Page 39 of The Vigilante's Lover
“Are you hungry?” Katya asks.
She has straight blond hair that just touches her shoulders. She’s pretty and fresh looking, no makeup, just the white pantsuit. I glance at her feet in white sneakers. I could use a pair of those. They look about my size.
I realize Dell never drank her tea. “A little hungry,” I say. “But I have a rule never to drink alone.” I push Dell’s cup toward Katya. “Dell poured this but didn’t drink any.”
Katya stares at the cup with undisguised concern. She’s not very good at hiding her thoughts, at least not yet. Jax would eat her alive. Now I feel sure the tea is drugged. I wonder how to get out of here.
But she picks up the cup and takes a sip. I watch her a moment, wondering if she is just not aware of what they have done.
Although I guess she probablymadethe tea.
When several minutes pass in awkward silence and nothing happens to her, I dump three spoonfuls of sugar in the cup and drink it greedily. I’m starving and thirsty and need calories if I’m going to escape this place. I don’t know if they told the truth about the bracelet or if it just tracks me. For all I know it’ll stick me with poison the minute I try to go anywhere.
“So why did you call me special?” I ask Katya, when I figure she’s at her most uncomfortable due to the silence and her awkward position on the sofa.
“Because you are one,” she says quietly.
“How did you know just by looking?”
“You have a zero screen,” she says.
“A what?”
She points above my head. “A zero screen. You can’t see them? They are angled to be visible only for your direct view.” She scoots downthe sofa and reaches for my bracelet. “Twist this one.” She turns a crystal on its gold hoop.
Above her, on the glass screen, appears a set of data like the one when Jax and I entered the facility.
Katya Reynolds. Age 18. Phase One Trainee.
Hey. That’s what Jax kept calling ME.
“What’s a Phase One Trainee?” I ask.
“It’s the status of anyone in their first year of training,” she says. “Why don’t you know that?” Her eyes get wide, like she’s just screwed up.
“I’ve been in a safe house,” I say. Maybe I can fake this. “For my protection.”
“You’re not much older than me,” she says. “You don’t seem like you’d be a special.”
“Is that why I don’t have one of those over my head?” I say, gesturing toward her wall screen.
“You do. Yours is just blank except for your name. That makes you a special,” she says.
I turn around to see my screen. Sure enough, all it says is “Mia Morrow,” the same as when we walked in the glass hall.
“But Dell said I just wasn’t in the system.”
“Everybody’s in the system,” Katya says. “From the moment your mother gets a positive pregnancy test.”
I shudder at the thought of someone watching a woman peeing on a stick.
It’s time to figure out where I am and what I’m doing here, before Dell comes back. Katya is infinitely easier to manipulate.
I pick up a sandwich and take a big bite as I think about what to say to Katya. I wonder if our conversation is being monitored. Of course it is.
My neck itches where Jax put that sedative device and I press my hand to it. “This is so annoying,” I say. She knew about the bracelet. Maybe she can deactivate this. “Do you know how to remove it?”
“It’s just a tracker,” she says. “You can pull it off.”
