by Vivi Andrews
Fuck the schedule. No sense sitting on their asses and waiting for five o’clock now. Grace gave the command to move in.
Her team moved quickly and smoothly into their positions, showing no signs that they’d only been training together for a matter of weeks. Most of them would be funneling the escaped shifters to safety, while those with the most martial experience would be clearing the areas on the schematics likely to hold clusters of guards. Grace and Dominec’s part of the mission would include three such cluster points, en route to the underground office Rachel had agreed would be the most likely place one of the Dead Presidents would hide if he was caught on site during the raid.
The Board members moved around from cell to cell. It was impossible to pinpoint their likely locations, but if one was here, that was where he would be. In the belly of the beast.
Listening with one ear to the activity on the comms—reports of guards found, both dead and alive, and shifters liberated—Grace jogged down the side hall with Dominec in her shadow and her tranq gun held loose at her hip. The combination felt oddly right.
Lone Pine had elected to go the prisoner route—capturing Organization guards and scientists rather than executing them all on site as some of the other attacking shifters would be doing—but from the sound of the reports whispering in her ear, the shifters escaping from the cells were doing a good job of taking that decision out of her force’s hands, leaving a trail of bloody bodies whenever they came across their erstwhile captors. Screams echoed from distant corners of the large building.
Through the shouts, one ear on the comms, the other caught the sound of voices ahead. Grace held up a hand to signal Dominec, but he was already moving into a flanking position, running low and lethally fast.
Five guards. Clustered in their security center, working frantically in an attempt to bring security back online.
Fish in a barrel.
They were all unconscious before they even knew they were under attack.
Grace didn’t pause to admire the efficiency of the strike. She plunged deeper into the building, Dominec at her back. Fiona’s program had left the emergency lighting operational and the narrow hallways were lit orange. At the first stairwell, they ran down—steps light but still echoing on the metal risers. The Organization had a thing for burrowing underground, it seemed.
The level below was home to the utility room—where two panicked guards were ordering a man in a maintenance uniform to get the power back on. The trio was quickly dispatched, but their next target—the guards’ locker room—didn’t promise to be quite so painless. Through the closed door, Grace could clearly hear the voices within—half a dozen of them at least—bolstering one another’s courage with promises to blow the heads off anything that walked through the door. Coming in low wouldn’t even necessarily help, since the guards would be expecting shifters on four feet as well as two.
She arched her eyebrows at Dominec, silently asking for ideas. He nodded above her head and she looked up to see an air vent. She almost snorted. Very Mission Impossible of him, but neither of them were small enough to fit through the opening, in any form.
But then what he intended burst into her brain, the idea taking hold and making her grin. Wasting no time, he boosted her up and she ripped the cover off the air vent with sheer brute force, careless of the screech of metal. The voices inside the room fell instantly silent—which would only work in their favor. Grace grabbed a smoke grenade off her belt and set the timer, rolling it down the vent shaft that ran over the locker room, knowing each irregular clank and clatter from above their heads would be making the guards about piss themselves.
And when the grenade went off and choking white smoke began pouring through the vent over their heads, every eye—no matter how well-trained—would flick for a fraction of a second toward that new threat, and Dominec and Grace would charge into the room before they knew what hit them.
It was poetry.
Seven guards. They got off two shots. Both of them going wide.
Adrenaline made Grace’s grin fierce as she turned to Dominec, barely resisting the urge to kiss him senseless. “Mr. President?”
He nodded and they began jogging toward the stairs to go down to the final level.
They were nearly back to the open stairwell when Dominec grabbed her suddenly, tugging her down to crouch low against the wall, his gun and gaze trained on the open arch that showed the stairs ahead. She heard it then—the echo of footsteps clanging on the stairs.
Her team was accounted for upstairs. The steps could only belong to a guard. Or a Dead President.
Curling her finger around the trigger of her gun, her heart racing, Grace watched the stairs, waiting to see the man fleeing from the lower level toward the exits above—but when the figure came, it was heading down, deeper into the bowels of the facility, and it was no ordinary guard.
Her fleeting glimpse of the running form gave her an only impression of a gray uniform and massive size—but Dominec sucked in a breath sharp with recognition.
“What?” she whispered.
“That’s a Sigma uniform.”
“Shit.” But another thought tripped over the dread. “Is he going down to get the Dead President out?”
“Possible.” His tone said unlikely.
“What’s the other possibility?”
“Protocol one. He’s cleaning house.” At her blank look, he went on. “Scorched earth. Blow it up or burn it down. Leave no traces.”
Double shit. Grace thumbed her comm open, speaking directly to the shifter running the escape upstairs. “Tayla, evacuate. Possible incendiaries.”
That done, she straightened, the tranq gun a comfortable extension of her hand and nodded toward the stairwell. “Let’s go get him.”
Kelly would have urged her to run to safety. Even Roman might have tried to be noble and shield her from the worst of it. Dominec gave a curt nod and moved down the hallway like smoke. At her back.
Damn, she loved that man.
The office they’d thought would house the Dead President of this region was empty—of both the Dead President and the Sigma. They continued to search the maze of the lowest level, keeping their steps as close to soundless as possible, but there was no trace of the massive man who had raced down the stairs.
Dominec paused, pointing to his nose, and Grace sniffed—but whatever scent he caught on the air was lost to her beneath the layers of the Organization’s distinctly antiseptic smell. She took a position as his shadow, watching his back as he crept through the halls, tracking the scent.
He halted in front of a door, crouching low to one side of the frame as Grace mirrored him on the opposite side. She couldn’t hear even a whisper of sound inside the room, but the Sigma would have Dominec’s training. He would be able to move like a ghost when he wanted to.
At his signal, Grace turned the knob and they erupted into the room—a room that was empty save the charges attached to one of the walls.
She’d seen too many movies. Even after the briefing one of the Cascade wolves had done on explosives, Grace was still expecting to see tubes of dynamite, winding wires and giant clocks loudly ticking away the seconds toward detonation.
There were no visible timers. No sticks of dynamite. Just grayish putty stuck to the walls and some small black devices—which she knew to be the detonators—smashed into the putty. The bombs didn’t look like much, but down here, attached to the foundations of the building, it wouldn’t take much to bring it all down around their ears.
Grace cursed softly. How much time did they have? She had no problem with blowing up the building, but not until they’d gotten everyone out. The Sigma would have wanted to give himself time to get clear. If she could remove the detonators—
A whisper of sound—the scrape of a boot on linoleum—whipped her around. Elvis has not left the building.
The
Sigma’s gun lifted. The muzzle flashed. The sound of gunfire echoed loud in the enclosed hall. Something hard slammed into her side, throwing her to the left and driving her to the ground a fraction of a second before pain burned a path through her right shoulder.
The report of the gun came again and again. Dominec had knocked her out of the way, shielding her with his body in the rain of bullets. Cover, her mind jabbered frantically. They needed cover. They were half inside the room. The tranq gun had fallen from her right hand, which refused to work. She drew her live weapon left-handed and returned fire, using her body to shove Dominec’s all the way into the room with the explosives and kicking the door shut.
The entire thing had taken a matter of seconds—but it wasn’t over. The door would not last as cover—but for now it caught the bullets that pinged against the other side. She threw home the lock. Thank God for the paranoid Organization and their bullet-proof doors.
Grace came up on her knees over Dominec, cradling her useless right arm to her stomach. “Dominec.”
There was blood. Way too much blood. Her own was making her clothing stick to her shoulder, but he was practically swimming in his. There was too much for it to be coming from one source. All of her medical training vaporized from her mind because it was him, but then instinct took over and she began searching for the wounds.
“Pressure,” she murmured, finding one gusher in his side and three in his back. No exit wounds. Fuck.
“I’m fine,” he said—but there was blood on his lips and they were going to have to have a serious discussion about the definition of the word fine. “The explosives.”
Right. Not blowing up did have a certain degree of urgency.
She swore and slapped his hand over the wound on his side—the only one he could reach. “Keep pressure.”
She leapt to her feet, slipping on the blood on the floor—don’t think about where it came from, Grace—as she raced for the bombs.
She didn’t notice the gunfire had stopped pinging against the exterior of the door until something hard slammed into it, rattling the frame. She didn’t ask if the Sigma would be able to break through the door. She’d seem him. He was built like a fucking tank.
Though she’d hoped the door would hold a little longer.
It exploded inward in pieces under the second blow.
Grace had reached the first detonator, prying it free, and she spun to face the Sigma.
Easily six and a half feet tall and as broadly muscled as Hugo, he wore a gray uniform with some kind of body armor and a thick band around his throat. A collar. The Organization had put collars on their pets.
But his gun was held at his side. He hadn’t taken aim. He hadn’t immediately killed them both. Perhaps there was still some shifter loyalty buried beneath the Organization weapon he’d become. His eyes were on Dominec, a slight frown on his face. Her lover lay bleeding and vulnerable beneath the shards of the door—she needed to get the Sigma’s attention off him.
“You don’t have to do this.”
His slate gray gaze lifted to hers, something odd reflecting off his left eye, almost like she was seeing a contact lens computer. “Actually,” he rumbled in a voice that sounded like he’d been gargling glass shards, “I do.”
There was enough sadness in his damaged voice to make her certain he wasn’t his own master—but he still raised his gun, taking aim at her heart.
Dominec broadsided him with a feral roar and the gun went flying. She’d seen her lover move like lightning before, but never like this. He was all lethal grace and lashing speed—even bleeding from four gunshot wounds. Claws flashed and bloody gashes appeared on the Sigma’s arms and torso—but he had been trained too. He swung out with massive fists, the two of them locked in a deadly dance.
Grace quickly pried free the rest of the detonators—the last thing Dominec needed was for the building to come down on his head—and drew her gun again, but she couldn’t fire when the battling men were moving so swiftly it was hard to see where one ended and the other began. Her aim was solid with her left hand, but not as pinpoint perfect as with her right, and her head was already starting to swim with blood loss from the untended wound that had ripped through her right shoulder. The last thing she needed was for her arm to waver if she took the shot.
She waited, ready to fire, ready to end it with a bullet to the brain as soon as Dominec was clear—itching to dive into the fray but not wanting to get in Dominec’s way. She needed to do something. Needed to help. Needed to fight.
The building shuddered under a distant blast. Then another, closer. And a third.
Those weren’t the only charges, Grace had time to realize before the ceiling came down on her head.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Tavio still had fists like sledgehammers.
For a fraction of a second when Dominec had gotten a good look at the figure at the end of the hallway, he’d thought Tavio was on their side, that he’d escaped when Dominec had and had joined the fight to bring down the Organization with the other shifters. Then the Sigma fatigues had registered.
That fraction of a second had nearly cost Grace her life. He couldn’t be merciful with Tavio now. Though mercy wasn’t coming into play at the moment, as he was struggling to hold his own. Tavio always had been the strongest and his punches still landed hard enough to send shockwaves through his body. He’d heard his own ribs cracking and didn’t want to think about the damage he was taking. He was faster. He was meaner. He should have been able to gut Tavio by now, but blood loss was making him slow and it was getting harder and harder to ignore the pain inflicted by Tavio’s fists.
A series of explosions shuddered through the building. Dominec saw the walls crack, a section of the ceiling separating. Twisting to free himself from Tavio’s grip, he spun, landing a kick in the big hybrid Sigma’s stomach that drove him back two steps—right beneath the section of ceiling that crashed down on his head.
He whirled toward Grace, but saw only a pile of rubble where she had been standing.
No. He would not lose his future. She was the air he breathed. He would not let her die.
Dominec dove for the rubble, flinging chunks of concrete and plaster out of his way as he dug for her. The building continued to shudder and groan, raining down new debris to strike his back and shoulders, but he ignored it, searching for her with single-minded focus. He didn’t breathe again until he found her hand—then arm, then all of her. Lifting her out of the wreckage, she didn’t stir—but he felt her exhale against his cheek as he cradled her high in his arms and sprinted toward safety.
He didn’t recall leaving the building. Panic purged the memories as soon as they happened. All he could think of was Grace. Getting her to safety. Seeing her blue-on-blue eyes open again. He lost all awareness of his own body, his own pains.
He didn’t know how he got up three floors to the ground level. He knew nothing before he was bursting out into the sunset, shouting for help. Help arrived and still his arms didn’t want to let her go, but the strength had left them and they gave up their precious cargo.
“We’ve got her,” a voice was saying. “It’s okay.”
He tried to focus on the face, but it was blurry and spinning. “She has to live,” he demanded, pouring the last of his energy into the command while his legs gave out and he collapsed face first toward the dirty snow.
Grace woke up with a pleasant, floaty feeling humming through her veins. As soon as she opened her eyes, she saw Moira’s familiar tanned face hovering over her and mumbled, “You gave me the good drugs.”
“That I did,” Moira agreed, relief bright in her eyes. “And enjoy them while you can because with a shifter metabolism they won’t last as long as you want.”
Still floating on the swoopy bliss of the drugs, she tried to remember how she’d gotten here. Her brow wrinkled as flashes of the attack came back.
“Dominec?”
Moira nodded to the next bed and Grace turned her head to see the scarred half of his face slack with unconsciousness.
“Is he…?”
“He’ll be fine,” Moira assured her. “I had to drug him to kingdom come to get him to rest and heal. Your tiger is the worst patient I’ve ever encountered—and that’s saying something.” The healer moved around the room, adjusting the IV drip attached to Dominec. “I had to put you in the same room because I was afraid he was going to hurt himself, trying to get to you and threatening to kill anyone who tried to get in his way. Of course, the younger nursing interns think it’s incredibly romantic. They’re all positively swooning over him. The story’s all over the pride. How he carried you out of a collapsing building, shot and beaten all to hell, bleeding all over the place and still commanding everyone to make sure you live before losing consciousness and going timber like a tree. Dominec Giroux is everyone’s hero.”
Everyone’s hero. “How’s he taking that?”
“Seems to hate it.” Moira shrugged. “However, he might be in a better frame of mind now that you’re awake and talking. No matter how many times I told him your MRI was clear and you’d almost certainly lost consciousness from blood loss rather than some traumatic, catastrophic brain injury, he refused to believe me. Apparently you were buried under a wall, but beyond a few cracked ribs, a fractured collarbone, and the gunshot wound, you’re perfectly sound. So do me a favor, tell him I told him so for me when he wakes up.”
“How did it go? The attack?”
“Minimal losses—on our side,” Moira assured her. “I don’t know all the details, but Patch made an announcement that nearly all of the attacks met with overwhelming success. Nothing for you to worry about now besides healing. Understand?”
Grace nodded, reassured. Moira wouldn’t lie to her. She may have dodged the question if things were bad, but she wouldn’t have lied to Grace. They’d won.
