Home > The Devil You Know (Mercenary Librarians #2)(7)

The Devil You Know (Mercenary Librarians #2)(7)
Author: Kit Rocha

His brows drew together in a stormy frown. “The girl—”

“You can’t have her.”

He glanced around the room, his gaze lingering on each of them with calculation so plain Gray could almost hear it echoing in his head. He was wondering if he could take them all down before they managed to get him.

“Try it,” Gray murmured. “I’m begging you.”

The man’s jaw clenched—the first real emotion the bastard had shown since his arrival. He straightened his jacket with a sharp snap, then turned and left without another word.

Knox exhaled sharply. “Conall—”

“I’ll make sure he’s gone,” Conall promised, clutching his tablet. “And check Emerge’s feeds. They may not have locked me out yet.”

“Do what you can.” Conall rushed from the warehouse, and Knox drove his fingers through his hair before glancing at Nina. “Is she safe upstairs if he comes back?”

“He won’t come back.”

“How do you—?” Gray’s words cut off as another wave of dizziness hit him. This time, it wasn’t mild enough to lock his knees and grit his teeth through it. It crashed over him, nearly driving him to the floor. His muscles cramped, and hot bile rose in his throat as agony joined the nausea.

“Gray?” Maya’s voice was laced with worry. “Gray!”

He slumped to the floor, and black nothingness rushed up to greet him.

 

 

CONTRACT FOR EXECUTIVE EMPLOYMENT

Page 1/371

Employee Name: DC-031

Position: Data Courier

Executive: Birgitte Skovgaard

Start Date: May 21st, 2070

Compensation: 1000/month stipend in credits, yearly executive profit sharing options to be held in trust by Birgitte Skovgaard until DC-031’s 21st birthday (May 21st, 2083).

Duties: (Listed pages 2–371)

Signatures

DC-031

Employee

Birgitte Skovgaard

VP Behavior and Analysis

 

 

THREE


Maya was usually better in a crisis.

Lord knew she’d seen her share. Jobs gone wrong, Protectorate raids, bar fights, and shoot-outs—and that was after she’d escaped from the TechCorps.

Maya had learned to keep her cool. After all, she’d already been through the worst life could throw at her. She’d been helpless and alone, caught in the sadistic clutches of the TechCorps’ VP of Security. And she’d survived.

Gray hitting the floor in an unexpected seizure shouldn’t have rattled her brain so hard it fritzed out.

Luna arrived from the upstairs apartment she shared with her aunt at a dead run, her T-shirt inside-out and her ponytail listing on her head. She may have dressed in a hurry, but she wore an expression of utter confidence as she used her tablet to connect to Gray’s implant—and for good reason. The biohacker was an expert in TechCorps implant maintenance, a literal prodigy when it came to the delicate neural interface that controlled all of the Silver Devils’ artificial enhancements. She’d been keeping them all steady for months now. She would fix this.

Maya believed it. She just couldn’t stop panicking.

This was Gray. Solid, implacable Gray. He was like an ancient oak tree in the middle of a raging storm. Nothing shook him. Sometimes it seemed like nothing even touched him. She’d stared at him for what felt like hours, trying to figure out what was going on behind those delightfully brooding eyes. For a while, she’d tried to attribute her attention to good old-fashioned self-preservation. An apex predator had moved in, after all, and she’d always had well-honed instincts for danger.

But the awareness that prickled over her when he entered a room wasn’t fear. And Maya had never been very good at lying to herself.

The seizure had subsided, helped along by Knox administering some sort of drug up his nose. Now, Gray was dreadfully still, his forehead covered with a sick sheen of sweat.

“Got it.” Luna’s brows drew together as her gaze raced over the tablet’s screen. “This can’t be right.”

Knox’s voice scraped over Maya’s raw nerve endings like his words were coated with gravel. “What is it? What’s happening?”

Luna barely glanced up. “I can’t adjust his implant. According to this diagnostic, it doesn’t need maintenance. Everything is normal.”

“This is not normal,” Nina insisted.

“No, I know.” Luna drove a hand through her hair, dislodging the ponytail and tangling the white streaks she’d bleached into the dark brown. “But whatever the problem is, it’s not his implant.”

Maya’s stomach flipped. Her brain skittered in too many directions at once, words tumbling over one another—medical assessments and proprietary experimental data and all the scary Latin names for things that might be slowly killing someone with Gray’s biochem implant. But she couldn’t latch on to a thread and pull it free because there was too fucking much, and she didn’t even know where to start.

What the fuck good was having what felt like half the knowledge of the known freaking universe throbbing in your head if you had to just stand there and helplessly watch someone die?

Luna was still speaking. “Without more information, I can’t narrow it down. We need a proper doctor.”

Nina exhaled sharply. “A neuroengineer?”

“Preferably a TechCorps-trained one.”

“No,” Gray croaked. “We don’t.”

“Gray.” Knox gripped his shoulder gently. “You need help. We can find someone.”

“There’s nothing they can do, Captain.” Gray’s expression was calm, almost serene. “I’m rejecting my implant.”

The words tumbling end over end through Maya’s aching head zeroed in on chilling specifics. Elevated ICP and inflammatory fibrosis and foreign body response. The pressure was unbearable, and her lips parted before she could stop them.

Her dispassionate recitation fell into uncomfortable silence, the words crisp and clipped, a perfect re-creation of the posh British accent of the scientist who’d issued the report to Birgitte. “‘In a certain percentage of recruits, implant rejection is immediate—and fatal. In a smaller subset, rejection may be delayed by a matter of months or even years. It is unknown what, exactly, triggers this belated response, but it seems to be linked to difficulties with neural interface installation.’”

Knox’s expression tightened. “Delayed rejection happens, but I’ve never heard of it happening after twenty years.”

“What can I say?” Gray struggled into a sitting position, waving Knox away when he reached for him to help. “I’m an overachiever.”

Nina eyed him dubiously. “None of this was in your medical paperwork.”

He didn’t seem to question that of course Nina had reviewed his charts. “One of the techs told me while I was in recovery after my implant procedure. The surgeon had trouble, but he told them not to mark it down.” Gray grinned. “Guess he didn’t want me fucking up the bonus linked to his success rate.”

Little flares of pain shivered up Maya’s arms. She looked down and saw that she’d clenched her hands into fists so tight that her nails were cutting into her palms.

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