Page 102 of Haunted Prey

His smile widened. “I know.”

I rolled my eyes at him as Micheal went to sit on the couch and started to read.

“Dom, make sure you check what she’s doing,” Leslie said as he slunk back to the garage.

“I’ll try to talk some sense into him,” Emery whispered before following him.

“Any chance I could get my phone back, Dom?” Lena asked. “I got a load of work to finish too.”

Dom gave her a sad little smile and shook his head before returning to his station. He wrote something out and showed us. “No can do. But Andrea will be around to take you out to make some calls soon.”

“Great,” Lena mumbled. She turned her chair toward the hall. “Well. I need a shower. Mind helping me get in at least?”

I followed Lena to the bathroom, helping her get undressed and in the shower, telling her I’d be back in fifteen to get herout. When I returned to the community room, I sat at the table, watching Micheal’s face as he read my paper.

When he finished, his eyes met mine. Without looking away, I went over to him and sat down.

“This is…really something,” he said.

“It’s a lot.”

“You discovered the reports about us?”

“Yes. I still have them.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “This is honestly fascinating, Eve. I don’t think anyone will ever have the insight you have into such a…unique situation.”

“Probably not.”

He gave me a serious look. “And you really plan to publish this? Even though it’s about your father’s company?”

“I do.”

He wiped his mouth. “That would…greatly benefit us. I wish it was enough to stop the experiments even now.”

“I will mention Severfalls. And Kennedy too. But I agree it would likely only start a defamation lawsuit and nothing more.”

“When we stop them for good, hopefully it won’t matter.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Either way people will know.”

He cleared his throat. “I assume there was information about me in the reports?”

“Some, yes. But I think adding more than just what was said in those files would benefit this, don’t you think?”

The corner of his lip twitched a little. “Yes, I think so.” I dared to believe he might actually start to trust me. “Alright. I’ll talk. Can’t say the same for the others. But I’ll give you a page of my thoughts.”

While he set up a space for us to talk in private, I helped Lena out of the shower. I returned to Micheal who picked Andrea’s exam room, giving me a chair to sit while he sat on the side of the bed.

I asked him some questions and he gave me a recount of his childhood. His father had died in a work accident, his mother, whether from grief or some underlying condition, started to lose herself. If she wasn’t having a fit of rage, she was drinking, leaving him alone at the age of four. From what he was told, the neighbors had found him one night in his own filth with flies on him and maggots in a festering wound that his mother hadn’t taken him to the doctor for. She had been gone for three days and all he had was water from the sink.

They took him away. He was in foster care from then up to age eleven when he was sold to the Martel company and from there tested in the warehouse. He got out of there at an early start because he had stabbed one of the nurses.

“I would have ended up like the others if I hadn’t fought back early on,” he explained. “I was down there for a little over six months, and I’ll never forget it. I still have nightmares. I can’t imagine how the others coped.”

“And you want to take out those responsible even now?”

His expression turned icy. “My rage is for the others more than myself. Yes, they did things to me, but I saw worse. Much worse. I won’t be able to let it go until I know they are done for good. Now that they are working on pregnant women, I’m even more prepared to let that rage take over. But we are all we have left. And…I want to keep the others safe. So I want to do things right, I want to finish this. But where we can still make it out and move on with our lives.” He tilted head, studying me again. “You understand that to an extent now, don’t you?”

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