Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 144571 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144571 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
Such confidence.
And suddenly he had it, too.
“Did Lou find her?” Tasha was in the doorway, and Cooper saw a sight he hadn’t counted on. Kenzie. She was still in the dress she’d worn when she met Ben Parker.
“Of course she did,” Kenz said. She moved in and joined what was now a big bear hug, mostly around Lou. “She invented a whole new tech so she wouldn’t lose Kala again. She gave us a lecture about it.”
At least one of them listened. “We’ll get her back.”
With this team around him, they would make it happen.
* * * *
Kala came awake in darkness, nausea rolling through her.
“There’s a bucket to your right,” a familiar voice said. “The drug you took, the side effects include vomiting. Usually after the subject wakes.”
His voice made her sick, too. She wanted to prove him wrong, but her stomach wasn’t in compliance. She rolled to her right and found the bucket just before the contents of her stomach came up. Chocolate croissants weren’t as good the second time around, but at least she hadn’t eaten the pizza she’d wanted to order. “Where’s my cousin?”
She hated being in the dark. Where the hell was Devi and what had she already gone through?
“She’s safe,” Huisman said, his deep voice accented lightly. French. He was born in Montreal, though he’d spent his formative years in Toronto. Still, that French accent was there in every word of English he spoke. “For now. I wanted to talk to you. What do you know about the bombmaker?”
She got to her feet. She needed to figure out where the hell she was and how much rope he’d given her. There was zero way she wasn’t in a cage. She held her hands out, trying to find the bars or walls or whatever he had planned for her. “She’s Shannon Reed.”
“Very good,” he said, sounding almost proud. “And you know Zach is your boyfriend’s biological brother. He’s boring, you know. Fastideux. Perhaps he would have been more interesting had he been raised by his true mother.”
“I assure you Eve McKay is his true mother.”
“We will agree to disagree,” he said with a sniff. He was somewhere to her right, probably ten or twelve feet away. “I don’t understand why an interesting woman such as you would have anything to do with him. He has no style. No real intelligence. Now your sister fits with him.”
“I assure you my sister is intelligent.” She hoped so because this fucker had almost certainly fried her tracker at this point. Kenzie and Lou and Tris would do anything they could to find her. And Devi. “I want to see my cousin.”
“She’s with Lena. They’re talking through all of her problems. So many issues with that girl. One would almost think something’s wrong with your family.”
“Yeah, she was a great therapist. Top notch, Doc.”
“She was actually top of her class. Completely delusional, though. I think her mother screwed her up with all those stories about the father who was taken away from them. The dumb bitch actually thought the rogue CIA agent she had a brief affair with would have come back to her.”
The evil doc had a real problem with women. She moved as quietly as she could. There seemed to be some kind of cot. That was what she’d been laid out on. Roughly six feet away there was another cot on the opposite side. So she might be getting a roommate. Hopefully her cousin. “Yeah, dumb bitches. It’s ridiculous to think the dude she’s screwing would be interested in the fact that they had a child together. So how’d you find her? Did you put out a post on the Internet asking for anyone who my parents killed in the line of duty to join your extraordinary league of supervillains?”
If she kept him talking, then he wasn’t torturing her. Although now that she thought about it, the worst would be him talking while he was torturing her.
He chuckled as though she’d amused him mightily. “League of Supervillains. I like this. It sounds strangely American. The rest of the world understands that these villains you look for are always close to the heroes. Personally, I think Americans don’t know either definition deep down.”
She reached out and found the bars. Yup. She was in a cage, but she didn’t panic. She’d known. She was pretty sure the bucket she’d thrown up in would also be her brand-new toilet. Fun. “Let’s move it along. I really would like to know how you found some random chick who thinks my father screwed her over. Is there, like, a Facebook group?”
He sighed as though disappointed. “Fine. You’re not being much fun, but I do like to explain my methodology. It’s probably the doctor in me. A very long time ago, my grandfather set up… Let’s call it a surveillance system. He wanted to keep track of the family that ruined his life.”