Marked Target ~ Chapter Two ~ by: Danielle Krieger (c) 2011 Lawrence "Lex" McKinley lives about as average a life as one can with metahumans popping up everywhere. Well, as normal as someone who spends their free time as an MMA fighter really can. He's about to get the shock of his life--the punch he never saw coming. In this installment: Lex begins to discover that he is imprisoned. How long? Who is keeping him? Why are they doing this? Who is that looking back at him in the mirror?

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DISCLAIMER :: This is a retroactive continuity. A “ret-con”, if you will. It follows other stories in Lilith Langtree’s “Comics RetCon Universe”. The story is mine, but some of the characters are not. This is a RetCon of X-23, from Marvel Comics’ X-men (with a special guest appearance from Dr. Hank McCoy). Laura Kinney, X-23, and Dr. Henry Philip “Hank” McCoy, Beast, are trademarks of Marvel Comics. All rights reserved. The pic, this time, has been brought to you by the incredibly talented Billy Tan.

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Chapter Two:

There’s this little thing about artificial, drug-induced sleep: you never dream. Through biochemical processes, your body is allowed to rest, but your brain still believes it is awake. Therefore, it will continue with its business until the body sends the signal that it’s time for repairs. It’s during those repairs that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep engages and you dream. People can live on for days, weeks, months, and even years but never be aware of the passage of time. In short: I have no idea how long I was out. It was like what I assumed being in a coma would be like or surgery. I’d never had surgery, so you can nix that frame of reference.

Slowly, I could feel my eyes begin to open. The great thing was there was no pain, but my head was still swimming. My vision was blurry, but there was a bright light pointed in my direction. It hurt. So, my eyes closed again. Yet, I could feel my head slowly roll back and forth. No other body part responded to any commands. The signal was going out, but didn’t come back and nobody responded. Great, my body was numb from the neck down. An exhalation revealed that my voice was very hoarse and sounded like I hadn’t had any water in days. It made a sick hissing sound.

Again, my eyes attempted to open. Thankfully, the light was much dimmer, now. Apparently, my head had sufficiently turned away from it. My vision was blurry and my eyelids were so heavy they felt as though they’d been closed for about a year. I tried to blink rapidly, but that wasn’t going to happen. I simply rolled my head to the right, away from the bright light, so that my eyes could slowly acclimate to my surroundings. This could take a while. Thankfully, I could hear soft, muffled footsteps that told me someone else was in the room with me. That gave me a little comfort, but not much.

The acclimation process seemed interminable. What should have taken minutes seemed to take hours. Though, when my visual clarity was enough to make out my surroundings, I felt like I had stepped out of my life and onto the set of Conspiracy Theory. You know, that great Mel Gibson movie where Patrick Stewart plays the bad guy? Yes, that one. The place looked like Alcatraz needed a new paint job and definitely needed the floors redone. It smelled like canned ass mixed with formaldehyde, too. Reminded me of the locker room. It may have been enough to induce vomiting, but there was nothing in my stomach to come back up.

My head rolled to the left, again. Though, this time I closed the left eye to further shield from the bright light. The sight my one eye beheld was something out of some episode of some obscure horror show on the Sci-Fi Channel. I was wearing something like a really long, white T-shirt that hung on me like some weird dress. There were leather straps everywhere, holding me to some strangely configured gurney. My arms and legs were separated from each other and my body. Honestly, the position my body was in gave the impression I had one of those glider suits on and had to spread wide to keep the air in the pieces between so I didn’t reach terminal velocity. It’s the only known way humans can “fly” without a machine propelling them. It also looked like that Leonardo Da Vinci painting with the guy all spread eagle, two arms, two legs, surrounded by a circle. What was it called again?

Still, odd position, but that wasn’t the worst part. There were electrodes hooked up to my forearms and calves that caused my feet to point outward and my hands to grip the ends of the “arm” tightly. There was some medical apparatus attached to the places between my index finger/middle finger and ring finger/pinkie finger areas. The same down between my big toe and index toe. It seemed to be some sort of medical clamp, but it was holding the skin open. Initially it looked like there was some kind of bony protrusion coming out from between my knuckles and there was something very red being clamped down around them.

So, I screamed. Or… at least I tried to. The only thing that came out was more like a frightened moan, if that makes any sense. Honestly, even now, I find myself wondering just what the fuck came out from my lips. I keep referencing the verbal exchange from The Princess Bride:

Westley: [inaudible]

Inigo Montoya: “’True Love’, you heard him? You could not ask for a more noble cause than that.”

Old man: “Yeah, True Love is the greatest thing in the world…. He distinctly said ‘To blave’ and as we all know, ‘to blave’ means ‘to bluff’, heh?”

Anyway, I was stuck in freak out central. What on the big, green, spherical Earth were they doing to me? I didn’t really have enough time to find out. The man with the shuffling feet quickly glared in my direction.

“Shit! He’s awake! Dose him again!”

There was another bee sting in my neck and about five seconds later, I was out like a light, again.

Cotton mouth. Hate that! It’s a well-known side effect of the medications anesthesiologists use to knock you out for surgery… or, so I’ve read. It’s also a rather common side effect of smoking Cannabis, but I’d never done that, either. Anyway, when I came back to the land of the living, I had one of the worst cases of “cotton mouth” that I’ve ever experienced. However, there was bright light waiting for me to open my eyes and I was not in the mood for any pain, just yet. My body still felt incredibly heavy, but at least I could feel everything from the neck down, now. That was mildly reassuring. Clumsily, I lifted my arms and brought them to my face. The good news: I wasn’t tied down to anything. The bad news: I didn’t like what I felt.

Again, not knowing how long I was out, I expected to find a little beard stubble on my cheeks, chin, and upper neck. Doesn’t every guy? Instead, what I found was smooth, soft skin–like, baby’s butt smooth. I jolted upright and my eyes shot wide open. That really hurt the eyes, which instinctively clamped shut again. However, I was awake, now… really awake.

Forcing my eyes to brave the light, I fluttered my eyelids a few hundred times. I was in a room, a really plain one at that. Strangely, this one had been repainted. As my tired eyes scanned it, they didn’t find much besides cinder block walls that were painted white, a gray cement floor, a cream-colored door, a stainless steel toilet in the corner with sink attached, and a big “mirror” on one wall. I had been laying on a hard surface with a small mat and sorry excuses for a pillow under my head and blanket draped over me. How did I end up in jail?

Gathering up whatever strength I had, I planted my feet firmly on the cold concrete and ignored it while I moved over to the big “mirror”. I’d seen enough of them. Just by looking at it, my eyes immediately recognized a two-way mirror. The first look at myself caught me a little off-guard. I could tell there were subtle changes in the reflection staring back at me. Again, I brought my hands to my face and felt the soft skin of it. To me, the reflection looked a little pale. That wasn’t what caught my eyes, though. I usually shaved my arm hair for tournaments, but that had been somewhere in the vicinity of two weeks ago. There should be hair on them, by now. However, there was none and the skin was the same pale color of my face. What the heck was going on?

The inspection continued. For the record, the shirt was technically a dress. It looked like a long, loose T-shirt, but it hung to about the middle of my thighs. Again, my legs were the same pale coloring of my face and arms. I was noticing a pattern. More puzzling was the fact that there was, actually, hair on my legs. However, they looked more like Julia’s did if she went about two months without shaving them, which only happened once. Yes, I pulled a “duh!” action in the next second. My hand shot straight towards my crotch. I am happy to report that, just like always, I had a good handful of penis and scrotum. I let out a relieved sigh. I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea, though.

“Well, well… our subject awakens.” A not-so-easy-to-decipher male voice sounded from what seemed like a nearby speaker.

Though I expected something like this, it still startled me. My eyes darted around, scanning for the little speaker box. It hung just above the center of the “mirror”. My eyes fixed on the reflective glass and narrowed. “Who are you? What do you want with me? How long have I been here? Where’s Julia, you sick bastard?” My voice was a little hoarse. Chalk up another score for the drugs.

He made some kind of sound like “tsk, tsk, tsk” in response. “Now, now, Mr. McKinley. You mustn’t over-stimulate yourself, lest you suffer a quicker transformation.”

My puzzled expression reflected right back at me. “Transformation? What are you talking about?”

“I would assume that you have heard tell about a certain rise in what we call ‘metahumans’?”

My eyes lowered as if contemplating the lower part of the mirror. There had been news reports of some Jade girl who dressed in a tight green and black outfit who had made a very public statement about the existence of “metahumans”. Then, there was some Terra girl in Texas. After that, some chick went crazy in Japan. Not long after, somebody who looked for all the world like the personification of a God from Norse Mythology (the Thunder God, Thor) with the outfit and big ass hammer, but they had boobs and lived in Kansas. Finally, there was some weird chick that idolized Robin Hood, apparently, who’d managed to rescue a whole cruise liner in the Caribbean and was now gallivanting around San Francisco. The press was having a field day with it. It was a break from covering the rampant corruption in Congress and the nasty truth behind two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Limply, I shrugged. “I might have heard of a couple. Didn’t hear that word, though.”

Did he really just cackle? “Oh, you are such a simpleton. My boy, you are one of them. We’re going to see just how far this meta-gene can go. You’re going down a rabbit hole, my friend, and it’s not a request.” A faint hissing sound reached my ears. “For the record, you’ve only been here approximately three days. It’s hardly enough time to find anything conclusive. You’ll be our ‘guest’ for some time. Sleep well, my boy.”

My body started to get heavy and my head started swimming again. My eyes rolled into the back of my head as I lost my balance and fell over. At least I landed on the bed, but it just wasn’t soft enough.

Waking up this time was a lot less groggy. Again, there was the mystery of just how long I was out. This time, my tired eyes scanned the room and landed on a tray of food in the middle of the floor. Good thing, too, because if felt like I hadn’t eaten in weeks. I swung my legs over the side and hopped down. Wait. Hopped down? All I had to do before was slide off. My eyes darted over to the “mirror” again. Something was definitely happening to me and it was very obvious.

My face was smaller, rounder, and softer-looking. My eyes looked twice as big. My eyebrows weren’t caterpillars over my eyes, anymore. They were very much thinner. My hair looked a little bit off. Had I sweat or did it actually get darker? Beyond that, the T-shirt/dress looked a little bigger on me. At eye level, I could tell that I had actually gotten shorter by about two or three inches. How was any of this possible?

Now was not the time to think about such things. Now, my stomach was growling fiercely.

The changes were getting more obvious, seemingly by the hour. My hair was completely black, now, and I had shrunk a little more. At least, that had stopped, yesterday. All the skin on my body was now much softer than it had been since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. In truth, touching my own skin was like touching Julia and it creeped me out more than a little. After all that, my chest itched something fierce and no amount of scratching eased it.

I learned how to tell time, though. They brought me three square meals a day. First one was morning, second was about noon, and the third was about dinner. They usually gassed me to sleep shortly after dinner. Then, all back to square one. Each day, the removed all three trays. They’d done that eleven times, now, so about fourteen days had passed since I got here. Where the heck was “here”, anyway? Weren’t people looking for me?

I felt so small, now, and my muscles seemed to be dissolving. I didn’t have bulky ones to begin with, but they were firm, tone, and readily in sight. They were disappearing rather quickly. Sitting on the “bed”, I bent my knees and wrapped my arms around them. The gas should be coming any minute, now.

Fuck, my dick was small! I’d been watching it get smaller and smaller over the course of a week until it was at a point, now, where it looked like I was six! It was bad enough they had to take my freedom, but “Little Soldier Boy”? Where’s that get fun?

Adding insult to injury, little nubs had formed on my chest. At first, there was the itching. Next, my nipples looked puffy, even as my pecks shrank out of sight. Now, there was no denying that there were little nubs that poked into my shirt and tented the fabric ever so slightly. My skin got a whole lot softer, too. Touch my arms and it was like holding a baby. Same with my legs. I didn’t dare venture under the T-shirt/dress that now hung to my knees. Looking into the “mirror”, my face was getting much more round, soft, and, dare I say, “delicate”? My hair and nails were growing out, but that was just time. Anybody who would recognize me as the Brendan Fraser look-alike wouldn’t recognize me, now. I didn’t even look like a guy, anymore. I was now what they call “androgynous”.

This will only end in tears.

My life officially sucks. Another week gone by and there was a funeral at Arlington for my “little soldier”. He was buried two days ago. I played “Taps”. It was beautiful. In his place, a puffy slit had formed. I had seen enough to know what that was. I had no idea if there was anything going on inside, but I was now the owner of external vulva. There was no pride in this. There wasn’t enough time to really mourn my little buddy. As soon as he was buried, the changes in my body really accelerated. Yes, I got a visit from the “boob fairy”. Damn things had gone from little nubs to puffy little cones. They were still a bit small, but they made it known that they weren’t about to stay that way. Not to mention, there was this annoying pain in my lower back, almost as if my tailbone was going to split in half. I don’t recommend it.

My face? Yea, that had changed. It wasn’t my face, anymore. I didn’t know who the fuck that girl was in the “mirror”, but she sure as fuck couldn’t be me!

The bastards have no heart. I woke up one morning and my shirt had been changed. It wasn’t the oversized, white T-shirt/dress anymore. They’d replaced it. It hung on me about like the first one had when I had first woken up. Worse: it was fucking pink! When I attempted to protest, they gassed me. At least, I was sleeping well.

Cotton mouth. Again? This was, what, the third time this month? What the fuck were they doing to me? There were so many questions and very few answers.

My body protested when I tried to move. Again, everything felt really heavy, especially my upper arms and lower legs. When I grumbled in protest, I got the shock of my life. My voice wasn’t my voice. It was almost like some whiny little girl grumbling to her parents about not being able to sleep another five minutes before having to get ready for school. I sat up in a huff. A foreign weight tugged on my chest and my hair hit me in the face. Now, my eyes were wide open.

Looking down, I was staring right between a pair of fleshy mounds that hung off my chest. They looked huge! My now raven black hair fell on either side of my face. Feeling a bit of urgency, I leapt out of bed and spun to face the “mirror”. Who the fuck was that? How did a teenage girl get in my cell and why was she looking at me like that? Since when do I have green eyes? Several times, my eyes darted from my chest to the “mirror” and back again. Below the neck, there were two engorged orbs pushing out the top of my T-shirt/dress, it synched in at the waist, and two rounded hips pushed out the sides near the bottom. The hair on my head was now long enough that it reached my shoulders. How long was I out?

I didn’t have time to dwell on this. There was an urgent need that suddenly swelled up in my abdomen. I ran for the toilet. My cushioned rear landed rather hard on the stainless steel metal surface. It was cold. “Where’d the panties come from?! This isn’t funny anymore!” The girl’s voice yelled at no one in particular.

The woman in the skirt suit, suntan nylons, black pumps, and white lab coat entered the room, sipping a cup of coffee. Sitting down at the table, she set her mug on a coaster and laid out the portfolio that had been nestled under her arm. She opened it and began to review the medical data before her.

“How’s our girl, today?” She glanced up to the female guard across the room who was situated by the semi-transparent glass.

“Pissed about your choice in underwear, as I understand it. I turned off the sound a while ago. She snores and it’s a little annoying.”

The suited woman smiled. “Well, she’ll just have to adjust, as will we. Anything new?”

The guard shook her head. “She was checking herself out a minute ago before she had to pee. I don’t think she realizes that she was unconscious for three weeks.”

The suited woman took a sip of coffee and raised her eyebrows at the guard. “Discovered the ‘boob fairy’, did she?” The guard nodded. “A shame we had to cut the procedure short. Something happened. We had to cut her loose.”

The guard woman stood. “Oh? Can I ask what happened or is it top-level classified kind of stuff?”

The suited woman shook her head. “Oh, no. You’ll need to know about it. She heals. Fast!”

“How fast?”

“We put a scalpel to her skin, make a deep incision, and she’s healed it all in seconds. It doesn’t matter where we cut. It all closes up too fast to get anything done.”

“Really? So, what’s that mean?”

“It means the boss man doesn’t get his super soldier, that’s what. She got her nails done, but the rest will have to wait until we can develop a procedure that’ll work on her.”

The guard woman glanced over at the glass. “You might want to get her a bra. She’s tugging at her shirt.”

The suited woman smirked, taking another sip of coffee. “Already ahead of you. Be a dear and get our little darling some breakfast, would you? Then, you should go home and get some rest.”

The strangest thing happened last night. Well, this morning, too, but I’ll get to that in a minute. After I lazed through dinner, I sat up on my bed and hugged my legs. I was doing that a lot, now. Just sitting there, I could hear the all-too-familiar hiss of the gas entering the room. For the first time, I noticed that it had a very distinct smell. I couldn’t place it because I’d never smelled anything like it before in my life. Very strange, but that wasn’t the half of it. There’s really no telling how long I sat there, but the sleep didn’t come. It was surreal. There was no head swimming or limp body or even heavy eyes. I didn’t actually fall asleep until I was so tired that my body just gave in. That was weird.

Of course, then I woke up in the morning. I didn’t feel as groggy as I always had. I actually felt refreshed and energized, like sleeping in my own bed with Julia right next to me. It was amazing. Then, I stretched. The strangest sensation gripped me. Well, rather, gripped my chest. Pulling out the neckline, I found a plain white sports bra over top of my new fleshy mounds. They had even changed my panties to a pair of white “boy short” style. At the very least, it was comfortable and my nipples weren’t being rubbed raw by my shirt, anymore.

Breakfast and lunch were already waiting for me. Had I really been out that long? Wow, I must have stayed up really late last night. My stomach growled, telling me it was definitely time to eat something. I feasted hungrily on the meager morsels they fed me.

Six more weeks. I could faithfully count the days, now. They stopped trying to gas me. For a couple of weeks, they tried different gasses. I know because I could smell them all. They tried sixteen in total before finally giving up. I smiled a lot. They couldn’t control me, anymore. I could sleep when I wanted, be awake when I wanted, and… well, that was about it. It’s boring as hell in an eight-by-twelve-foot cell, okay?

Cabin fever was really beginning to set in, now that I knew how long I had been there, for sure. I was constantly glancing around at the walls, trying to find weak points in their security. They thought of everything, though. Pity.

On the plus side, everything that was going to change already had. I was shorter than before, but I didn’t know by how much. My hair was raven black and had grown down past my shoulders, now. For some reason, someone saw fit to trim my nails every once in a while. They looked okay, I guess. The “boob fairy” had finally pissed off and my chest was no longer inflating. My hips quit widening and my waist quit shrinking. I could somewhat understand the look. I mean, there was Native American, Sioux, in my family history. So, the black hair could be explained. But, what was with the green eyes? That baffled me. I think my mom had mentioned something about a cousin with green eyes, but I’d never met them. There was hope if I ever got out, though. I could hit up the Goth clubs, again, but this time as some freakish baby-Goth girl. My skin was definitely pale enough, but that was probably because I hadn’t been in the sun in some indeterminable amount of time.

There was a lot of time to reflect on things. Obvious, I know. However, there was a part of me that thought I’d buried certain things about myself from all those years ago. It was buried mostly because it was beaten out of me. My parents didn’t approve, least of which was my father. He said he was going to “pound the fag” out of me. I didn’t know what he was talking about because I liked girls well enough… I also liked their clothes. Before puberty really betrayed the idea, I thought for the longest time that I was going to grow into a woman. Seriously, I did. I could still scream like a girl until well past fourteen. I even kind of looked androgynous until I was nearly sixteen. I didn’t mind. It kept me sane. Then, BAM! The dude witch came hard and fast. I told myself that it was probably meant to be.

Now, look at me. Seeing my face, now, reminds me of a young girl preparing to become a young woman. I certainly wasn’t ready for it. Still, deep down, some part of me actually relished in the changes. My skin was softer, my hair was sleek and shiny, even my nose looked almost like a cute little button, now. My lips were full and somewhat pouty, like Julia’s were. My boobs were huge, but they were kind of nice. My legs could use a shave, though. It wasn’t quite so bad. As a very young child, I’d fantasized about growing up someday, settling down, having a baby, and all that “white picket fence” kind of stuff. Even as an adult, I would privately fantasize about going back into my teen years and doing everything “right” from the word “go”. Now, I guess that was my reality. Well, besides the being in jail part.

As the weeks rolled by, though, dispair set in. I was crying a lot and meekly pounding the cinder block with my fists. It was an exorcise in futility, but it let me vent. After a while, dispair turned into anger and frustration. How long did they really expect to keep me locked up like this?

One faithful day, I was kneeling on my “bed” and pounding angrily on the “mirror” for them to let me out or have some semblance of human interaction. I was going crazy, I think. Still didn’t matter. The more I pounded, the angrier I became. No one answered me, after all. Then, it all changed.

Snickt! “Fucking OW!” The girl’s voice, my voice, screamed. I felt four pains, two on each hand.

I immediately stopped and could see the surprised look on my face. Slowly, my head raised up my arms. There was a little blood dripping down the backs of my hands. Then, my eyes caught sight of my balled fists. Two shiny metal knives, about a foot long, protruded from my hand. One was between my pointer and middle finger; the other was between my ring finger and pinkie. They looked like flat-bladed bread knives, actually, but filed to a point on the end–like long claws, but metal. There was an open wound at the site where they had come out of my hands. I have no idea how long I stared at them in astonishment, but my eyes started to sting from over exposure to the air. Blinking quickly, my hand opened up.

Snickt! “Son of a bitch!” The girl’s voice, my voice, screamed again. The four pains returned.

After flinching, my eyes opened up again and I got another surprise. The blade-claws were gone. The wound they left behind closed up in mere seconds, right before my eyes! Afterward, the only evidence that the wound had even been there was the blood on the backs of my hands. Immediately, I started rubbing my hands at the spot where the things had come out of from my knuckles. There wasn’t even so much as a little bruise. My hands were fine, all things considered. It was exciting and quite frightening at the same time. It gave me an idea.

Turning from the “mirror”, I sat with my legs in a pretzel on my bed, looking down at my hands, and began to flex then relax my hands. Nothing. Taking a deep breath, I tried again. Several times, I balled my dainty little hands into a fist and then relaxed again. Still nothing. Come hell or high water, I was going to figure this out. So, I tried again and again for what seemed like hours to reproduce the effect. It wasn’t until I heard the little doggy door open and my dinner be dropped off that I hit a revelation. I was startled by the sudden “creak” of the little door and my hands flexed really tight.

Snickt! “Fuck!” I screamed again with my girly voice. The four pains were back.

Looking down at my hands, the blade-claws were back. How were they metal, anyway? I cleared my head of side thoughts and focused on how tightly I had balled my fist. Again, there was a little blood and the wound was there, but the blade-claws were jutting out from it. Confident that I’d taken in how tight my fists were, I released my grip.

Snickt! “Fucking hell!” I screamed. It was probably going to hurt every time, I deduced. Again, the wound healed up in mere seconds. No harm, no foul, right?

As it turns out, with a little bit of practice, I was able to call forth the blade-claws on command. As anticipated, it hurt pretty badly every time they came out. My training with Shifu started to take over. If there was pain, use it. And, I did. The anticipation of the pain alone gave my muscles the wherewithal to clench my fists hard enough to bring the claws out. With a little giggle, I finally hopped off the bed, washed my bloody hands, and settled down to dinner.

One downside to the whole revelation: my dinner was cold.

The woman in the skirt suit trudged across the smooth, carpeted floor of an office straight out of the 1940’s. The walls had mahogany wood paneling, there was a marble mantle in the center with a painting above it, Persian rugs adorned the floor, various animal specimens lined the walls, and a large, oak desk was set near the picturesque bay window. A bald man in a pin-stripped navy suit hung up from a cell phone call as she dropped a portfolio on his desk.

“Good morning, Miss…” The man began.

“Stuff it! We have a problem: the kitty has found her claws.” The woman stated in a huff as she planted her hands firmly on her hips.

“Surely, it isn’t as bad as you assume. She was bound to discover them sooner or later. Besides, I’d be hurt if she didn’t appreciate my gift.” He smiled reassuringly.

“Yes, but we anticipated being able to drug her to the point where we could have interaction with her in a safe manner. It was intended to begin the indoctrination. Now, we can’t even gas her to sleep! We’ve tried seventeen different chemical agents to induce sleep in humans and none of them phase her. Worse: you won’t be getting your super soldier. She heals too fast for the procedures to proceed.”

The man nodded. “Well, that is a mouthful, my dear.” He considered the news. “Have you considered brute force?”

The woman stammered. “Brute… f-force? Are you joking? You remember who she was when we brought her in here, don’t you? You’re insane if you think I’m going to sacrifice my staff members’ lives for this.”

The man shook his head. “Please, my dear, it’s been a little more than six months–give or take a few days–since she came to our humble abode. She hasn’t trained and she’s gone through a remarkable transformation since then. I have my doubts that she has what it takes to seriously injure your staff.”

The woman blinked. “Are you nuts? Did you forget about the metal claws you insisted on giving her?!”

The man’s eyes narrowed on the woman harshly. “Just do it or I will find a reason to make you do it. How’s that darling husband of yours, these days? We wouldn’t want any sort of terrible tragedy to befall him, would we?”

The woman’s eyes widened. “You wouldn’t!”

The man nodded, not straying his gaze. “Oh, believe me, my dear. I very much would.”