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“Never,” I muttered, pressing the last few rounds into the magazine. “Not one time.”
Tabitha smiled slightly. “Kael, you’re not thinking clearly, because you love her.”
I paused. “What?”
“You love her. And dude,” she added, raising her black eyebrows, “you’ve had it bad for a long time. Why do you think she got away from you so easily before?”
I frowned, replaying our interactions in my mind. “That’s…” I pulled an incredulous face. “No, there’s no way.”
“It’s the truth,” Tabitha reiterated. “You haven’t made a single logical choice with Mattie.” Her mouth softened. “You’ve loved her since you met her. And it’s clouded everything you do.”
I thought back to all the maddening encounters I’d had with Mattie over the last year or so. Every sniping round of banter, every scuffle, every frustrating back-and-forth exchange that had culminated in a chase and capture I hadn’t been ready for.
Mattie challenged me. She challenged my perceptions, my skills, my patience, my icy, dead heart. She challenged me to feel. She challenged me to grow and change, and I realized then that Tabitha was right. I had craved that so badly that I had sought her out even when I shouldn’t have.
I had been chasing Mattie, but it wasn’t because I had wanted to catch her. I wanted to be caught up in her, in all that made her vivacious, witty, and clever. I wanted to be wrapped up in her until I had nowhere else to go. Because there was nowhere else I would rather be.
I swallowed hard, meeting Tabitha’s stare, and she shook her head. “Kael, you’re thinking like a man in love. Mattie doesn’t need that. She needs Ghost.”
I closed my eyes, blowing out a calming breath and stepping away. I slammed the magazine into the gun well. “Okay.”
“You can do it,” Tabitha said with quiet confidence.
I paced the length of the cabin until I reached the back, and then I leaned an elbow on the cherry wood inlay. I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against my fist. Think, Ghost. What do you know about Jonathon?
Ownership. He wants to own her. She said he wants her, and you know what men like him are like. You know how far they’ll go. But you also know their profile. Genius, unlimited resources, but predictable patterns. Always predictable patterns. They crave control. Routine. And if he wants to “own” Mattie, then where would he want her?
“He has an entire collection of mineral deposits from the trench itself that he’s installed in the château.” Alicia’s breathless voice speared through my memories first, followed closely by Mattie’s.
“I escaped an entire fleet of bodyguards in France. I can handle one ghostie.”
I opened my eyes and fixed them on Tabitha. “Change our destination to France.”
Iopened my eyes to find a bokeh of white and green, blending together and shining bright against a dark backdrop. A droning beep pierced through my aching skull, and its rhythmic ting made me think of a hospital. Like a heartbeat monitor. As my vision came into focus, I realized that it was my own heartbeat on a monitor. Then a blood pressure cuff tightened around my arm, and the sharp sting of an IV in my arm catapulted me back to awareness.
Lobotomy.
Had they already done it? Had I lost a piece of myself? Had my frontal cortex been severed, and my emotions tampered with… taken away from me?
No. No, I still felt the same. Maybe I wasn’t meant to feel the difference? I felt terrified, desperate, and so angry, I could happily snatch up the nearest medical instrument and shove it deep into Jonathon’s eye cavity. Surely that was a good sign. I pulled in a breath, filling my lungs that felt tight and unused, like I’d been barely breathing for hours.
“Where is Doctor Hughes?” a male voice asked. “She needs to be put under.”
“On his way,” a woman answered.
“She has a fast metabolism. She woke before he could get here.”
“Should I push midazolam?” the woman asked.
I forced out a groan, rolling to my side on the table. From what I could tell, I was in a dark operating room, and the only light in the room had been cast on the operating table where I lay. An older man—a surgeon, I guessed—had already scrubbed in and held his hands aloft in the way that I usually saw them do to keep the field sterile. A nurse, also masked and wearing the same pale green medical outfit, turned a questioning glance at the gray-haired man.
“I think you’d better,” the doctor said, his eyes roving over me.
I had on a medical gown, but my limbs weren’t tied down. As the nurse went to a silver tray at her side to reach for a drug, a hit of panic jolted through my veins. Move, Mattie. Get up. Don’t let them. I shook off the monitors on my left hand, and without stopping to think about the safety of the motion, I reached over and ripped the IV out of my right arm.
“She’s up,” the doctor said, darting forward to grab me.
I didn’t know if it was because he was old, or perhaps they hadn’t expected me to wake up before the anesthesiologist had put me under, but I evaded him easily. Even with clumsy limbs and a sluggish mind fogged over with drugs, I managed to flop off the table and scramble away. The doctor and nurse were the only ones in the room, and I realized with a stab of surprise that this wasn’t actually an operating room at all. It was a dining room. They’d closed off the room with plastic and tape, and although furniture had been moved against the wall and medical equipment moved into the space, I was still in the château.
