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Cavendish said he’d asked him to so he could meet me! He wanted me to join him, told me he was my father,” she babbled. “I swear to god I hadn’t met him before that! I don’t even believe he is my father! Mom said my father died before I was born. So, if Paul or somebody told you he was, they were lying! I don’t even know the guy!”
    “Who the fuck is Paul?”
    Anna blinked at him again. “My assistant—Paul Warner.”
    “Where is he?”
    “We need to take her to the Watch Center to interrogate her,” one of the men said.
    “We’re liable to attract company we don’t want here!”
    “We could go back to my place!” Anna volunteered, immediately certain she had no desire to be taken anywhere else, adding in a small voice when Simon glared at her, “Couldn’t we?” And then she could tell them everything she knew, which shouldn’t take more than five minutes, and they could go away again!
    Simon looked like he wanted to bite nails in two and could’ve done it. He uttered a growl of pure frustration. “The bastard’s probably already slipped through our fingers,” he muttered. “Snakes!”
    “He isn’t mine!” Anna gasped. “Swear! I’ve only known him a few weeks, and Cavendish told me he’d sent him.” Her chin wobbled. “I don’t know what’s going on here! I’m just a scientist! I genetically engineer plants! And I’m really bad at it, too!
    Everybody calls them franken-veggies! I’m sure I’m absolutely useless to you, so you might as well just let me go! I won’t tell anybody! I have a bad memory for faces and names!”
    She didn’t realize the men had turned away from the city and begun tugging her out to sea until Simon abruptly dipped her head beneath the water. She came up coughing and spluttering and swinging her arms wildly.
    “God damn it, Simon! Was that really necessary?”
    “It shut her up, didn’t it?” Simon growled.
    “We need a suit to take her down,” one of the others said.
    “I’ll breathe for her.”
    “Aw, come on, Simon! Lighten up! It’ll scare the ever loving shit out of her!”
    “If you can’t keep your mind off of your dick, stay out of it!”
    “Oh yeah? Well maybe it’s you that can’t keep your mind off your dick! I wasn’t the one that suggested I’d breathe for her!”
    “You’re both scaring the piss out of her! Keep a lid on it!”
    Anna was shaking like a leaf, but she was hardly aware of the conversation going on around her. Her entire focus was on the fact that they seemed determined to take her below and her phobia of heights—which included depths! As tempted as she was to plead her case further, the dunking had taken what little spine she had and beyond that, she wasn’t sure she could get her mouth, tongue, and vocal chords to cooperate. Her heart seemed to stop in her chest when Simon turned her to face him and she knew he was about to take her far below the surface.
    She didn’t have gills! She couldn’t sift the oxygen from the water! She was going to drown!
    He slapped her cheek lightly. “Focus, Anna! I’m going to breathe for you while I take you down!”
    She nodded jerkily, but it was an instinctive urge to agree with anything he said, not actual comprehension. She whipped her head to the side the moment he ducked beneath the surface with her, holding her breath. He waited until she began to fight him frantically and tightened his grip around her. She would’ve continued to try to elude his mouth if he hadn’t tangled his hand in her hair and held her head.
    She continued to claw at him in mindless terror for several moments after she felt his heated breath in her mouth and sucked it into her starving lungs. He touched her nose. She was at a loss to grasp why until it occurred to her that he was telling her to breathe out through her nose.
    The panic never really left her. She simply wore herself out fighting him and went limp, her entire focus on sucking in each breath he gave her and waiting anxiously