Midnight Promises by Lisa Marie Rice Read Free Book Online

sight.
    Lauren blinked. “
I
didn’t know she was coming to me. How could anyone else possibly know?”
    Felicity opened her mouth to talk, but coughed instead. It pulled her stitches and she grimaced.
    “Look,” Metal said reasonably, though he was perfectly prepared to be unreasonable. Felicity was going home with him. No question. “She’s slightly sedated and in no condition to give us a rundown on what people could know about her movements. If she came here for you, there is probably some trace of that somewhere. It’s not likely, but you have Jacko to protect you and he will, but he can’t protect two people. So we’re splitting it up. Not to mention the fact that my house is more secure than yours. Speaking of which, I’d recommend you spend the next few days at Jacko’s. At least until we find this asshole.”
    “Yeah,” Jacko growled.
    Lauren bit her lip. Everything Metal said was true. Jacko hadn’t had time to make Lauren’s house secure, certainly not as secure as his own and Jacko’s. The two of them had security built into their DNA and Lauren sure as hell didn’t. She was an artist and a good one. But clueless in terms of securing her safety.
    He and Jacko weren’t clueless. In fact, they were fucking good. Good luck to anyone trying to attack them in their homes. So yeah, Lauren was going to stay with Jacko for a while.
    And Felicity was going to stay with him.
    Because his home was secure and he was one farther step away from Lauren.
    Because he was a trained medic and could take care of her medically.
    Because…because.
    Metal bent over Felicity so all she’d see was his face.
    “Felicity?” She licked her lips and nodded. Her beautiful eyes shifted left to right as she watched his eyes. She opened her mouth and closed it. Talking took too much energy. That was okay. She didn’t have to talk. She just needed to be informed. “I’m taking you home with me. If the guy after you somehow knew where you were headed, he won’t find anyone at Lauren’s. But we’ll have cameras running so if he stops by we’ll catch him on film. Lauren will be staying with Jacko and you’ll be staying with me. My home is secure and I can look after you. You’ll be just fine. I’ll be there if infection sets in or you need anything. Nod if you understand me.”
    She nodded, eyes huge.
    “Nod again if this is okay with you.”
    She hesitated a second and his heart sank. Because the hard truth was she was coming home with him whether she liked it or not. Someone was after her and was not going to get a second crack at it. After a second or two she nodded her head.
    “Good girl. I’m going to carry you to my vehicle. Is that okay?”
    That earned him a small smile and a nod and something in his chest gave a hard thump.
    She was staying with him.
    Yeah.
     

Chapter Three

Manhattan
    Borodin sipped his after-dinner Armagnac and thought of lost worlds and worlds to come.
    A generation ago, he and a group of other young KGB officers had seen the handwriting on the wall, though none of them in that long-ago summer and fall of 1989 could ever have imagined how great the loss would actually be. No one imagined that the Soviet Union could actually fall.
    At the time, all their hopes had been pinned on the great closed city of Chelyabinsk, one of an archipelago of
naukograd
, science cities. The rest of the Soviet Union was going to hell, the situation even worse than the idiots of the Politburo realized, but in the
naukograd
, things held. Orderly and wealthy and elite, great things were coming if only the country could hold out.
    The greatest invention, what was going to change the world forever, was being slowly pieced together by a genius-level nuclear physicist named Nikolai Darin in Chelyabinsk, a
naukograd
specializing in nuclear weaponry. Darin was working on man-portable nuclear weapons, called Deti, Little Ones, and they were going to change Russian history. World history.
    Borodin had seen the specs