In My Skin (The Obsidian Files Book 3) Read online

  Come back to me…

  Luke remembers a few things. Just not his last name. Or anyone he ever knew. He knows that he’s a supersoldier, genetically enhanced and loaded up with brain implants. He recently escaped from a year-long hell of captivity, and to protect his family and friends from his tormentors, he blocked most of his memories. Now he needs them back, fast…or he and those he loves will die agonizing deaths.

  Luke’s dangerous plan to reconnect with his past—and stay alive in the present—has drawn his enemies’ attention to the tough and sexy Dani LaSalle. He’s duty bound to protect the luscious beauty from the evil pursuing them, but he can’t control the scorching desire she awakens in him.

  Dani’s strict routine has been trashed by Luke’s explosive arrival. This rock-hard slab of valiant, smoldering manhood appears out of nowhere, saves her life, spirits her away to his mountain lair, and bewilders her with tales of sadistic researchers and enhanced assassins. Is this gorgeous, problematic sex god just plain crazy—or is she? But hey. Luke can do things with his mind that are just as wild as what he can do with that body. She can’t say no.

  And there’s no time to wonder. As their passion flares, Obsidian moves in. Luke and Dani must place their lives and their hearts on the line just to survive…

  Visit me at my website, http://shannonmckenna.com, for news and updates, but the best way to stay in touch is to subscribe to my newsletter! Here’s the link,

  http://shannonmckenna.com/connect.php. Be sure to set up your email to allow my messages through so you never miss a new book or a fabulous promo opportunity!

  Also by Shannon McKenna

  The Obsidian Files Series

  Right Through Me

  My Next Breath

  The McClouds & Friends Series

  Behind Closed Doors

  Standing In The Shadows

  Out Of Control

  Edge Of Midnight

  Extreme Danger

  Ultimate Weapon

  Fade To Midnight

  Blood And Fire

  One Wrong Move

  Fatal Strike

  In For The Kill

  Stand-alone titles by Shannon McKenna

  Return To Me

  Hot Night

  Tasting Fear

  Anthologies

  All Through The Night

  (with Suzanne Forster, Thea Devine and Lori Foster)

  I Brake For Bad Boys

  (with Lori Foster and Janelle Denison)

  Bad Boys Next Exit

  (with Donna Kaufman and E.C. Sheedy)

  Baddest Bad Boys

  (with E.C. Sheedy and Cate Noble)

  All About Men

  (a single author anthology)

  In My Skin

  The Obsidian Files

  Shannon McKenna

  Praise for the novels of Shannon McKenna

  “Blends an intensely terrifying psychic thriller with a

  mind-blowing erotic romance.”

  —Library Journal, on Fade To Midnight

  “Blasts readers with a highly charged, action-adventure

  romance . . . extra steamy.”

  —Booklist

  “Pulse-pounding . . . with searing sex and raw emotions.”

  —Romantic Times, 4 ½ stars

  “Shannon McKenna makes the pulse pound.”

  —Bookpage

  “Shannon McKenna introduces us to fleshed-out characters in a tailspin plot that culminates in an explosive ending.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “An erotic romance in a suspense vehicle on overdrive. . . sizzles!”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “McKenna expertly stokes the fires of romantic tension.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “McKenna strikes gold again.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Her books will take readers on a nonstop thrill ride and leave them begging for more when the last pages are devoured.”

  –Maya Banks, New York Times bestselling author

  “Full of turbocharged sex scenes, this action-packed novel is sure to be a crowd pleaser.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Edge Of Midnight

  “Highly creative. . . erotic sex and constant danger.”

  —Romantic Times on Hot Night (4 ½-star review and a Top Pick)

  “Aims for the heart with scorching precision.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Ultimate Weapon

  Copyright

  Copyright © June 2018 Shannon McKenna

  http://shannonmckenna.com

  Cover Design by Wax Creative

  Edited by Hilary Sares

  Interior Design by Renee Rocco

  Print ISBN: 978-0-9977941-4-4

  Digital ISBN: 978-0-9977941-5-1

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Also by Shannon McKenna

  In My Skin

  Praise for the novels of Shannon McKenna

  Copyright

  Contents

  About The Obsidian Files:

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  RIGHT THROUGH ME

  Chapter 1

  My Next Breath

  Chapter 1

  Meet Shannon McKenna

  About The Obsidian Files:

  More than human…

  Years ago, a group of stray teenagers were swept up into a top-secret experimental research program funded by The Obsidian Group, a shadowy cabal of super-rich global moguls. Brain stimulation, nanotech, gene modification and cybernetic implants were used to mold the runaways into lethal supersoldiers…and expand the boundaries of being human.

  Obsidian’s attempts were spectacularly successful—if not quite in the way the researchers had intended. Their captive test subjects rebelled, burned the Midlands Research Facility to the ground, and vanished.

  Now, years later, this band of rebels live under deep cover and keep their incredible abilities secret, trusting only those in their own tight-knit group.

  But the shadow of the past keeps getting longer. The Obsidian Group hasn’t forgotten them—and they will never give up the chase.

  The Obsidian Files are
their stories…

  Chapter 1

  Damn. The car Luke was following jolted off the freeway and onto the exit ramp. Sooner than he was expecting.

  Luke put on a burst of speed. He searched the darkness for the retreating taillights. They had vanished into the night. Didn’t matter. His brain implant had connected with its onboard system several miles back.

  Once he was in, that car was his bitch.

  But Luke had hesitated to assume total control right away. Hadn’t wanted the courier at the wheel to panic and contact his handlers. No sense pissing off vicious, powerful enemies in advance.

  Bad call. Now he had to improvise. And the guy was speeding through the residential neighborhood, drifting and correcting like he was drunk or high.

  Shit. Luke had big plans for Braxton’s courier that didn’t involve witnesses with smartphones, car accidents or traffic cops.

  He followed close behind. His ASP, the augmented sensory processor implanted in his brain by Obsidian, was monitoring the fleeing car’s data on a transparent screen that overlaid half of his field of vision. He could follow that car in his sleep.

  Though he never actually slept. At least not how normal people did.

  A sense of urgency thrummed in him. Time check, dude. Reality exists on a twenty-four-hour grid, seven days a week. Months vary. Watch out for February. He scrolled back in his memory.

  It was exactly thirty-seven days, sixteen hours, and forty-three minutes since his escape. His ASP pegged the breakout from Braxton’s cage as his personal zero hour. Reborn, after three hundred and fifty-nine days, eight hours and forty-two minutes locked in an underground, soundproof glass box, outside of time. Every second free of that hellhole was a fresh start.

  But as who? As what?

  Freedom didn’t seem much different from captivity. He still felt like shit. Isolated, numb. Maybe that was the effect of his self-imposed brain block. He’d put up a protective wall in his head that Braxton couldn’t get through with torture or drugs.

  It worked. It held. But who the hell was he protecting with it?

  He couldn’t…fucking…remember.

  Random things sometimes floated out of the fog. His first name, not his last. No address. No hard data on any family or friends. Nothing from his childhood. Sometimes, he got flashes of faces. Younger people, mostly. Male and female. Their worried eyes. He wondered if they really existed.

  A family, an identity, a life. It was all like a mirage. Memories on the far side of his brain block shifted and moved. Elusive shadows behind frosted glass. They vanished when he tried to hang onto them.

  Ironic, that he could recall every detail of the experiments Obsidian had conducted on him. Their torture was burned onto his mind.

  But the memories he actually wanted were out of his reach.

  Just as well. If there were people in his former life worth protecting, anyone at all that he cared about, he’d prevented Braxton and Obsidian from destroying them. He’d done the right thing. It just had a hellacious price tag, that was all.

  Focus. You have a plan. Follow it.

  He was a block away, closing in fast when he saw the courier’s car suddenly stop. When he caught up, the driver was gone and the car door hung open. Headlights on, motor running, the car straddled the sidewalk, crushing a low hedge in front of a small house. 2425 Camden Lane.

  Luke parked his black Porsche SUV and did a swift, targeted data-dive, which revealed that the house was rented to a woman named Daniela LaSalle. A nurse at the local hospital.

  He checked to make sure no one was looking, and used his implant to remotely shift the courier’s abandoned car into drive, sending it jouncing and rattling over the bushes and sidewalk and back onto the street again. He maneuvered it to the curb some distance down the block and killed the engine.

  Blood drops stained the sidewalk. Hot blood, steaming and starkly visible to the thermal sensor in his eye implants. A trail of drops led around to the back of the house.

  He heard a TV going. Lights on in living room and kitchen. LaSalle was home.

  Fuck. This operation should have been smooth and secret. He had everything ready; knockout drugs, restraints, a scalpel, anesthetic, disinfectant, broad-spectrum injectable antibiotics. He didn’t want to hurt the guy, but that computer chip embedded in his pectoral muscle had to be extracted tonight, one way or another. It contained the drop-off info for a shipment of Manticore gear. And Luke needed it.

  Manticore Tech was Braxton’s new enterprise, his latest supersoldier research lab. More advanced than the work he’d done thirteen years ago, back when Luke was an unlucky street kid, captured to be Obsidian’s lab rat.

  Braxton had learned from his mistakes. He’d refined and honed his craft. He’d surpassed himself. Or so he claimed, bragging into the mic of Luke’s soundproof cell.

  Braxton’s new supersoldiers were walking, breathing supercomputers. Invincible freaks of bioengineering. By all reports, Manticore Tech had gone above and beyond Obsidian’s sadistic research in the bad old days.

  Because hell, things could always get worse. That was a fact Luke could cling to in an uncertain world.

  The chip was crucial. That shipment contained a device Braxton had called his “wakey-wand.” Cute fucking name for a dangerous brain probe, one that dissolved memory blocks.

  That was his plan. Just hoping like hell that Braxton’s wakey-wand would stimulate his own shredded brain. Enough to bring back memories of his vanished life.

  Most likely it would just kill him. He was fine with that.

  He wanted his memories back. At any cost. Without them, he was adrift to nowhere. No compelling reason to exist other than being pissed off. Wanting to punish the fuckheads.

  But he didn’t want to punish Daniela LaSalle. She didn’t need to witness him carving the chip out of the courier’s chest while the unlucky bastard fought and howled.

  That would look bad. It would be tricky to justify or explain. So would trapping the guy in the transport box he’d prepared, designed to block tracking implants inside the courier’s body. At least until Luke could figure out what the fuck to do with the guy. That was a blank he hadn’t filled in yet.

  The obvious solution, of course, was to kill him and hide his body. The ASP processor tossed that up onto his retinal screen as the optimal plan of action, after running the numbers, calculating the data, and going off the deep end. Luke sighed. Murder was not a simple one-two-three thing, not in front of goddamn witnesses, and this quiet suburban neighborhood was not a fucking battlefield. His augmented sensory processor was useful sometimes, but totally amoral. And geared specifically for warfare. It defaulted straight to blood and guts every damn time.

  Sure enough, as soon as his brain implant factored in Daniela LaSalle, the ASP promptly suggested that he kill and hide her, too. So simple and clear, whereas all the other alternatives were insanely complicated. A snap of a neck, and problem solved.

  Classic Obsidian, all the way. Kill, kill, kill. They lacked imagination.

  Fuck that. It just wasn’t his style.

  * * * *

  Dani stared down at her bare feet, which were propped on the coffee table, and contemplated how much energy it would require to make dinner. She’d picked up extra shifts lately at the hospital and today had been her first day off in what felt like forever. She’d had ambitious plans for it. Running, stretching, laundry. Repotting that spindly Norfolk pine, a birthday present from her work colleagues. Just looking at the poor thing made her feel guilty. Cooking a big healthy pot of chili or stew, most of which she’d ladle into single portion containers and freeze.

  So far, all she’d managed was to plant her exhausted ass on the couch and stream cooking shows on her laptop. Desserts to die for were up next.

  The magically speeded up assembly of a pan of apple dumplings made her think of her long lost friend
Naldo and his crazy sweet tooth. The guy could eat sugar all day and never gain an ounce, the lucky dog. But Nal’s longing for goodies probably had more to do with his abuela and her fragrant kitchen back in the day. Food and love, always glued together. A subject too deep to contemplate when she was this tired.

  But thinking about Naldo made her sad, so she focused her mind on the recipe.

  Didn’t look hard. Store bought puff pastry sliced into ribbons, wrapped around apple chunks. Drenched in butter and sugar and cinnamon. Bubbling obscenely in the oven. She smelled it in her mind. Now she was the one writhing with sugar yearning.

  Damn. Didn’t she have some wrinkly apples in the back of the veggie drawer?

  Aw, bullshit. Nothing was as easy as those shows made it look. She didn’t have any store-bought pastry dough and she sure as hell wasn’t going to make it from scratch.

  Get real. It was peanut butter toast for dinner. Best-case scenario, scrambled eggs.

  A disembodied hand had just scooped a perfect ball of vanilla ice cream and placed it tenderly on top of the luscious dessert when the banging started.

  Back door? Front door? Dani jolted up, adrenaline jangling. She held her breath, listening hard.

  More banging. Scraping. From the back of the house. Like the zombie apocalypse had begun, and the zombies were at her kitchen door. Hello. How are you. We want to eat your brains.

  Fuck. No joke. She was afraid. And she’d left her phone charging on the counter. She got to her feet, padding to the kitchen. Listening, listening.

  Silence. Except for a low, distant throb from Garson Arena, five miles away. The band sold out the venue every year. A few fans got carried out on stretchers every time.

  Her footsteps slowed as she reached the darkened kitchen entryway and peered at the small windows of the back door. No one appeared to be standing out there, but the motion sensor had switched on the porch light.

  She moved closer. Felt a draft, though the door appeared to be closed. Her skin crawled.

  Thud, boom. The door rattled and she stumbled backward, lunging for her phone and yanking it off the charger cord.

  More banging. Louder. She jabbed at the keypad, relieved to hear the flat voice of the 911 operator. “What is the nature of your emergency?”