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Well, fuck a duck. I squinted at her, considering my reply. “I think I’m just going to assume whatever you tell me is a lie, Red. It’s safer that way.”
“It’s not a lie. The others told me what happened. It was before I came here. Those two got into it with your family. They tried to abduct your daughter and your brother’s girlfriend. Your sister and brother rescued them. Wiped them and their team out. Very bloody, very public. Halliwell was beside himself. But she’s okay. Your little girl, I mean. Your brother and sister, too. So? Score: one for the Masters family, zero for Halliwell. Yay, right?”
I suppressed a shudder of emotion that I did not dare to examine. “Great bedtime story, beautiful. I’ll cherish it. Now get lost. I don’t want any more news out of you.”
“And that shock collar? I hacked into Vincent’s files after the first time I saw it, found his specs. He had eight different versions. The one you’re wearing was his latest model. He finished it just before your sister shot him to death.”
I deliberately ignored the lure she was throwing out about my family, but the collar info was too much to resist. “You have the specs for this fucking thing?” I touched the collar clamped around my neck. It itched and chafed when it wasn’t shocking or stinging me or slicing me with the wire. It was a small preview of hell.
“Yes. I’ve been studying it. If you try to take it off, or move out of range, the system triggers the wire to tighten, and the shock amps up to lethal.”
“Sweet.” My jolt of laughter made the wire against my throat sting. “Great to know. Thanks for that tidbit. I’ll sleep like a baby now.”
“I swear to God, I’m not trying to pry that algorithm out of you. I just want to know why he’s so obsessed. It’s all anyone here has worked on for months. What does he want with it? I need to know, Shane. I don’t want blood on my hands.”
“I can’t comfort you, Red. I can’t give you any information. But not because I won’t. I literally can’t. My head was bashed in. My brain’s all fucked up. So if he sent you here to sweet-talk me, you’re wasting your breath. End of story.”
“No. I’m here on my own. Secretly.” She held up a blank silver card with a string of lights on it. “I cloned Halliwell’s passcard a couple weeks ago. So far, no one seems to have noticed the movement in the logs. Fingers crossed. We’re alone. For real.”
I gestured at the video cameras in the high corners of the room. “There’s a recording of every second that passes in this place from five different vantage points.”
She looked back over her shoulder, then leaned close enough to the glass that her breath fogged it. “No,” she whispered. “I hacked into their security system and embedded a program I wrote. I call it ‘Invisibility Cloak.’ It swaps in alternate loops of video and audio for whatever camera or mic that I’m walking past, in real time. The signal covers me for twenty meters, coming and going. It’s safer at night, because the lighting is more consistent, and the corridors are deserted, and people would notice if people started winking out of existence on the monitors, or if noise suddenly cut out. For the cameras in this room, I have a loop of you meditating, and one of you sleeping. If anyone looked right now, they would see you, sitting cross-legged, in complete silence. So I can visit you secretly. Anytime, in the night. If you want.”
I stared at her for a minute. Wow. So my dream girl was a laser-sharp computer whiz, as well as beautiful. Scary, how Halliwell knew just how to yank my chain.
“I don’t want,” I said flatly. “I’m done with wanting. Don’t fuck with my head. The floor show is over for tonight.”
“I swear, I’m not?—”
“Fuck off, Red. It’s past your bedtime.”
She straightened up, her mouth pressed tight, and turned. She marched out, head high, her round, gorgeous ass twitching in those worn jeans. Her thick braid swaying.
The dead silence after she left was smothering.
Strange move, on Halliwell’s part. A pretty girl offering fellowship, secrecy, confidence, intel. Halliwell must think I was a pathetic slob, to fall for it.
And maybe I was. Damn. I regretted throwing her out. I missed her already.
Whether Red was real or a fantasy, I had a creeping sense that Halliwell was ready to toss me in the shredder. Red might be the last beautiful thing I’d ever see.
If I ever laid eyes her again, I better make it count.
CHAPTER3
Cass
Jana, one of my Halliwell hell-sisters, was on punishment duty. She was out on the terrace on her hands and knees with a scrub brush, in full view of the rest of us, who were working inside. We were supposed to witness her humiliation as we worked.
It was embarrassing, distracting, perverse, like everything else in this godforsaken place. But nine weeks had gone by, and Reggie was still alive, in his clinic, so I was going nowhere fast.
It was raining heavily outside, and Jana was drenched, her pale hair darkened by water, plastered to her head and face. The terrace was cluttered from the mess from yesterday’s base-jumping party. The food, plates, glasses, etc., had gotten blown all over the place by the wind off the ocean. Halliwell had demanded that Jana and I be his smiling hostesses at the party, and I’d done my best to be cute and perky. Jana had done okay for a while. Then something had set her off. She’d started crying uncontrollably.
In the end, I’d escorted her to her apartment, and called the doctor to give her something to calm her down.
Halliwell had been infuriated to have his party marred by her emotional incontinence. So the luckless Jana was out there in the rain with her cart and bucket and mop and scrub brushes, putting on a shame show for the rest of us.
It was a shitty use of resources. The guy had a veritable army of cleaning staff, and Jana was a gifted doctor and scientist with five graduate degrees and three medical specialties. She was a genius in pharmacology, she knew everything there was to know about medicine, and there she was, out there on her knees in the pounding rain, scrubbing. Like fucking Cinderella.
