Page 32 of Adonis (Salt and Starlight #1)

Connor darted to his room, changed, and returned downstairs. He heard Trevor’s voice in his bedroom as he passed it.

In the kitchen, his dad leaned over the sink looking out on the driveway. He glanced at Connor as he came in.

The first thing that struck Connor was the dark circles under his eyes.

Connor held his nervous apprehension in check, constructing a casual facade. He joined Ben at the counter and raised his eyebrows at him. “Been burning the midnight oil?”

“Research has been fascinating lately,”

his dad answered. “And my boss is in town, so we’ve been showing him everything we’ve found, getting him up to speed.”

Cessair was in town.

“Don’t you send out regular reports?”

“Some things need to be seen in person.”

His dad cast Connor a long look as he turned around, facing him instead of the window. “I’m here to pick you up.”

“Pick me up?”

“Boss wants to talk to you about the juvenile approaching the glass,”

he elaborated.

An uneasy feeling filled Connor. Even if he hadn’t learned what he had, he would have been unhappy at the prospect of an interrogation. He wouldn’t share what he’d seen of Adonis, what he now knew about him—no chance. The idea of answering questions about him made Adonis seem more like a research subject than a living being.

“What’s there to talk about?”

Connor feigned nonchalance. “I told you all about it. He was vibing with me until you and Arthur chased him off. Aren’t your cameras high-tech?”

“He wants to talk to you in person,”

his dad said. Except this time, he used that tone. That hard, unyielding one that always ended with him getting his way, because his mind wouldn’t change no matter what. Well, Ben had another thing coming if he thought Connor would bend to him the way he used to. Connor almost smiled. Why would he still try so desperately to earn a shred of affection from his dad, when Trevor gave it out in the bucketfuls without the psychological torture?

“Yeah, well, good for him. Half the country wants a one-on-one talk with me. Even more now, given the news that’s breaking.”

Connor cast his dad a cutting look. “And here I thought you came to talk about why you hired a lawyer to fuck me over.”

The corner of his dad’s eye twitched. The muscles in his neck tightened. “I just found out about that. I haven’t gotten around to sending the information to the detectives.”

“I heard. Couldn’t bare to part with the research, right? Same old story. Well, why don’t you get around to it? Hm? And maybe I’ll think about letting your billionaire boss ask me some questions.”

Connor kicked off the counter. “I don’t think I can concentrate on anything other than my case until I know I’m not going to be thrown into a jail cell.”

His dad’s hand snaked out, seizing his wrist. Anger filled his eyes. “Enough with the attitude. We’re going.”

Connor sneered. “That’s mom’s favourite line. Have you ever seen it work on me?”

His dad’s grip on his wrist tightened. “You always have to make things difficult.”

His gaze focused on something behind Connor, and he nodded.

Connor started to turn before an arm locked around his neck, and something covered his nose and mouth. Connor’s surprised outcry was ultimately killed—smothered by his covered mouth, and then the air he needed to make any more sounds was cut off by the elbow locked on his neck.

Déjà vu filled him.

Connor’s body jerked to life. He reached up wildly with his free hand to the person holding him, clawing at the arm cutting off his air supply. At the same time, he kicked out, nailing his dad’s knee and then his hip, before he fell backwards with a hiss. The hand his dad had restricted came free. He jabbed it into the face behind him, going for an eye. He found something soft and the body against his grunted. Familiar smells of dog and coffee washed over him.

Connor kicked out again, knocking the nearest chair down with a loud clatter.

A sharp pinch stabbed his neck, and Connor felt cool liquid rushing into his veins. A bolt of fear shot through him. What was that?

His body slackened, legs too heavy to fight, let alone move.

“Are you—what the—”

Laurence’s surprised voice morphed into a cry of pain. Dread curled Connor’s stomach. He tried to move, tried to turn, to help, to do anything, but blackness punched through his vision, deadened his motor control. He couldn’t do anything.

“Dad!”

Laurence cried out, his voice coming from low down, like he was on the ground.

The man at his back loosened his grip and slid onto the floor with him. Ben knelt next to him, holding a needle. Connor mustered up everything he could to glare at him but it was a feeble effort. Everything in him was fighting just to stay conscious.

“You’ve never exhibited any signs of change,”

his dad said, taking a bottle from his pocket. “Not the way Austin did. But your resistance to drugs is impressive in its own right.”

Connor heard Nick shouting. Footsteps thundering down the stairs. Trevor’s angry bellow. Edith crying out. Barking. A laugh.

His dad filled the syringe, and the man cupped Connor’s chin, holding his head still as the needle disappeared into his neck as the second dose flooded his bloodstream.

Connor’s world went black.

*

“Was the rough treatment necessary?”

a quiet voice asked.

Consciousness bloomed in Connor with a roaring vengeance. Everything came back to him at once: getting drugged at the house, waking in the car and being soundly beaten into submission. Waking as he was jostled onto the ship, taking a boot to the ribs when he’d managed to get himself upright, only to be knocked down again.

The gentle rocking beneath his head told him he was still on that ship. He opened his eyes, flinching at the sharp ache in both of them.

Austin’s face came into focus. Connor became aware of his gentle touch combing through his hair. Austin was looking over his shoulder at someone, his face pale and his expression fraught with unhappiness.

“He fought,”

a familiar voice answered, clipped. “He’s lucky. I suggested a more permanent solution, but the doc insisted otherwise.”

Austin turned even paler, but he fixed his jaw in stubbornness, which turned into an outright sneer at whoever he was talking to. “My dad can buy brutes like you anywhere. If I were you, I’d be on my knees praying there’s no permanent damage.”

The man laughed. It was an awful, scornful kind of laugh. “He doesn’t even give a shit about you getting damaged. He’s going to care even less about him.”

Connor tilted his head, bringing the man into his line of sight. It was shorty from the lab—Rick—and he had his dogs at his sides, as always. No wonder Connor had hardly heard him talk before; he was a fucking psychopath. His gaze darted to Connor.

“Your boyfriend’s awake,” he said.

Austin’s gaze snapped to Connor.

“You might have time for a quick fuck while I report it?”

Rick suggested with a sneer before turning around and leaving. The room was clean but empty. He was on the ground, with Austin kneeling behind him. It felt like a folded hoodie under his head.

Connor tugged at his arms, groaning as he found them tight in constraints.

“Don’t,”

Austin whispered. He leaned down, pressing his forehead against Connor’s shoulder. Pain and anger were in his eyes. “You shouldn’t have fought so much.”

“Why wouldn’t I have fought?”

Connor got out. Damn, his throat hurt. And his eyes, and his everything. “Do you know if they are okay? Laurence and Trevor?”

“I have no idea,”

Austin said. “If they’re willing to do this to you, then fuck knows what they’d do to someone with no value to them.”

Fear stabbed through Connor. “Untie me.”

Austin lifted his head, tucking his silvery hair behind his ears with trembling hands. “I’ve already tried. Last time you stayed unconscious, but you kept waking up this time. He used chains.”

Connor tried not to flip. His warring emotions streamlined his thoughts, letting him make all those stupid leaps that made no sense, but fit together. “Your dad is my dad’s boss, right? Cessair?”

he asked to confirm as he pieced the rest together in the only way that would give him some semblance of an answer.

“He adopted me. He’s not my dad,”

Austin said, eyes burning in anger.

“They experimented on us.”

Connor’s gaze darted to Austin’s silvery hair, his eyes that shone brightly. He was always so eye-catching. So alluring.

Austin nodded.

“And you approached me. Dated me. Set me up—”

“I was curious! We were the only babies that survived, and I was always different. I wanted to meet you.”

Austin’s eyes burned in that way that always sucked Connor in. “I didn’t ask for what happened to me. And I never wanted any part of this, but Connor, I never had any choice in it.”

It came out angry, sharp.

Connor couldn’t linger on any of that. Rick was going to tell people he was awake. He and Austin were some sort of experiments—his dad was a researcher—fine. That could all be unpacked later.

“What’s going on now?”

Connor hissed. He tried to sit up, but his arms wouldn’t move an inch.

“You’re bolted down,”

Austin told him.

“Answer me.”

“I don’t know, exactly,”

Austin said. “He told me they were bringing you back to the area to investigate the changes you were going through. But this? Abducting you? I don’t know. I just overheard a few bits of conversation about what to dose you with to keep you under.”

“Changes?”

“Biological ones,”

Austin said. “I haven’t had any since I was a baby, and you never had any at all until after Christmas.”

“How would they even—”

Connor cut off. The blood bank. The one he always went to with Austin because he believed in giving blood. “You little fuck, Austin,”

he growled.

Austin flinched at his tone but shot back an equally hostile glare. “I had as much choice as you did coming here. You don’t know how lucky you’ve been. You’ve never had even a leash around your neck—not with your dad able to monitor you when you were a kid and then me doing it during school. And I’m the only one on your side here, so try not pissing me off.”

Connor gritted his teeth. “Call the police. Call—”

The door to the little cell opened, and Connor shut his mouth. Rick approached, swinging a key around his finger. “Time to go,” he said.

Austin tensed up, his hand on Connor’s shoulder. Austin stared up at Rick, and Rick stared down at him. A slow smile turned up Rick’s lips. “Are we going to do this?” he asked.

Austin’s hand tightened.

Connor took in Rick, the dogs, and Austin’s small body. “Move, Austin,”

he said. There was no point in Austin taking a beating when this was a fight he wouldn’t win. Austin met his eyes before he stood and moved aside.

Rick clucked his tongue in disappointment. “Maybe next time, sunshine,”

he mocked. He knelt next to Connor, reaching behind him with the key. Connor’s arms came loose from the ground, but chains still covered his arms. “We could have had a lot of fun, you know.”

Without even looking at him, he took Connor by the shoulder and hauled him to his feet. Connor groaned, sharp aches shooting throughout his body. He didn’t get the chance to take stock of it all as he was dragged out the door and down a plain hallway. They walked up a flight of narrow steps and stepped through a door that led outside. Austin trailed after them, and when Connor glanced back, he was putting on the hoodie that had been his headrest in the room. The look Austin cast at him was packed with worry and trepidation.

The night sky greeted Connor as he stepped through the doorway, and salty ocean air washed over them. A high wind had kicked up, and the waves on the sea were tall. He scanned the full length of the ship; it was massive, like a cargo hauler or a cruise ship. His gaze snagged in the middle of the decking. A container of glass and steel, filled with water, stood in the centre of the deck, and part of it disappeared into the middle of the boat.

A fresh wave of fear blossomed in Connor’s gut. That was a cage. And there was only one thing they could possibly need Connor for to trap.

“Bring him here,”

his dad called.

Connor dragged his gaze away from the cage to see his dad toiling with equipment near the edge of the deck. As they approached, he saw Arthur was there too, adjusting scuba gear.

Connor’s heart beat loudly in his throat. “What’s the plan, exactly?”

He packed as much scepticism and scorn into his voice as possible. “Lure him in and dart him? He won’t come near you.”

Please, god, let Adonis keep his distance. He had stayed away from the lab after being spotted. He could stay away now. “As if that glass could hold him, anyway.”

“It’ll hold,”

his dad said. “It’s held his kind before. Ready?”

he directed the question at Arthur.

“Ready.”

Rick dragged Connor forward a few more steps. Arthur approached with the scuba tank, and he and his dad strapped it onto Connor. They set the tank over his chained arms and secured the straps over his chest.

“I need my arms free,”

Connor said. “If I’m diving, I need my arms.”

“You won’t be doing any swimming,”

his dad said.

Connor tried to meet Arthur’s eyes, but he kept his gaze pointedly away from him.

“And if the mouthpiece falls out? I need my arms.”

As his dad tightened the straps on his chest, Connor noticed the bruising around his nose. A memory of slamming his knee into his dad’s face as they grappled in the car flitted through his mind. The sharp look his dad gave him said plenty. He wasn’t being given any more freedom than necessary. Connor wanted to curse at him. Scream, fuck you, and spit. So what if his dad took a knee to the face? Connor was trashed.

“Here we go.”

Arthur dragged an anchor with a chain attached to the end to the side of the boat. Rick pulled Connor to it. Arthur began to bend down next to Connor’s legs, but his dad grabbed his shoulder.

“You move your legs while we do this, you’ll be going down there unconscious,”

he threatened.

Connor kept painfully still, believing it. They clicked the locks around his legs into place with a thick padlock. He stared at that anchor attached to the end of the chain.

“You’re dumping me into the middle of the ocean.”

Nobody answered him.

His dad took the mouthpiece for the gear and jammed it into Connor’s mouth. He couldn’t object anymore, afraid that nobody would put it back in if he spat it out before they threw him overboard.

“Wait,”

Austin said. He stood in front of Connor and reached up. He put on snorkelling goggles. Connor whined at the pain of pressure being exerted on his face. He had to have some severe bruising there. Austin tore strips from a roll of duct tape hanging from his wrist and secured the mouthpiece to his face. And despite everything, Connor was grateful for it.

Austin returned the duct tape to his wrist and tested the mouthpiece by wigging it. He then put his arms around Connor, going onto his toes to press his face into his hair. “Survive this, okay?”

he whispered. “Survive, and I can get us out while they’re busy with their new subject. Please.”

Austin lowered back onto his heels, looking up at Connor with worry swimming in his eyes. “Grit your teeth on the way down.”

Rick hauled Connor to the edge of the decking. He pushed the anchor tied to Connor’s feet overboard and unceremoniously shoved Connor out after it. Connor hit the water sideways, and all the equipment tied to him jerked up as he hit the water. His mouthpiece yanked hard to the side: if it hadn’t been taped so securely to his mouth, it would have come out. He floated in the water for a second, and then a sharp tug at his feet pulled him under.

Connor tried to breathe through the panic as he descended into the dark. The water pressing in on him was a heavy pressure that grew colder and more oppressive as he descended. It took every bit of self-control he had to actually breathe. To get air into his lungs before he blacked out from raw panic.

His descent came to a sudden stop. The anchor hit the ocean floor and, weighted by his equipment and chains, Connor hit it next. Two lights floating in the water illuminated the sandy ground he’d landed on. Connor looked around the anchor, identifying the checkered pattern in the sand as net squares.

Don’t come. Please, don’t come.

Connor didn’t think that Adonis could be caught so easily, but his dad said that the cage on the ship had held one of his kind before. That meant they had caught one in the past.

Don’t come. Don’t come.

Darkness surrounded Connor. The quiet of the ocean moved around him. He bet the lights had cameras on them. He bet he was being watched right now.

Don’t.

Connor felt Adonis’s presence before he saw him. He wanted to cry out. To scream. To tell him to stay back. But Adonis came out of the dark of the ocean, swimming right up to Connor to take his face in both hands.

Connor shook his head at him, desperate. But Adonis looked at him with eyes widened in worry, in distress. He touched his cheek to Connor’s, and Connor felt the vibration of his hum through his skin.

The world went wild.

Bubbles exploded around them. Connor caught a glimpse of the netting springing high in the water before it snapped closed on them faster than Adonis could escape. Not that he tried. Adonis threw protective arms around Connor as the netting tightened inwards. His body took the brunt of the impact, but Connor still got crushed. His leg pinned to Adonis’s tail, and his body slammed in as the net collided with the equipment at his back. The sharp netting pressed inward, crushing his hip, his ribs, his ankle. Blinding pain took him, disorientating him.

He only knew they were ascending from the way his ears popped.

He thought they broke through the ocean’s surface, but he couldn’t say for sure. Not until he fell onto the hard ground, and the impact wasn’t dulled by anything. The netting was gone, and he lay on his side, shaking.

Connor didn’t know long he lay there. Distantly, he was aware of the tape being pulled from his mouth. His goggles being taken off. His arms loosening, not that he could move them.

“It’s okay. You’re okay,”

someone said to him, over and over and over. Eventually, Connor realised that Austin was the one whispering the desperate mantra. Awareness returned to him slowly. And he almost wished it wouldn’t as pain came with it. Connor could barely breathe.

Austin was bent over him, combing the hair at his temple back as he whispered to him. Excited voices spoke over him. A dull noise thudded over and over. Connor opened his eyes, coming face to face with a scene from his worst nightmare.

Adonis was in the cage.