Page 24 of The Beast's Betrayed Mate
“Intrusive,” she said, but then she seemed to catch herself because of course they would do things that were intrusive. They were all about profit margins and keeping their board of investors happy, they’d shown that time and time again. They did some good along with all the bad, though; the world would be worse off without the medicine they produced, which was why he had stayed for this long.
“I wanted to make a difference,” she said slowly, lost in her own thoughts. “I can’t believe I thought this was the way.”
“Hey,” he stopped her. “You had no way of knowing.”
“Going in blind? Not being told anything? And just hoping on a wing and a prayer that this meant that my work was going to be used for good?”
“Was the money good?” he asked, and she slapped him in the chest, but then sighed softly.
“Yeah, it was,” she admitted. “I should’ve known it was too good to be true, shouldn’t I? But Cora, she’s so convincing. She’s…”
“Who’s Cora?”
“My boss,” Olive replied. “And the woman who recruited me. She came in with such a strong argument for why I needed to be a part of the trials. Why I had to be the one to oversee them. How I was crucial. What if they knew about our shared history?”
He felt his heart slow heavily in his chest at the mere thought. Then he frowned at her. “Why would that matter?” he asked.
“Well, if they wanted you to have someone by your side through the transition, wouldn’t it make sense that they’d bring us together?”
“Not when you hate me,” he remarked.
“I don’t hate you,” she rebuffed, and he cocked an eyebrow again.
“Oh?”
She gave him a look that, for better or worse, went straight to his groin. It wasn’t that he hadn’t found her attractive while they were at college. Truth was, he’d noticed her their first day there. But then he’d figured they wouldn’t have anything in common anyway. He’d pushed the thought of her away so hard that it turned around and slapped him in the face when she stood before him telling him that they should have dinner.
He felt like confessing how he’d obsessed over that moment to an unhealthy degree but decided now was not the right time to dredge up the past. Now was the time to focus on the present.
“I can see that there are correlations,” he admitted. “But we still don’t have a big picture.”
“I know,” she agreed. “I think we need to go back to the source for that.”
“What source?”
“The BR project itself,” she said. “It’s the only way to find out if we’re a part of some crazy experiment, right? We’ll be in the trial files. We’ll be monitored.”
“Yes, exactly, heavily monitored,” he remarked. “Don’t you think they’ll notice we’re there?”
“Not if we go in through the back entrance,” she said. “I know where there’s no CCTV.”
“Everywhere at work has got CCTV.”
“Yes, but the project isn’t hosted at work. It’s in a different facility all together a few miles out of the city.”
“What the fuck?”
“I know. What do you think?”
He couldn’t see that they had any other choice. “I mean, this is crazy,” he said. “We’ll probably get shot.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” she said. “Ifwe’re part of the experiment then wouldn’t we be more valuable to them alive than dead? They might just lock us up for the rest of our days with no one having even the faintest clue about where we are.”
“Ah,” he muttered. “Awesome.”
She smiled then. “We’d better wait until the earlier hours. That’s when the morning shift comes in to take over from the night shift. There’ll be less people after four for about an hour or so, and everyone will be busy handing over their work for the night and debriefing those taking over so we should be able to slip by unnoticed. Or at least without getting everyone’s attention on us.”
“Okay, great,” he said. “It’s like ten o’clock now. What should we do before then?”
