Again, she couldn’t form an argument. Her own thoughts on the matter had traveled that same route on occasion, and for years, she’d harbored guilt over how Chuck had grown up and been treated by both her mother and their father.
“Nikki, I loved you until the day you came back from France and took over a company you knew nothing about.”
She wanted to tell him he was wrong, that she’d learned the ins and outs of running a corporation, that she’d understood what Daedalus was all about. She’d thought running the company would be more about managing day-to-day operations, handling publicity, and doing paperwork. She’d been content to stay on the fringes of the inner workings. Or maybe content wasn’t the right word. Maybe she’d been happy to remain blind to what was truly going on inside the company her parents had built.
So in a way, he was right. She’d known nothing about the company, and the truth now just made her sick.
“If you’d just resigned like you were supposed to after the lab-deaths scandal, none of this would be happening.”
Like she was supposed to? She inhaled as an unimaginable thought came to her. “Oh, my God, you were the one who signed the death warrants. You set me up, didn’t you?”
“You left me no choice.”
Flabbergasted, she couldn’t even speak for a moment. When she finally found her voice, it was so full of anguish that even Chuck flinched. “How could you? My God, Chuck, you’re my brother.”
He brushed his knuckle over her cheek the way he used to do when she was little. The reminder of how close they’d been pained her. “You wanted to dismantle the company I’ve put my soul into. Your ideas to sell off entire divisions pissed off the board. Everyone was looking to me to rein you in. I had to do something. I wanted the company to send you to our Siberian post.
You’d have been out of the way but still alive. I didn’t want this, I swear.”
A chill shot up her spine. “This? What is this?”
Chuck stood and shook his head sadly, as if this was all out of his control. “This,” he said, “is a clinical trial.”
“A what?”
“Clinical trial,” he said slowly, as if she were an idiot. “Well, not technically. We don’t have government approval, and obviously, we’re bypassing the ‘informed consent’ portion of the test, but if it’ll make you feel any better, this will help a lot of people in the future. Your sacrifice won’t go to waste.”
Her sacrifice? What kind of insane trial was this?
Using his foot, he hit the latch on the head restraint, and with a snarl, she whipped her head to the side in a frenzied bid to take a bite out of him. She didn’t care that all she’d get would be a mouthful of leather. She wanted to hurt him the way he’d hurt her.
Her teeth barely scraped his shoe, and then he was gone, the cell door closing behind him with an ominous metallic clank.
Finally able to look at more than the sterile white ceiling, she craned her neck in Riker’s direction. Her heart squeezed painfully tight at the sight of him hanging from chains on the wall. Dried blood plastered his tawny hair to his forehead, and fresh blood dripped from raw wounds on his wrists, where the shackles had bitten deep. His silver eyes were molten with hatred.
“Chuck.” She peered up at him through the thick glass window that separated the chamber she and Riker were in from the main room. “You don’t have to do this. We can work this out—”#p#分页标题#e#
“Too late.” Chuck hit a button on the wall next to the door, and her remaining restraints popped loose.
“While you’ve been busy trying to sell off Daedalus bit by bit, I’ve made progress on the new antivampirism vaccine. But government bureaucrats aren’t convinced it’s safe, and they won’t give us the go-ahead to use convicted felons as test subjects.”
Of course they wouldn’t. The government wasn’t as concerned about the blood-borne form of the virus as they had been about the saliva-borne form. Infection via contact with a vampire’s blood was rare and, according to many lawmakers, not a pressing problem.
“I know how much you care about your work,” Chuck continued, “so I figured that if we have to get you out of the way, at least you’ll be making a contribution to humanity. I injected you with our vaccine, and now we’ll see how effective it is.”
She staggered to her feet, her aching bones and stiff muscles making her clumsy. How long had she been out? “What if it works and I don’t turn into a vampire or die during the transformation? What then? You’ll have to kill me to keep me quiet. Are you prepared to do that?”