Page 33 of Adonis (Salt and Starlight #1)

Connor was lying near a corner of the tank, and Adonis was as close to him as he could get. His gills flared wide in agitation, and as Connor watched, he twisted in the water, slamming his tail against the glass in a powerful attack.

Connor swore he felt the impact through the floor and watched the cage flex outwards. But it didn’t crack; it didn’t break. And it gave no indication that it was close to it either. Ben and Arthur stood to the side, watching Adonis. A man dressed in pale orange boat shoes, tan trousers and a crisp white shirt paced in front of the tank. It was him talking animatedly. Connor didn’t need to even guess.

Cessair.

“Connor?”

Austin noticed him awake.

Connor stared at Adonis, his thoughts sluggish. Adonis floated to the corner, his gills flaring out, his lips parting the way they did when he made softer sounds. His gaze fixed on Connor; worry and agitation filled his widened eyes.

Connor was certain that terror filled his, not that his body could do anything but lie there, slack. He couldn’t move. A fog drifted across his mind, blanketing his thoughts in a sluggish haze.

Cessair stepped between Adonis and Connor, breaking their eye contact. “We’re here, too, you know,”

Cessair said, snapping his fingers in Adonis’s face. Adonis’s expression transformed into anger. He snarled, and his tail once again smashed into the glass with an almighty wallop. That had to hurt.

Cessair set his hands on his hips, everything about his posture radiating annoyance.

“He’s moody,”

his voice was nothing but irritated. “I thought you said he was intelligent? He’s acting like nothing but an animal. The last one we had would communicate with us. Why isn’t he?”

Connor would argue that Adonis was communicating with them. Communicating just how unhappy he was about being locked up. Connor’s fingers twitched. Warmth and pain filled his joints as he moved his hands, curling and uncurling his fingers.

“He’s agitated,”

Arthur answered. “We need to give him time to calm down.”

Adonis pounded the glass next to the man, making him jump. “And why is he—”

Cessair whirled around, beady eyes fixing on Connor. “He’s looking at him, is he?”

he strode over to them, his pale shoes stopping a few inches from Connor’s nose as he bent down next to them. “Hm.”

Now that he was this close, Connor couldn’t turn his head to see his face. Even trying to twitch his eyes in that upward direction made his head spin with pain. Even if he hadn’t guessed by now, the way Austin tensed up would have told him who this man was. His dad’s boss. Austin’s stepdad. The man who set Connor up.

Richard Cessair.

“He looks dead,”

Cessair said. “Should we throw him into the cage with it? That might calm it down.”

“No!”

Austin objected.

Cessair’s attention moved to Austin. Austin’s hands clutched at Connor’s clothes, trembling in either fear or anger, Connor didn’t know.

“He’s—you said it yourself; he’s valuable,”

Austin added in a calmer tone. “We should go to the med bay. It will pay you more attention if Connor isn’t here.”

Austin squeezed the fabric of Connor’s shirt while he waited for an answer.

“Fine, let’s do that.”

Cessair turned on his heels. “Ben, why don’t you—actually, no, you stay here. You two—you bring him away.”

He gestured somewhere behind Connor.

A few seconds later, hands were at Connor’s arms, hauling him to his feet. Connor’s knees buckled, but Austin swooped in, setting his arm around Connor’s back and guiding his arm around his shoulders. “Take his other side,”

Austin instructed. The man who did was too tall to be the guard with the dogs. The other one. Connor’s thoughts were too sluggish to recall his name.

Connor wanted to object as he was brought away from the tank, from Adonis. He heard the panic behind him, Adonis thumping against the glass as he fought to get out. The spike of pain that stabbed through the back of his skull with each slight jostle kept Connor docile. If he opened his mouth, the only thing to come out would be vomit.

Austin brought him inside, navigating the winding hallways until they entered a small room with cots lining one wall and equipment lining the other.

Connor groaned as they set him on the bed.

“Be careful with him,”

Austin snapped, his voice as painful to Connor’s head as the moving was.

“I am trying to be,”

the man replied. “It isn’t going to do much good given his condition.”

Austin sat on the bed next to Connor, brushing back the hair on his temple. He had part of his bottom lip between his teeth, tight enough to both mark the skin and draw blood. He was paler than Connor had ever seen, fear in his expression. “I’m going to get you to a hospital soon, okay?”

he reassured Connor.

“Watch it, Austin,”

the man said. He came to Austin’s side of the bed, and Connor stared at the second guard. Name—what was his damn name?

Austin looked over his shoulder to the guard. “Do you have the boat ready?” he asked.

The guard nodded.

Austin turned to Connor. “I have a way out, okay? We just have to wait until Rick goes on break. A few more hours, and we’ll get out of here.”

Connor stared at Austin. It took a lot of effort, everything in him, to shake his head. If he left with Austin, if they snuck off to escape—then this ship with Adonis on it? He got the feeling he’d never find it again. That no matter who he called in to get to it, Adonis would end up stuck in that cage forever.

“No?”

Austin looked at him in disbelief. “I know he’s your dad, but shit, Connor. Look at what he did to you! He doesn’t care about you—you were only ever an experiment to him.”

Connor put that aside. With great difficulty, he got himself sitting upright. The world spun, and only Austin reaching out to support him held him steady. “I’m not leaving without Adonis,”

he rasped.

Austin shook his head in confusion. “Adonis? Wait, the merman?”

The tall guard stood by the exit, watching them while he kept an ear to the door.

“Yes,”

Connor said. “The merman.”

“There’s not a chance in hell we can get him out, too,”

Austin said. “He’s locked down tight, and even if we are valuable research subjects, we’re nothing compared to him. They half killed you to get him for Christ’s sake. Try to get him out and they’ll put a bullet in your head.”

“There’s four of them, three of us.”

“Don’t be stupid, Connor. You’re on death’s door, and I’m half the size of them. Not to mention you’re forgetting that asshole’s dogs. It’s more like one against six.”

Austin replied sharply. “I’m not risking any of us.”

Connor studied Austin and then the taller guard. He was getting Adonis out, no matter what. “What would we need to break the tank?”

“We can’t.”

“Hypothetically, Austin.”

“It’s not happening!”

Austin jumped up from the bed and shot Connor a furious look. “We’re barely going to survive this, never mind trying to bring that thing with us.”

Connor thought about it. He tried to figure out a solution, but nothing presented itself to him as an easy fix. He needed to clear his head. He needed to be able to move, to coordinate. “Are there any painkillers in that cabinet?”

He nodded to the glass-lined shelving unit with small bottles stacked up high.

Austin crossed the room to it. He hardly looked at the bottles before grabbing one out. He returned to Connor and shook out four pills into his hand.

“Will these knock me out?”

“I doubt it,”

Austin said.

Connor hesitated.

“It was impossible to keep you under on the way here,”

the tall guard at the door said. “And we were using drugs designed to tranquillize elephants. Painkillers aren’t going to do what the doc’s drugs couldn’t.”

Connor popped the pills.

“Leave, Austin,”

Connor said after he’d swallowed them. “You’re obviously terrified of them, so if you have a way out, take it.”

As much as Connor could do with their help, he couldn’t use Austin if there was a risk that he’d sabotage Connor’s attempts to free Adonis. He could, however, make use of Austin’s escape to cause a distraction… And he didn’t need to fight everyone—he didn’t need to break the tank—he just needed to get the top doors of it open.

“Not without you.”

“I’m not leaving him here,”

Connor said. It would be a nightmare if he got caught because of Connor, and then Connor escaped while Adonis was kept locked up. Connor wouldn’t let this be Adonis’s fate, no matter what he had to do to change it.

Austin’s jaw tightened. “Connor,”

he said in a strained voice, “the only reason we have a chance is because they have him now. If they don’t, that leaves only the two of us as carriers of the genes they want to study. And we’re a whole lot easier to get a hold of than that thing in the tank. But if they have him—”

“—then they don’t need us,”

Connor finished. “Which explains why you waited to help me. Waited until this point to try to tell me anything.”

“Telling you anything before now would have only gotten you locked up,”

Austin said. “And trust me—I’ve been there, done that—it’s not worth it.”

“But it’s fine to leave him to that fate, is it?”

Connor snapped.

“We have to look out for ourselves. Nobody else is going to,”

Austin said, steel in his voice.

They stared off.

“Someone’s coming,”

the taller guard said. He straightened up, standing on alert as the door opened.

Connor’s dad walked in. He nodded at Austin. “Your dad wants you.”

Austin’s angry expression had been replaced with a cool poker face. Without a backward glance he left the room, the guard following at his heels. Connor watched them go until the door swung shut behind them.

His dad approached him. “You’re already upright,”

he said, more to himself than Connor. He spotted the bottle of pills in Connor’s hands as he dragged a stool over to sit in front of Connor. He took it from him, reading the labelling. “How many of these did you take?”

“Four.”

“Feeling any effects?”

“No.”

“Double up on it. Four isn’t going to do much with your constitution.”

His dad shook out four more into Connor’s palm. Connor hesitated only a moment before taking them.

“I’m a genetic experiment?”

Connor cut to the chase.

His dad looked at him sharply.

“I’m not saying it as an attack or a barb,”

Connor said calmly. He knew his dad. His temperament, at least, if not all the dirty, disgusting secrets he kept, and he knew that a calm, curious approach was his best bet to get the ball rolling. Ask about the science, and once his dad started, he wouldn’t stop. “I’m just asking. Austin mentioned the two of us were the only subjects to survive. That we carry valuable genetic information in us. I’m assuming that means we were part of a genetic experiment. Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

His dad’s answer was clipped and rough.

Connor’s gaze lingered on the bruising around his nose. “Are you really going to hold that against me?”

Connor asked as his dad inspected his face in turn. Connor knew there was more damage than on his dad’s face, that was for sure. “I was heavily drugged, and I barely remember it.”

Ben didn’t answer.

Fuck. If Connor couldn’t get his dad talking, he didn’t have a chance of getting to anyone else. He opened up the bottle of pills and poured one out onto his hand, offering it to his dad. “Here. It’ll stop hurting, and you can stop holding it against me. What kind of genetics is it? Another merman?”

Ben glanced at the pill. After a moment, he took it and swallowed it dry. “It was a female subject. She didn’t do well in captivity, and we were looking for a way for her genetic information to survive her.”

Ben picked up a pair of scissors and cut away Connor’s hoodie. “The experiments weren’t going well. The fetuses all rejected the new genetic information no matter what techniques we used.”

“Until me and Austin.”

“Until you,”

Ben corrected. He peeled away Connor’s damp clothes and threw them onto the floor. He pulled up a rolling table set up with gauze and clean water. He dabbed at Connor’s open wounds with disinfectant, but Connor saw he was mostly bruised rather than cut. Except for his wrists, which were a bloody mess. The pills did nothing; the disinfectant stung like hell.

“Edith, she…well, you weren’t planned.”

“I figured that out a long while back.”

“We discussed an abortion,”

Ben said. “And I figured since all the fetuses were dying anyway, I could get some valuable information out of your termination. I brought Edith to the lab and injected the latest serum into you.”

A sick feeling turned Connor’s stomach. “Did she know what it was you were doing?”

“No.”

Connor had to swallow past a thick lump in his throat. “And the one time it was supposed to kill the baby, it didn’t. I survived.”

“You didn’t just survive; you thrived,”

Ben said. “You grew fast, you were healthy and hardy, and all of your vitals were pitch-perfect for the entire pregnancy. After you were born, we had just enough genetic material left to replicate the formula, and it worked the same. Austin was injected even earlier than you were. We think that’s why he showed more obvious changes when born. We’ll have the chance to investigate the changes that happen using the genetic material of the newest subject.”

“Did Mom know?”

Connor asked, his throat closing in. She went in to get an abortion and ended up with a genetic experiment in her womb.

“I explained it… she was somewhat hysterical about it when I told her she couldn’t abort you,”

Ben spoke in the same calm manner he always did. Dispassionate. Uncaring. Like he wasn’t telling Connor something horrifying.

“And then?”

“We had to keep her in the lab, of course. To make sure she didn’t try to abort you on her own. It meant she was very stagnant for much of the pregnancy—and we all worried about the effect that might have on you—but your health never declined.”

Connor couldn’t prompt the next question. He couldn’t—

Ben’s gaze flicked up. He must have been waiting for another question, but his expression hardened as he laid eyes on Connor. It must have been in Connor’s expression, in his eyes. His absolute disgust.

He’d been awful to Edith. He’d always thought she was a horrible mom, and that was how he’d treated her. How did she feel looking at him? Looking at the thing that had caused her to go through imprisonment? The thing she had been forced to give birth to after taking measures to avoid being a mom?

There was no way to hide how he felt. No way to backstep.

“Are they okay?”

Connor asked. His voice didn’t come out calm or level. It wasn’t a scientific enquiry or a question that Ben could answer with any interest. “At the house. I heard there was fighting, but I blacked out.”

Ben turned his attention to bandaging Connor’s wrists. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, as in they’re okay? Beaten up? Or—”

“I didn’t check,”

Ben replied.

“You didn’t check if Edith was okay? I heard her coming down the stairs.”

“I didn’t check,”

Ben repeated in that same indifferent tone.