My Cyborg Savior (Crimson Romance) Read Online Free PDF Page B

bullshit. If angering her had any effect, it got her to drop her guard. He had a lot of information on her now. Information he’d probably use to hurt her. He hoped he would never have to.
    She batted her lashes at him. “Well, Galen, we’ve talked so much about me. What about you? What deep, dark, tortured past lurks behind those blue peepers? What are your secrets?”
    Galen shook his head. If she knew all the things he kept from her, she’d have him executed, along with the rest of his people. But could he reveal a small part of his past without giving her enough to get himself killed? Maybe. He hadn’t shared it with many people. It wasn’t something he liked to talk about. He considered his options. Her gaze seemed to plead with him to share something. She was vulnerable right now. She needed to connect. Maybe if he gave her something small, she would feel closer to him. It might make his job easier. Both his slavery and his actual mission.
    He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. In reality the wounds he was about to reveal were nowhere near healed. And every moment he spent on this mission made them that much more raw.
    “There isn’t much to tell. I was in the military. When I came back, my wife claimed I’d changed, and it wasn’t for the better. She left me. Took our daughter with her. I abandoned my post to search for them, and later was taken captive by the slave trader when I was caught stealing food in a district a lot like Forbidden. He knew I would make him good money. Granted, he was only supposed to deal cyborgs the government was willing to part with. He broke the law by selling me.”
    About eighty percent of that was a lie. She’d never notice. Cyborgs were the government’s dirty little secret. People knew they were created, but not for what purposes and against their will. He’d been trained to lie with almost no signs — only another one of his kind would have been able to tell that he was bullshitting. He hadn’t been in the military. He’d been trained by their government, and was better than your average soldier. He’d never looked for his wife until much later in life. He’d been kidnapped by people like him, and deprogrammed. He was a thief to be sure. Since his deprogramming, he’d stolen food, medical supplies, fuel, the government’s deep dark secrets they didn’t want anyone to know about … but it hadn’t landed him here. He’d deliberately placed himself with that slaver.
    The only part he hadn’t twisted was his wife and daughter leaving him, and the reason why. He hadn’t even known she was pregnant when he’d been taken. She hadn’t gotten the nerve to tell him yet. Having a baby wasn’t a good thing. They couldn’t have gotten medical care for either of them, and it was another mouth to feed.
    But it didn’t matter. He would never know his daughter and never had to take care of her. He hadn’t been worried about his wife once they’d fucked up his mind. He’d been changed, and when he was sent back to her, he’d been sickeningly loyal to the government. He’d also been aggressive, dominant, dangerous … He could see every little lie she told, and she’d held some pretty damning secrets of her own.
    He shook himself. He didn’t want to dwell on his wife leaving him. At the time, it hadn’t mattered. Nothing but serving the Federation of Planets had mattered. Now, thinking about it hurt. As soon as he’d been able to remember who he was, he’d been in physical pain from his loss. No matter how hard he’d tried, he never could find Amanda, or baby Charlise, who would be far from a child by now. At twenty-seven, she would look more like his sister than his daughter. He hadn’t aged since the government had accelerated his growth. None of them had. They didn’t know if it was a kind of immortality due to genetic alterations, or if one day their time would run out, and they were just being kept in fighting form.
    “It sounds like you could add a lot