Blood Knot Read Online Free

him. She rested her hand on his arm on his arm. “It’s alright,” she soothed. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
    He paused, gazing at her. “It is?”
    She halted the flow of his endorphins she had sent streaming into his blood as soon as she had touched him. The adrenalin spike from seeing her had been countered now. He, like most men in security and military forces, had a highly responsive biology and was easy to manipulate. She concentrated instead on soothing chemicals. Calm and happy juices. “Sure is,” she told him. “Everything’s just fine. Why don’t you sit down?”
    She had learned long ago to make them sit, first. The bruises they got from falling raised too many questions later.
    “ Okay,” he said happily and sat on the floor. He grinned up at her.
    Winter reached into his mind, riffling through the acids and proteins there, looking for the most recent patterns. “You’re not going to remember anything about me when you wake up later. You will wake refreshed from a short sleep and feel guilty about falling asleep on the job, but that’s all.” She found the sugars and fats that marked his most recent memories. “You won’t remember anything out of the ordinary other than you fell asleep. And it was a lovely sleep.”
    “ Okay.”
    She put him to sleep and lowered his head to the ground. He was smiling in his sleep and she quickly adjusted the memories she had found, smoothing out the patterns and spikes. Dreams from his sleep would take their place.
    Winter stood up and took one of the syringes from the pouch on her hip. Sebastian and the few who knew of them thought they were her secret wonder drug, her personal weapon that knocked people cold and left them with no memory of events afterwards. This, in part, enhanced Winter Manon Kennedy’s mighty reputation for breaking into the impossible-to-reach places, the unbreakable vaults, the unassailable locations.
    If only they knew the truth. She grimaced and squirted the saline in the syringe onto her dress where the beading would hide the wet patch and put the syringe back in her pouch. The guard was snoring now, still smiling. Under the closed lids, his eyes were moving rapidly backwards and forward in deep REM.
    One down, seven to go.
    She paused to adjust her own arousal. It was always this way. Touching others, reaching inside them, especially combined with a job, gave her a rush. At first, she had resented that it was so. Now she learned to accept that life had shaped circumstances and her in such a way that this was how she was. She tamped down the arousal enough to ignore it and moved on.
    Eight minutes and forty seconds later, seven of the eight guards were sleeping peacefully. She couldn’t find the eighth. He seemed to be eluding her. Finally, she rounded the corner of the last turn of the corridor, slowing down, her caution ratcheted up high. There was nowhere else the guard could be but somewhere in this last stubby wing of the corridor.
    The corridor was empty. Winter didn’t let her guard down as she slowly traversed the twenty yard long passage. There were doors all along the corridor. He had to be behind one of them. She just had to draw him out.
    Winter inched down the long length of the corridor, until cold steel touched her bare back. “Stop right there.” The guard had the sing-song cadences of a native Singaporean and from the direction of his voice, he was short. Winter estimated he was shorter than her own five foot nine inches.
    She backed up half a step.
    “ I said stop,” he repeated.
    Winter wasn’t going to be able to reach him that way. She turned her head enough to sight him over her shoulder. He had his gun fully extended from his body. It didn’t matter. A finger was just as good a contact point for her as a chest or a face. She could reach into a body with her fingertip touching through thin cloth, like a business shirt, or the shirts the guards wore. But she had to be able to touch, at least.