Lightning Game (GhostWalkers #17) -Christine Feehan Page 0,14

with the orphans he’d experimented on. The longer he’d had the girls in his possession, the more he’d done to them. She could admit it to Rubin and his brother, but they wouldn’t know how she was enhanced—what exactly Whitney had done to her.

Jonquille nodded. “Yes. In order to make his perfect soldiers, he had to do his experiments over and over to make certain nothing went wrong when he tried them on all of you.” She kept the bitterness from her voice with effort.

Whitney did love his soldiers. It mattered little if the women were imperfect and his supersoldiers were imperfect. He ran tests on soldiers in the military to see if they could join the elite Ghost-Walker program, but they had to score very high in so many areas and most flunked out in the psychological division.

Whitney offered those failures another program—his. They could “die.” Receive full military honors and their families, their benefits. He would then pay them ridiculous amounts of money to work for him. He would enhance them and they would be every bit as good as the elite GhostWalkers they had applied for. What he didn’t tell them was they would burn out very fast. He would send them to be tested against the female soldiers he’d created, with their venomous bites or other deadly enhancements, promising the soldiers they could then be paired in his breeding program with the woman of their choice. He often sent them against the Ghost-Walker teams to be tested as well. They lived very short lives.

“Whitney does have a flawed way of thinking,” Rubin conceded without rancor. “He has his breeding program now, forcing the women he still holds captive into it, expecting them to give him babies, yet having no respect for what they can provide. That doesn’t even make sense.”

Jonquille was very glad she had escaped before Whitney could pair her with someone in the program.

“You’re saying the things he does can’t be reversed.” She just put it out there, watching his face.

She studied Rubin. He didn’t give much away on his very handsome face. He looked a little sad. A little regretful. Those dark eyes of his didn’t blink, reminding her even more of a predator and less of a man. She was susceptible to him in many ways. His voice. His looks. His brain. She had to be careful not to let her guard down. He wasn’t the gentle man he appeared to be. It was important to always remember that. He’d all but warned her.

The bottom line was, he wasn’t going to help her. She heard it in his voice. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe there was no way to help her. She’d run out of options. All that work tracking him down for nothing. She’d known. That really wasn’t why she was here, but when she saw him, she’d suddenly had hope. She wasn’t going to cry. She’d given too many tears to Whitney’s messed-up experiments already. She didn’t have any left to give.

She took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “All right, then. I’m sorry I invaded your space. It was just an idea. My last one, actually, but you sounded promising.” She looked around the cabin. “This has been one of the nicer places I’ve stayed.”

Rubin frowned. “You’re moving on just a little too fast.”

He was reading her body language and everything said she was getting ready to run. She couldn’t help it. Maybe she should have tried to hide her intentions better. She knew he’d tried to be very careful of every word he said, but it hadn’t mattered. She was intelligent and she knew what he meant. At least he hadn’t tried to lie to her. That wouldn’t have worked either.

“I’m not certain what you mean.” She tried to sound neutral, but knew it was impossible to keep her body language from screaming that she wanted out of there.

“We might not be able to undo everything Whitney did as far as enhancements go, but between the three of us, we should be able to figure out ways to ease the situation.”

She shook her head. “I can’t stay in one place too long. I picked up a tail a few months back, after that last convention where you gave a talk on the uses of managing lightning strikes.”

She pulled the edge of her sweater out of her mouth, suddenly aware of what she was doing. It was a bad habit and one she thought she’d overcome a long time