This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

BROKEN

Published by Dark Valentine Press

Cover design by Lou Harper

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems — except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews — without permission in writing from its publisher, Dark Valentine Press.

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Prologue

Santa Fe, New Mexico

One year after the Dying

The voice came to him in the darkness, just as it had for the past few weeks. He’d kept a careful count of every day, every agonizing twenty-four-hour span, drawing each one in a line of blood so he could never forget. Some people might have wanted to forget, but he held his captor’s wrongs close, kept them always in the forefront of his mind so that one day he’d be able to repay each of those wasted days in the blood of his enemies. They hadn’t wanted him to know how long he’d been held — the stinking djinn had taken away his watch, his belt, anything he might have found useful. Maybe that hadn’t been their idea at all, but a suggestion from one of the human turncoats they were shacked up with, since the selection of confiscated items seemed to indicate a familiarity with human technology.

At any rate, his meals came at regular intervals, and he was allowed to go outside to get fresh air every once in a while, and those data points provided enough information that he had never lost count of the weary days. The last time his guard had taken him out to the sheltered street that backed up to the U.S. Marshals’ building, the breeze had felt brisker, the air cooler, and so he knew the year was winding down toward autumn, exactly in line with his calculations.

Even so, he couldn’t exactly recall when the voice had started speaking to him. Not right away; he knew that much. He’d spent many nights in dead silence, alone with his thoughts, trying to figure out what he could have done differently, which traps he could have avoided so he wouldn’t end up here.

The most obvious solution would have been to kill that troublemaking bitch, Jessica Monroe. If it hadn’t been for her scheming — aided and abetted by the djinn here in Santa Fe — Margolis would still have Miles Odekirk working for him, and Julia Innes would still be safely under his thumb.

Julia. It had been so long since he’d been with a woman that the thought of any female flesh might have been enough to get him to stiffen…but she’d been the best. She hadn’t fought, but he still could sense the defiance in her cold silence as he pounded into her, taking her body for his own. The almost palpable waves of her hatred had been the ultimate turn-on.

You can have her back,
the voice said.

When he first heard the voice, Margolis thought he was going crazy from the isolation. But he didn’t feel crazy…and besides, the voice said such reasonable things to him, things that made sense. Surely if he was crazy, he wouldn’t have manufactured such a logical companion for his solitude.

I can?
Margolis thought back at the voice. Even from the beginning, he’d realized he needed to refrain from speaking out loud. There was no chance of his escaping from this cell, not in this high-security vault under the U.S. Marshals’ building in Santa Fe, but that hadn’t kept the town’s inhabitants from keeping a guard on him night and day, just a few steps away from the door to the cramped chamber that now made up his world. Sometimes that guard was djinn, sometimes a well-armed human. Either way, he wasn’t getting out any time soon.

Yes,
the voice replied.
Julia Innes will be delivered to you — along with anything else you desire — as long as you do exactly what I say.

Margolis didn’t like taking orders — he’d been the one to give orders after the Dying took away all other established authority — but he figured obedience was a small price to pay for being free of this jail cell and having Julia once again. He inhaled deeply, recalling the sweet scent of her long, silky hair, the warm perfume of her flesh.

Then he sat upright on his cot, blood seeming to thrum through his veins as he contemplated the prospect of freedom. A return to power, and Julia his. That was enough to give a man hope.

Tell me what I have to do.

Chapter One

Julia Innes pushed away the mound of paperwork on her desk and stood, then went to the window of her office, which overlooked Los Alamos’ main street. It was a bright early fall day, the sky blue, a few puffy white clouds scudding by. The slender aspen trees in the planters spaced along the sidewalk were just beginning to turn gold.

Looking at the trees and their reminder of the turn of the seasons, she realized that the Dying had struck exactly one year ago. September twenty-sixth. The world had been upended, and the few survivors of that hideous plague were still trying to put the pieces back together. Whether they’d been entirely successful or not, she wasn’t sure.

Oh, they’d definitely made progress. The residents of Los Alamos had been thrilled to have her in charge. Or maybe they’d just been so glad to have Margolis gone that they didn’t care who else led them. And bringing Miles Odekirk, their resident genius, back with her to this stronghold of the Immune had also helped. After all, it was Miles’s devices that had ensured their ongoing protection from the rampaging djinn, those otherworldly beings who had been so systematic about purging the world of the few humans the Dying had spared.

Only not all of the djinn sought vengeance and death. Some of them were friends, allies….

She wanted to shut her mind down before it finished that thought, but too late.

Lovers.

Not for her, of course. And she really didn’t want to think about that. She
shouldn’t
be thinking about that. Hadn’t she already spent the last six months doing whatever she could to drive
him
out of her mind?

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