenty feet up.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, Rose wondered what it would feel like to die. And just before the world sank into total blackness, she felt the bizarre, impossible sensation of strong, muscular arms catching her, cradling her close…
***
When she awoke later, her head was pounding and she couldn’t move her left arm at all. Slowly, her eyes opened and vision returned in patches of dim light. She was alone in a hotel room, and most importantly, she was alive.
But… how?
And why was she handcuffed to the bed? Rose looked around in horror and confusion, afraid that she’d been kidnapped. And then she saw it: Joe’s laptop, the screen bright as though he had only just left the room. As she painstakingly propped herself up on her right elbow, she felt a scrap of paper crinkling under her arm. It was a note.
Rose—
You fainted in the warehouse. I don’t know what the hell you were doing there, but you are safe now. I had to leave to take care of some unfinished business. I will come back for you. Please try not to fall from any other great heights or otherwise throw yourself into direct peril while I’m gone. We will talk about this upon my return.
—Joe
Simultaneously annoyed and relieved, Rose set about picking the lock on her handcuff with a safety pin she found on the bedside table. Luckily, she had been kind of a punk kid in high school, and she had taught herself how to pick locks in order to break into people’s lockers and prank them.
It was embarrassing, something she definitely did not put on her resume, but it did come in handy at times like this. Upon finding that the doors were locked and bolted to keep her in, she settled on the bed and began doing the only thing she could do under the circumstances… snoop through Joe’s computer. She spent the next few hours reading over his encrypted, bizarre notes on genetic experimentation, mutations, and governmental agendas.
It was like reading the script to an X-Files episode.
But as much as Rose wanted to discount it, to shrug it off and just tell herself that either she’d decoded the encryption incorrectly or that her boss was a secret nutcase— something told her neither of those scenarios were true. That this was real. And that somehow, in some inexplicable way, Joe was tangled up in this insanity.
When he finally returned, he burst through the door looking disheveled, but at least he wasn’t soaked in someone else’s blood this time. However, she realized with dismay, he did have cuts and bruises up and down his arms.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Joe growled, bounding towards her with fury in his amber eyes. He stopped just short of grasping her by the collar, scaring her half to death. But she was going to stand her ground, damn it. She was tired of being the one in question.
“I’m worried about you,” she argued.
“I didn’t hire you to play detective. You’re my secretary, goddamnit.”
“I can’t help it, you never told me anything.”
“It’s not your place to know. Your job is to manage my office.”
“I can’t help it. You came to work banged up. If you had just told me what was going on, I wouldn’t have had to tail you!” Rose retorted, anger building in her gut.
“Do you think this is some kind of game? You could’ve died back there, Rose!”
“I wasn’t planning on getting caught.”
“But you did get caught.”
“Well.” She crossed her arms indignantly. “What about you?”
“This is my job. This is what I do. And you need to stay the hell out of it, if you want to stay alive,” Joe snarled, but that tinge of worry colored his tone.
She gave up. “I can’t work like this, Joe! You ask so much of me but you refuse to trust me!” Rose shot back, standing up in front of him, glaring up into his handsome face. Maybe she was being irrational. But she had feelings for him, and not knowing what was going on was driving her crazy. She didn’t want to get a call from the morgue and find out she had a body to identify.
She didn’t want to lose him…
