Page 79 of Devil's Due

She couldn’t stand it. She lunged forward and grabbed for them. He moved, lightning-quick, and took hold of her forearms, pulling her down to her knees.

The photos spilled over the concrete floor between them, glowing in the lurid red light. Black-and-white photos, taken from above. Grainy, as if ripped from a surveillance feed.

A woman lying on a white hospital-style bed, wearing a loose gown.

Knees up. Feet in stirrups.

Some kind of medical procedure.

Some kind of …

Lucia cried out and buried her face in McCarthy’s shoulder. In his warmth and strength. He kissed the top of her head and rocked her, and she twisted to stare at the photos again, silent now.

The stroking of his hand on her hair was almost hypnotic.

“It’s all a game to them. Percentages,” he said. “Anthrax to get you sick and vulnerable, and keep you running scared. They’d planned to check you into the hospital and get it done there, but Eidolon kept disrupting things, forcing their hand. I didn’t carry through on getting you in bed, but it didn’t matter, they had a backup plan. When you finally did collapse, when you were unguarded—they took you.”

She stared at the photographs. The details of an invasion of her body, clinically photographed.

“I dreamed,” she murmured. “I dreamed of lights … This was it, wasn’t it? It wasn’t all treatments for the anthrax. The feeling of violation.”

He didn’t answer. There didn’t seem much point, she supposed. It was right there, in the pictures. The doctors with their tools and their completely scientific rape of her body.

“How many times?” She felt as if there was a huge weight on her lungs, suffocating her. Like the old wives’ tale of waking with the cat on her chest, stealing her breath. This could not be true. Could not be happening.

“I don’t know. As many as it took to make sure, I suppose.” His voice sounded raw. Bloody. “You’re just a tool, Lucia. Just a body and a genetic code and a place in history, standing where they need somebody to stand, for the greater good.” The weight of sarcasm he gave the last two words made her shiver. “And our baby’s going to be exactly the same.”

She stirred and looked up. Her hair had fallen over her face, and she pulled it back out of the way. “Ourbaby?”

He kissed her. Not on the lips, on the forehead. A burning kiss of anguish and apology. “I can’t be sure without a DNA test, but yeah. They took sperm samples during the tests in the prison hospital, before they told me what I was supposed to do. That was what they wanted from me. Pretty much all they ever wanted. Their backup plan, in case I—got difficult about things. I guess just anybody wouldn’t do. Had to be me.”

They sat in silence, surrounded by the fallen photographs, wrapped around each other for comfort, until Jazz rapped on the door and asked if everything was okay in there.

Lucia straightened, wiped her face free of moisture, and forced a smile to her lips. McCarthy, bleached of color by the lights, looked awful. She didn’t expect she looked any better. “Nobody else needs to know,” she said. “You and me. Nobody else.”

“Jazz—”

“No.Nobody.Promise me.”

“I promise.” He gave her a wan, empty smile. “The least I can do.”

“No,” she said. “The least you can do is think of yourself. Whatever that is. Leave. Stay. Hate me. Love me. Do what’s in your heart, Ben. Whatever that is, just do it. Quit making decisions based on what you think I want.”

His eyes opened wider, and for a second he didn’t move or speak. She wasn’t sure if he was thinking or just feeling stunned. And then, without saying a word, he kissed her. A hot, damp, desperate kiss, tasting of tears. Wild, distilled passion. His hands rose to cup the back of her head, urging her closer, and his tongue nudged her lips apart.

She let him in.

Our choice, she thought, with what little conscious thought she had in that moment.One pure thing. Just one.

He broke the kiss with a tearing gasp and buried his face in the hollow of her neck. The moan that came out of him moved through her like a holy visitation.

“What the hell was that?” she asked, shaky.

“What I want.”

She wanted to stay there forever, in the safe red light, suspended in the warmth of this moment, but she reached down and scraped the pictures together, and slid them into the envelope. He straightened up and put his hands on her shoulders, then her face. Thumb tracing her damp, swollen lips.

“Make it your choice, Lucia. Let them chew on that.”

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