by Anya Nowlan
Ryker glanced at Rio and then Kayla, who nodded at him.
“He can’t help us if he doesn’t know, right?”
“Right,” Ryker confirmed.
The four of them headed deeper into Sy’s little secret lair while Ryker gave him the Cliff’s notes of what had happened over the last few days, as well as bits and pieces of history that filled out the rest of it. Kayla tried to detach herself from the conversation as much as she could, because hearing all of those things out loud just made it all the more painful. That wasn’t something she strictly needed at the moment – there was enough pain in her to last a lifetime, as well as worry.
Instead, she looked around, curious eyes taking in the wonders of modern engineering around her while Rio kept his hand on her and made her walk close to him. Absently, her arm draped around him and she hooked a finger in the back pocket of his tactical pants. It was an old habit she used to have when she walked next to either of her lions. It wasn’t until they reached Sy’s living quarters that she noticed she’d been doing it.
Quickly, she pulled her hand back, blushing a little.
“Don’t worry about it, baby. I think it’s cute,” Rio said, leaning in to plant a kiss on top of her hair and squeeze her shoulder reassuringly.
Doesn’t mean I feel like any less of a love-struck teenager, though, she thought, the blush deepening.
At another time, she might have been wondering about what it was that made her so awkward about sharing such familiar affection with two men who were clearly going above and beyond for her. But this was not the time.
Sy clicked on the lights as they passed through a modern kitchen, complete with a flat screen TV projecting a picture of the ground above them as sort of a makeshift window, and then moved onto his lab. Ryker finished his tale just in time for Sy to sit down at his workstation and spin his leather chair around to look at the three of them.
He had weary, quiet gray eyes and the look of a man who’d seen as much as the Tyrens had, but chosen a vastly different approach to dealing with his demons. But it was clear that he had plenty of them, because no ‘normal’ human being or shifter would hide themselves away from the world beneath tons and tons of earth and dirt, in the middle of the Nevada desert, along with what looked like enough hardware to take over a medium-sized nation.
“That’s fucked up,” he said finally, rubbing the short stubble on his chin while his other hand tapped on the armrest of his chair. “You know, I figured you guys ended up in one of those soldier-for-hire places. I guess I need to be glad that you picked the good guys instead of the bad guys.”
“They just got to us first,” Rio said simply, and his tone was completely earnest.
It was sort of a scary thought, to realize that the men Kayla had known and loved were just one bad choice or a spot of odd luck away from having become people like The Arctics. Another thing she chose not to dwell on.
“I think there’s more to it,” Sy said, shrugging his shoulders. “But anyway, I’m sorry about your kids.” This time, he looked straight at Kayla and she nodded as he waved for them all to take a seat and come in closer. “Can I see what you got?”
“Sure,” Kayla said, fumbling around in her pockets, searching for the stick drive.
She pulled it out of her jacket and handed it over to Sy after a moment of hesitation. It had taken some clever sneaking and a bit of blind luck to end up on a level in The Firm’s compound that wasn’t too strictly guarded. A techie had left for a coffee break, or called off – she left in a hurry one way or another – and forgotten to shut down her computer.
Kayla had made a few quick searches in the complex database system that the techie had been working on and pulled all the files she could that referenced the names of her sons or Hank Jensen, the kid Rio and Ryker had been tasked to save. The one thing she’d remembered was that Rhamos’ last known, or at least assumed location was Oakley in Nevada and with that knowledge, they’d set off, but there hadn’t been a better chance to really go through the information she got.
“Thanks,” Sy said, spinning around to face the five-monitor setup he had and plug the drive into a USB slot.
“Sy used to be on our squad back in the SEALs,” Ryker explained, pulling his chair closer to Sy’s. “He taught me half of the stuff I know now. Hell of an engineer.”
“And hell of a tech-head in general,” Rio added.
“Awe, you guys, you’re gonna make a boy blush,” Sy said with a grin, flicking through the folders of documents that appeared on the screen.
He pulled up a search option and tapped in ‘Oakley’, bringing up the folder dedicated to the place. It seemed from the images and the snippets of text that Kayla managed to read over Sy’s shoulder that it was a presumed Arctics-sympathizer organization’s main residence, a group called the Wanderers.
The Wanderers seemed to control the whole city to some extent, with most of the other residents having wizened up and moved out when they had the chance. They seemed to have a penchant for face paint and facial tattoos, mostly with dark, tribal patterns and all of them frankly looked like they were tweakers. She recognized most of them as likely hyenas – there was just something about their build that suggested that all too clearly.
Kayla frowned as she read the descriptions of the acts of violence against both humans and shifters that had happened in Oakley.
“Shouldn’t something like that have made it to national television? I mean, it looks like there have been at least twenty unsolved murders there. You’d think someone would take note,” she said, pursing her lips.
The three men shared looks among one another, as if trying to decide who should be the one to burst her naive little bubble of hope for decency in mankind and shifterkind alike.
“Shit like this happens all the time, all over the place. The authorities weigh their options. If there’s no one around to care, or they’re not rich enough, then things never get escalated. Oakley’s one of those cases where the local law enforcement has found it easier to ignore the problem than deal with it,” Sy explained. “It’s not the first time it’s happened and it definitely won’t be the last.”
“That’s… horrible,” Kayla said, slouching down on the armrest of her chair with one elbow.
And I thought I was used to the fact that everyone’s an asshole. Guess that shows me.
Being a mother had done several things to her. Among them was the fact that while she rationally knew that expecting the worst was the easiest thing to do most of the time, then ever since having her boys, she couldn’t help but hope that things wouldn’t turn out that way.
A lot of good that’s done me.
“Wait. Go back,” Ryker said suddenly as Sy flipped through a series of photographs of Wanderer agents and members who’d been spotted around Oakley. “There. Stop.”
“What are we looking at?” Kayla asked, squinting her eyes slightly.
The man captured from his profile was a tall, rather wiry looking guy with burn marks on his skin and what looked like a large scar running the length of his cheek. He was missing his left ear as well and that whole side of his face looked like it’d gotten stitched together in a hurry sometime long ago.
Ryker and Rio seemed to be completely still, like time had stopped around them. They stared at the picture wordlessly before Rio looked at Ryker, clearing his voice before he could speak.
“It’s him, isn’t it?”
Ryker looked like he couldn’t tear his stare away from the screen.
“Who?” Kayla asked, sensing the tension that had suddenly entered the room. “Do you know him?”
She took another look at the man in the picture but he didn’t look like anyone she’d ever met. He definitely didn’t look like someone she’d like to run into in a dark alleyway, though.
“That’s the fucker who killed our family,” Ryker said finally, his voice gravelly. “That’s Sawyer.”
“And now he might have Rhamos,” Rio added grimly.
&n
bsp; Kayla stared in disbelief, her gaze flitting between Rio and Ryker. Every time she thought things couldn’t get any worse, she’d be proven painfully and completely wrong.
Seventeen
Rio
“You have to promise to keep her here. She’s a wily one, she’ll try to run,” Rio said, giving Sy a stern look. “No way in hell is she allowed anywhere out of your goddamn tank, you get me, Sy?”
“Loud and clear,” Sy said, giving a mock salute as they hid in the shadows of darkness outside of Oakley.
“Don’t I get a say in this?” Kayla asked, poking her head out of the tank, though her tone wasn’t particularly combative.
Too much had happened over the last few days to bother fighting one another on trying to stay alive, after all.
“Do you want one?” Rio asked, arching a brow at her.
“Probably not. The tank seems like a safer option than coming outside,” she said with a snort.
“That’s the spirit,” Rio grinned, leaning forward over the armor-plated body of the behemoth of a vehicle to steal a quick kiss from her. “I’d rather have you back at Sy’s place, safe and sound, but I don’t think I have enough strength to tie you down somewhere where you don’t want to stay.”
Knowing Kayla, she’d scream so loud that they’d hear her all the way to Los Angeles if we pissed her off, he thought with some nervous, affectionate humor. That wouldn’t exactly help with keeping things low-key.
“Damn straight,” she agreed, checking the gun she’d borrowed off of Sy for the umpteenth time.
“Okay, so we’re clear on what we’re going to do?” Rio asked, tapping the top of the tank with his fist.
“We’re going to let you two cowboys go in, make a mess, and if it looks like you’ve shit the bed, then the cavalry rolls in to save your skinny lion asses,” Sy recited.
“Who the hell are you calling skinny?” Ryker grumbled, sitting on the roof of the armored transport they’d also borrowed from Sy for getting in and out of Oakley fast.
Ryker was taking a long drag of a cigar, blowing out the smoke in rings. He rarely bothered to make a show of it and it was one of the clearer ways Rio knew how to tell that his brother was on the nervous side for this mission. No wonder, the safety of their son was at stake.
And the possibility of catching the guy who’d killed their sister and mother right in front of them in cold blood added a whole other layer of expectation on top of that.
I’m going to sleep for a week once this is all over, Rio thought, pushing himself away from the tank and jumping down.
He crossed over to the truck in a few steps and banged the door with a flat hand twice, signaling Ryker to get down and get moving. They were lucky that Oakley wasn’t more than an hour’s drive away from Sy’s little secret lair and that they were blissfully in the middle of nowhere, where only an occasional rattlesnake might have noted their odd choice of transportation. They’d set out in the dark and the plan was to hit Oakley and get out way before it got light again.
Whether or not that would work would be another matter entirely.
“Time to go,” Rio said as Ryker took the driver’s seat this time.
“Yup,” he confirmed mildly, keeping the cigar in his mouth as he leaned forward and waved at Kayla before taking off.
“So what do you think the odds are that we’ll actually get out of this alive?” Rio asked conversationally, going over the gear he’d strapped on one more time for good measure.
He was basically a walking explosives warehouse. Getting hit in the wrong place would result in a decent-sized block getting taken down with him. It was a thought he didn’t entirely hate – if he had to die, he was taking as many hyena fucks with him as he could.
“It’s a good fifty-fifty,” Ryker said, beginning to push the all-terrain vehicle hard across the bumpy, uneven ground of the desert that stretched around Oakley.
“So we’ll either die or we won’t?” Rio asked, grinning wildly.
“Yup,” Ryker agreed with a nod.
“My kind of odds.”
They hadn’t learned as much as they’d hoped from the documentation Kayla had gotten, but that was probably because The Firm wasn’t in possession of much knowledge to begin with.
Oakley had been a tiny town of about one thousand residents before the Wanderers showed up. Since then, it had dried up to about two hundred residents, most of whom seemed to be Wanderers or their people. Terror, murder and looting cleared out a nice little town real fast.
The Firm seemed to believe that there was something questionable going on in an old paint factory on the outskirts of town, which had shut down production about five years ago. A single surveillance drone flight over it had shown that it had armed guards and the occasional truck pulling up to it, which was odd considering that it was supposed to be entirely derelict and abandoned. The best chance they had of finding Rhamos was there, as far as Rio and Ryker were concerned.
Sawyer, the hyena shifter the twins had recognized as the man who played a pivotal part in killing their pride, had been spotted only a few times in Oakley and there wasn’t more on file on him than some obfuscated theories. The primary one being that he might be tied to The Arctics through one of the shipping companies that handles the research equipment and –subject transportation for both the Wanderers and The Arctics.
Rio was damn sure that if he or Ryker happened to see that guy during the hit, there wouldn’t be much more of him left than an unfortunate memory.
“Lock and load,” Ryker murmured as they came out of the cover of darkness and into the light of the occasional streetlamps that dotted Oakley on the pass they’d chosen for entry.
It was the shortest way to the factory. Both of them knew that there’d be no way they could scour through the whole city and when they got found out then all of the fire power in Oakley would be targeted right at their faces. It was imperative that they managed to hit fast and hard and get out just as quick.
“We’re here,” Rio said, seeing the high profile of the factory looming in the distance.
Ryker stopped the large, lumbering vehicle half a block away and they both jumped out, shouldering their rifles immediately. Taking off in a dead run, Rio caught himself holding his breath, his lion flashing violently against his resolve. With so many things on the line, he couldn’t afford to lose his cool but damn if he didn’t want to.
They made it to the chainlink fence that surrounded the factory quick enough. The compound didn’t have traditional guard towers and they didn’t spot anyone making rounds in the courtyard either, but there were lights on in the factory and someone was definitely home.
Rio pulled a set of cable cutters off his belt and cut through the fence quickly, making a hole big enough for the both of them to slip in one after another. Ryker took point and he came up behind him, their ears pricked and ready for anything.
“We’re in,” he said quietly into the headset, Sy and Kayla being on the other end of the commlink.
Communications were going to be kept to a minimum that night and if Rio had his way, they’d be out of this ghost town before anything worth mentioning happened, Rhamos safely with them.
It was eerie, really. Though they hadn’t driven down more than one or two streets, the signs of abandonment could be read everywhere. ‘For Sale’ signs dotted the yards, roofs were crumbling and the yards on most of the residential houses hadn’t been cleared in years. It was a modern day American relic, seemingly forgotten by all aside from the creeps who’d decided to claim it for their own.
And whatever they had needed it for had to have something to do with the contents of that damn factory.
They ran the length of the fence to the narrowest place where they could cross over to the building, keeping out of the direct light of the two lampposts set up in front of the building. Their steps were featherlight, something that every shifter SEAL mastered quick enough when they got called into active duty. The bigger you were, the lighter you had to
move unless you were looking for a bullet with your name on it.
Pushing his back against the cool bricks of the factory, Rio reached into his gear belt and produced a small packet of explosives, slamming it against the wall and making it stick. It was already set and armed and within a few punches of a keypad he could have that and a dozen others he had with him or already set down explode and do plenty of damage.
If he died, they’d all go off as well unless he’d disarmed them before. A deadman’s switch was any pyromaniac’s best friend on missions like that – at least if he went out, he went out with a bang.
They made it to one of the four entrances that they managed to count on the drone pictures, including the ones meant for cargo drop-offs. This one was just a simple, metal door with a basic lock on it. It didn’t sport any of the fancy numpad systems and heightened security that Shifter Squad Nine had seen on their raids to just about every Firm location on the globe. Either these guys didn’t care, or they thought no one would be interested in their little operation.
Ryker tried the door handle and it budged easily, opening up away from them and showing them a cluttered, dark hallway that snaked into the distance in an uneven line.
Ryker looked at Rio and both of them grinned like Christmas had come early, the perfect guise to hide behind when their hearts were pounding out of their chests and the possibility of finding something they didn’t want to find seemed all too likely.
“Time to play,” Rio whispered and they stepped inside, the door closing softly behind them.
Eighteen
Ryker
Ryker’s vision swam as he stepped into the building, hearing almost nothing. Rio’s footsteps were barely audible behind him and for anyone further away than a couple of feet, they’d be completely silent.
Just the way it should be.
They made their way through the corridor quickly enough, military training and shifter senses joining together to make their assault soundless and undetectable. If only anyone could hear how loud Ryker’s heart was pounding in his chest though, it would be a completely different matter. He felt like the whole factory had to pulse with the way his heart thudded.
