Once Bitten, Twice Burned

She wanted to keep talking. He knew more about her, she realized that. The knowledge was in his eyes, in the way he glanced over her body. Phoenix. He’d called her that before. The only phoenix she knew was a mythical bird. She had to get Ryder to tell her more. To explain to her just what she was.

He was the key to so much, provided, of course, he didn’t kill her again.

Ryder had already headed up the stairs. She glanced at his wide back. Trusting him would be stupid. She wasn’t stupid. Most of her memories had come back, and, so, okay, she didn’t fully remember his attack on her. I don’t want to.

Sabine just wanted to get out of this crazy hell, and to do that, she had to follow the vampire.

Follow him, work with him. Trust him?

Her fingers curled around the metal stair railing. The stairs squeaked beneath her feet as she hurried and climbed up behind Ryder. For better or scary-as-hell worse, they were together now. Maybe they’d both manage to get out of that place alive.

Are vampires even alive?

She had so much to learn.

Wyatt took his time scanning the notes he’d made on Sabine. She’d recovered nearly all of her memories after just three days. Fairly fast, considering that she’d just been through her first rising. She had amazing potential.

Test Subject Twenty-Nine is showing remarkable recovery skills. He quickly jotted down that notation. He couldn’t wait to monitor her after the second rising.

Wyatt glanced down at his watch. Donaldson should be shooting her at any moment. He put the papers aside, not wanting to miss the experiment. His pace kicked up as he hurried toward the observation room adjacent to Twenty-Nine’s cell.

Think of her as Twenty-Nine. When he’d first brought her in, he’d been thinking of her as Sabine. An amateur mistake. He knew better. But when she’d first come in, she’d looked human.

They’re numbers. Subjects. Not people. Because he’d referred to both Sabine and Ryder by name, he’d noticed that his staff had started to refer to them that way, too.

You can’t see them as individuals. As men. As women.

That was a huge mistake. His father had taught him that. His father never saw the humanity in his subjects. They were numbers, not names.

The beings in his lab were test subjects. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Donaldson had hesitated when Richard gave him the order to shoot Subject Twenty-Nine. He’d hesitated because he’d started to see her as a woman, not the monster she was.

I’ll have to brief all the staff. Only numbers from now on. No names. The new recruits he had coming in would learn this lesson from the very start.

You were less likely to feel sorry for a number.

The door to the observation room slid open. “How is the test proceeding?” Richard began, then jerked to a stop when he realized two of his staff members were unconscious on the floor.

His gaze flew to the two-way mirror. The exam table was empty, but the room wasn’t. Donaldson stood, statue-still, in the middle of the room, with a gun pressed to his heart.

Son of a bitch.

Richard rushed forward and pressed the button for the alarm.

They’d just reached the top of the stairs when a shrill alarm pierced the air. Sabine clamped her lips closed to hold back her instinctive cry and pushed behind Ryder. But instead of opening the door that was just a few precious feet away, instead of getting them the hell out, he spun back around and caught her arms.

“Guards are coming,” he rasped.

Her eyes narrowed. She could almost hear the fast thud of footsteps. Wait, she did hear them.

His head jerked up. He looked to the left. The right.

Then his stare came back to her. “I can kill them all.” Said with absolute certainty.

Her heart clenched. She didn’t know these men and women. Maybe they were as screwed up as Dr. Richard Wyatt—every time she saw him, her skin crawled. But what if they weren’t? What if some of the guards truly didn’t understand all that was happening at Genesis? Was that even possible?

“Don’t,” she whispered.

Ryder shook his head. “That’s a mistake.” His gaze locked with hers. “But we’ll play it your way, for now.”

Then, instead of shoving open the door and getting out of the stairwell, he turned toward a grate behind them. He kicked out and the grate fell inward. “Get in,” he told her. “Crawl forward fifteen feet, take a left, then punch out the screen you’ll find in front of you.”

How did he know this stuff?

But she didn’t question him. She just hauled ass. Bending low, Sabine pushed into the entranceway. Some kind of air duct. She crawled forward even as she mentally kept up a hopeful refrain of No rats, no rats, no rats.