“Please,” Eve’s soft voice. “Wyatt has other test subjects, Damon. He’s going to hurt them, the way he tried to hurt me. We just want to save them.”
She wanted to save people. Cain wanted to kill. Why couldn’t they both get what they wanted?
We can.
“Where is he?” Eve asked the human, her voice so light and gentle. “Don’t die without helping those others. Tell us, please.”
“B-Beaumont . . .” The word seemed torn from Damon. Probably because it was. “He’s got . . . second lab . . .”
Cain waited.
“In . . . Beaumont.”
Cain had heard of the city. A small town, just inside the North Carolina border, nestled in the mountains. “Thanks for the information. Now you can die happy.” Or maybe with a semi-clean conscience.
“Cain!” Eve shoved at his back.
Sighing, he stepped out of her way. She immediately fell beside Damon. Her blood-smeared fingers reached for the man’s cheek. She leaned in close and told him, “You aren’t dying.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Yeah, it hurts like a bitch, I know, but the bullet missed your heart, and that second wound’s just a graze.”
While she was talking Cain was calling nine-one-one . . . and keeping a close watch on Eve.
“No vital organs were damaged.”
The woman sounded like a doctor. Fitting, since she’d played one back at Genesis. Cain wondered . . . how much of that role had been pretend?
“You get stitched up, get some good drugs in you, and you’ll be just fine.” Eve gave Damon a light tap on the cheek. “Sorry I had to press down so hard on your wounds, but I needed you to hurt a little bit more.”
“Pain can make people talk,” Cain murmured. The nine-one-one dispatcher answered in his ear and Cain told her to send an ambulance. “We’ve got a human down.”
Eve looked back at him with a frown.
Cain tossed the phone onto the countertop. “You make one fine bad cop.” He could admit when he was wrong.
The left side of her mouth hitched into a half-smile. “Told you that I have my moments.”
Yes, she did.
“But your bad cop . . . was better,” she admitted.
Because he hadn’t been playing.
Eve glanced back at the groaning man on the floor. “Just stay still until the ambulance gets here. You really will be okay.”
Anger tightened Damon’s face. Anger and pain.
Eve rose and went to the sink. Cain shadowed her moves—just in case Damon wanted to attack. She washed the blood away from her fingers. The water turned red as it poured down the drain.
Cain took Eve’s arm and began to lead her from the kitchen.
“You’ll . . . stop him . . .” Damon’s voice. Weak. Growling.
Cain glanced back. “I will.” A promise.
Damon nodded. “Good. He’s . . . sick . . .”
“A real monster,” Eve whispered. She cleared her throat and told Damon, “When the doctors sew you back up, get out of that hospital as soon as you can. Wyatt tried to kill you once, and when he finds out he didn’t succeed, he’ll come after you again.”
When you worked with the devil, you had to expect to feel the fire. “And if you try to warn him that we’re coming,” Cain said, voice sharp and hard when Eve’s had been soft, “I will be back for you.”
Damon’s breath heaved out. “Won’t . . . tell . . .”
He’d better not.
But just in case, Cain planned to attack the lab in Beaumont as soon as he could.
The distant wail of an ambulance’s siren reached him. Help. Coming quickly for the human.
They hurried back to their vehicle. Left the blood behind. Didn’t look back.
By the time the ambulance turned onto Branchline, Cain was already heading in the opposite direction. He watched the ambulance’s flickering lights in his rearview mirror.
“They’ll save him,” Eve said, sounding so certain. “The wound was all gore, but nothing vital had been hit.”
He glanced her way.
“Two years of med school,” she explained with a sigh. Her eyes closed as if she were tired. “I know what death looks like.”
She also knew how to be one fine actress.
She’d just bluffed her way into getting them the information they needed.
How f**king perfect.
Beaumont.
Now, to just find a safe place to leave Eve while he turned Wyatt’s new playground into ashes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN