by Amelia Jade
“I’m never going to live that down, am I?” he complained.
“Never,” she said evilly, finishing dressing and heading for the door. “Now let’s go get some food, shall we?”
He smiled and followed.
Life was looking up.
***
The smile was still on his face hours later as he jogged into the command center, long after he had dropped her off to resume her search for her dad. No. Her father, not her dad. She was very specific about that. They’re family, but she’s never been extremely close to him. It explained why Shay wasn’t out desperately searching for him every minute of the day. All she had were a few photographs, and a three-month-old trail at best. It seemed to him like she’d already given up hope, and was just going through the paces.
Justin wished he could help her, but his team needed him.
They had a mission.
He stuffed the second picture Shay had given him of her father into his wallet. This time it was a more clean-cut looking fellow compared to the beard and shaggy-hair sporting man in the first one. Brown eyes, a crooked nose, and a gap-toothed smile complemented the black hair. The nose, smile, and a mole on his left cheek made him rather identifiable in a crowd, if Justin ever did happen to see him. He’d promised to keep his eyes open for her, but the vague description of what her father did wasn’t exactly much of a help. It sounded like he was a security guard of some sort, but he didn’t know.
With a helpless shrug he filed all that information away, opening his brain up to what he was about to be told. For the moment, the mission was his priority.
“Okay, now that you’re all here,” Madison said without preamble. “Extraction mission.”
Justin nodded. Those were the bread and butter of his team.
“Location?” Jared asked.
“The warehouse you located the other day,” she said without hesitation.
The entire Sentinel team sat up straight in their chairs. This was not the standard evacuation mission.
“This is a rescue mission,” Justin said after a split second as his mind processed everything.
“Correct,” Madison said. “You were going to extract them later this week, but it appears the Agency got wind of them first. One of our trackers spotted them moving in and departing with the shifter. He tracked them to the same warehouse.”
Justin frowned. The spotters were human elements of the Underground, people who volunteered to go out in the field to do nothing but reconnaissance. It was a hugely risky job, and he respected all four of them currently working for Madison.
“This is a trap,” he said bluntly before Madison could go any further. “It has to be.”
To his surprise, Madison didn’t argue. “I agree.”
Justin blinked in surprise, fumbling for a different set of words compared to his first.
“So why are we going then?” Jared asked.
“Because it’s a good time to turn the tables on the Agency,” Madison said simply.
He frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense. Us going in there after this guy is exactly what J and Baldy are going to want. This is going to be a trap, designed to ensure we don’t get out. Why would we willingly walk right into that?”
The smile that played across Madison’s face chilled his stomach. “Because we’re going to turn their trap into an ambush of our own.”
Justin exchanged glances with the rest of the Sentinels. “How, exactly, are we going to do that, ma’am?” he said as respectfully as possible, hoping his formality would get through to her. “He’s going to have more than enough men there to overwhelm the four of us. We’re good, but even we have limits in the end,” he stated firmly.
He felt his stomach begin to roil. An ambush meant fighting. Fighting meant killing.
Madison nodded. “That’s why there won’t be four of you,” she said.
Jared growled. “What is your plan? Simple and concise please,” he said firmly, taking over the conversation.
“We’re going to assault that warehouse, and burn it to the ground,” she said, standing upright.
“We?” Jared said carefully.
“Yes. Your team will go in first, the four of you. Ajax’s team will come in second to turn the trap into an ambush favorable to us.”
Justin frowned as he listened to them talk. Ajax’s team? He knew the big shifter was still in town, but who else was here with him?
“Who is composing this second team?” Jared inquired, his thoughts running parallel to Justin’s it would seem.
“Ajax, Milos, Andre, Arianna, and myself,” Madison said coolly, leveling her eyes at Jared in challenge.
“No,” the big shifter said. “Absolutely not.”
“Yes,” the leader said bluntly. “It’s happening.”
“Ajax has training. Hell, even Andre and Milos have some training now after spending several months with us. But the two of you have no combat training at all!” Jared fired back, still shaking his head.
Justin bit his lip, letting his Alpha do the talking, even if he agreed completely.
“We’ve been training,” Madison said ferociously, “And if you encounter any of the enhanced versions of their Agents, then you may very well need me.”
Beside her, Arianna also nodded strongly. Although she couldn’t shift, she was still as strong and as fast as a shifter, thanks to the Extremis serum coursing through her blood.
Justin had to give her a point there. With the dual nature of the serums Madison had injected herself with, one bonding to her human DNA and one to her shifter DNA, she was the strongest shifter Justin had ever met that wasn’t a dragon. He himself hadn’t fought against one of them, but Connor had, and he swore up and down that Madison was a match for them in sheer strength.
But again, she didn’t have any training.
It didn’t take Justin long to realize that no matter what he or Jared said, this was going to happen. Not long after that, his Alpha came to the same conclusion.
“You do not lead. Ajax leads, and you obey his orders in the field. And he obeys mine. In here, you are the boss, and I am okay with that. But not out there,” the Alpha said. “Out there, I am the one with the training. My team are. All of them have more specific training for this than your entire team put together. So you will obey them, or this is a no-go.”
Madison looked triumphant for just a split second, then nodded seriously. “I have no issues with that, and I don’t think anyone will argue against your team’s expertise. If Ajax and Arianna weren’t in town to bolster our numbers, I wouldn’t recommend us going anyway. But we can do this,” she said strongly. “It will be a big blow to the Agency, one that we’ve needed to strike for a while now.”
Justin just sat back, wondering if he’d be able to do what was expected of him. This mission was going to result in a lot of killing. He still hadn’t quite come to terms with that, and truthfully, he had been hoping to have a little more time to make a decision on the question bouncing around in his head.
Around him, people got to their feet, preparing to head out.
Could he continue to do this?
Chapter Eleven
Shay
She had to be stupid.
Her fist rapped on the door once, then twice.
Shay was proud of herself for being strong enough that her fist didn’t shake as she did so.
Strong? No, you quite literally have to be the stupidest person on the planet to even consider doing what you’re doing right now.
So that begged the question: why was she doing this?
The answer was: this was the only place that had even had a hint that someone knew her father.
You really should have told Justin where you were going.
That was true, but she hadn’t for two very good reasons. First, he needed to focus. They had just come back from an exhilarating bike trip through the city, reuniting Shay with her need for speed and the feel of going fast. It had been so refreshing. When they had gott
en back, however, he had been notified of an urgent mission. Shay had wished him luck and told him to keep his team safe. She hadn’t told him because she didn’t want him worrying about her going somewhere where a gun had been pulled on her last time.
The second reason was even simpler. If she had told him, he wouldn’t have let her go. Just like that. Shay couldn’t let that happen though. This was the only place that offered a hope, and she needed to take that. The longer she waited, the more unlikely it was that there would be any trace of her father left.
To her surprise, the door opened not long after her first knock. She hadn’t even needed to use the buzzer.
Shay stepped back and to her right, leaning against the building and looking at the door as it swung wide.
“I thought we told you to go away,” a dour-faced guard said, once again pulling his shirt tight to reveal the gun.
Shay tried to keep herself steady at that pointed reminder, convincing herself that he wouldn’t actually shoot her. It was just a warning. What kind of threat was she anyway?
“I know,” she said slowly, pushing off the wall and slowly walking to her left. “But I just felt like you and I had some unfinished business.”
The guard frowned. “I’m not the same person who was here last time.”
Shay laughed. “Whoops,” she said, continuing to move to the left, forcing the guard to push the door all the way open to keep her in sight. “My apologies. With the mask, you all look the same to me,” she tittered, trying to play up the ditzy-girl aspect of things.
Her shirt was pulled low for a reason, not because she wanted to show off this much cleavage to everyone.
The guard snorted, not taken by her act, though he couldn’t stop his eyes from flicking down to her breasts.
Shay arched her back ever so slightly, pushing them out at him just a bit more as she reversed her direction.
Distracted, the guard kept the door open all the way, leaning against it as they continued to look at each other.
“So, what do you say?” she asked, taking a step closer and pulling her shirt just a little lower, exposing the edges of her bra to him. She felt dirty, but it was working, so she went with it, biting down on her lower lip as she neared him.
“What, uh, what do I say to what?” he asked, his eyes now completely focused on her cleavage.
“To letting me in of course,” she said, skipping past him and into the building.
Behind her, the guard cursed himself and turned to pursue her, but Shay was already jogging down one of the boring gray hallways. There weren’t any rooms along it, just one long tunnel.
Odd.
She finally reached a door at the end and pushed her way through it, still about half a dozen steps or so ahead of the guard.
The door immediately led outside to the pier area. Overhead a big boom crane swung, loading up a container from a stack of its fellows onto the back of a flatbed truck. Several other men, clad in the same black as the guard chasing her, walked around the grounds. , But for the most part it was fairly empty.
“What the fuck is going on here?” she asked, confused at the lack of activity.
The guard chasing her shouted at his comrades and they all began to converge on her. Shay dashed forward, darting between two containers and weaving a path through them in an attempt to escape.
Unfortunately, as she soon realized, there were not very many of them. She emerged into an open area to be confronted by two guards with weapons drawn.
“Where is Charles?” she asked, as her hands automatically rose in the air. To her surprise, her voice was calm and unwavering.
“Who?” one guard asked, though the other remained silent, his head did tilt a little.
“You,” she said, pointing at the other guard, ignoring the way they both leveled their weapons at her when she did. “You know where he is. Where is Charles Lyon? Is he here?”
The barrel of another gun poked into her back before he could respond.
“I will take you to Charles,” another voice said, the cold metal pushing her forward. The two guards split to the side as she walked forward.
“Finally,” she said, letting her hands fall by her side. She wasn’t stupid enough to attack anyone. Shay lacked those sorts of skills and she knew it.
The guard behind her prodded her down the pier, farther away from the road. She took in their surroundings, trying to figure out where he was taking her. Ahead at the end of the pier was a building, more like a guardhouse than anything else. It could perhaps hold three men sitting down. She ruled that out.
Lashed to the concrete, however, was an opulent, ultra-modern yacht, all sharp edges and smooth curves. Next to it were two sleek, powerful speedboats, easily thirty-five or forty feet long. Her eyes devoured them as she wondered what they had under the hood.
“Gorgeous creatures,” she commented as they went by, the metallic paint jobs sucking her in.
The guard just grunted.
Ugh. No taste.
The guard pushed her onto the yacht, though by then she wasn’t surprised. There was really nowhere else to go this far out onto the water.
“In here,” he man said as they boarded the yacht. He pointed to a nearby room.
“Hand over your purse,” he commanded.
She thought about saying no, but he’d already raised his gun. Shay sighed and handed it over before resuming her walk to the room.
Shay felt a sense of foreboding descend over her, but it was too late by that point. The guard shoved her in the room and abruptly pulled the door closed behind her. She heard it lock with an audible click.
“Hey!” she shouted, pounding on the door, trying to pull it open from the inside.
There was no answer, but that didn’t stop her from hammering on the door with both fists. The thick plastic reverberated, but no matter how hard she punched or kicked, it didn’t give way.
“Fuck,” she swore aloud, turning to look at her cell.
Did you seriously expect for this to end up any other way? You went right back to a place willing to threaten you with a gun, and thought that by sneaking in, they might relent? What the fuck were you thinking?!
Her brain continued to berate her for the stupidity of her move, and now that things had collapsed around her, Shay realized that she should have listened. Of course coming back was a dumb move. She had been so caught up in the fact that they actually knew something that she had overlooked the danger. That wasn’t all though. With the revelation that Justin was actually one of the good guys, she had allowed herself to believe that maybe the same could happen here.
Judging by her swift imprisonment, she couldn’t have been more wrong.
Stupid and naïve. Good job.
The room was empty.
There was quite literally nothing in it. No chair, no bed, no table, not even a light. The only thing allowing her to see was the thick glass porthole that was too high on the wall for her to see out of. All she could make out was the sky, and nothing else.
“And of course, I decided to forego getting a new cell phone, so I can’t even call for help,” she said angrily, kicking the door one more time.
So she sat down and waited. Someone would have to come for her eventually.
Wouldn’t they?
Chapter Twelve
Justin
They roared into the parking lot, making no effort to hide themselves. In fact, the arrival of the two trucks was designed to hopefully draw out any Agents that might have been waiting for them.
Tires screeched as both drivers slewed the vehicles around to a halt. Justin wasn’t behind the wheel. He was an expert on a bike, but both Connor and Jared were better behind the wheel of something bigger. He emerged swiftly though and the four of them strode toward the warehouse.
To their left was a long low grassy ridge that ran all the way down the long side of the rectangular building and extended for at least half a mile on either side of it. Somewhere behind that, the other five were pullin
g nearer. Madison had procured a minivan from somewhere, and they had all crammed inside that, deciding it would help hide them better than the normal trucks they drove.
Behind them was the main road that ran in the opposite direction of the ridge. It hung a hard turn and went parallel to the ridge heading in the opposite direction of the Agency’s warehouse, making it an end unit. To the rear and right of them were more buildings, each just as large as the one they were about to enter.
“This is crazy,” he muttered, his stomach in knots over the upcoming fight. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t sure if he could follow through with what was necessary.
It wasn’t that he wanted to run from the fight. Justin wasn’t scared of that. He could take on the Agency, and he could fight their men. But he wasn’t sure he could land the killing blow. Injuring them and rendering them useless to the fight he was okay with. It was taking the next step that he was unsure he could do.
“Stay alert,” Jared ordered, his voice muffled through the mask they all wore in an attempt to hide their identities from the Agency.
Justin sounded his confirmation as the warehouse loomed up, blocking the sun from them as they neared it.
The lower-lying section they had scaled the other night was off to their right. In front of them was a giant wall without windows, punctuated by a massive garage door big enough for two semis to fit through on their right. Neither that nor the personnel door had any windows in it either. They were going in completely blind.
“This is suicide,” he said aloud, his back slamming into the wall on the right of the door. Connor mimicked his pose on the left, while Josh took up position behind Justin.
Jared approached the door, looked at his team to ensure everyone was ready, and without preamble kicked the door in. The hope was that the Agency wouldn’t expect them to attack, but would instead be prepared for some sort of covert operation, which was normal for the Sentinels. This full-frontal assault wasn’t their normal style, but even he thought it might have a chance of working.
Jared fell back from his kick, absorbing the force. Before he was recovered Justin was already through the door, Josh and Connor hot on his heels.
