Synthetic Dreams (6 page)

“More than tweaked, Vyn.”

“All right, I flooded my college with illegal glamour. My heinous crime.” She let a wry smile lift her mouth and reached for the cedar-and-apple-scented bar of soap on a dish. It eased over her skin. “I had a technical talent. Such a thing is…distasteful in a woman of N-District.”

Paul’s soft laughter surprised her. “So I’ve seen.”

Liam had come from an executive family, which meant Paul moved in the upper levels of society. With his looks he no doubt snared the attentions of the plastic women. It was none of her business. He’d seen her naked—she ignored the little frisson that gave her—and shown not the slightest interest. And why
would
he be interested, when women like her simulacrum were his normal fare?

Vyn eased the soap over her thigh, her knee, and rubbed lather into her grubby toes. She’d slipped into forgetting again. His smooth, calm persona was a lure. He would most likely kill her when he’d made use of whichever of her skills he wanted. But his questions had dredged up old feelings, old memory and guilt.

“My family?” Her hand paused over her other knee and she couldn’t look at him. “How…how are they?”

Paul was silent for a moment. “Your father retired. He and your mother are comfortable.”

The soap slipped over her thigh. Had they missed her? Wondered about her? Even tried to find her? She’d never been a favoured child, but she was their flesh and blood. Or she had been. “Comfortable?”

“They spend a lot of their time in the upper tier.”

His calm voice flowed around her, deep and smooth. Goosebumps ran over her skin and she imagined his gaze travelling over the length of her thigh. A sliver of need pushed up from her belly, but she willed herself not to let her fantasy overtake her. She was in the cold-world. Reality was bitter.

So her parents were still rich and could enjoy the dubious pleasures money bought them. A sour smile tugged at her mouth. They could’ve been the glamour-filled people she’d seen in the club, unknowingly wearing touches of their lost daughter’s product. “And Richard?”

“Based in Scotland. Has a daughter, Natasha. Six.”

Her fingers gripped her calf and she ignored the pain.
Six.
The age they’d taken her.

Vyn’s heart drummed too loud in her ears and she willed herself to breathe through the sudden surge of panic. She forced out the words. “And she’s safe? The Goodmans haven’t taken her, touched her?”

“You think it goes by blood?”

A short laugh escaped her. “Who knows? But maybe with the bastards dead, what they did to me dies with them.” She needed to believe that. The thought that the Goodmans would destroy another child twisted a tight pain in her chest. “The Mind corrupted them. When they created it, the fucking idiots thought they were gods.”

She dunked her head, soaking her hair, wanting to put the dead men from her mind. As she surged out of the water, Paul was waiting and handed her a small tube of shampoo. The sharp scent of lime cut the warm air. She dunked herself again and found him sitting on a small stool beside the bath.

“I do want something from you.” He undid the buttons of his jacket. “You’re my way into the Box.”

Vyn frowned at him and dipped down into the darkened water. “The Box?” He might be unconcerned by her nakedness, but she didn’t want her nipples on show. Not when they were obviously peaked. Her arm snaked across her breasts, further obscuring them, and her other hand slipped over her mons. An ache inched across her shoulder blades as she strained to keep her chin from slipping into the water. For a second, she closed her eyes. “Can we do this when I’m out of the water?”

There was that hint of a smile again. It ran a shiver under her skin, a strange mixture of fear and arousal. “Yes, we can.” He stood, pulled a large cream towel from an alcove and held it open. “I’m waiting.”

Vyn pushed at her memory, trying to remember if men in N-District always behaved this way. Vague images rose, but nothing like Paul Cross. She stepped out of the bath. He wrapped the towel around her, the hard strength of his arms holding her tight to his chest.

She willed herself to breathe as his lips brushed her ear, the heat of his mouth on her skin hurtling her thoughts back to the simulacrum. His scent warmed her, wove around her, caught her in such an unexpected way that she didn’t move, didn’t want to. She swallowed, her mouth dry. “What is this?”

“I believe you’re attracted to me.”

Chapter Five

Vyn felt the heat rise under her skin to burn her face. She was relieved he couldn’t see her mortification. “I live with skanks. I don’t get prime flesh very often.”

“So it would appear.”

She pulled herself free, taking the towel with her, and turned to face him. “What’s the Box?”

“The First Family don’t believe in exotic names.”

He was very good at answering questions she wasn’t asking.

Vyn tucked the towel firmly over her breasts. The damp air brushed her skin and, after the heat of the bath, she shivered. Wet tendrils of her hair dripped water over her shoulders. The Box. It was something of which the Fomorians were ignorant. She’d certainly never heard of it and she had Ossian’s sharp ear. Practically nothing escaped him.

She frowned. “Do you think I’m a hacker?”

“You’re a very specific one.”

Vyn snorted. “And you said you know everything about me. I don’t hack.” She grabbed another towel and wrapped it around her head. “I play with code, refine it. If you want to break security, find someone with a death wish. That isn’t me.”

Paul took her arm, his fingers hot and strong against her skin, and guided her into the bedroom. “‘The Box’ is a euphemism. It’s more than a detention centre. Those replaced and vanished are…stored there. You, and these—” he traced his thumb over the thin white lines swirling over her bicep, and her skin tingled, “—are the key to getting in.”

He pointed to the bed. “Sit.”

Vyn dropped to the edge, the mattress firm under her thighs. They
stored
the vanished? How was that even possible? Her thoughts twisted, imagining how the Corporation could hold so many against their will. She winced. Her mind had to go to a particularly unpleasant place. To the extreme edge of technology. Mind-shock. Thoughts, a brain caught in a trap, held, frozen, looping as the body aged. But mind-shock was a myth…just like simulacrum.

“I play with glamour. That’s my skill.”

Paul walked across the room on silent feet. He opened drawers and pulled out clothes. “I don’t need your skill so much as what you are.” He handed her a long-sleeved T-shirt and loose trousers. His fingers traced the pattern of scarring across her shoulder, a light touch that flushed heat under her skin and made her very aware of wearing only a towel. “What they made you into.”

Her mouth was dry and her heart drummed. “And what’s that?”

His dark eyes held her, the flicker of unknown emotion shifting there. “It’s not magic, demonic or otherwise. Your scarring forms an organic circuit. You’re a key.” His thumb teased down over her collarbone, and her nipples peaked, her body choosing to ignore his impossible words. “You can open the Box. Free my brother.”

She caught his hand against her skin. She had to think. “I’m a
circuit?
” Unconsciously her fingers tightened around his, and she willed her breathing to remain even and steady. There’d been whispers, theories, but the price of living, breathing circuitry, of laying it into flesh… How many had died before her? “How did you find out?”

“A month ago I was assigned to you by the CEO’s office. I’m your guard…at a discreet distance.” He sat next to her, easing his hand from her skin, but his fingers remained laced through hers. A short smile lifted his lips. “And I worked it out.” He looked down at their linked hands. “As, I think, had Liam.”

Questions bubbled up inside of her. Her guard? She had a
guard?
Was the CEO protecting an asset? And why, if she was so very important, had the Corporation thrown her out into S-District?

“How long?” She pressed her lips together, the wild rush of emotions twisting her insides. She wasn’t certain whether she wanted to cry or laugh hysterically. Her whole life wasn’t what she thought it was. “How long had the other guard watched me?” She paused. “And why was he removed—did he work it out too?”

“I don’t know. I was called in because a skank gang took out your previous guard.”

She heard the undercurrent in his voice, his doubt. If he’d been senior security, like Paul, then whoever it was could easily have taken on a bunch of untrained skanks. “He was vanished too?”

“Vyn, I don’t know what’s going on. Something is shifting in the Corporation. Something that does involve you.”

He still wanted that grab for power. Holding her would force all parties to have to deal with him. She looked around the smooth-walled bedroom, expensive and immaculate. Just like every other house so close to the hill. “Why was I expelled from here?”

Paul lifted her hand, his other covering it. His touch warmed her, eased some of the tension, the fear from her flesh. His gaze held her and her brain blanked. Should she be surprised that the attentions of an attractive man would take her mind off her troubles? And there was something about this particular man that pierced her to the core. She was sure he was very used to lust at first sight.

“You drew too much attention. Your illegal activity was a screen to remove you. Better to put you beyond the reach of those wanting to use you.”

“Attention.” That pulled a smile from her. “I was shunned in the cold-world and wore glamour from head to toe in the Mind tiers. Believe me, no one was interested, or knew me.”

“Liam talked about you.” He was pulling the conversation back to his brother. The supposed reason she was there. His thumb stroked along hers, a disconcerting touch that ran a shiver deep into her flesh. “A few days later I had to call a stranger my brother.”

“And you think Liam’s in this Box?” She turned the clothes over in her lap, unfolding and refolding them. “I can understand the Corporation being reluctant to…dispose of executive family members. But Fomorians? We—they—aren’t worth the effort, surely.”

He released her hand and stood. “My concern is with Liam. He’s there. Frozen.”

“And what would you do with him?” Vyn made herself ask the question and not feel the emptiness of her hand. She tugged the towel from her head and scrubbed it over her damp hair. “It’s not as if he could resume his old life.”

Paul frowned and his gaze burned with a quick anger. “I have contacts outside the Corporation. He will have a new name, a new life.”

“For you too?”

“Perhaps.”

“And what do I get?”

A dark smile lifted his lips, the ceiling light a halo in his hair. “You get to keep your secret.”

She frowned. “My secret?”

His gaze flicked back to the bathroom. “You created a simulacrum.”

Vyn froze, the towel a tangled mass on her head. He knew? How could he know? Her heart pounded, her mind shooting off in every direction. He’d been stalking her. He knew the layout of her flat, her drop boxes, and there was a hint of him knowing so much more about her. Had he been in her flat, been through her things? There was that little thrill again.
Watched
her?

She closed her eyes and tried to focus her thoughts. How he knew wasn’t important. That he knew she’d broken the secret to the simulacrum was. She opened her eyes and held his. There was little point in denying her crime. “What now?”

Paul rubbed his hands together, the sound hard and dry in the silence of the room. “Something about the organic circuitry in your skin needs the simulacrum. I’m not a gear-head.” He looked away from her, frowning. His fingers locked. “Lose the towel.”

Vyn blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Naked. In the bed. Now.” He strode away from her, back into the bathroom. There was the quick sound of water and he returned to the bedroom a few seconds later. His smoke-smeared face now had the wet shine of a quick but thorough wash. He tugged at his tie and shucked off his jacket, letting it fall to the floor. “I said
now
.”

Chapter Six

“I’m not…”

He kicked off his shoes, and his trousers hit the carpeted floor. “I don’t want to have to explain you. Not to him.”

A door banged somewhere below them. Vyn bit back a curse. She ripped away the towels and scrambled under the smooth sheets. It would be mortifying…if everything to do with Paul Cross didn’t hold the sharp possibility of her dying anyway.

“Paul?”

A man’s voice, one that sounded vaguely familiar. Vyn pulled the sheets up, obscuring half her face. Her knuckles whitened, fisting the smooth cotton. It was a voice from her past…and then her heart turned over. She mouthed the name “Liam.” Her gut twisted. Not Paul’s real brother, his replacement.

“Yes,” Paul muttered, and she shivered as he climbed into the bed beside her. The mattress dipped and the unfamiliar brush of his bare skin ran a fast ripple of goose bumps over her flesh.

His large calloused hand skimmed her spine, jerking her against his hot body. Vyn closed her eyes, her mouth temptingly close to his collarbone, the urge to taste him trapping a groan in her throat. She tried to ignore the press of him, refusing to think the word, to acknowledge that he grew hard against the softness of her belly.

“Relax, Vyn.”

His breath brushed her ear and another shiver ran through her. He smelled of the cedar-and-apple soap, mixed with the hint of smoke and his skin. She could relax…if he would simply stop moving his hands over her body. The action was
not
soothing.

“I said relax.” His low deep voice, the unexpected heat and promise in it, curled her fingers into fists against his shoulder blades. “It’s not going further than this.”

“Paul?” Liam’s voice echoed, was louder, closer.

Paul rolled her, his thigh pushing between hers. He ghosted her mouth with his lips and a quick, hot ache burned up from her belly. Her fingers trembled as she loosened them and teased a slow, uncertain touch over his warm skin. “Or maybe it is.”