Page 127 of You Only Love Twice
"I don't know what's going on, but I need you up there." Her eyes were pure bronze, given over entirely to the wolf within. "It's Gemma. Gemma's the Chameleon. And you're my only chance of stopping her without having to put a bullet in her head."
Gemma.
A chill ran through him.
A stillness.
"How?"
He sat up abruptly as Ingrid stepped back, all the heat in his body seeming to retreat.
"What?" Charlie groaned as he rolled to his side. She'd taken him down too.
"I'll explain in the elevation chamber," she snapped, hauling Obsidian to his feet. "Something's come over her—her eyes are so blank it looks like there's nobody inside, and Isabella said she wasn't the Chameleon, Gemma was, and Malloryn's down—"
"The neural implant," he whispered.
But when had—?
Of course. When the baroness and Gemma were assaulted. Gemma had escaped, but it had been almost twenty-four hours she'd been missing for. Long enough for the doctor to implant the neural implant if they were prepared, and her CV levels were high enough to heal any sign of the swift surgery.
They'd all thought she'd escaped, but had she?
Or had Ghost deliberately let her go?
Rage burned through him like a combustion engine stoked high.
"What neural implant?" Charlie demanded. He hadn't been in the original briefing.
"Keys?" Ingrid snapped, and Charlie unlocked the pair of them from their cuffs.
"There's a device implanted in her brain," Obsidian said as Ingrid stabbed the buttons to the throne room floor. "Gemma's still in there, but it's overriding her control of her body. She'll do things she'd never want to do, hurt people she'd never want to hurt."
She wouldn't be able to stop herself.
Heknewthe feeling far too well.
"How do we stop her?" Ingrid smelled like panic. "She's going after the queen. Byrnes is trying to slow her down, but if he can't lock her out of the throne room.... If she gets inside.... We have to stop her from killing the queen. He'll have tostopher."
The fucking elevation chamber wasn't moving fast enough. He paced the small cage, knowing what she was saying. The only way to stop Gemma was to kill her. "Leave Gemma to me."
"She'll try and kill you."
A hollow sensation echoed around his heart. "Iknow."
Because he'd been there once himself, on the inside looking out as his body pulled the trigger, no matter how much he screamed inside....
It was all starting to come back to him. All the things he’d never wanted to remember.
A sudden concussive force slammed the elevation chamber from side to side. Obsidian staggered into Charlie, then pushed away from the walls as the chamber stabilized. They weren't moving.
"What was that?" Ingrid demanded.
"Explosion." He looked up through the roof.
"She's taken out the power grid to the elevation chamber," Charlie said, stabbing buttons and trying to work the lever. "She knows we're coming. We're not moving."
"We're trapped in here," Ingrid snarled.
