But the injured and bleeding young woman lying before him now had known him from a much different time, in a different place. When he'd been a different person, born with a name none of his rebel followers would recognize.
"Kellan . . . ?"
Her voice was hardly a whisper, barely audible, even to him. He felt her hand brush his, feather-light, questioning. Against his own will, he glanced down into her face. Her eyes were not even half open, heavy-lidded and unfocused. She drifted off in that next moment, her fingers falling away limply, head lolling to the side in a heavy, drug-induced slumber.
He briefly closed his eyes, expelling the past and reaching for the only thing he had left.
"Show's over, people. Now look alive. We still have work to do."
Chapter Five
SHE HADN'T EXPECTED TO WAKE UP.
Hell, she hadn't really expected to be alive. Not after fighting with her captors in transit, sticking the one named Vince with her dagger soon after they'd shoved her into the van at Jeremy Ackmeyer's house. They might have killed her then. And she couldn't have blamed them if they'd finished her off during the struggle she'd put up once they'd arrived at this place either.
This . . . wherever she was.
She tried to open her eyes where she lay now but saw only darkness. The pressure on her face told her she was blindfolded. Handcuffs bit into her wrists, which were fastened somewhere above her head. She gave them a tug and heard the shackles grate on what she guessed was a metal headboard. Her ankles were restrained too, fixed to the bottom of the bed.
Her mouth felt as dry as if it had been packed with cotton, but at least they hadn't gagged her. Then again, what good would it do her to start screaming? She didn't have to see the walls of her prison to know that they were made of thick, impenetrable material. Stone, she was guessing, from the dank, stale odor of the place, more than likely without a single window in the room.
She smelled the faint brine of the ocean in the damp air. Heard the low roar of waves rolling onto the shore from not far off in the distance. Beyond that, only silence.
No, raising her voice in this place would only alert her captors.
Mira shifted on the thin mattress and winced at the dull ache that flared in the side of her neck. She remembered getting punched there with something sharp. Something that took out her legs and sent her mind reeling. Tranqs, it was obvious to her now.
But it didn't take much to recall the sudden, overwhelming sense of floating, falling . . .
Dying, she had thought.
She'd even seen the face of an angel in those final few moments of fading consciousness. Kellan's face, handsome and haunted, his soulful hazel eyes holding her in a gaze that seemed mournful, somehow heartbroken.
God, they must have given her some powerful shit.
It took more than a little effort to shake off the soft pang of longing in her chest that always followed in the wake of Kellan's memory. Instead, Mira rallied herself around her present reality - which, at the moment, wasn't looking too promising.
She tested her shackles again, to no avail. Next, she shifted her head around on the pillow, trying to use friction to slide the blindfold away from her eyes. It moved up only a fraction on the right side, not enough for her to see anything.
And she'd apparently made enough noise already, because now she heard the heavy jangle of a key turning in a lock. From somewhere beyond the foot of the bed, a heavy panel door creaked open.
"You're awake." The woman with the long black hair. Brady, they called her. Mira recognized her voice and the long-legged gait as footsteps approached the bed. "How do you feel?"
"Like I'm going to vomit," Mira replied, her own voice raw from disuse. "But then, being near rebel scum tends to have that effect on me." She cleared her arid throat. "That's what you are, right? Rebels. Lowlife cowards who plot and skulk around in the shadows like a den of rats, making messes for other people to clean up. Taking the lives of people worth any hundred of your kind."
The woman said nothing in response to all that venom. There was a soft rustle of movement beside the bed near Mira's head, then the liquid sound of something being poured into a glass. "Drink this," she told Mira. "It's water. The sedative you were given will have dehydrated you."
Mira turned her head when the cool glass came close to her lips. "I don't want anything you give me. Tell me what you've done to Jeremy Ackmeyer."
A soft sigh. "You don't need to worry about him. He's not your concern."
"I'll decide what's my concern or not." Mira tried to rise, but there was nowhere to go with the restraints digging into her wrists. She dropped back down on a hissed curse. "Where is he? What do you want from him?"
The water glass came up to Mira's mouth again. "We're going to release you tonight, unharmed," the female rebel said, ignoring her questions.
"Release me?" Mira scoffed, refusing the drink a second time now. "And you think I believe that? I've seen all of your faces. I may not know exactly where you brought me, but I know we're not far out of Boston. Somewhere very close to the bay - so close, I can hear the water. I can taste it in the air. Some kind of bunker would be my guess. Something very old. It won't take long to figure out where this hideout is, and then I'll come back for all of you."
"We've considered that." No worry in that calm reply. "Precautions will be taken, of course."
Precautions, Mira pondered silently. Were they taking Ackmeyer to another location? Or did this imply the rebels would be moving their base of operations tonight, scattering somewhere like the vermin they were?
No way they'd ever outrun her, let alone the Order, no matter how far or wide they fled. And if they thought hooding her for the ride back to this base earlier and keeping her blindfolded now would protect their identities or the location of their lair, they would be sorely mistaken. Short of lobotomizing her, which would definitely negate the "unharmed" part of their promise, Mira didn't see how these humans figured they could turn her loose and expect to get away with it.