You Are Mine Read Online Free PDF Page B

staring at one of the monitors. Really, she should be checking her email and her schedule since she had a teleconference with some of the research team in LA, Void Angel’s Silicon Valley offices. Problem was, she was finding it difficult to concentrate.
    Had been finding it difficult to concentrate ever since she’d recognized the man in Alex’s video—one of the guards in the house she’d been imprisoned in for two years.
    Zac’s response to the meeting yesterday hadn’t helped.
    She’d let him down, she knew that. And he had every right to be pissed with her for withholding the information he wanted.
    The last piece of your soul.
    Eva pushed her chair back and walked soundlessly over the thick dark-charcoal carpet to the massive floor-to-ceiling windows.
    It was night and yet the sky was full of light. Manhattan in all its glory.
    Man, she loved this view. At this height, with the dark apartment behind her, it was like she was hovering in the blackness, floating in the void. Able to see everything and yet remaining unseen. Hidden. Safe.
    The rest of the world was a busy abstraction of light, a galaxy, and she could see the connections between the stars like the connections between chips on a motherboard. Binary. Pure code. So much better than being on the ground among the noise and sweaty masses of people.
    She’d once lived on those streets, a runaway, a lost girl, fighting every day for just the right to exist. Yet now she couldn’t even remember what that had felt like.
    And you’d swap that existence for the one you have now in a second.
    Eva gritted her teeth. No, she wouldn’t. She had money, she had her haven, and she had Zac. What else did she even need?
    A proper life?
    Yeah, well, no point in wishing for that. Any chance she’d had of a normal life had been taken from her the moment those men had pulled her kicking and screaming from the streets. What she had now was her best approximation.
    And that’s so well adjusted and normal.
    â€œShut up,” Eva said into the darkness, to the city outside her window. To herself and her stupid fucking thoughts.
    That was part of the problem of being alone sometimes. Her brain would get on a mouse wheel, thoughts going around and around in her head, a spiral she couldn’t escape from or break. And when it got bad, there was only one person who could help her.
    She tugged her phone out of her pocket and looked down at the screen, her finger hovering above the button that would call his number.
    He always answered, no matter where he was, what he was doing, or what time it was. His dark, deep voice a reassurance that steadied her. That broke the thought spiral.
    â€œYou won’t even trust me with this?”
    She knew that voice. In seven years she’d come to learn its many textures and timbres: smooth velvet when he was calm, shot through with steel when he was angry, a deep, lazy thickness when he was amused. But she hadn’t heard that edge in it before. An edge she thought was probably pain.
    Are you surprised? Seven years and you can’t even trust him with this.
    Her throat tightened. She’d hurt him and she knew it, and yet she couldn’t bring herself to say the words that would fix it. She’d been guarding herself, protecting herself for far too long to give in so easily now.
    She had very little left of herself. She couldn’t give those last few pieces away just like that. Not even to the man who’d been at her side for the past seven years. Giving her everything she asked for and yet asking for nothing in return. Not once.
    Ever wonder why that is?
    Eva stuffed her phone back in her pocket. No, she didn’t. And maybe she could handle the night and all the thoughts that came along with it without him. She’d done it before. She could do it again.
    At that point a soft chiming noise came from the bank of computers on her desk. Turning from the window, she crossed