by Anya Nowlan
“Get on in there, we’re already behind schedule,” the man said, gripping her by the arm as they made it to the plane.
Dutifully, she climbed on, took her seat behind the pilot’s chair and had the belt fastened around her quickly and efficiently. Two guards filed in after her and a few minutes later, the airplane was taking off, the small engine making a questionable rattling sound that Meredith had come to learn to expect.
She looked out of the window in time to see the first explosion, originating in the middle of the lot that the twins had parked their car at. Meredith gasped as the small plane rocked to the side from the blast, the pilot steadying it swiftly enough when two other, smaller explosions followed the first one in quick succession.
Right about then, Shifter Squad Nine was descending down on The Arctics’ base like a plague of locusts, starting with blowing up their car park with the use of several high-duty explosives set in the armored vehicle Meredith had travelled in. It wouldn’t take the squad long to get in through the gates, seeing as Prowler and Price opened them from the inside, and Thor had taken the guards out from a nest set up a few days in advance.
The only people who’d stand to tell anything about the existence of the two bases in the middle of the Peruvian rain forest were Meredith and the three lucky sods that had gotten on the airplane with her. No one else would live to tell the tale and frankly, Meredith wouldn’t shed a single tear for any of them.
I’ll get back to you, Dice. Show them hell while I work on my side, she thought, plastering a look of shock on her expression as the men around her burst into aggravated conversation. We’ll make it through. Together. We have to.
Eight
Dice
Nine months later…
Dice’s footsteps were hard and heavy as he crossed through the long hallways of the Chicago base. He was muddy, bloody, filthy and smelled like someone had dunked him in a pit of gasoline, which wasn’t too far from the truth. But it was sure as hell that no one was going to point any of this out to him or question his cleanliness right now, because the expression he wore promised that the first person to get in his way would die a sudden and very painful death.
“Where the FUCK is he?!” Dice commanded, storming into the third floor research facilities.
The Chicago base mostly dealt with research and development for The Firm, while the one in California acted more like a forward camp for outgoing missions all over the world. The Firm had an endless supply of safehouses and command bases all around the world, though the clusters were mostly in the USA and the major European and Asian cities.
Most of the management seemed to be in the States more often than not, or so they’d have their employees think, because no one really knew for a fact who owned The Firm.
However, Dice had it on good account that right now, he could find Spade in the Chicago offices and if he didn’t, he was going to tear through the whole goddamn globe until he found the man and personally removed his spine from his body.
“W-who?” the clerk asked, a shuddery looking young woman with mousy-brown eyes.
“Spade,” Dice hissed, the word like a curse as it came off his lips.
“He’s in t-there,” she said, pointing at the large doors down the corridor that would take Dice into one of the simulation bays.
He glared at her, as if to make certain whether or not she was telling him the truth, before stomping off again in the noted direction. Slamming the door open in front of him, the large werebear commando barged in, completely uncaring as to what he might be interrupting. In fact, one look at him would confirm that the more of a mess he managed to create at the moment, the gladder he would be.
“Dice. Back so soon,” Spade said flatly, handing a clipboard with information to an aid as he surveyed the large man approaching him with murder in his eyes. “Leave us.”
Spade’s command was heeded immediately. The two geeky-looking aids skittered out of the lab faster than Dice could approach them and the large piece of machinery that was being tested at the moment was shut down as well. He thought he could hear some movement at the periphery as well, assuming that some people in viewing rooms to the sides were making themselves scarce.
They were in a large gymnasium-looking room, the walls painted an unappealing gray, with what looked like some sort of a futuristic tank sitting in the middle of it on some piece of machinery that seemed to act as a variable physics terrain device, providing resistance and higher or lower altitudes and natural formations for the vehicle to cross over. The boy in him wanted to go check out the tank, but every single other part of him wanted to kill Spade where he stood.
So he stormed right to the man, knowing that his eyes had to be dark brown and threatening as fuck at the moment, and swung at him with all the strength he had. Spade sidestepped him like he was some sort of an amateur at his first boxing match.
He was still faster than anyone Dice had ever known. It was fucking enraging.
“Where IS SHE!?” Dice growled, his voice resonating back from the high ceiling of the lab. “You fucking promised she’d be there. I tore up half of fucking Bolivia with your bloodhounds and she wasn’t there.”
“Guess the intel must have been wrong then,” Spade said with the simplest of shrugs, his gaze impassive and almost bored as he ducked and weaved as Dice attempted to land a punch again.
He must have been exhausted and out of his mind, or Spade had gotten even better over the years. Both probably had a bit to do with how easily Dice was out-maneuvered. He hadn’t slept in three days, though it felt like he hadn’t rested since he’d allowed Meredith to slip out of his grasp.
“You guess? You fucking GUESS? What is this, the tenth fucking time your intel’s been off?”
Dice couldn’t keep his voice level or wipe the honest rage from his expression. It simply could not be done. He was too pissed off and far too ready and willing to see Spade’s brains coating one of those gray walls, if for no other reason than to relieve some of the pent-up anger he was experiencing.
“In all fairness, I never promised that you’d find her there,” Spade said with a shrug of his shoulders, looking at him almost as if he were bored.
Dice’s hands rolled into even tighter fists, forcing himself to stand still for a moment, to breathe and see if he could incite any other emotion in himself other than flaming outrage. So far, no luck.
“I haven’t heard from her in six months, Spade. Six. Months. You dangle my mate in front of my nose like some twisted kind of bait and then you let her disappear again? Where is she, you motherfucking piece of shit?! Where!? I need to know. I’m done doing your dirty work, I’m done wrangling your zoo. Keep them. Keep it all. You either tell me where Meredith is or I swear to all the spirits, I will make it my life’s mission to make your life hell.”
The smirk that crossed Spade’s features was probably the closest thing Dice had seen the man show that could loosely be defined as an actual emotion. It only made things worse that Spade chose to quietly mock him for his pain.
Dice’s jaw squared, his eyes narrowing. Man against man, Spade could outmaneuver him. But shifter against shifter? He wasn’t so sure. Not that Spade would ever let it come to a fight where he didn’t have a clear and immediate advantage, of course.
After Meredith had been tucked away on that plane and flown out of Peru right along with Dice’s heart, Shifter Squad Nine had gone to town on the outpost. They dismantled it to its base particles. Not only would there not be a single Arctics’ agent in the region to tell the tale of how The Firm won that day, but every transmission, every video feed, every wall and tower had been captured, destroyed and blown up for good measure.
Dice had never seen Rio quite so happy as when Dice had given the order to make sure that nothing on the two Arctics’ sites could be larger than the size of his fist. The amount of firepower and destruction that damn lion could pack into an afternoon was staggering. It was like watching the Fourth of July fireworks over Los Angeles
when Rio had thrown the switches later that day. Pure magic, really.
For the first few months after that mission, things had been working smoothly enough. The Firm gave Dice frequent updates on Meredith, along with her supposed location and the occasional video feed or two, and he could keep his head in the game.
Shifter Squad Nine had continued to be thrown into more and more harrowing situations and begrudgingly, they’d come to respect one another enough so that Dice could at least pretend to trust them not to shoot him in the back during a mission.
He wouldn’t go so far as to say that he was friends with any of them, though the twins seemed to get along well enough amongst themselves as they seemed to resonate on the same frequency of crazy, but when he gave an order, he could assume that it was followed. There would be plenty of bitching and moaning, but they’d fucking do it.
It had taken at least three near-death experiences, including Ryker almost getting his arm cut off during an especially brutal fight in New Zealand with some zealot-like Arctics’ groupies, and Price nearly getting them all killed when the chopper he flew was cut off by two assault helicopters during a mission over Cambodia. In short, times had been interesting for Shifter Squad Nine.
But over time, the feeds seemed to disappear completely and the news on Meredith grew rarer and rarer until it seemed to stop completely around the five-month mark. Since then, Dice had been getting a very elaborate song and dance routine about how getting reliable information was ‘hard’ and he would be told as soon as something came up. In a word, it was bullshit.
The longer he waited for news, the more antsy and angry he got, until it didn’t take a genius to realize that Spade had been throwing the squad into increasingly questionable missions all over the globe, most of the time as far as possible from The Arctics’ main hubs. Dice was wise enough to assume that it was partially because Spade didn’t want Dice going guerilla on his ass and starting to bomb The Arctics’ main sites with reckless abandon.
“Hell, hmm?” Spade finally asked, still wearing that smug, indecipherable smirk of his. “I don’t think you know the definition of it.”
“Yeah? Having my mate being held by a terrorist organization run by people I can only assume to be carbon copies of who you are now is not your understanding of hell? Maybe so, but I certainly know what bitter pain tastes like and I sure as fuck would like to give you a crash course on that, friend.”
He stressed the last word, in a standoff with the high-ranking Firm agent. He had a sidearm on his hip and the rifle he’d used during the mission still slung over his back. Spade didn’t look to be armed, but knowing him, he certainly had a piece somewhere. But as much as Dice wanted to wring his neck, he couldn’t. Spade was the only one who could actually know where Meredith was.
Dice had gone from questioning his former friend’s morals to hating him as fiercely as any other man in The Firm, but he wasn’t dumb enough to think that anyone else could help him solve his very obvious and glaring problem.
“I think you’d find that to be incorrect,” Spade said, the smirk falling off his features and his tone somber.
It made Dice’s brow tick up, but nothing more. He waited, controlling himself so he wouldn’t lash out again.
Deep fucking breaths, Dice…
“Did you get what I needed you to find?” Spade asked suddenly, shoving his hands in the pockets of his black slacks.
“In Argentina? Yeah, we got it. We got the convoy and took the blood samples you wanted. Thor handed them over to the lab geeks,” Dice said, gritting out the words as if each one cut him personally.
“Good,” Spade said with a nod.
“I wasn’t kidding, you know. I’m done. You either tell me where Meredith is and show me some kind of a plan to get her out of there, or I’ll go find her myself. I might not fucking find her but at least I’ll be doing something instead of playing Earth Warden for your twisted schemes.”
“I know,” Spade said, his words dull. “And you won’t leave.”
That disarmed Dice. Was Spade calling his bluff?
His brow furrowed, glaring back at the tall, foreboding figure of the one man that every operative seemed to loathe with equal fervor, and all for different reasons. All good reasons.
“You know? Does that mean you’ll do something about it? And why do you think I won’t fucking quit? I’d rather be a bouncer at a club at this rate. The Nine guys are fine on their own, they can work without me.”
The last one was a lie. They needed someone to hold onto the goddamn collars around their neck the whole time if any of those shifters wanted to pretend to be a functioning member of society. Even a fucked up one like The Firm.
“Dice, you should know by now that none of this happens without a good, solid reason to back it up,” Spade said with the makings of a sigh, strolling up to him in the most casual way. “Follow me,” he said, and begrudgingly, Dice followed as Spade led them out of the lab.
His steps were fast, but still came off as somehow ambling, as if he had all the time in the world while Dice by his side was losing what shreds of sanity he had left. He had half a mind to peel off and just leave then and there, abandon everything, get some of his old Navy buddies together and mount his own mission to go find Meredith. But unfortunately enough, he knew that the chances of that actually playing out in his favor were slim to none.
The world was too fucking large to find one woman on his own.
Spade led him down the hall, past the clerk Dice had scared half to death before, and into a small office space with several desks and set-up workstations with people typing away. He walked to the closest one and a low growl of a command made the guy sitting at the computer spring out of his seat and practically jump ten feet away from Spade.
Must be a cheetah, Dice thought with some grim amusement.
Without sitting down, Spade leaned forward and typed a few commands into the command line, until he was prompted to give a series of passwords. Finally, a folder opened up, titled Meredith Wilder. The contents of it made Dice crumble into the seat the techie had vacated.
There were folders after folders of photographs of Meredith at various locations, some of which Dice recognized as sites he had actually scoured through over the last nine months. Times when he had thought himself to have caught a whiff of her scent here or there, or sense her presence in one way or another now came out to be true. He’d simply always been one or several steps behind her, though he got the feeling that this too was intentional on Spade’s part.
But other than the places, it was the woman depicted that shocked Dice. He understood immediately why the video feeds and pictures hadn’t been sent to him after a while.
She was pregnant. And then very pregnant. And then holding a baby boy in her arms in a few pictures.
His baby boy.
Dice looked up at Spade, his gray eyes wavering with barely contained emotion, both rage and confusion boiling over into one tangled sensation of confusion.
“How could you…” he started, trailing off.
Not tell me? Keep me from her? Keep my child from me? How COULD you!?
“This is bigger than both of us,” Spade said dryly.
And this time, Spade didn’t deny Dice the pleasure of punching him in the face. The way Spade’s cheek crackled against his fist was almost too rewarding.
Nine
Meredith
“What about today? Can I see him today?” Meredith begged, the strong, sure arms of the two guards, one at either side of her, holding her by the elbows feeling like vices as she was half-dragged, half-walked down to the cells.
“We’ll see,” one of them said, the taller one, though after being in the complex for what must have been over two months now, she still didn’t know what his name was.
Or anyone’s name, really. No one was sharing a thing with her anymore. Now, she was just one of the prisoners, only vaguely recognizable by the fact that she got pulled out of her ratty room every day to be walke
d down to the labs and shoved in there for twelve hours until night came again.
Every day, the routine would be the same. She would wake up and beg to see her son. She’d get evasive answers, exactly like the dozen or so other women she knew to be in the rooms around her, including the three that were with her. They’d have breakfast, she’d get carted off to her work, be served lunch and something vaguely resembling dinner in the lab, and then walked back to the rooms when it was too dark outside to see anymore.
Not that she ever really saw a window. There was only one, and even that one she could only partially see sometimes when she was being walked to or from the rooms, if one of the doors along the main hallway leading to the staircase happened to be left open. It almost never was.
So far, her assumption was that she was stuck somewhere in the Middle East, because even with the air conditioning going full blast it would be hot in the building, but not humid. It was a dry, scorching heat that seemed to permeate your whole being and make every pore thirst for water, even if you were drinking at the very moment.
Meredith hated it. Then again, there were very few things lately that she did not hate. After Dean had been taken from her, finding joy had become increasingly impossible.
Dean.
Simply the thought of him made her eyes water and her throat seem to collapse on itself. She shook her head quickly, willing herself not to cry in front of the guards. There would be plenty of time for that when she got back into her room.
“Will my work be checked soon? I’m almost done, I need live test subjects now. Please, have them check my work,” Meredith whispered, reciting the same plea she’d been saying for more than a week now, her body convulsing with a tremor as she looked up into the cold, uncaring faces of the two men carting her back to the rooms.
