Part Twenty-Nine

ONE WEEK LATER

Vaughn watched the lights come on, one at a time, fast, as if they were nearly tripping over themselves in their hurry. In seconds, the space was illuminated—a yawning, industrial cavern, clinical but not cleanc dusty. There was a faint taste of iron in the air, as if the space itself had rusted. Lines of old storage shelving, empty, ranged across the far right end. The doors to the loading dock broken the even plane of the left wall, and next to it were a panel of buttons, red and brown and most of them cracked.

It looked so much like Elena's LA warehouse that Vaughn's insides clenched. Same emptiness. Same layout. Same feeling of tension, as if even the air was just barely keeping itself from letting out a shudder. It felt older than it looked, like consecrated ground—it felt like power, but not like goodness, not like God was supposed to feel.

"Wow," breathed Nadia, returning to stand beside him. He glanced at her. Dust from the fusebox was smeared across her slacks; he didn't think she'd even registered it. Her eyes were bright. "Do you feel that?"

"Yeah." But she didn't seem to be feeling the same "that" that he was—she was too awed, too breathless, the pleasure on her face too clean.

"It feels so . . . that energy! Do you think it was like this when she found it, or did she do something to make it this way?"

"Elena?" Of course she meant Elena; he was just . . . he didn't know what he was. "I don't know."

Nadia moved toward the left wall, and he followed because he felt stupid staying put. She went straight to the panel of buttons—not quickly, but unerringly. Her hand was hovering over the panel, palm first, when he reached her.

"I know this place," she said, looking at him. Her eyes were wide and vulnerable, swallowing up her face. She pushed the button under her hand, and three others. And part of the back wall slid open.

They were in what used to be the furthest edge of the Soviet Union, having found this location recorded cryptically in Bill Vaughn's files; he'd included it with information on Elena, and her ties with the KGB. It was one of four addresses, and this was the fourth address they'd tried; two had been demolished (one by an unexplained explosion), and the third hadn't yielded anything but dust. Fourth time, it appeared, was the charm—this place was a place Nadia knew but had not remembered, and the only way that was possible was if it were a place she'd been kept—held—as a child.

Vaughn had seen the videos, of course—he'd been with Sydney when she'd found them, and been as soul-deep horrified by the unknown girl, frail, detached, dwarfed and jerking helplessly in the chair. But the room, in person, was different. Cleaner than it looked in grainy black and white, even after years of disuse. Smaller, more claustrophobic.

Nadia looked pale now, almost white. He wanted to reach out to her, support her, let her lean on him—but they hadn't touched since the night he'd kissed her. It wasn't that things hadn't been friendly between them. If anything, Nadia had been more friendly, more open with him, and he didn't know why. Was it a mask, a way of concealing some other feeling? Or was she just relieved to have had the tension between them brought out in the open and then satisfactorily dismissed? He worried over it more than he should have, thought about that night more than he should have. He thought about the heat coming off her compact body, her surprisingly understated scent, and thought about what might have happened, if—

Well. Now he just wanted to jar her back to reality, to the now, because her eyes were so far away. But even as he watched she seemed to shake that off, to turn to steel, and something in him felt a familiar pang of grief. She didn't need him anymore than Sydney ever had. She started, "This was—"

And Vaughn said, "I know," to save her from having to say it. That much, at least, he could do.

She just nodded, and turned from him to look at the room. There was the chair, in the room's center, the way he remembered seeing it on film. But what hadn't appeared in the video frame was the workstation it faced. Antiquated glass jars sat, still in a tidy row, along the back edge. They were half-filled with medical supplies: gauze, q-tips, hypodermic needles. Plastic gloves. A nightmare version of the family doctor's office.

Nadia trailed her fingers along the top surface; the light coating of dust swirled and settled in their wake. She rubbed her fingertips together and he wondered what she felt. What she was thinking. Her face was smooth and empty now, almost clinical, like the workstation behind her.

"We'll need to clean it first," she murmured.

"Nadia?" he asked, unsure he'd heard her correctly.

"It needs to be cleaned," she said, turning back to him, "if we're going to use it."

What she meant dawned on him all of a sudden, obvious and horrific. "Nadia, we can't."

"We have everything we need. Everything she had back when she . . . ." She trailed off, and for a moment her face crumbled, lost its detachment. But only for a moment. "We could do it. Recreate the formula. See what it does."

"Nadia—"

She shook her head furiously. "No. I know what you're going to say, and it doesn't matter. I wanted to find Elena's work, to figure out my destiny, so I could stop it. But I need to know, Michael. I need to finish the work. Finish it, and then destroy it."

"It's too dangerous."

"It's too dangerous not to see it through!" She looked vulnerable all of a sudden, horrifically vulnerable, horrendously young. "I don't want to do it alone. Michael, please, help me. Help me, and that way you can make sure nothing goes—nothing goes wrong. Please."

He rubbed his face hard, trying to make his brain work, coming back again and again to the image of that little girl, her tears dark and wet on the straps that held her there. This wasn't right. And yet . . . .

"We can stop the prophecies from coming true," she urged. "Sydney won't be in danger anymore, not from me. Rambaldi says you're supposed to stop me—kill me, maybe—so help me instead. Help me stop it."

He could have argued more. He almost did. But he knew, in that instant, as he looked into her eyes, how it would end. He knew he'd say yes. Of course we would. Of course he'd help her. Because all of this, it was all his fault, he was the one to blame for bringing her back into this, for calling up the ghosts he saw now in her eyes.

And there was satisfaction, he realized with disgust, in the idea of bucking Rambaldi's prophecy—of saying "fuck you" to his supposed part in it . . . the part that had brought Lauren into his life, the part that had turned Bill Vaughn from his father into the head of an international intelligence organization as bad as any SD cell. Rambaldi hadn't ruined his life the way he had Nadia's, but he'd done enough, and Vaughn was holding one hell of a grudge. One that that took a sick, twisted pleasure in spitting in the man's face.

Nadia must have seen the resignation on his face, because hers relaxed, and she sighed the air out of her lungs. She tried to smile at him. He let her see his helplessness, his need: to make this stop, to make his life mean something more than pain. And he thought her breath might have caught.

"Michael," she said, "Michael—" And then she said the last thing he ever thought he'd hear her say: "Kiss me."

Time spluttered to a stop. His mouth went dry; his stomach bucked, hard, somewhere between nausea and desire. His head, already spun, spun further.

No. No. She couldn't mean—

"—here?" he choked out, only faintly aware that hadn't been the right response. But she was coming towards him, slipping buttons open on her shirt, chin lifted and eyes defiant and face flushed, and when her fingers closed on his shirt front and pulled him against her, he let it happen—he kissed her.

Her mouth was hot and lush and tasted dark, tasted like the antidote to a life of rules, of staying between the lines, but her skin was cool and clean at her throat, her collarbone, the rise of her breast above her bra.

Sydney, he thought, then, No, and pushed her out of his mind. Nadia deserved more than that. She deserved everything he could give her.

When she pulled him down, over her, his knees hitting hard ridged metal, he didn't resist—until he realized where they were, what she had pulled them down onto. The chair.

"Nadia," he started, pulling up, struggling, but her fingers but into his wrists.

"I don't care," she said, and kissed him again, open mouthed, pressed her lower body up and into him and he stopped fighting, stopped doing anything but feeling her, tasting her, smelling her. Her hands worked between them, releasing the last buttons; she shimmied out of her shirt as he lowered his mouth to the valley between her breasts. He released the clasp with one hand, pushed it off her shoulders after the shirt, and then her breasts were in his hands, cool and soft and heavy.

She gave a little gaspy breath, then a full-throated moan.

"The last man I took to bed," she said, breathless, eyes closed, "died because of me."

Fuck. It should have been a warning, but it sounded like a come on, the way her accent thickened with need.

"I'll take my chances," he told her, and kissed her throat.

"Good," she said, and cried out as he slid a hand between her thighs.

The cloth was heated and damp with sweat and arousal; he dragged his nails along either side of the pants seam as he closed his mouth over hers.

"Fuck me, Michael," she whispered against his mouth. "Michael, fuck, Michael—"

When she came, the sound echoed through the warehouse rafters. Later, hard and hot inside her, hands braced on either side of the hair's metal back, he swallowed his own groan of completion, keeping the sound a secret. His life, his body, his desire, however wrong—those things, at least, were still his own, and he would grant them where he wished.

Rambaldi be damned.

-

The light was different at dawn, cleaner. Just the time of day, Vaughn thought, but he felt good—clean—too. He wanted to stretch his muscled but didn't want to disturb Nadia, curled up against him. Her body had molded into the shape of his as they'd slept . . . or it could have been the other way around. It was nice. Sydney had always needed more space, had never been able to sleep so close to him.

When her eyes opened, he smiled, but she didn't return it. Her eyes were miles away.

"We need to get started."