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Chapter Eighteen


After I walked away from us she called me a coward. It stung, but I chalked it up to another of Robin Scorpio's numerous defense mechanisms. Takes one to know one, right? Something kept ringing false no matter how many times I told myself that I know what I want and who I am and that being in a committed relationship wasn't what I wanted. When that didn't work I reminded myself of what an inherently self-involved man I was and how important my career and reputation were and that they were all I had the time and energy for. In the next breath I'd tell myself and anyone who would listen that I couldn't give a woman like Robin what she needed and I was doing was actually the noble thing by walking away before she got in any deeper. That all I was feeling was simple caring and professional admiration. Hell, even gratitude for all she did for me in saving my father's life and my own. Truth is I was too scared to be honest and now all I can see is the time I wasted.

Time.

In one way or another the measure of time had been Robin's enemy.

There was the time her parents were away from her – too long.

There was the time she had with Stone – too short.

There was the time she needed to complete her studies or some experiment – never enough.

There was the time she had left in her live with the ticking time bomb of HIV in her system –too short.

Now, there was simply too much time stretching in an endless line before her.

There was always the old stand by of hope, but it was hard to come by and getting harder every minute. Time again.

She closed her eyes and tried to pretend she was somewhere else. Somewhere not in this sterile, underground lab where she is being forced to spend endless days trying to solve the unsolvable; where if she solves it she will be empowering the evil that holds her – and anyone else who gets their hands on it – to further their twisted agenda.

If she were free to choose she would have eliminated the enemy of time. She would have fought to not go along; she would work harder to escape.

Or she would simply end her own life.

It would be easy. She could mix up a compound from the materials she was forced to work with into a lethal dose. Or she could stop taking her protocol and let time finally do its job.

She couldn't.

If she tilted her head just so she could swear she could smell Patrick's aftershave. The thought of him stabbed at her. He was like a limb that had been removed and she could still feel the ghost of it haunting her. He was one of the reasons none of those options were to be taken and why she was still sitting here in this lab slaving away. Or pretending to.

"Open your eyes!" A voice snapped out, a hand slammed down on a metal table behind her.

Not startled, Dr. Robin Scorpio, MD took her time opening her eyes. She knew the sounds of this room that she was stuck in for sometimes eighteen or more hours at a time. She knew every hum and click. Even lost in her thoughts of Patrick she had heard the screech of the metal door and the click of footsteps over the metal floor.

Her eyes open, she turned and looked into the furious face of Dopey, as she had nicknamed this captor.

The first thing she noticed when she was taken and delivered here was that they didn't hide their faces. It erased any question whether they ever intended to let her go alive.

"We told you what we would do if you didn't cooperate!" His dark eyes were the same color as Patrick's, but they were filled with a dispassionate and evil rage that the man she loved would never feel.

Or maybe he would, Robin thought, shivering at the memory of the images of Patrick taken after she had left that they had shown her.

"I'm working as hard and as fast as I can, you know that."

"Fuck the work!" the man swept her vials off the table and leaned across and grabbed her by the hair. "You've hacked through the pharmacology database you claimed you had to have and sent messages. We've tracked you and those childish messages." He pulled her closer, over the table. "Now, we've used them to our advantage."

Tears came to Robin's eyes from the pain, but she refused to give him the satisfaction of verbalizing her pain or begging to be released from it. She knew that it would do no good.

"Seeing your father tortured before your eyes was not enough incentive. It's time to try something else."

"No!" Now she did cry out, not for herself, but for whomever it was she loved that they would hurt to punish her.

The dark-suited man said nothing just walked around the table, still pulling Robin by the hair and pulling her out of the lab into a small room built much like the lab with a metal floor and walls, except the only item in the room was a big screen filling one wall.

"No! Leave my father alone. Please." She cried out, trying to pull away from him as the door clanged shut behind her. "I won't do it again." The sound and image of seeing her father tortured filled her body with terror.

"Is that what you choose?"

"Yes, yes. I won't send the messages anymore. Leave my father alone. Please."

"Fine. We'll leave your father alone." He threw her into the room. She stumbled and fell onto the floor. He walked slowly behind her. The fluorescent lights glowing from the ceiling went off and the wall screen came on. "But there will be no more messages because there will be no one to send them to anymore."

Her body began to shake uncontrollably.

Her apartment had been invaded. She had been threatened and shown photos to prove they could get to her loved ones at any time to get her to come along with them quietly. She had driven a long distance, traveled on three planes, another ground ride, this time blindfolded. She had been drugged, threatened and manhandled. She had been locked in a lab and ordered to turn a therapeutic drug combination she had created into a weapon. She had her father captured and paraded in front of her bruised and bloodied as a threat to make her work better and faster. Through it all she had held it together. She was a Devane-Scorpio, after all.

But this, this might be too much.

Bruising fingers closed on her chin, turning her head to face the screen that flashed on.

"NO!" she gasped as the image of Patrick filled the wall. Her eyes dragged over his lithe form, her fingers tingled to touch him, her body ached to be filled by him. Her breathing became ragged.

She saw his lips move almost in a silent prayer fitting to the church he was about to enter. The camera panned up to the ornate brass sign reading "Marry in haste, repent at leisure" poised above the bright red door of the church. She watched as he steeled himself and opened the door and quickly slipped inside.

Then nothing but a shot of the red door.

Then there was a loud boom coming from all sides of the room and then a flash. Then a loud rumbling and crash after crash. Debris flying into the camera lens.

Pain radiated through her body. She couldn't hold back anymore. She began to scream.

"No. No. No. No. No. No."

"You did this," he told her tonelessly.

"No. No. No. No. No. No."

"Your mother is next if you don't behave. Then your father. Then your pretty friend Brenda Barrett. Then your Uncle Mac. Your dead loverboy's father. Then Georgie. Then Maxie. Then Cameron Smith Spencer. Then Nikolas Cassadine and his little boy. Then, well, the list goes on and on doesn't it. All those people you care about just waiting to die for your disobedience."

The threats permeated her horror and she stiffened and bit back her cries. "This is a trick. It's a lie," Robin rasped. Tears were streaming down her face. She held her back straight through sheer will. The will not to be broken. The will not to believe.

"Change it."

The screen changed to a local news report showing resideren video. The scene was the burning church they had just watched explode. Fire crews. Police. Smoke. Flames. Debris. They could fake this, she knew, but she didn't think they would bother.

Something inside Robin snapped.

"No! No! No! No! No! No!" She launched herself uselessly at the larger man who flung her like a butterfly onto the floor. She stayed where she landed. Her cries turned into a haunting keen of grief. It filled and echoed around the room.

The man stood over her impassively.

"You have fifteen minutes to grieve. Then get back to work or we kill your next loved one. Maybe we'll have you kill your father yourself?" He walked around her, leaving her crouched on the floor. "We can get to any of them. At any time. Remember that."