The Asset

Chapter 5

She was good at uncovering secrets, at finding things that people wanted to keep buried. The Red Room program had trained her well. If they'd known what she was doing, turning those same skills back on them, the consequences would be severe. But she didn't care. They wouldn't bury this.

She remembered the fear. Once, they'd used it to break her. But that training, those early missions, had hardened her. For a time, she'd thought herself above it, thought herself immune. Fear was emotion. Emotion was weakness. It was one of the first lessons that she had learned.

But James had changed things, changed her. With him, she hadn't felt weak. In those few short weeks of fighting by his side, she had felt invincible.

That had been the problem. They'd grown too bold, too sloppy. Their affair had been one of the program's worst kept secrets. Some looked the other way, but then James had started asking questions, defying orders. So had she, but she wasn't reckless enough to show it. Even after what happened, she couldn't blame him. That impulsive nobility had been one of the things that she'd loved most about him.

They'd been discovered together. He'd been ripped from her arms, disappearing so quickly and completely that she had been certain he was dead. That's when the fear had returned. She'd dared to disobey, to forget the most basic lesson. And it had cost her everything.

But she had learned that there were some things stronger than fear. She started digging, uncovering what she could, knowing full well the consequences of discovery. They were right, after all. James had been reckless, stubborn. And he had trained her well.

The Red Room buried its secrets deep. She listened well, listened where she shouldn't have, stealing documents and shipping manifests. She identified the weak links in the chain, asking questions where she could, just as she'd been taught. The poor driver who'd finally given her the location had screamed for hours.

But he'd given her hope, pointed her in the direction of an old storage facility, a graveyard for defunct weapons and failed experiments. The security was no trouble. Whatever was inside that dank and musty building wasn't worth the Red Room's best.

She'd dropped in through the ceiling, keeping to the shadows as she crept through towering aisles of unknown horrors. There was no doubt that the driver had been telling the truth. She'd been thorough, meticulously so.

When she found what she was looking for the fear returned in force, knocking the breath from her. She buried a gasp in her hand, tears stinging her eyes as she turned her face away. Death would be better than this. She immediately regretted the thought, but still it rang true.

James hung suspended in a thick glass pod, glowing faintly with the energy that sustained his life. It cast strange shadows on his face, a ghostly echo that reminded her of the moonlight streaming through the window on the last night he had slept beside her. She reached out for him without thinking, jerking her hand away as the cold stung her fingertips.

She didn't want to look, didn't want to feel the helpless scream welling in her chest. But she forced her eyes to open, forced herself to see what they had done. There was frost in his eyelashes. It coated his cheeks, formed delicate webs of spun crystal in his hair. Shadow deepened the hollows of his eyes and traced the line of his jaw, throwing into sharp relief the muscles of his chest, the scars that she had traced so often with her fingers. He was startlingly beautiful, but there was no peace in this sleep. The bile rose in her throat.

That's where they found her, her masters' leash tightening again. Of course, they had let her find him, let her think she was beyond their control. They'd wanted her to see this, but it was more than a lesson. This was punishment, cruelty for cruelty's sake. They never let her have a chance to mourn. Soon enough, they hadn't even let her remember.