Broken Communication (3 page)

“Going to cry yet, bitch?” the man asked, making mocking gestures with his hands before acting as if he was jacking off.

“Call her a bitch again,” came a shockingly deep voice from the cell next to her.
 

Harmony froze in place, her eyes wide as she stared over at the cinder block wall, kind of expecting a half-man, half-beast creature to burst through it. What she’d not expected was the man to sound…like a man. She leaned some, trying to get a better view of him. The wall still blocked him from full sight, but she did catch a glimpse of his hands once more. This time they were not covered in fur with long dagger-like claws. They seemed normal. They were also big. Like him.

Shifter, she thought, unsure if he was the kind that came out of the womb that way or if he’d been manufactured like a number of them had. A pang of guilt swept over her. If the man had been tested on and made the way he was, had her father played a part in it?

The two men standing guard shared a look that said they too were concerned. The smaller of the men, who was slightly less disgusting than the first and whom she’d taken to thinking of as Shorty, since he was considerably smaller in stature than Jerk Off, nudged the bigger one and shook his head. Harmony didn’t need to be psychic to know the little guy wanted the big one to keep his mouth shut and avoid taunting Hulk.

Jerk Off squared his shoulders and Harmony expected the dumbass to actually try to pick a fight with her new fellow detainee. Instead, Jerk Off rubbed his jaw line and then looked to Shorty. “Why the hell is Krauss so bent on us housing this guy? He’s got better places than this to hold the thing.”

Notwithstanding Harmony’s fears of the newcomer, she disliked hearing him referred to as “the thing” by the guards.
 

“No clue, man.” Shorty leaned and kept his gaze on whoever was behind the partial wall. The small man paled.

Harmony gulped again and took a small step in the other direction, feeling the need for some space between her and the new arrival. Her gut said the chains weren’t as strong as everyone was banking on.

“Nothing else to add? Done with referring to the woman as anything other than lady?” the prisoner next to her asked. This time his voice wasn’t quite as deep, but still heavily masculine all the same. Oddly, his voice made her think of Casey, and she had to push the thought aside to avoid crying. She’d never see him again. As much as the hairy jerk annoyed her, she wanted to see his face again. She wanted to hear him call her princess and mock her decision to wear heels for almost everything in life.

More than that—she wanted Casey.

Jerk Off picked up another of his girlie magazines that littered the old desk near him. He eyed her and then held the magazine open in a way that suggested he was looking at the centerfold and then her, his gaze darting back and forth. He grinned and bit his lower lip.

Perv.

Shorty didn’t seem to care that his buddy was a creep. He also didn’t mind the guy blatantly touching himself.

Two pervs.

Jerk Off flipped aimlessly through the pages. She was surprised he could get any of them to turn and that they weren’t stuck together from as much as she’d noticed his hand down the front of his pants over the last few days. The sick pig had then dared to touch, with the same unwashed, jacking-off hand, what he’d tried to pass off as food for her. She nearly retched just thinking about it.

She sighed, reflecting on her best friend Laney. Harmony had wanted to tell her the truth over the four years of their friendship, but the time never seemed right. And how did one go about telling another they weren’t human? That they’d levitated the butler more than once as a child before causing the dinnerware to dance about the table after watching the animated version of a popular French fairy tale about a beast and the beautiful woman who fell in love?

Not to mention Laney’s strange obsession with the weird and wacky. The girl seemed to live for outing supernaturals, and Harmony had played right into Laney’s “the truth is out there” theories. She’d funneled information toward Laney, hiding behind a hacker name rather than simply telling her friend the truth.

Supernaturals were real and Harmony just happened to be one. In her defense, Harmony had finally gotten to the point she was going to confess everything to Laney, but then Laney had been so excited about her blind date that Harmony hadn’t wanted to spoil it with a talk that would not have been short or simple.

“I’m sorry, Laney,” she whispered, tearing up thinking about her friend. Laney had gone on a date with a man she’d met via the Net and hadn’t returned. It had been foolish to let her go off alone like that with a man neither of them knew, and it was especially dumb to let her venture off on her own when she’d been doing what Harmony had tasked her to do—discovering the truth about what the government and big financial backers like her father were doing.

Experimenting on supernaturals and humans.
 

Harmony knew the dirty, ugly truth by accident. She’d happened upon it all buried deep within one of her father’s dummy corporations. Her computer skills were impressive, and she excelled with technology. Dolls had never really interested her, but taking things apart to see how they worked did. And then there was magik. It had captivated her as a child. It didn’t matter she had little control over it. She’d been swept away by it all.

Not her parents. They’d shared sad looks as if what she could do was something horrid and wrong. Something they’d somehow brought upon themselves.
 

When she’d discovered the horrible truths her father had never wanted her to know, she’d been sickened, and it had taken all of her to keep from going to him and shoving it in his face—demanding to know everything. She knew better. She’d seen the files and the reports. People who asked questions, even family members, were dealt with accordingly. The Corporation and its reach was vast and deep. They didn’t let anyone get in their way, not even daughters.

She swallowed hard as the awareness settled over her that the men holding her had something to do with the Corporation. She’d seen the name Krauss in the files. He was some mad scientist who was anything but human—that much she’d gleaned from the dates of the records. He’d lived far longer than a human ever should, a sicko who had even worked for Hitler at one point in his past, under an assumed name, of course.

Harmony had known all of this, but still let her friend go off with a stranger. A man Harmony felt deep in her bones had links to the Corporation somehow, though she had no proof. Only a hunch. And she’d learned over the years her hunches were often right.

She fought tears as she remembered how she’d told Laney she’d have her back. That she would be her friend’s stone-cold, back-up bitch.

Some back-up bitch she’d been.
 

“I’m hungry,” proclaimed Jerk Off, standing and stretching, the girlie magazine discarded to the pile of porn. His whining pulled her from her inner thoughts and the distraction was a welcome one. “Let’s go grab some food.”
 

“What about Blondie there?” asked Shorty.

Blondie. The name made her think of Casey. He alternated between calling her that and princess. Well, and fucking ray of sunshine.

Jerk Off laughed. “She’s not going anywhere.”

That’s what you think.

Harmony waited until they were gone from the area before she went to work trying to find a weakness with the cell bars. One that would permit her rather uncontrollable magik to assist in getting it loose.

Chapter Three

Casey stared around the small room, his gaze on the walls where he’d pinned clippings, information, and photos over the years. As someone who spent the majority of his life staying one step ahead of those hunting him, he had to be good at surveillance. The fruits of his labors were in the room. Backup copies were in the possession of a few people around the world he still trusted. If something happened to him, they’d be sure the information was protected.
 

It was how he kept track of those who were doing testing on humans and supernaturals alike. How his mind put it all together. The walls were covered with his findings and with his sketches. In some areas, the information was several layers thick. Yarn stretched across varying areas and wrapped around pins, making it all look like a spider’s web.

A web of lies.

Of deceit.

It looked more like the jumbled thoughts and fixations of a mad man, but Casey knew the truth. He wasn’t a conspiracy theorist. He’d lived it. He’d been a witness to just how far mankind would go in the name of science and it wasn’t fucking pretty.

Somewhere in it all was a clue to who had his woman.

His Harmony.

Casey’s jaw tightened and he clenched his fists, his emotions teetering on the edge of going overboard into the dark area. The area he had found it harder and harder to come back from over his long life.

“Where are you?” he asked, his gaze on several photos of men in suits, looking as if they were heading to a high-end fundraiser rather than to a hit.
 

Casey came by his information in ways most would frown upon. Though he did have connections who supplied him with some, it wasn’t as if his connections were necessarily legit or on the level. He didn’t give a shit about laws. In the same way the government didn’t give a shit about him. To them, he’d been expendable, something they could play with, try to mold into a super soldier before discarding. And they’d done just that. They’d used him, manipulated his genetic make-up, and then when he didn’t yield their desired results, they tucked him away in what could only be called a loony bin before deciding to pull the plug on the misfits.

The defects.

Unlike most of the other first attempts at creating a super soldier, Casey lived, but he wasn’t perfect. His group—the test subjects created from straight animal DNA rather than any shifter, but with other strange mixes added in to what one of the men had called a cocktail—tended to mentally break. He personally knew of three who had gone on killing sprees. And they hadn’t just killed, they’d slaughtered everything and everyone around them. Rumor had it another was doing something similar in Seattle.

Casey lived in fear of doing that himself. Over his long life he’d learned to control his shifts much better than he first had. During the testing stages, he’d actually gotten stuck in a partial shift, looking like a half-man, half-beast for months. And that would never do. The men in charge wanted soldiers who could blend and appear fully human. They didn’t want a guy who looked like what he was—a werewolf.

Thankfully, Casey had been able to get himself to shift back to human, but it hadn’t been easy. The doctors weren’t happy with how much work he had to put into it all and considered him a failure. Though, they’d attempted putting him in the field once he’d learned to shift back and forth with relative ease. That was about the same time several of the men who had gone through testing with him in the beginning snapped and went berserk. All of the men in Casey’s testing group were recalled and labeled defective.

“Rejects,” he said with a snort, remembering what one of his teammates had called them all. The official on-paper term was Outcasts of the Immortal Ops Division. Then again, those official terms never saw the light of day and they certainly never saw the public. Humans had no clue what went on around them. They’d wet themselves. They were weak and his kind was strong.

My kind
, he mused.

Hardly.

He wasn’t one of the Immortal Ops. Not anymore. He wasn’t perfect enough for the people in charge. He was a broken model, one past the point of repair or service. A fucking liability. He shook his head, running his hands through his shaggy, long, black hair. There had been a time when he’d only worn his hair close cut. High and tight. Those days were past.

Casey scratched at his beard, thinking more about his woman. Though, calling her his woman was a bit of a stretch. She hated him. Pretty much thought he was a homeless bum. He couldn’t blame her. That was the image he put out for the world around him. It was better that way. Kept the enemy off his trail and scent.
 

His gaze went to a tattered American flag he’d kept with him all these years. It served as a reminder of what he’d once believed in with all his heart, and the government that turned its back on him and his kind. On his men.

Thinking of his men ripped at his gut. But returning to that mindset wouldn’t help him locate Harmony or who had taken her. And finding her was paramount. He’d venture so far as to say it was an obsession.

She had been missing a week. He didn’t want to think about the fact she might very well be dead. She couldn’t be. He’d only recently figured out his pull to her and why it was he’d been blind to see it. He couldn’t lose her. She might hate him and think him scum, but the Fates thought they’d work together.

His pulse sped and he tried to calm himself. The thought of Harmony being hurt or dead assailed him from all angles. With a growl, he spun. The tips of his fingers burned and he hissed as claws sprang from them, his emotions out of check at the thought of harm befalling Harmony.

The pampered princess meant something to him. Something, up until now, he hadn’t admitted even to himself. He didn’t need to say the words out loud to know them to be true. She had been created for him and he’d allowed harm to befall her. He’d failed her in a way a mate never should.

He snarled, the beast side of him threatening to seize hold and control all his actions. If one hair on her blonde head was out of place, Casey would bring down anyone and anything involved. He’d let his beast free and they’d all fucking learn what happened when someone messed with what was his.

And she was most certainly his.

He growled, his teeth starting to change as well. The scents of the forest around the safe house grew as he lost himself more and more to the beast. He hated his lack of control. Hated what he’d been turned into.

A monster.

A defective operative.