Beast in the Tower

Dr. Damon Sinclair crawled toward the emergency exit at the back of his lab. The door where he’d entered minutes earlier to pick up his notes for tomorrow’s board meeting was no longer an escape route. The glass entryway had shattered and the fire was now licking its way into the hallway on the opposite side.

Beakers exploded from the heat and rained glass on his back. Their contents fed the flames. The few sprinklers that had survived the explosion were doing little more than creating steam as they spat out water at irregular intervals.

If he hadn’t smelled the chemicals—if he hadn’t reacted to the searing stench of the volatile combination and dived beneath his desk to avoid the initial blast—he’d already be dead. The milliseconds of warning had left him with a head wound, an armful of research documentation and a chance at survival. But that chance was slim if he couldn’t find a way out.

Blinded by the blood seeping into his left eye, feverish from the blazing heat, he moved forward by instinct alone. When he hit a wall instead of the exit, he knew he had to make a choice. He set the binders on the floor with a reverence for the miracles contained inside. His work could save lives—it had saved lives. And now he’d set it aside to save his own life.

The answers were all inside his head, anyway. Given enough time, he could recreate them if he had to. If he ever got out of this hellfire, he’d have all the time in the world to…

A farewell look at his work elicited a choice curse.

“What the hell is this garbage?” These weren’t his notes. Just pages and pages of numbers and equations that didn’t make sense. He hurled the worthless counterfeits into the growing flames.

Was that what this was about? This treacherous, purposeful destruction, just to hide a theft?

Whoever was responsible… Whoever had planted that damned incendiary… Reams of notes and calculations—gone. Successful equations and rejected experiments he could learn from—gone. State-of-the-art technology designed by his own hands…

His hands…

“Son of a bitch!”

They were on fire.

Damon reengaged his brain and fought off the groggy disorientation that consumed him.

Whoever was responsible for this betrayal would not go unpunished. There were means a man of his intellect and bank account could use to make the bastard who’d sabotaged his life’s work pay.

He let the rage suffuse him. Give him strength. He clutched his arms to his stomach and doubled over to stifle the flames with his own body. “You’ll pay.” The heat from his own hands seared his flesh. “You’ll pay.”

“Help! Damon! Help me!”

“Miranda?” A pain far more cruel than any physical torture twisted in the pit of his stomach. Oh, no. God, no. “Miranda!”

His wife’s screams hurt worse than the scorching agony of the skin blistering on his fingers. Her terror cut deeper than the shrapnel in his forehead. He’d gladly give up any medical secret he could devise, but please, please, spare his wife.

“Miranda!” He shouldered aside burning tables, melting plastic and shattered glass, desperately searching through the roiling smoke. “Miranda! Ans—” He choked on the toxic gases coating his lungs and crumpled to the floor. A hoarse cough racked his body and ravaged his throat before he could summon the strength to push to his knees. “Answer me!”

“Damon!”

Her screech of desperation drove him on. He crawled through corrosive puddles and ruined work and unknown treachery to find the only thing that truly mattered. “Miranda? Please. Keep talking. I’ll find—” Coughing cut like broken glass through his raw throat. The spasms drained his strength and he collapsed again. But he pulled himself toward her ragged sobs. “I’m coming.” His administrative assistant. His love. His life. Work be damned. “I’m coming.”

“Damon…”

A chunk of ceiling gave way and crashed to the floor, shooting up a snarling roar of white heat and orange flame. Damon rolled to the side, sucking in the last breath of oxygen hovering above the floor. The firefighters and paramedics were on their way. But even if they were already in the building, they had twenty-eight stories to climb. Damon was his wife’s last—her only—hope for survival.

“Miranda!”

He found her curled into a ball in the corner of a storage closet. Her clothes and hair had caught fire, and though she’d managed to douse the flames, she’d already suffered serious burns.

If she was still breathing, Damon couldn’t tell. He could only cradle her in his arms while he carried her to safety. Outside the burning lab, he collapsed and lay her on the floor. His damaged hands couldn’t detect a pulse, but he put his lips against hers and breathed. “Come on, baby,” he rasped. “Live, Miranda. Live.”

The old images faded as Damon twisted in his sleep. But the nightmare wouldn’t end. It merely transformed—into something hideous and ugly. Like him.

They were at the asylum now. Months later. Miranda’s willowy figure was lost beneath the green hospital gown. And she was crying. At least, her shoulders moved with the sounds of sobbing. The tear ducts beneath the bandages that wrapped her face could no longer cry.

“Why won’t you help me?” Her blue eyes pierced him straight to the core, adding to the weight of well-deserved guilt he carried. “How can you make yourself right and not help me?”

She should never have been a part of this. Miranda was an innocent pawn, caught and trampled by someone’s jealous greed. If only he’d been an ordinary man. Less rich. Less powerful. Less of a visionary brainiac. None of this would have happened. His work wouldn’t have been stolen. His lab wouldn’t have been destroyed. She wouldn’t have been hurt.

Damon Sinclair loved like an ordinary man, but he was cursed with being anything but.

“We nearly lost you in the E. R. when you reacted to the treatments. I won’t risk that again until I run more experiments. For some reason the tissue regeneration formula doesn’t work on you. I haven’t figured out why. Yet. But I will. I promise.” He joined her at the window. It was the last time he remembered feeling the heat of sunshine on his skin. “In the meantime, there’s reconstructive surgery—”

“That 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.