Page 5

5

The Devil You Know

F rom across the room, I blinked at Chase so many times that his polished, smooth-shaven face began to blur.

He saw us as biological material . We were his property that our parents supposedly stole.

That’s why his eyes were glinting with avarice. The motherfucker actually appeared to believe he owned us.

Surely, he couldn’t be that insane.

A memory of Jaggar pointing his gun at me moments before he pulled the trigger—on Chase’s orders—flashed through my mind.

Never mind. Obviously Chase was precisely that insane. Not only did he think he owned us, but he thought that gave him the right to kill us, in order to … what? Provide him with more precious data?

When forced to confess, our parents had admitted they’d run from their “employer” and hidden us from said employer. They’d failed to mention that a narcissist considered us his possessions, but the rest added up well enough.

“Raynar,” Chase said, slicing through my thoughts. “Go get the nurses.”

With a quick glance at the discarded weapon, Raynar rose from the armchair and exited the room.

Once the door shut behind him, I told Chase, “No matter what you think of us, we aren’t your fucking property. We aren’t anybody’s property.”

“Seems like that should go without saying,” Hunt inserted.

I huffed a bitter snort. “Totally. And taking us away from an obviously awful, incredibly toxic situation doesn’t make our parents thieves.”

It made them good parents, right? Maybe they’d redeem themselves after all.

Chase’s lips parted to reveal expertly whitened and straightened teeth. “If they were your actual parents, your argument might have some merit. Perhaps. But they aren’t.”

Again, my eyes lost their focus as his words registered.

“Come again?” Layla whispered.

“Your parents ”—the billionaire hooked manicured fingers into air quotes, his shiny watch catching the light—“aren’t your parents. They were the lead researchers of my most important project. They were my employees, with no rights to any part of discoveries they made while in my employ. Their research was advanced under a work-for-hire arrangement. I’d explain what that means, but you’re all smart enough to already know. I won’t talk down to you.”

Oh, so “talking down” to us was his main concern here? The balls on this asshole!

“You’re the result of experiments conducted under my authority, funded by me. That means you’re my property, and they took you. Plain and simple. That makes them thieves, and that also makes you mine to do with as I please.”

Layla and I shot to standing, and even as I wobbled, a growl rumbled in my chest.

I wasn’t the only one. The five of us sounded more like beasts than people. Even shot and bleeding, Brady clenched his teeth and narrowed his eyes at the nutter, about to attack.

Beyond grumbling their disapproval, Griffin and Hunt had gone still. That meant they were as dangerous and poised to take down a mofo as Brady, Layla, and me.

I was unsteady on my feet, and any attack I might attempt would likely result in my ass landing on the floor.

Didn’t mean I wouldn’t do it anyway.

This megalomaniac was too fucking much.

He didn’t even care that Hunt was holding a gun! Did he believe he, too, was invincible? That he’d come back to life after Hunt shot him between the eyes? Maybe he did. But money couldn’t buy a person a second chance at life, even if they had enough cash to fill an entire Olympic-sized swimming pool.

Chase chuckled—further proof there was something majorly wrong with him—while Jaggar cast what he must have thought were covert looks at his weapons, just out of reach.

“I’m not saying that’s the kind of relationship I want us to have,” Chase clarified, presumably as clarification of his ownership claims . “I’m just stating facts so you can understand the situation as it really is. The scientists who’ve charaded as your parents all these years have been lying to you your entire lives. I’m here to tell you the truth.”

Layla snorted. “Yeah, I’ll just bet you are.”

Chase tipped his head in a way that said, “But I am!” Then the door opened and a nurse in plain gray scrubs marched into the room with no more than a glance at the standoff going down right in front of her. She was either remarkably well paid or had seen enough to know that she should keep her curiosity to herself. She flicked a glance at Griff, then Brady—triaging—before walking over to Brady first.

A second nurse entered, pushing a stainless-steel cart laden with scalpels, needles, and other surgical supplies. Behind her, an orderly with a broom swept the glass and crystal shards, cleaning them all up, before a surgeon waltzed in. Unlike the nurses and the orderly, his eyes widened at the scene. Even so, he didn’t say anything, stalking across the room to examine Brady’s wound as the nurse cut open his shirt.

“Well?” Layla prompted. “You said there was no time to wait to talk. So, talk.”

“Yeah,” Brady said, then hissed as disinfectant burned his wound. “Before one of us decides we’d rather pummel your ass than hear you out.”

Chase positioned himself so he could lean against the patch of open wall beside the door and crossed his arms over his chest. “I wonder if this group aggression is a side effect of your unique makeup.”

“Sure, why not?” Griffin barked, his sarcasm thick. “It couldn’t be because none of us are fans of being fucking owned . Or of a manipulative asshole pulling strings to get us all killed . It couldn’t be that, no.”

The surgeon looked from Brady’s gunshot to the rest of us, his eyes wide and startled.

Chase caught his stare with an intent one of his own, and the surgeon hastened to make a show of examining the back of Brady’s shoulder and finding an exit wound. A clean shot through. That was something, at least.

The nurse injected Brady with a local anesthetic while Chase said, “First off: all of you, please, call me Magnum. I’d like us to be friends.”

Brady and Layla snorted. Griffin and Hunt seemed to vibrate with pent-up ire. I wondered if maybe I was dreaming all of this, starting with Brady impaled upon unforgiving rebar at that party. The experience felt too bizarre to be real.

“We’ll get there,” Chase said.

“If you really think that, then you don’t know the first thing about us,” Hunt said.

Chase appraised him and the gun he still held, though loosely now. “Maybe it’s you who don’t know me.”

“Whatever, dude. Get to talking.”

Raynar carried in one of those ergonomic seats with knee, ankle, and elbow cushions instead of a back, and placed it in front of Chase. Without so much as a nod of thanks or acknowledgment, Chase slid onto the leather-and-polished-wood contraption, his posture perfect, and studied the five of us, his attention sliding off the others in the room as if they weren’t even there.

“How much do you know about your past and your abilities?”

“Assume we know nothing,” Griffin said, coming to sit beside me on the bed, Layla on my other side.

Chase nodded, his sharp eyes going distant for a few moments. “Across recorded history, and even before then, handed down from generation to generation in oral tradition, there have been legends, stories, and myths of immortal beings. The details vary greatly depending on the culture and its overarching belief system, but it boils down to the same thing: there are those who can outlive death. The topic has long fascinated me.”

None of this was news, and yet I wouldn’t hurry him along. Perhaps we’d finally get some answers.

“I tasked a team of promising young scientists with discovering a source of said immortality. I wanted to replicate it. To be able to create this ability in others.”

In himself, he meant. The billionaire who had everything money could buy, and now wanted what it couldn’t.

Typical. Nothing was ever sufficient for those lucky enough to have their every conceivable need met with ease and luxury.

“When my scientists managed to duplicate the conditions that brought about immortality in the lab, they repaid me by stealing every piece of information that would reveal how they’d done it. Including you.”

“How? How’d they do it?” Hunt asked while tucking the gun into the waistband of his jeans, against his lower back. I knew from watching him practice the move: he could draw a weapon from that position faster than Jaggar could reach his.

“The answer to that question,” Chase said, “is a trade secret. Once I secure your agreement to honor confidentiality, I may be willing to share more of the details with you.”

“Wow,” Layla sneered. “So fucking generous of you.”

Chase slid his stare to her. “If you give me the chance, you’ll find that I’m extremely generous. I can make things very good for all of you.”

“I don’t call being killed and shot at ‘good,’” Brady retorted as the surgeon stitched him up. From what I’d observed from our too-frequent recent experiences with hospitals, surgeons usually left secondary doctors or nurses to do the stitching or stapling. But beneath Chase’s watchful supervision, the surgeon didn’t hesitate to do it himself.

Chase steepled his fingers atop the cushion. “I wouldn’t call that good either. It’s regrettable, but it became unavoidable when my former employees decided to break their agreements and set me back years by stealing from me. I assure you, moving forward, we can be friends, and I can make life better for each one of you than you’ve ever dreamed of.”

Layla harrumphed from my left but didn’t say what I was sure she was thinking because I was thinking it too: we couldn’t trust the finely dressed snake as far as we could throw him.

Griffin clasped my hand as I said, “Just like you probably did for the Aquoians?”

He whipped his head to look at me. Deep and penetrating, his stare saw too much and revealed too little. In a clipped tone he hadn’t used with us yet, he said, “I offered them the easy way. I offered them riches so great they could have radically improved the lives of their people for many generations to come. They could have bought back much of their land, perhaps even secured more of their rights with the amount of money I offered them.”

“To think, money can’t buy everything,” I said, a taunt I instantly regretted.

His eyes hardened to brown, brutal flints. “As I told you already, we can be friends. Or we can … not. I think you’ll all much prefer having me as a friend.”

Then, without breaking eye contact with me, he asked, “Dr. Chadbourne, are you finished with your patient?”

“Yes, sir. But I’ve not yet treated the second.”

“You’re excused. All of you, leave now.”

Not even Jaggar complained as he and Raynar collected and holstered their weapons, then hurried to join the others in leaving us alone with the man with more money than sense.

When the door clicked shut, Chase leaned forward onto his elbows. His stare remained as sharp as before. Finally, we were seeing more of what lived beneath that polished exterior.

“This storytelling isn’t suiting us. Let me get down to the meat on the bone. I’m deeply invested in seeing the five of you thrive. I’m uniquely situated to help you understand yourselves, your powers, and to pretty much help you do whatever you want with your lives. With my support, there will be very little you can’t do.”

“And in exchange?” Griffin asked.

Chase didn’t flinch at Griff’s bluntness. “In exchange, I get to study you, observe you, help you.”

“You want to become immortal yourself?” Hunt asked. He remained standing in the center of the room even while the rest of us sat. He tracked every one of Chase’s movements for sign of a new threat.

“Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t given the choice.”

“True. But I’ve given you a great gift.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Brady said.

Meeting each of our stares in turn, Chase then said, “You may not like me now, but I think you’ll soon see I’m the one who offers you the most benefits.” He chuffed. “By far. You may be thinking now that you’ll never trust me.”

“We are,” Brady said.

Chase shrugged, the crisp shoulders of his shirt rising to accentuate his total lack of concern. “Trust me or don’t, time will reveal that, but realize, I’m the devil you know. I’m not hiding my motivations from you, and I won’t hide information from you either, once we come to an agreement.”

“So you keep mentioning,” Layla said. “What about our parents?”

He leaned back, his hands coming to his thighs. “Again, not your parents. Not a single one of you were carried in the wombs of those you believe to be your mothers. I paid surrogates quite handsomely to do the job.”

My mom’s smiling face flashed into my mind. The many photos she and my dad had shown me of her with a swollen belly, him hugging her, and the two of them beaming as they celebrated the baby soon to come.

Me.

“Bullshit,” I snarled.

“No. They might have stolen from me, but I have my resources. Of this, I have plenty of proof.”

“Show us,” Layla whispered, her volume alone suggesting her disbelief likely rivaled my own.

“I’ll show you everything. I’ll share the truth. It might not be pretty, and you might not like it, but I’ll never lie to you.”

None of us said anything. If we couldn’t even trust our supposed parents, like hell were we going to just start trusting this guy. A man who’d proven he had no qualms about justifying murders—ours and who knew how many others.

“What would you prefer? The liars and thieves who deceived you for your whole lives? Or me? At least with me, I don’t claim to love any of you. I don’t even like any of you yet; I only like what I can get from you. With me, you’ll always know my motivations, which are predictable. Can you say the same about the scientists who stole their lab rats and pretended to be their parents?”

Brady whistled. “Man, you are one stone-cold sonofabitch, aren’t you?”

“I am. And that alone makes me more trustworthy than them.”

“Show us the proof,” Layla said, “and then we’ll see.”

“I could. But I won’t. I know how to play the game of leverage and I play it quite well. My many business associates can attest to that.

“At this moment, the people you believed to be your parents are scouring the area, searching for you. By now, they’ve probably figured out I’m behind the fire at the school and the disappearance of their precious ‘children.’” He scoffed. “What a ruse. All to have continual access to up-to-date data. Before long, they’ll find us. After all, I hired them because they’re the best in their fields, which makes them at the very least smart enough to follow a few breadcrumbs. You agree to come with me and I give you the truth. All of it.”

“And if we refuse?” Hunt asked while Griffin squeezed my hand.

Chase looked at Hunt, his face relaxed and unapologetic. “I take you anyway, by force, and then we don’t get to be friends. And you don’t learn the truth your parents will never give you because they don’t want you to know what they’ve done. You won’t like what you find out about them, I’ll warn you.”

With that, even though it was maybe stupid and definitely reckless, I was in.

“Where would you take us?”

“To a special school I’ve been building just for those like you.”

“There are others like us?” Griffin asked softly.

Chase smiled genuinely for the first time. “There are. And their experiences are just as promising as yours.”

With that, I suspected the rest of my friends were on board. Without exception, we were a bunch of curious fuckers.

We might not be able to be certain about much, but we did know a few things: our parents were most definitely liars—we just didn’t know to what degree. We could likely survive most danger and be no worse off than we currently were. And I wanted to know how far this rabbit hole went with a fervor that kicked any reservations and desire for prudence swiftly in the ass.

“If we were to go with you,” Hunt said, “would we still get to choose whether we stay or not?”

“You would. But I won’t make it easy for you to go.”

Truth.

Hunt looked at each of us. One by one, we nodded. I understood I might regret the decision even as I nodded to accept it. But if there was a better option, I didn’t see it.

Hunt faced Chase. “Fine. But I keep the gun.”

Chase laughed. “Of course. It won’t make a difference.”

Shit . We were so majorly fucked.