Kai (A Dark Assassins Novel Book One) (2 page)

After several hours, her hand covered a small yawn.
 
She glanced at her watch, and he felt the side of his mouth tilt as she rolled her eyes.
 
Thanking the waitress, she reached for two tens in her pocket and dropped them on the table before she packed up and left.

From that night on, he made a point to arrive at the diner minutes after she was seated, and spent hours scanning her face as he watched her work.
 
And every night, he slid into the shadows as she walked home to her small cottage, with its bright white siding with cornflower blue shutters that matched her perfectly.
 
Each night, he waited until she was safely inside with the door locked, before he made his way back to his home on the mountain.
 

His attraction also came with a somewhat unwanted reaction.
 
Protectiveness.
 
He estimated her height at under five and a half feet tall, and although she walked everywhere in their relatively safe little town—to her job at Standard Biotech and her home, several blocks from the diner—he had to tamp down his need to protect her.
 
From what, he couldn’t explain, even to himself.

She was oblivious of him, so eventually he stopped covering his face as he entered the diner.
 
He kept telling himself that it was enough, being with her as she sat a short distance away.
 
But she continued to be blissfully unaware of his presence, and something deep inside him wanted answers to his questions.
 
And those questions had nothing to do with her blood.
 

The obsession had grown steadily, and although he couldn’t explain it, he knew he couldn’t give her up.
 

With one last glance at the clock as he pulled himself from his thoughts, a snarl ripped from his throat.
 
Time seemed to have slowed.
 
Winter allowed him to rise earlier in the afternoon, and with several hours to kill before he could see her again, he worked on his fighting technique while trying to drain the tension that gripped him whenever he knew he would see her.

And if an assignment came in, he would put it off for a couple hours just to make sure that she arrived home safely, before he’d delve into the background of his target or carry out the assassination.
 
No one knew of his obsession, and he planned to keep it that way.

After two hours of punishing himself, the tension unfurled in his chest and he knew that the time had come.
 
Ripping off his grappling gloves and tossing them aside, he rushed upstairs to shower and change.
 
Within five minutes, he was out the door, his entire being primed and ready to see her.
 
He’d stopped cursing himself for his weakness over time, and with his feet barely touching the ground, he rushed down the mountain.

When he spotted her several blocks away, he felt the corner of his mouth lift and the tension that had lessened due to his punishing workout completely drain away.
 

As he started forward to follow her, his cell beeped once, indicating a new assignment.
 
A curse flew from his mouth before he could corral it.
 
When he lifted his cell to glance at the message, a sense of dread washed over him as he tried to swallow, his throat tight and dry.
 
After a quick glance around to see whether anyone had spotted him, he slipped into the alley near the diner, and forced himself to reveal his next target.

Chapter Two

Olivia

Olivia Sabin’s eyes scanned the numbers from the day’s antibodies test, and when she reached the final set of figures, she blew out a frustrated breath.
 
She reminded herself that throughout her career she had countless setbacks in her research, especially when it came to cell regeneration as a cure for cancer, and she never let herself become discouraged.
 
But she had to admit in the privacy of her own lab that she’d had more than her share of failures as of late.
 
Nothing seemed to be going her way, and no matter how hard she worked, she found herself no closer to finding a cure for a disease that killed close to eight million people a year worldwide than she had when she started.

When she graduated from college, her main focus was immunology, specializing in finding a way to eliminate cancer cells by increasing the number of healthy cells to fight off the cancer, treating the disease as an infection.
 
Her early research had been promising, but there were several problems with increasing healthy blood cells in the human body, including kidney and heart failure.
 
She had started to develop a work-around for that, but she hadn’t refined a way to cure anything as of yet.
 
That meant that her work was in limbo.
 
She had been working fourteen-hour days, six days a week for five years, and she’d come no closer to a solution or even a viable test since she’d started, but she was determined to figure it out.
 
Even if it took her the rest of her career.

Blowing out a breath, she stood and stretched out her back after being hunched over the microscope.
 
Dropping down on to her chair, she rolled over to her computer and typed several passwords that allowed her to log on to a secure server that would back up all of her work from the day.
 
But when she glanced up, she found herself on a strange system with two icons on the darkened screen.
 
There was no name attached to the computer she was logged in to, but as she moved the mouse hastily to exit, a video file labeled with her last name drew her attention.
 
Without a thought to what it might be, she clicked on it.

The video focused on a massive man handcuffed and chained to a metal table in the middle of the room, surrounded by five scientists she didn’t recognize.
 
Standard Biotech housed at least a dozen various research buildings, all of them concentrating on different secret research projects, so she wasn’t surprised that she didn’t recognize anyone.
 
Her eyes darted back to the detained man, his movements frenzied as he searched for a way out of his bindings, growling at anyone who came close to him.
 
As the scientists stepped out of camera focus, the man struggled harder to find a way out of his chains.

“Sabin bio-weapon project seventeen.
 
Enhanced patient zero.
 
Begin test.”

Olivia had no idea what was meant by enhanced or why her name was associated with the test, but tension tightened in her belly as she slid her chair closer to the screen.

A woman in a typical white lab coat strode forward.
 
She inserted the needle into the chained man’s bicep and pushed down on the plunger.
 
Once the syringe was empty, the woman scrambled away, as if she were afraid that the injection would add to the man’s volatility.

Olivia ignored everything except the man on the table.
 

At first, nothing happened and she blew out a breath, sending out a silent plea that the test had failed.
 
But in the next second, her eyes were drawn to the injection site, where his skin rippled down his arm and across his body in a wave that was unnatural and grotesque.
 
For several silent seconds, both of them watched as the injection spread throughout his body, until his head snapped up and a pronounced animalistic growl ripped from his throat.
 
In the next instant, the man broke the chains and cuffs from his arms and legs as if they were made of paper, and leapt toward the camera.
 

Olivia’s hand slammed down on the space bar to pause the video and slapped a hand over her mouth to prevent the scream that threatened to escape.
 
Alerting anyone to this outrage would be the end of her career, and she would never let that happen.
 
Even though she had a lab to herself, accessed by a code that she and her supervisor had, a scream would alert security to come running.

Her wide eyes scanned her sterile white lab filled with medical and diagnostic machines, microscopes, and computers to confirm that she was alone.
 
The electric frosted glass security feature that surrounded her entire office blocked out any prying eyes, and although she was secure, fear of what remained on the recording had her hands shaking.
 
The lone sound in the room was her stuttered, harsh breathing.

“Okay, it’ll be okay,” she said.

Without admitting her fear, even to herself, her gaze traveled back to the screen.
 
She swallowed hard when she noticed that her hand shook, but ignored the movement and pressed play.
 

One of the scientists had run to the door and fumbled with the code in an effort to escape, all while his eyes were tracking his other colleagues with a haunted look that marred his face.

Olivia could hear the screams that soon turned into gurgling, and assumed that patient zero had attacked the others in the room.

Without the action on screen, she leaned forward so she could decipher what she heard in the background, but jumped back when two men ran for the door, pleading to the man who’d slipped out a split second before.
 
A feral growl sounded extraordinarily loud in her isolated lab, but her eyes were glued to the screen as the feral man leapt into view and pinned both of the men near the door.
 
They begged for their lives until the answering snarl silenced their pleas.

She had no idea what happened off-screen earlier in the video, but in the next moment, her curiosity was answered in the most horrific way possible.

“Oh, no, no, no,” she begged, knowing it was futile to try to change the outcome of an event that had already happened.

The patient leaned toward the first scientist’s throat, and bit down.
 
With a few shakes of his head, she heard a tell-tale snap of the man’s neck breaking.
 
She couldn’t stand to watch the other man die, so she lowered her eyes as he was dispatched in the same manner.

A loud roar broke up the audio, and when she glanced up, she noticed that the patient was left alone, the others around him dead.
 
Without anyone else to attack, the patient proceeded to destroy anything he could get his hands on in the small examination room.
 
With everything around him destroyed and no others to attack, he paused, his chest heaving and his eyes wild, searching.

Her body shook with the shock of what she’d witnessed, but the next moment chilled her to her core.

Unable to contain the rage that had been caused by the injection and seeing no way out, the patient started to tear off his own flesh.
 
Each roar of pain shivered into her bones and left her shaking with the horror of a man who was slowly and painfully killing himself.
 
With one last breath, he reached up and ripped his own throat out.
 
He sank to the floor as blood poured out of his gaping wound, and within minutes, he was dead.

Tears streamed down her face at the senselessness of what she’d witnessed, and her heart ached for the man who lay dead on the screen.

Minutes passed as her mind worked through the points that had bothered her about the experiment, beside the obvious.
 
The scientists in the room had created the scenario in which they sealed their own demise, and experimenting on anyone was, to her, deplorable and forbidden.

Her mind drifted to the patient, who hadn’t, she was certain, volunteered for their experiments.
 
She remembered how his teeth had grown jagged, and how the pierce of a neck could explain the gurgling she heard in the background.
 
His fingers and nails elongated into claws when he’d ripped away his own skin.
 
They called him enhanced, and he clearly demonstrated that with his ability to break the chains and leap long distances, but she had no idea whether their experiments made him that way or…

“Enhanced, of course.”

Then she remembered.
 
The same man for the past six months, hidden in the shadows as she walked toward the Blue Plate, and slipping inside minutes after she arrived.
 
She never sensed that he might be dangerous to her, but he’d stayed hidden and had never spoken to her.
 
As she traveled the same route night after night, she had tried to sense his movements and memorize his gait or the sound of his footfalls, but what greeted her was silence.
 
Whenever she tried to turn and catch him following her, the street and sidewalk were empty.
 
As a scientist, she should have come up with a probable explanation for his movements, but there had been no logical reasons she could deduce.

Her memory cataloged his height at well over six feet tall, wide shoulders, slim waist, and from what she could see, he hid a muscular physique underneath his clothes.
 
Once, his eyes flashed to hers and she became fascinated at the color.
 
The lightest silver, piercing and brilliant, with a defined black ring around his iris.
 
He had a thin beard that was trimmed, and short cropped dark hair, and as she pieced together his features in her mind, she knew that was the most handsome man she’d ever observed.
 
With instincts that had never failed her, she knew there was something different and dangerous about the man, and because of that, he might be able to help her.

When she was able to think clearly, she realized why her name was associated with the video.

She scrambled to the computer and clicked on the other icon.
 
It was a folder that contained her work from close to a year ago, when she thought that she had made headway on her research.
 
But superimposed over it, was the formula for the bio-weapon that had been injected into patient zero.
 
According to the data, the experiment had only been conducted one time.
 
They were trying to mutate the bio-weapon so it kept the aggression and rage, but they had yet to work out a plan to control the test subjects.
 
The research was at a standstill, it was noted, because they hadn’t gleaned a solution from her own research since her experiments had failed.
 
Once she found a way to manipulate cells into completing a task, such as killing cancerous cells, they would use her research to tweak the bio-weapon.