Excerpt of My Next Breath by Shannon McKenna

That voice. Hers.

Zade isolated that sound from all the others competing to
be heard: traffic, gusting wind, cold rain driving down
on the black asphalt, dripping off the vinyl awning he
lurked beneath.

Fading out. Fuck.

Zade listened hard for that free-floating sound thread,
thin as a strand of spider-silk waving around out there
in the humming urban buzz of Seattle.

Yeah. There she was. Coming out of the Mercer Center with
some people. Adults and kids. Umbrellas whooshed open.
Cars pulled up. A few taxis stopped. He heard her,
talking, laughing, saying goodnight. A subtle thrill
racked him as that low, husky female voice stroked
delicately down his nerve endings.

Simone Brightman. He liked her voice.

His phone vibrated in his pocket. He checked the display.

cold out here wtf

He tapped back a response.

Wait

Lightweights. His hired goons had been waiting hours in
the rain. Boo-f**king-hoo. He was damp and chilled, too,
but he wasn’t bitching about it. Nor should he.

It was what he deserved for prowling around in the dark
like a f**king criminal.

Whatever it took. He’d kill for information about his
lost brother Luke. And what he was about to do fell way
short of killing. Nobody was going to get hurt tonight.
At least not physically.

Simone Brightman had to know something. And that was as
far as he’d gotten. Months had crawled by without a
single opportunity for a chance meeting with her. He’d
plotted and schemed, increasingly frustrated. But no
dice.

Mostly she stayed stubbornly locked in her house. No
errands, shopping, gas stations, malls, post office,
restaurants, movies. No workdays at her biomed lab, which
used to be the sum-total of her life. This once-a-week
math tutoring thing she did with kids was the only reason
she’d gone out at all since she and Noah Gallagher broke
their engagement.

She must be depressed. Fine. He could work with that. All
she needed to make her misery complete was some mouth-
breathing scum menacing her on a dark street.

Add terror to the mix. And himself, never on the side of
the angels.

He followed a brief conversation she had with some kids
on their way out of the Center. He could barely hear what
they were saying, but they seemed to really like her.

“Get home safe. See you next week.” There was laughter in
her voice.

Finally it was just her, making her solitary way toward
her car, not knowing that it had been disabled. About
three blocks away now. Her rubber-soled lace-up leather
boots squeaked.

Lately, for some unknown reason, she no longer bothered
with her ultra-professional ice maiden look.

At first, he thought he’d miss that super-controlled
vibe. It had been stimulating to watch that round, taut
ass twitching purposefully along in tight pencil skirts
as she went about her business, heels clicking.

Also gone: her sleek designer suits and smoothly styled
hair. She’d been so tightly buttoned up it was actually
kinda kinky-porno-hot. He got off on it.

Now when she got dressed, it was in battered jeans or
pilled leggings, sloppy sweatshirts, full-length skirts.
Black, horn-rimmed glasses so butt-ugly they passed for
aggressively cool. Her curly blond hair—surprise,
surprise, not smooth at all—was out of control, unless
she bothered to pin it up or put it in a messy ponytail.

Her new look was as different from the old as it was
possible to get. And it jazzed him just exactly as much.
Go figure.

And he looked at her a lot. Getting surveillance vid-cams
installed in her place had been a hell of a thing. Her
home security was top of the line. He’d finally succeeded
in maneuvering a few micro-drones through her front door,
two while the housekeeper came in to clean, one while
Simone was having groceries delivered. Completely silent,
nearly impossible to see. One was perched on the kitchen
light fixture. One was on a bedroom curtain rod. The last
sat on one of the wall-mounted speakers in her living
room.

She was always in her studio or bedroom. Always working.
She slept very little, and ate so seldom it had actually
started to worry him. The f**k? An adult human being
couldn’t live on yogurt, a slice of toast, and the
occasional f**king fruit chunk. It was a miracle that she
functioned at all.

Damn, now he’d lost the sound thread again. He reached
for it—listening harder … yes. Rubber boot soles on the
wet pavement. He’d know that little squeaky-squeak song
anywhere. He’d memorized its exact rhythm and pitch.

Less than a block away now. He was already getting a
whiff of her. Warm, female smells. He seriously dug that
honeysuckle shampoo. Couldn’t wait to sniff it at close
range.

He stepped out of the shadow of the awning, and raised
his hand to signal the men waiting down the street. One
of them lifted his hand in response. They were ready. She
was an easy target, parking an almost new Audi on a badly
lit street like this.

His heart raced as his augmented sensory processor kicked
into high gear, as if revving for combat. Which was
overkill. He didn’t need an ASP jolt for this. The
Obsidian researchers had wired him and rewired him during
the Midlands experiments on their quest to produce the
ultimate, relentless war machine. The data that speed-
scrolled over his field of vision whenever he was
stressed was a constant reminder of how they’d changed
him. Permanently.

But he ignored it. He’d stolen himself back. He and all
the rest of the Midlanders. He was more than what
Obsidian had tried to make of him. Fuck them all.

Tonight—for her—he needed to be funny, smart, and
unthreatening, for starters. And good in bed, if he got
lucky. Past experience suggested that he would. It was
bad form to get cocky about it, but whatever. A guy could
hope.

In fact, he quivered with hope. Watching Simone for two
whole months had kept him perpetually half-hard. It
wasn’t like she was doing anything sexy. On the contrary.
She mostly just sat there on the bed, cross-legged in a
thick snarl of wires and cables, surrounded by screens,
dressed in leggings and a sweatshirt. Braless. Eyes
narrowed with ferocious concentration as she typed so
fast and hard the detached wireless keyboard bounced
against the mattress.

He loved how the mad typing made her nipples jiggle.

He could watch that for hours without losing interest.
Simone Brightman’s life was slit-your-wrists boring, yet
watching her somehow kept him continually buzzed.

He was in a groove with surveillance monitoring. Forget
sleep. Not happening, even thought he’d sworn never to
inflict sentinel sleep on himself again after their
escape from Obsidian’s research facility at Midlands. He
hated the way sentinel sleep made him feel. Constant
vigilance turned even the strongest into a numb, circuit-
fried robot, no matter how skillful he might be at
alternating his brain hemispheres, resting one while
using the other and blah-blah-di-f**king-blah.

He was good at it, yeah. And so? He was good at a metric
f**kton of unspeakable things. That didn’t mean he would
ever do them again. He’d won his freedom back. Obsidian
could go suck its own dick.

But he’d do sentinel sleep for Simone. He’d do any number
of desperate, unspeakable things for a chance to find out
what happened to his brother.

Besides, watching Brightman prance around in her
underwear was no chore. She was so damn pretty it just
turned his head around. Why sleep when he could look at
that?

She was almost upon him. His ASP processor sent a fire-
hose of data scrolling wildly up both sides of his field
of vision. His senses sharpened to a level beyond
painful. He hadn’t expected this. Bullshit timing.

Her footsteps echoed in his ears, boom-scrape-squeak. Her
soft breathing, the quick and steady drum of her heart.
He smelled the warm mix of her hand lotion, her wool
coat, the leather of her boots, heard the swish of her
long skirt, the brush of wool tights between her thighs.
He smelled the coffee she’d had not long ago and a hint
of the vanilla flavored creamer she’d lightened it with.
Whiffs of the perfume she used to wear back in her
corporate days wafted out of her purse like little
ghosts.

He also smelled the festering mouth-breathers who waited
across the street.

His heart thudded loudly. In a few seconds, he’d see
Simone in the flesh. The mysterious ex-fianceé of Noah
Gallagher, Zade’s friend and fellow Midlander rebel.

A woman who might or might not hold the key to the last
possible clue that could lead him to his brother.

Or to his brother’s bones.

That thought stabbed through him like a thin blade of ice
just as Simone Brightman rounded the corner and hit his
line of vision.

Showtime.