She blinked, her gaze riveted to his face. He was made of stone, perfectly expressionless. She couldn’t read him at all, but the energy rolling off of him was not as low level as it usually was. It was furious and purposeful. In spite of his fingers shackling her ankle, the violence struck her hard, taking her breath, pounding at her head, building until she was afraid she would explode.
Dahlia threw herself sideways, away from him, rolling off the bed, breaking the light grip Nicolas had on her ankle. He made a grab for her, but she caught him off guard.
Glass fragmented in the windows, the sound loud in the night. Spiderweb cracks raced across the windows and mirror. The lightbulbs shattered, the pieces exploding like a bomb and raining down in slivers onto the floor. The room itself seemed to shift, the walls flexing, bubbling outward as if something pressed against them, then receding abruptly as if the invisible force could not find an escape. The temperature soared in the room. Nicolas peered over the edge of the bed. He couldn’t see Dahlia’s body, but a red glow burst from the floor, casting her small shadow on the wall briefly before the flickering color died down and winked out.
“Dahlia? Are you hurt?”
She coughed. “No. Are you?”
She sounded hurt, her voice shaky. Nicolas reached down and picked her up, dragging her against him. “Nothing touched me. Are you certain?” Her skin was hot to the touch, searing his fingers and palm.
“I’m going to be sick.” Dahlia pushed away from him and staggered on bare feet toward the bathroom.
Nicolas caught her up and carried her, unwilling to take the chance that she might cut herself on the shattered glass. He held back her hair while she was violently sick, over and over. “This is my fault, isn’t it?” Grimly he handed her a towel.
Dahlia rinsed her mouth repeatedly. “It’s Whitney’s fault, if we’re going to blame anyone.” She shrugged and looked at him. “It’s my life.”
“I’m sorry, honey, I should have been more careful.”
She flashed a wan smile. “You can’t stop feeling, it doesn’t work that way. And who would really want it to? I’ll be fine. Let me brush my teeth. It’s gone now, a flash fire so to speak.”
Nicolas turned away from her to pace restlessly across the floor. “Where’s the broom? I’ll clean this up.” He couldn’t think about what her life must be like. How difficult being around people would actually be.
“I’ll get it. I don’t bother with brooms. It’s easier to just use whatever energy happens to be handy to collect it. And right now, there’s plenty of energy in the room.”
Nicolas turned back to look at her. She made the announcement so casually, as if what she said and did wasn’t truly exceptional. She was busy brushing her teeth. He took a moment to really study her. She was all flowing grace and soft movement. Very feminine. Why hadn’t he noticed it when he had watched the training tapes? He had viewed her as a potential enemy and looked for strengths and weaknesses. Everything was so different. Just looking at her warmed him.
“Dahlia, what did you mean by a stealth torpedo?”
“A silent torpedo. One that can’t be detected before, during, or after being fired from a submarine.” She tossed her hair over her shoulder and moved to stand beside him. She bent low, her palm just above the glass, and began to move her fingers in the same rhythm she often used with the spheres.
“That’s impossible. You can hear the outer doors open. You can hear the burst into the water, and you can hear the motor of a torpedo.” He couldn’t take his eyes off of the glass shards as they began to spin in a circle, pulling together and rising beneath her palm. She amazed him with her control. “They’ve tried and failed over and over.”
“I don’t think they failed this time,” Dahlia said and walked very carefully to the wastebasket. When her hand was over the top of it, she stopped all movement and watched the glass drop into the basket. Only then did she turn and look at him. “I think someone figured it out, or at least was close to figuring it out.”
“And you know this how?”
“I don’t know it, I just think there’s enough data to be suspicious. Prior to being asked to go in for a recovery, I was asked to duplicate the information at the university where the professors were working together with their teams. I looked at the information I was bringing out over the last few months. The original research read nothing at all like the findings sent to the government.”
“So it didn’t work, and they’ve dropped it and gone to something else.”
“They’re dead. All of them. The first professor to die was a woman. She was in a car accident about four months ago. She had one assistant. He died while hiking in the national forest. That happened about three weeks after the first death. The second professor died when he fell from a balcony in what the police said was a ‘freak’ accident. The head of the team was walking along the street when he suddenly fell to the ground, clutching his chest in an apparent heart attack. That was a couple of weeks before I was sent out. Granted, they all died weeks apart from what could truly have been accidents, but if you put that with a couple of other deaths of minor assistants, all dying in similar ways, it means to me that they succeeded in their research and that someone wants to cover it up and sell it elsewhere.”
“So the government was officially notified that it couldn’t be done.”
Dahlia nodded. “The report came in just a few weeks before they all started dying.”
Nicolas studied her face before crossing the room to stand in front of the window where he examined the spiderweb fragmenting the glass. “You’re not an innocent woman working out of a sanitarium, are you?” He stared out the window into the darkness. “You know exactly who you work for.”
Dahlia crossed the room to stand beside him. Close, but not touching him. “I’m sorry, yes. I work for the NCIS, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. So does Jesse. I didn’t know who you were, Nicolas, or whom you worked for. You showed up the same time my home and my family was destroyed. I’m investigating something that has probably killed several people. Jesse Calhoun has been taken prisoner and is probably being tortured for information. If I were a member of the other side, I’d probably put someone like you in place. I had to be sure you were really who you said you were. It was such a coincidence for you to show up at exactly the right moment.”