He remained silent as she led him inside the indoor shooting range and flipped on the lights. That silence continued as they walked past the long row of booths to a door at the end. The door was steel and marked with a yellow biohazard sign. Below that sign though was a laminated painting of a vivid green viper, and nestled protectively in the coils of its body was a tiny bird, a lark. Erik’s work. It had been a gift from Kong last Christmas.
Opening the door, she ushered Grady inside. “This is my private range.” The walls of the fifteen-foot by seventy-five-foot room were plain gray concrete, pitted and grooved in places that had taken damage, and piled up against the closest wall was a small mountain of scrap metal.
“What is this?” Grady asked as he looked around the room, seeming a bit confused.
Lark didn’t answer him. He’d see soon enough. Grabbing what had once been the rear axle of a car, she hauled the sturdy piece down the length of the room and stood it up against the back wall.
Walking back, she grabbed some goggles off a hook behind the door and handed them to him. “Just in case,” she told him, then toed the yellow line on the floor that had a painted 65 over it. Sixty-five feet.
Looking over at Grady who had donned the goggles, she raised a brow. “Are you ready?”
“I have no fucking clue what’s going on, but yeah, I’m ready.”
Opening her mouth, her fangs dropped as she squeezed the muscles of her venom glands releasing a pressurized spray that shot across the room at blinding speed to hit the axle at the other end.
“Jesus… Christ…” Grady breathed and she could hear the shock and disbelief in his voice.
The concrete behind the axle that had taken some overspray began to smoke and pit from the splatters, but the axle itself that had taken the highest concentration began to dissolve in places, crumbling in on itself as it lost its structural integrity. Soon it would be nothing more than a puddle.
Lark turned to face Grady who was staring at the other end of the room like he couldn’t believe his eyes. “You think you need to protect me?” she quietly uttered. “People need to be protected from me.”
She held her breath. Would he be disgusted by her now? Would he look at her like she was a freak? Lark didn’t think he’d be afraid of her – men like Grady Carter weren’t built that way – but there had been too many times in her life when people had rejected her for what she was, for things she couldn’t help, and she didn’t want Grady to be one of them.
“That’s amazing,” he breathed as he strode purposely toward what was left of the axle.
Lark closed her eyes and let out a sigh of relief. He wasn’t horrified. By the sounds of it, he was impressed.
A low whistle. “Sixty-five feet,” he uttered before he turned and asked, “Is that your max?” He turned back to the axle and examined the pitted wall behind it. “I think you could go longer.”
“Seventy-three is the farthest I’ve tested and it drops a bit short at that point. My reach grew as I did, so I kept having to adjust the distance, but the General didn’t want me compromising Black Bay’s retaining walls. That’s why this room was added for me to practice.”
Grady nodded thoughtfully and walked back to her, a small smile tipping up one side of his lips. God, he was gorgeous, but when he smiled…
“So I guess what you’re saying is I shouldn’t piss you off?”
Lark let out a little chuckle. “What I’m saying is you don’t need to be all noble and leave to protect me. I can take care of myself.”
His good humor fled, the frown returning to his face. “I still need to leave. Not just because of what happened earlier with you. I need answers. I need to finish this. I have rage, Lark. So much rage.”
“That’s normal. We all went through it after we were freed.”
He shook his head. “That’s the thing. Thisisn’tnormal. I should be angry, yes, you’re right about that, and I am. But this rage I feel is out of proportion. It’s blinding and destructive, and… I know it sounds crazy, but it doesn’t feel likemine.” He let out a humorless bark of laughter. “That sounds ridiculous – I mean, who else’s could it be? – but I don’t know how else to explain it.”
“You think it’s something they did to you?”
Lark had been steadily going through all the files they’d obtained on the Resurrection project, but her focus had been on figuring out the best strategy for freeing the soldiers they’d already augmented and stopping more from being taken. She’d only skimmed the technical aspects of the upgrades they’d modified the soldiers with. She’d have to look deeper. It might be something programmed into that chip in his head.
“They must have. I remember enough now about who I was to know that my reactions are too exaggerated to be wholly natural.”
She nodded thoughtfully, thinking about how she might narrow the search. “Let me question Doctor Dietrich. She’s a control freak and would have micro-managed every aspect of the experiment. If something’s going on there, she’ll know.”
Lark saw it then, the change that came over him just at the mention of the geneticist that had worked on Resurrection. His eyes went cold and flat, his jaw taut with anger, and his hands at his sides were fisted; the flesh and blood one clenched so tightly that his knuckles were white.
Rage. And he was fighting to control it.
“Look at me,” Lark demanded. She let her pupils contract into slits as she held his gaze. She couldn’t mesmerize Grady, but she might be able to distract him, pull him back from that razor’s edge he was riding. “Just focus on me.”
His nostrils flared, but his eyes remained on hers, slowly warming by degrees until he was back in control.
