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“Stop telling me how much danger I’m in.” His eyes were full of fury, his eyes darker than I’d ever seen them.
“I’m going to keep doing so until you get it. You need to come clean with me. Who were you trying to contact? Is this some kind of game?”
It dawned on me what he was saying. I tried to jerk out of his hold, but his fingers dug into my skin painfully. “Are you crazy? Do you think I’m betraying my own country?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart, but you’ve been cagey for two days, hiding something. What the hell is it?”
He shook me again. I had to trust him. I opened my mouth, but no words came easily. How could I tell him I couldn’t trust my own father? That I feared he’d sold out his country? I looked into Cobra’s eyes, able to catch another glimpse of his soul.
“Please tell me everything is going to be alright.”
After taking a deep breath, he backed away. “I can’t tell you something that isn’t the truth. Your apartment building and laboratory were torched. Several people died. These monsters will stop at nothing to hunt you down, Isabella. Nothing. And when they do, there will be nothing I can do to save you.”
CHAPTER8
“Hidden in each of us is a secret person, often unknown even to ourselves.”
—Dr. Jean Wolf
Isabella
Secrets.
I’d been very good at keeping them my entire life. In fact, I excelled at pretending they didn’t exist, living in a flawed fantasy world. I’d fallen in love with science because it allowed me to touch reality. I had the feeling the life I’d pretended to live had just collided with the raw existence of a world that I’d never wanted, nor had I been able to face.
Pretending was far easier and less painful.
Cobra remained quiet, his expression emotionless. I sensed extreme tension in his muscles and the thickened cords in his neck. Hell, I felt it, thick enough a sharp knife was needed to cut through.
I sat on the couch, staring at the flames as they licked against the chunks of wood. The sound of crackling and hissing created jarring vibrations as I envisioned myself being swallowed in the fire. That had been another method of coping, although not one prescribed by doctors. What did they know? They couldn’t see inside my mind, the hidden passages I used in order to keep myself sane.
I’d overheard my mother on more than one occasion, acting concerned that they’d spawned a sociopath. I’d learned then that I wasn’t wanted or loved, merely tolerated because of my father’s illustrious position.
Cobra exhaled, but the slight sound reverberated in my mind, swirling and pinging against my frontal lobe. He was angry with me. He was also very disappointed, but no more than I was in myself.
As I stared at the items he’d purchased, scarves and a colorful wig meant for Halloween festivities, another wave of shivers coursed through me.
“Talk,” he snarled.
I jumped.
He turned his head slowly in my direction, allowing me to capture a silhouetted view of the fury on his face.
“Everything I told you before is true,” I insisted. “The discovery I made and subsequent formula I created can either be used for advancing life or terminating it. I had no interest in the latter and those I worked with didn’t either. Or so I thought.”
“Meaning what?”
I took a swallow of the whiskey he’d brought me, two ice cubes slowly melting. I’d studied them, the flames creating colorful prisms. The shimmering colors had kept my mind from reaching all the dark places I could crawl into. “Meaning I had several threats over the last four months.”
His only reaction was another forty-five-degree turn of his head.
“You have to understand that in handling such sensitive compounds, threats occur more often than you might think from various organizations who don’t want the possibility of an explosion, to crazies who screamed that the end of the world was coming. It bothered me at first, just like it did everyone else on the team. Then we got used to them. Complacent. Of course every threat was checked out, a few people arrested but nothing serious. Then two threats that seemed to create a stir.”
“What happened?”
“It’s not what happened as much as what didn’t happen. Our labs were swept, phones replaced, all in accordance with the security measures established long before the project began, but then there was no follow-up. We heard nothing about the outcome. I asked the man in charge of the program, a fellow doctor I respected, and he just told me not to worry about it.”
Cobra finally moved to the chair across from me, sitting down. “What did you make of it?”
