“I felt what she’s feeling,” Nathan yelled. “She felt like her head was going to explode, like something was breaking inside her skull, but she bore it to reach out to me because those assholes have her again. Do you have any idea what they did to her the last time they had her?”

Resnick slowly shook his head, his face going paler by the second.

“They beat her. They tortured her. For days she endured hell because she wouldn’t give them information about Grace. After she escaped, she asked me for help. She’d tried to do so before, but they kept her too drugged to maintain a pathway. And now because you’re a stupid fuck, she’s back in their hands and she can’t give me any goddamn information because you shot her full of drugs that prevent her from using her gift.”

Resnick’s hand shook as he dragged it through his hair. “You have to know I didn’t intend for this to happen.”

“I don’t know anything,” Nathan snapped. “You claim to care about her. You think she might be your sister. Where the fuck do you get your idea of family from? What is wrong with you?”

“Save the insults, okay? I fucked up. I just wanted to protect her. I had no idea that you and she were involved. I didn’t even know how the hell she ended up with KGI. I thought I could remove her without having to explain anything. I wanted to protect her and Grace without anyone finding out about their abilities. I still don’t know how she got involved with you or how she knew to ask you for help.”

“Because she saved me,” Nathan said in a fierce voice. “She heard me out of all the other voices in the world and she answered. We formed a bond long before we ever met face-

to-face, and I’ll be damned if I let you or anyone else break it.”

Joe slid his hand over Nathan’s shoulder again. “No one’s going to do anything. We’ll get Shea back.”

Just hearing the conviction in his brother’s voice settled Nathan. As he glanced around the room at his other brothers and Steele and his team members, he saw the same conviction in every one of their faces.

Garrett turned to Resnick, his eyes so cold they’d freeze a polar bear. “It’s time for you to start talking. We need every piece of information you have on this lab where you and Shea were conceived or created or whatever the fuck you want to call it. We need names, organizations, and we need to know who’d have an interest in them now. Or who would even know about them.”

“Do you have their abilities?” Sam asked as he took a step closer to Resnick.

Resnick shook his head. His nostrils flared and his lips flattened into a thin line. “I was a…failure. A dropped experiment. Disappointing results. They went back to the drawing board after I was born. It wasn’t until many years later that Grace and then Shea were born.”

“So what, you just hung around the lab? I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around this,” Ethan said. “It doesn’t add up and it damn sure doesn’t make sense.”

Resnick lit another cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke. “There wasn’t anything else to do with me. I was the first. They didn’t have a plan for what happened if I didn’t yield the results they were looking for. After me, they adopted out babies that didn’t work out. But they kept me.”

“Who is they?” Nathan asked impatiently. “We’re wasting time here. I’m not interested in your life story.”

“The project was started during the Cold War. At first the U.S. was primarily interested in psychic and telepathic powers. They wanted a way into the heads of people in positions of power. They wanted their secrets. It sounds far-fetched, yes, but then a whole lot of secret research is pretty damn unbelievable.

“There wasn’t any solid success until after the Cold War ended. That’s when Grace and Shea were born. At first there was a lot of excitement that the two girls could communicate telepathically with each other. But then when their ability to heal and take on pain was discovered, it marked a complete one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn in the possibilities.”

“Okay, so who do we like for this?” Nathan demanded. “The government? Some unheard-of, nonexistent shadow group of the CIA who want to keep experimenting on Shea and Grace?”

“Where did they get the donors?” Donovan cut in. “Shea said that according to her mother’s journal they paired egg and sperm from donors who had remarkable abilities. That doesn’t explain how they laid hands on these people. Hardly something you can advertise for.”

“I don’t know the answer to your question, Nathan,” Resnick said in a low voice. “But we’ll use whatever resources I have to find out. I swear it.” He turned to Donovan. “That’s exactly what they did. They studied each and every case of special abilities. Some turned out to be hoaxes, but there were others who clearly displayed unique talents. Years went into cataloging and searching out men and women with psychic or paranormal gifts. They were tested extensively and then semen samples were taken from the men and the females had eggs removed. Then began an experimentation on mixing and matching certain profiles to see what the result would be.”

“It all sounds fucking unreal,” Ethan muttered.

“I was a failure. As were many of the offspring that were created in the lab,” Resnick continued. “In fact, Grace and Shea were the only two who displayed marked abilities. You can imagine the excitement they caused when it was discovered what they could do. There were others with questionable abilities but nothing that was tangible, that was there in black and white, that could be proven, and most important, controlled and reproduced at will. That is what they were looking for, and that’s why Grace and Shea aren’t safe. They want them not only for what they can do, but for the possibilities their offspring would provide.”

A chill went up Nathan’s spine, and fury gripped him all over again. There was no fucking way Shea was going to spend her life being tortured and have her eggs taken to produce mass offspring in hopes of having one or two who shared her remarkable ability. The mere thought made him sick to his stomach.

A sudden thought occurred to Nathan and he met Resnick’s gaze. “You were the one who helped the Petersons, weren’t you? When they moved to Oregon. It’s how you knew about the house there and why you sent Phillips there to find Shea.”

Resnick gave a resigned sigh. “Yes. I didn’t locate the Petersons or the girls until they were nearly adults. The Petersons took the girls and ran when they were very young. Just toddlers. I was glad. I hated seeing what was done to them. I was just a teenager who was helpless to do anything but watch while they were treated like objects.

“They were why I pursued a job in the CIA and why I worked my way into the upper echelons of the intelligence community. I not only wanted to find and protect them but I wanted to keep my ear to the ground so I’d know if there was an effort to regroup or if anyone began digging around for information on the girls.

“The project folded after the Petersons escaped with Shea and Grace. There was a fear of discovery. No one knew when or if the Petersons would go public. One day the project was alive and well. The next day it was a ghost town.”

“And you?” Sam asked. “Where do you fit into all this, Resnick? What did you do after the project folded? Or did you keep your hand in it all this time?”

Resnick’s lip curled at the distrust in Sam’s voice. “Since I was conceived in a lab, I didn’t officially exist. I didn’t even have a name, though the Petersons called me Adam. For the first created man. But I had no official identification. No birth certificate. To the world I didn’t exist. It was pretty easy to disappear, start over, create my own past. It didn’t take long to get a birth certificate and a social security number. Things were much easier back then. Not as much red tape. And once you’re in the system, you’re there. And so I became Adam Resnick. More importantly, my connection to the research project has never been known.”

Resnick stopped for a moment and then he tiredly ran a hand over his jaw. His injured arm hung loosely at his side and he had a gray cast to his skin. He looked beaten. Regret radiated from him in waves.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, Nathan. I didn’t know. I couldn’t have known. I only wanted to protect Shea. I still want to protect her.”

“Then let’s find out who the fuck has her,” Nathan ground out. “Last time they caught up to her in California and they held her in the vicinity for a week. She escaped and I found her in Crescent City, hiding in a culvert. They kept her drugged the entire time. She remembers little except the torture, so she couldn’t tell me anything about who they were.”

Resnick sighed. “I’ve looked for her and Grace ever since the Petersons turned up dead and the girls disappeared. I knew they were in serious trouble. I made sure the Petersons’ bodies were removed and nothing got out about their deaths. The house belonged to me under an assumed name, and on paper the Petersons were renters. They kept to themselves and never involved themselves in the community, so it’s doubtful anyone ever knew they were gone. I made sure the house was kept up in case…in case one of the girls ever came back.”

“You mean you intended to nab them as soon as they showed up,” Nathan said darkly.

“I would have taken them in, yes,” Resnick said calmly. “I would have done anything to protect them. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one watching the house, and Phillips and his team got there too late to help Grace. I was determined to at least bring Shea in. When we failed to intercept her at the house, I knew that eventually you’d take her home, so we waited for our opportunity and took it.”

“Who else is watching?” Sam demanded. “Who else wants them?”

“I don’t know. But I plan to find out.”

“So what now?” Garrett demanded with his trademark impatience. He was positively fidgeting with all the talking going on, an impatience that Nathan shared.

Resnick pushed off the edge of the counter. “Now we find the fucks who have Shea and we go blow some shit up.”

Ethan grinned. “Now we’re talking!”

CHAPTER 38

TORTURE was preferable to this hell. Her sanity was slowly being eaten away.

She was in a clear plastic tube, the sides pressed to her arms so she couldn’t move. Bands circled her ankles, her wrists and even her neck. That one was the worst of all because she fought the sensation of choking every second she was conscious.

They’d already taken blood samples. It had all been sterile and very methodical. No one spoke to her. They treated her like she was a nameless, faceless object. Soulless. No one. Just another research project. Was this what it had been like for her and Grace in the beginning?

What did they want from her? Tears pricked her eyelids and her vision blurred. She was a human being regardless of the circumstances of her birth.

This wasn’t right. None of it was right. She and Grace deserved to be left alone. Running from a faceless enemy was no way to live.

She glanced fearfully over at the monitor positioned to her left. She had to calm her thoughts. Make everything blank.

The electrodes attached to her head monitored brain waves and activity. She’d already learned the hard way that the consequence of her trying to communicate telepathically was horrific pain, not only from the lingering effects of the drugs but from the electrical shock that speared through her body every time her brain activity increased.

But telepathy wasn’t the only thing that would raise the level of her brain activity. She had to be careful to temper her emotions.

She felt like the negative reinforcement rat. Eat, zap. Do the wrong thing, zap. Zap, zap, zap.

Yeah, she was starting to lose her mind. It wouldn’t take much at all to sever her fragile grasp of reality. She was clinging by a thread, and right now it seemed a lot easier to just let go and check out.

She hadn’t tried to contact Nathan for hours now. She could still feel the lingering pain from her last effort. The empty void in her mind was hell. The claustrophobic capsule they’d crammed her in was hell. She knew in that moment that she didn’t want to connect with Nathan. She never wanted him to know how this felt. He’d already endured so much torture, and knowing what was happening to her would send him right over the edge.

RESNICK paced back and forth in the basement of his home that served as his office away from his headquarters in D.C. “She should have been able to communicate with you by now. Have you tried reaching out to her recently?”

“I won’t do it again,” Nathan said fiercely. “Every time I do, I can feel her pain. It’s horrific. I won’t put her through that. I can feel her confusion, her emptiness. She’s so goddamn alone and she’s hanging on by the thinnest of threads and the pain is unimaginable. We have to give her more time.”