Forged: An Altered Series Prequel (3 page)

Connor came across the room and stepped into the light with me. It only hit half his face, leaving the other half in shadow. He looked down at me, and all the blood in my veins drained to my toes. My knees grew weak.

He looked absurdly handsome right now, even though it was the middle of the night. Where my hair was disheveled, matted in the back, flat on one side, his was messy in a way that seemed deliberate, as if he’d just gotten out of the shower, run his fingers through it, and called it
good
. Several locks fell in front of his eyes, but he still managed to keep his gaze settled on me.

“What did he say to you?” Connor asked, his voice quiet, but heavy on the inflection.

“Nothing.”

The corner of his mouth quirked. “You can trust me, Dani. I’m not going to reprimand you. I just want to know.”

“Usually if someone needs to tell you they can be trusted, it means they can’t.”

He smiled but didn’t say anything more.

I thought about the bruises painted across Sam’s face. “Maybe it’s not me I’m worried about getting reprimanded.”

Connor narrowed his eyes inquisitively. “You barely know that guy.”

“So?” I furrowed my brow. “He looks like he spent the day getting the shit kicked out of him.”

Connor tilted his head, as if he were listening for the things left unsaid. “Spoken as if you know something about the subject.”

My throat tightened and tears burned immediately in my eyes. I
did
know. I knew too damn well. And I wondered if Connor knew, too. How much had OB told him?

“He only said there was a lot of training,” I answered. “Endurance. Memory. Hand-to-hand combat. That’s it. He didn’t say anything else.”

Connor watched me too closely. I didn’t blink. The less I gave away the better.

“Good,” he finally said, and turned to the door. “Try to get some more sleep. Six
AM
will come quicker than you think.”

And then he was gone, but his presence had left an impression on me, and I knew sleep was going to be impossible.

Was he trying to rattle me?

Because if he was, he’d succeeded.

I ate breakfast alone and waited in the lounge area for someone to come get me, to tell me what it was I was going to be doing today. Or what I was going to be doing at all.

After Connor left me earlier in the morning, I’d taken a shower and dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a black tank top with the black Nikes. It was a comfortable outfit, but not what I was used to wearing. At least I had my makeup, so I could still feel slightly like myself.

When I heard footsteps nearing the lounge, I perked up and expected it to be Connor coming to retrieve me.

It wasn’t.

My immediate disappointment caught me off guard.

It was a woman who stood in the doorway, staring at me. She didn’t seem much older, or taller, or stronger than I was. Twenty-two, maybe. She didn’t seem much of anything, actually. She was unremarkable. Unadorned. Unattractive, but not ugly.

“Are you just going to sit there?” she said with the quirk of an eyebrow.

I stuttered for a second and silently chastised myself. I must have sounded like an idiot.

“No,” I finally got out. “I’m coming.” I scooted the chair back and in my rush nearly knocked it over. She raised her eyebrow higher.

When I came up in front of her, she offered me her hand. “I’m Natalia. I’ve been assigned as your instructor.”

We shook hands, and I was surprised to find a lot more strength in the shake than I had anticipated. A lot more strength and a lot more confidence.

Maybe there was more to Natalia than her modest appearance.

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

She smirked. “Wait until tonight,” she said as she walked away. “You’ll be taking that back.”

I was slammed on the blue mat for what felt like the millionth time, and the pain didn’t register quite as much as it had the time before. I wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad one.

As I lay on my back, trying to call the air into my lungs, I stared at the round overhead lights hanging from steel rods and enclosed in steel cages, and I wondered if that was me in some symbolic way. Hanging by a thread but trapped in a cage at the same time.

Maybe I was delirious.

“Get up,” Natalia said.

I could hardly feel my legs, but I managed to roll over onto all fours and suck in a gulp of air. I was used to being kicked around, after all. I could do this. If it meant saving Anna, I could suffer through anything.

“Hurry. No assailant will wait for you,” she reminded me, and I lumbered to my feet.

“Who would be assailing me?” I asked as her fisted hand landed a punch to my lower jaw, sending a shock wave of dull pain through every tooth root.

I was on the mat. Again.

“It’s not your job to identify your attacker.” Natalia appeared overhead, blocking out the lights. For a second, I thought I’d gone blind and dumb. “It’s your job to identify danger first, risk second. You should be able to predict where they’ll move and how they will attack by their body language alone. Everything else is a distraction.”

“Okay,” was all I said, and we started again.

She went easy on me after that. Her movements were slower. She gave me instruction as we grappled: “Put your hand here,” “Swing from here,” and, “If you twist this way, you’ll get more leverage.”

We did that forever. I had no idea how long exactly. We were in a gym below ground, so there were no windows to mark the daylight. There were no clocks, either. Natalia had strapped on a watch when we first came down here, but I was too proud to ask her what time it was.

I worried I’d run out of energy before we were even halfway through the session, but I somehow managed to keep going. And just when I thought I might die before Natalia called an end to the training, Connor showed up.

Sweat had soaked through every dry patch of my clothing by that point, so I’d stripped off my shirt and now wore only the sweatpants and a black sports bra. My mascara had all but melted off and smudged beneath my eyes. Several hunks of hair had come loose from my ponytail and were now glued to my forehead and the back of my neck.

Still, I felt Connor’s eyes trailing the curves of my body. “Is she done?” he asked Natalia.

“I guess.”

He slid his hands into his pants pockets. “She either is or she isn’t.”

Natalia crossed her arms over her chest and let her high ponytail swing to the side as she cocked her head and narrowed her eyes at Connor. I could feel the ice crystals forming between the two of them.

“She is,” she answered, and marched out of the room.

Connor finally turned to address me. “I apologize if my sister was hard on you.”

I frowned. “Natalia is your sister?”

He nodded. “Half, actually. But that rarely matters when you share a mother. It’s sharing a father that makes it different.”

“She wasn’t hard on me,” I said after a beat. “Though I’m not sure I’m as athletically trained as she is. I had trouble keeping up.”

He laughed. “No one is as athletically trained as she is. She was almost an Olympic gymnast at sixteen, then decided the event trivialized the sport. She’s a tough girl to get ahead of. On anything.”

“I can see that.”

I grabbed the bottle of water Natalia had given me an hour ago and drained the rest of it, crumpling the plastic when I was finished. “So now what?” Inside, I prayed the training was over. I didn’t have anything left to give.

“Now you eat something and go to bed, and you do it again tomorrow.”

“Until when?” I called, following him out of the gym. “When are you going to tell me what I’m doing here? What’s the point of all this?”

“When you’re ready,” he answered, and disappeared down the hall.

Connor wasn’t lying about the training. I trained with Natalia every day. Occasionally, I’d get the afternoon off, but that was only to go to the lab to have more blood work done, more physical exams. I had a few mental evaluations too, but no one told me whether or not I passed.

I still hadn’t had the chance to escape into town to find a phone to call Anna. Her absence in my life was starting to get to me. Some mornings, I’d wake up, and the first thing I did was hurry to my bedroom door, planning to go see Anna, or make her something for breakfast. And then I’d remember. She wasn’t here. She was a hundred miles away in that crappy house, with our crappy parents, alone.

I needed to talk to her soon.

I saw Sam twice more the next week but only briefly. Once in the lounge, just as I finished my breakfast, and again in the lab. Sometimes, I’d knock on his door to see if he wanted to watch TV or work out together, but he never answered, and the door was always locked.

I started to wonder if he was a ghost, if maybe his room was always empty. I began treating it like a game, like a child checking his father’s desk drawer to see if it was unlocked, to see what he hid inside.

Before breakfast, I knocked. After dinner, I knocked. I did this for a few days until he finally answered.

At first, I was so shocked to actually see him inside, to have the door actually open, that I just stood there staring at my raised knocking first as if I were dreaming. Or hallucinating.

“Hi,” I said, and let my arm drop. “You answered.”

He smirked. “Well, you wouldn’t stop knocking. I got tired of hearing it.”

“Sorry. It’s just…”

I’m lonely.

I didn’t say it out loud, but I wanted to. I rarely talked to anyone other than Connor and Natalia. I still hadn’t seen that goddamn Fox since the day he brought me here. He was always out or gone or unavailable.

It was painful for me to admit to anyone that I needed them, but I figured if anyone could relate to the loneliness that came with living here, it was Sam.

“I’m going crazy here,” I said, and looked at the floor, then back up again. “Come eat breakfast with me?”

He thought for a second and then nodded. “Lead the way.”

Breakfast was cheesy eggs, bacon, and oranges. Sam told me about his first days in the building. He told me about his training sessions with Natalia and how she kicked his ass a lot. We laughed about the way she shook her head when we screwed up and made this
tsk-tsk
sound, as if she couldn’t bear to waste words on our incompetence.

After that day, Sam and I had breakfast every morning. He told me a lot about his mom and his dad. About where he grew up. He told me about his dream of owning a ranch in Montana someday.

But the morning ritual lasted only a week. The following Monday, Sam wasn’t there. And his absence in my routine had an effect through the rest of the day. I got through my training with Natalia by some miracle or act of God, but Connor noticed right away that something was wrong.

“You seem off today,” he said as he walked with me after the training session. He’d been sitting in on them a lot, and I always worked harder when he was present. Today, I could only muster the bare minimum.

“I’m restless,” I answered. It wasn’t exactly the truth but close enough. “I’m stuck in this building with no one to talk to, nowhere to go. I’m starting to feel like a caged animal. And…” I trailed off.

I miss my sister
, I thought.

When I agreed to come here, the Fox hadn’t said anything about cutting off communication with Anna. I’d never gone a day without her before now.

When we reached the hallway of my floor, Connor pulled me to a stop outside my room. I looked down at his hand, his fingers gently wrapped around my wrist, thumb touching index finger. He had nice hands. His fingers weren’t too thin or knobby. The veins running through his knuckles were just present enough to be sexy in a way that was decidedly male.

He stepped closer to me, and my stomach pinwheeled. I pressed into the wall, and he mirrored my movements, putting only an inch or two of space between us.

I swallowed the rush of excitement trying to burst out of my throat, tried to put out the heat climbing up my legs.

If this was some kind of game he was playing, I had the feeling he’d set his trap and I was already caught in it.

He leaned into me and let go of my wrist, running his hand up my waist, sending gooseflesh down my spine. I nearly vibrated beneath his touch.

“Don’t give up, please. I know it’s rough,” he said.

“I feel like I don’t belong here.” I glanced away. “Like I’m not cut out for this.”

“You are.”

I buried the urge to snort, knowing how extremely unattractive it would be in this moment. “I don’t know about that. Your sister thinks I’m weak.”

“Natalia thinks everyone is weak.”

I met his eyes again. “What do
you
think?”

He pushed a stray lock of hair away from my face and stared at it, trapped in his fingers, for too long. “I think this place needs someone like you.”

He took a step back, smoothed down his oxford shirt and started for the elevator. As I watched him go, I repeated his last words in my head, over and over again until they sounded a lot like,
I think
I
need someone like you.

Dinner that night was spaghetti. My favorite. But the table had only one place setting again, and Sam didn’t answer his door when I knocked.

I went back to the lounge, got comfortable at the table, and dug into the food. The spaghetti was delicious. The sauce was definitely homemade and had all the right herbs and spices.

I finished it off in record time, downed the small cup of applesauce they’d given me, and turned lastly to the lump of tinfoil on my tray. It looked like garlic bread, but when I unfolded the foil, I found a cell phone inside and a note tied to it.

My chest felt light and fuzzy with something close to gratitude. Something I hadn’t felt in a long time.

I undid the twine, and unfolded the note.
Call Anna
, it said, and was signed C.

Connor.

I clutched the phone to my chest and smiled.

I took care of my dinner dishes in a rush and hurried back to my room. I paced the floor, trying to decide if it was safe to call Anna here. No one ever visited my room except for Connor, and he’d been the one to give me the phone, so chances were I wouldn’t get in trouble.