Beast in the Tower. Julie Miller
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takes too long. I’ll never be the same.”
He gently stroked her arm. “Money is no object. Whatever it takes. Whatever experts we need—”
“I thought you were the expert.” She shrugged off his touch. “Your hands have healed. But my face…?”
Damon reached for her again, but she slid away, crossing to the far side of the small room whose posh amenities couldn’t completely mask its clinical purpose. “Miranda, you are beautiful to me. Inside. Where it counts. I love you. I will always love you, no matter what.”
“But I’m not beautiful outside anymore, am I?” She faced him then, the bandages masking everything but the accusation in her eyes. “You can’t look at me and say I’m beautiful on the outside, can you?”
His medical breakthroughs weren’t infallible. “I can’t fix my eye, either, and the nerve repair is still incom—”
“But you fixed the skin on your hands. What about the skin on my face? It’s not vanity. It’s humanity. I have no face left. No lips, no nose. Just…scars.”
She hated him. So much. Where once he’d seen love, he saw nothing but blame and contempt. Hell, he hated himself. He’d worked miracles for so many patients. “Miranda—”
“Fix me, Damon. Fix me!”
“I don’t know how.” The admission twisted cruelly through a brain that had always had the answers. Always. Until now. “I don’t know how.”
“I don’t know how,” he muttered, finding no peace in slumber. “I don’t know how!”
Damon lashed out at himself in his nightmare and awoke to the crash of glass.
He blinked his good eye into the glaring brightness of lights reflecting off stainless steel. Even as he pushed himself away from the lab table where he’d fallen asleep, the frustration and guilt that haunted his nightmares were still with him. He had a shattered petrie dish and contaminated solution on the floor by his feet, to boot. “Damn.”
Another experiment gone to waste. Not that he’d expected this one to work better than any of the others he’d run in the last month. He didn’t know if his equations were off, or if the sample had been tainted. But as he rolled the kinks from his neck and adjusted the black strap that crossed his forehead and held the patch over the empty socket where his left eye had been, he knew the answers would continue to elude him tonight.
A glance out the window of his twenty-eighth-floor lab told him it was well past midnight, even before he noted the time on the clock above the door. Time would forever be his enemy. No formula or device his clever mind could conjure would ever grant him the time he needed. The time he’d lost with Miranda.
Their marriage hadn’t been perfect. He’d worked too much in the lab; she had loved to travel. But she’d given him a beautiful home life and a trusted voice in the Sinclair Pharmaceuticals office; he’d given her everything she’d asked for.
Except her humanity.
He hadn’t found the answer to heal her in time. He hadn’t made her feel whole again. He couldn’t save her from her injuries—or the resulting depression. His skills weren’t enough. His money wasn’t enough.
His love wasn’t enough.
Wide awake, as he searched for a broom and dustpan, he saw the vision—as clearly as he’d seen it that morning at the asylum.
Miranda. Dead.
An empty bottle of pills beside her on the bed.
No stomach pump, no science, no miracle could bring his wife back to him.
The note she’d left him had been brief.
D—
I can’t do this anymore.
M.
Some lousy chromosome in her genetic makeup kept the miracle drugs that had earned his company millions from working. He’d even tested the tissue-regeneration formula on himself. The prototypes might be scarred and ugly, but he’d regained the use of his hands. The fingerprints hadn’t all come back, but he had sensation in almost every nerve, and most of his dexterity had returned. He could do his work. He could type his notes and mix his chemicals and write his equations. He could feel heat and cold and pain.
God, yes. He was a pro at that now. Through and through. Some days, pain was all he could feel.
Damon paused in the center of his new lab. He pulled back the front of his white coat, propped his hands at his hips, tipped his head back and roared at the soundproof ceiling.
It wasn’t fair that he should be alive while Miranda was dead. It wasn’t fair that he should have more money than some small countries and not know happiness anymore. It wasn’t fair that he couldn’t find the solution to Miranda’s Formula—the tissue-regenerating miracle intended to save patients who shared the same genetic predisposition she’d had.
He couldn’t even honor her memory with that.
“So what are you going to do about it, Doc?” he asked aloud, breathing deeply and talking to himself in a way that had always cleared his thoughts and enabled him to concentrate. “For starters, I’m going to see if that persistent bastard has made any progress breaking into SinPharm’s restricted files.”
With something new to engage his brain, Damon was a happier man. He rolled a stool over to his computer and logged in to his company’s database. In just a few keystrokes, he located the illegal activity and grinned. The nosy SOB was back. “Welcome, Mr. Black Hole of the Universe.” Catchy online name. Appropriate since the hacker had tried a dozen different ways to download his research codes. In the middle of the night, when SinPharm’s corporate offices were closed and the satellite labs and production facilities had been secured, someone was trying to hack into Damon’s private files.
It had been another restless night a couple weeks back when he’d first detected the unknown computer geek trying to access his research through online channels. The hacker had broken in three different times to download codes that were misdirecting fakes to begin with. Once the false codes were applied to the data that had been stolen from his lab eighteen months ago, the thieves would realize that they’d been duped. Again. They’d wind up with cotton candy or a laxative—not any of his patented medicines or experimental drugs.
Though he’d had no luck tracing either the location or the identity of Black Hole yet, Damon had led the intruder on a merry chase. He sat and watched the screen as his opponent peeled away layer after layer of security protocols, getting closer to the translation codes that could turn Damon’s equations from gibberish into millions of dollars.
And just when the perp was about to reach the innermost level, Damon pushed a button and scrambled the codes all over again.
His laughter was rare, a rusty sound that stretched the scarred muscles of his throat. SinPharm’s security firm had their way of preventing industrial espionage, and Damon had his.
“That should keep you busy for a few more days.” Hell, if the enemy wanted to reproduce his formulas and market competitive medical treatments without doing their own research, then they were damn well gonna have to get past him. Unless he tracked them down first and introduced them to the FDA, the FCC and any other government organization whose laws they’d violated.
And if Damon discovered the hacker was in any way responsible for the theft and fire that led to Miranda’s suicide, then he would personally put him out of business.
Permanently.
While he relished the image of the unknown spy throwing up his hands and cursing at the computer screen, Damon knew he had problems closer to home he needed to deal with. He glanced at the broken glass and dissipating chemical on the floor. “Like you.”
Damon rolled his stool over to another desk, where two rows of monitors helped him keep an eye on the Sinclair