Two Weeks' Notice

“Pat!” Training kicked in, and Bryn forced herself to slow down, push feelings aside. “Did she get the artery?”

“Yes,” he said. “Look after her. I’m fine.”

Not with that much blood outside his body, he wasn’t. Bryn grabbed up her belt from where it lay by the door and wrapped it around his arm above the wound, then yanked it as tight as possible before twisting it even tighter. “We need an ambulance,” she told Joe, who nodded and rose to his feet to pull out his cell phone. “What the hell happened?”

“What Pat thought might happen,” Joe said. “Your sister’s under Protocol. Mercer didn’t lose her; he sent her like a guided missile to kill you, or Pat, or both. Until we detox her with Manny’s new formula, we can’t break her Protocol conditioning, so I have to keep her out for a while, but we needed to be sure.”

Bryn remembered what it felt like to have her will taken away; it was one of the hidden military applications of Returné. That undocumented feature—that was what it was called, in bureaucracy-speak—was one of the first things that McCallister had asked Manny to change in the formula he’d developed independently…and the most difficult.

It wasn’t that Annie felt right about trying to kill them.…She just had no choice. She was a passenger in her own head, with no will of her own, until they could break the Protocol. Which I thought I’d done. It had been stupid. She’d fallen into the trap of her own wishful thinking.

But she couldn’t worry about Annie just now, not with Pat’s skin fading to a pale, shocky color under the olive tone. He looked calm, but there were stress lines around his eyes and mouth.

“I’d love to put on some pants,” he said. “If you don’t mind. Joe—”

“I’ll do it,” Bryn interrupted. She helped him dress without another word, and Joe kept watching Annie’s limp body as if his life depended on it. He was keeping his observations strictly to himself, which was very un-Joe- like.

“Hey,” she said, and put a hand gently on Pat’s face as he lay very still on the bed. He had his eyes shut, but he opened them and focused on her. “Don’t think I missed the fact that she was going for me first, and you got in the way.”

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, as if the segue made sense, “that I don’t want to just be friends with benefits.” It was possible he’d lost enough blood that he’d forgotten Joe was standing in the room, unable to not hear this. Bryn tried not to glance in that direction, but her cheeks burned a little. “I hope that’s all right with you.”

“Yes,” she said, and swallowed hard. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

“Good,” he whispered, and closed his eyes again. “Very good.”

Joe cleared his throat as his cell phone dinged for attention. Text message. “Ambulance is on the way,” Joe said, and pocketed his cell phone. “Damn. It’s way too early for this kind of excitement.”

Bryn wasn’t sure which kind he meant, exactly, but it didn’t seem a prudent time to ask.

Chapter 7

Patrick’s slice to the interior aspect of his forearm needed stitches to close the brachial artery, and then more to match up severed muscle and flesh. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as Bryn had feared. It was, for one thing, his left side and not—as Joe had laconically remarked—his main trigger hand. “Can’t shoot for shit with his left anyway,” Joe had observed. “If a barn’s attacking us, he might get a solid hit.”

Bryn could tell by Pat’s eyes that he was still doped when they rolled him out in his official release wheelchair, but only mildly, and the first thing he said was to Joe, not to her. “Is she still out?” Meaning Annie. He’d given the ER doctors a bullshit story about a kitchen accident, which they’d probably not believed but had accepted nonetheless.

“Like a hammered ox,” Joe said, as Patrick got out of the wheelchair and walked toward the sedan parked in the covered area. Bryn tried not to hover. He’d had a unit of fresh blood, but even so, he still seemed pale to her. “I let her wake up and put her on a slow drip of the new formula, but it’s going to take time. The Pharmadene standard is pretty strong stuff, and it’s not easy to erase a Protocol—you know that.”

“You left her with Liam?”

“He’s armed, warned, and she’s strapped down.” Joe paused in the act of opening the car door and said, “I’m sorry, man. I should have gotten Liam to spell me when I hit the toilet, but she’d been so quiet all night I didn’t think she’d move. I was gone maybe two minutes, tops. Don’t know how she beat the door. My fault.”

“Mine, not yours,” Pat said. “I expected her to go for Bryn first, and Bryn always locks her door from the inside. I thought we’d have time to intercept. And I needed to let her try to act, so we’d be able to verify what he’d done to her.” He sent her a half-apologetic glance. “I was hoping I was wrong, but I thought you’d need proof to convince you that I was right.”

“Well, I think you’ve got it,” she said. “And how do you know I always lock my door?” Bryn always did, even in the mansion—the habit of growing up in a large family, and living in an apartment complex where theft was a common occurrence.

He didn’t answer that, other than with a slight smile.

“Oh, and by the way, no worries about me busting in on you,” Joe said with an insane amount of cheer. “Didn’t see a thing.”

Pat sighed and put his head back against the seat, eyes closed. “You’re not going to forget it, are you, Joe?”

“Which part? The two of you naked in bed? Bryn going hand-to-hand naked? Because it’s fairly memorable, my friend.”

“Pervert,” Bryn said. “I’m going to tell your wife.”

“She’d be shocked if I didn’t remember. And then she’d check me into the hospital.”

Bryn smiled, but her mind wasn’t on the banter; it was on her sister. Annalie had been lost for months, and come back…brainwashed wasn’t the correct word, but neither was wrong, because she’d simply lost control of her body to the program. It can be fixed, Bryn told herself. It can all be okay. But she didn’t know that for certain. She’d seen Annie when Mercer had first taken her, and even then, she’d looked…damaged. Desperate. Almost destroyed.

Six months later, how much of the original Annie was still there to be saved? I’m so sorry. I never should have gotten you involved in this. She’d regretted it every day, but regret wasn’t helpful.

Nothing was helpful right now. She just had to wait and see how Annie came out of it. And Pat was right— she’d have to keep her guard up, regardless. She couldn’t trust her own sister anymore. Protocol instructions were wicked difficult to countermand when raised to their highest levels like this.

It was now almost eight o’clock in the morning, and as Joe drove them back to the McCallister estate, she held Pat’s free hand without even considering that she was doing so until they were almost home. It felt…right. Comfortable. After last night, they couldn’t reset the clock, couldn’t take that giant step backward, even if she wanted to…which she didn’t.

Whatever was ahead, she’d keep moving. Maybe it would end badly, or just end, period, but one thing was certain: the ride was bound to be…extraordinary. And bumpy. It was insane that she’d finally reached that breathless, intense space with Patrick, and had the world crash down on them almost immediately, but she had the sense that any relationship with McCallister was going to be driven hard by adrenaline.

Maybe he might say the same about her.

Bryn checked her calendar on her phone and sighed. “I have the job for Pharmadene this morning,” she said. “Don’t give me that look, Patrick. It’s fact-finding. It’s not dangerous; it’s just fact-finding. All the file asked me to do was go in, meet with the owner, and ask some questions about invoices. It’s nothing. It’s white-collar crime, at worst.”

“Sure,” he said. “That’s why they’re sending the woman who can come back from the dead. Because it’s not