Free Edge of Betrayal by Shannon K. Butcher

wasn’t in control, that he had no choice in his actions.”
    “So?”
    “So maybe Adam and Clay have more in common than you care to admit.”
    “Bullshit. You’re just messing with my head so I won’t cause trouble. I know you were one of the people who wanted Adam working with us. Weren’t you?”
    “What I want is unimportant. All that matters is helping those who need us—helping the people your father damaged.”
    That was all Mira wanted, too—to make up for somesmall amount of pain her father had caused. Maybe if she’d been smarter and less trusting of him, she could have stopped him years ago. Sure, she’d been just a kid, but she was a smart kid.
    Her father had seen to that.
    “What do you want me to do, Payton? Forgive Adam?”
    “I don’t care whether or not you forgive him. All that concerns me is how well the two of you work together. That means there has to be some level of trust.”
    “I won’t trust him. Ever.”
    Payton picked up her notepad and wrote something down before tossing it onto her desk.
    She picked it up and looked at the note. The letters
AE
were written, followed by a string of numbers. “What’s that?”
    “Knowledge. Yours to seek or ignore as you please. Just know that once you see it, it can’t be unseen.”
    “If this is more of my father’s depraved human experiments, I think I’ll pass. I already know enough about what he did to fuel my nightmares for eternity.”
    “This has nothing to do with your father. It’s all about Adam.”
    She didn’t want to be curious, but she was. She didn’t want to ask, but she did. “What about him?”
    Payton shrugged. “That’s up to you to find out or not. Look at the files or don’t. That’s all I’m going to say.”
    “Why do I feel like this is some kind of trap?”
    He glided to his feet, smiling in a way that was both devastatingly handsome and chilling, all at the same time. “Because, my dear Mira, knowledge like this always is.”

Chapter Seven
    R iley pounced on Mira’s e-mail the second it hit his in-box.
    Sure enough, Sophie’s name was on the List—one of the victims of the Threshold Project who’d been experimented on when she was a kid. Mira’s father had been the one to alter her.
    That’s why those goons had been after her. The vicious Dr. Norma Stynger was more than willing to pay to recover any of the children who’d been touched by Dr. Sage’s research. Despite the best efforts of the government and everyone at the Edge, no one had been able to locate Stynger and shut her down.
    She was a ghost—one smart enough not to show her face when so many people wanted her dead.
    Riley scanned the file, then read it again.
    Sophie had been volunteered to enter the project when she was four. The name of the person who signed the release was hard to read, but Riley made out enough to see that the person shared her last name. A parent? Probably. If her father had gambling debts, who knew how far he’d go to pay them, up to and including selling his own daughter.
    Dr. Sage had paid good money to those willing toloan him their children. From the inheritance Sophie’s dad had left her—armed men hunting her down—Riley doubted that the man would have lost a lot of sleep over the idea of letting some bastard hurt his baby girl.
    From what Riley could tell, Sophie had been subjected to the same protocols that Mira had. It didn’t mean that Sophie wasn’t in trouble, but at least the doctor hadn’t done anything to her he hadn’t been willing to do to his own daughter.
    Enhanced memory, improved intelligence, reduced need for sleep, ability to multitask well and recognize intricate patterns—they were all goals of the brain-altering protocols and chemicals that had been pumped into both Mira and Sophie.
    Riley read all the notes, few of which made any sense to a man who was better with his hands than he was with his head. If he could have killed her ugly past with a well-placed bullet or the sharp