Broken Communication Read Free Page B

him again. As much as the hairy jerk annoyed her, she wanted to see his face again. She wanted to hear him call her princess and mock her decision to wear heels for almost everything in life.
    More than that—she wanted Casey.
    Jerk Off picked up another of his girlie magazines that littered the old desk near him. He eyed her and then held the magazine open in a way that suggested he was looking at the centerfold and then her, his gaze darting back and forth. He grinned and bit his lower lip.
    Perv.
    Shorty didn’t seem to care that his buddy was a creep. He also didn’t mind the guy blatantly touching himself.
    Two pervs.
    Jerk Off flipped aimlessly through the pages. She was surprised he could get any of them to turn and that they weren’t stuck together from as much as she’d noticed his hand down the front of his pants over the last few days. The sick pig had then dared to touch, with the same unwashed, jacking-off hand, what he’d tried to pass off as food for her. She nearly retched just thinking about it.
    She sighed, reflecting on her best friend Laney. Harmony had wanted to tell her the truth over the four years of their friendship, but the time never seemed right. And how did one go about telling another they weren’t human? That they’d levitated the butler more than once as a child before causing the dinnerware to dance about the table after watching the animated version of a popular French fairy tale about a beast and the beautiful woman who fell in love?
    Not to mention Laney’s strange obsession with the weird and wacky. The girl seemed to live for outing supernaturals, and Harmony had played right into Laney’s “the truth is out there” theories. She’d funneled information toward Laney, hiding behind a hacker name rather than simply telling her friend the truth.
    Supernaturals were real and Harmony just happened to be one. In her defense, Harmony had finally gotten to the point she was going to confess everything to Laney, but then Laney had been so excited about her blind date that Harmony hadn’t wanted to spoil it with a talk that would not have been short or simple.
    “I’m sorry, Laney,” she whispered, tearing up thinking about her friend. Laney had gone on a date with a man she’d met via the Net and hadn’t returned. It had been foolish to let her go off alone like that with a man neither of them knew, and it was especially dumb to let her venture off on her own when she’d been doing what Harmony had tasked her to do—discovering the truth about what the government and big financial backers like her father were doing.
    Experimenting on supernaturals and humans.  
    Harmony knew the dirty, ugly truth by accident. She’d happened upon it all buried deep within one of her father’s dummy corporations. Her computer skills were impressive, and she excelled with technology. Dolls had never really interested her, but taking things apart to see how they worked did. And then there was magik. It had captivated her as a child. It didn’t matter she had little control over it. She’d been swept away by it all.
    Not her parents. They’d shared sad looks as if what she could do was something horrid and wrong. Something they’d somehow brought upon themselves.  
    When she’d discovered the horrible truths her father had never wanted her to know, she’d been sickened, and it had taken all of her to keep from going to him and shoving it in his face—demanding to know everything. She knew better. She’d seen the files and the reports. People who asked questions, even family members, were dealt with accordingly. The Corporation and its reach was vast and deep. They didn’t let anyone get in their way, not even daughters.
    She swallowed hard as the awareness settled over her that the men holding her had something to do with the Corporation. She’d seen the name Krauss in the files. He was some mad scientist who was anything but human—that much she’d gleaned from the dates of the