For a fleeting second, her voice was so soft and wondrous, the memory painfully stark and clear—but he couldn’t hear the name. He could nearly see the shape of it on her mouth, but he couldn’t hear it.
Fuck. Memories were such goddamn unreliable things, dangerous things. At least his were. There’d been a few times in the last six years when he’d thought he remembered something, but none of it ever tied together. None of it had ever given him anything except a frickin’ holocaust of a headache, which he could sure as hell feel coming on. He started to push away from the GTO, when a piece of paper clipped to the driver’s-side visor caught his eye. He reached in and flipped the visor down, and his heart caught in his throat, hard and sudden, holding him stock-still where he stood.
The paper was a picture of three men and a car, the photograph creased and faded where the clip held it to the visor. Corinna was the car, and a man with long blond hair, a rough-looking golden boy with a surfer’s easy smile and a wicked-looking sheath knife on his belt, was leaning back against her hood—the man who’d come after Con in Paraguay. Standing next to him was a younger guy, a good-looking kid with a jarhead’s haircut and a shit-eating grin. And next to the kid was a guy Con recognized without a doubt in his mind. The man was strongly built, ripped, and lean through the waist in a stark white T-shirt. His hair was dark and longer than the kid’s, but not by much. Like the younger guy, he had straight, dark eyebrows and deep-set eyes. Both were broad-shouldered and tall, the same height. Both had dimples when they smiled, especially the younger one.
Both had been cut from the same cloth. And somewhere, at some time between when the photograph had been taken and now, the older one had been cut in a hundred different places and had a scar to mark every wound. Con knew who he was looking at. There was no mistaking what he was seeing, and it made his gut churn.
A brother and my life before … before he’d been butchered and put back together by Dr. Souk.
The heat in his face spread, running down his neck and onto his shoulders, sliding like water down his chest to his stomach and down his legs to his feet—but doing nothing to thaw the block of ice his heart had become. It was beating hard and slow, feeling like a half-ton weight.
This wasn’t a memory. This was real, the evidence staring him in the face. He had a brother, and they’d been together in this place, standing next to the GTO, along with the guy with the blond hair and the big knife.
He pulled the photo off the visor and stared down at it in his hand, and the longer he looked at it, the tighter the knot in his stomach grew. A brother. Geezus. He needed to wrap his mind around that, but not now, later. He was already edging too close to his own personal disaster.
Way too damn close.
He dug in his pocket and pulled out a fistful of pills, feeling a sick twist of pain eddying into life at the base of his skull—the headache from hell. Green, blue, red, yellow, purple, orange, every color was a path to salvation. All he had to do was choose the right ones, and nobody did that better than he. Skull cracking open was best dosed with two of the red gelcaps, the gut-churning symptom of impending doom needed a yellow.
And over and over and over again, from one month to the next, from one week to the next, and especially since the ketamine, from one day to the next he needed more and more pills just to maintain the status quo.
It wasn’t a good sign, and he knew it.
He picked the brightly colored red and yellow gelcaps out of his palm and tossed them in his mouth before shoving the rest back in his pocket. Geezus. He was so fucked. These guys knew more about him than he did, and he couldn’t think of a better way to get himself killed tonight, because he would not be taken alive. Not ever, not by anyone. Been there, done that for endless eons of pain under Souk’s tender care. Capture was not an option, and yet he was here, in their lair. The