by Vivi Andrews
“We need you off the grounds before the surveillance upgrade decoy finishes running. If they suspect anything and hit the alarm, even my badge won’t get us out of the exterior doors—they only open from the outside during lockdown and then only if your clearance is higher than mine. But if we can— There!” She straightened, his last bindings falling away. “Can you stand?”
She reached for his arms, and he flinched back, crossing his arms over his chest. A flash of hurt was quickly masked on her face. “I’m helping you,” she said, low and calm. “We’re escaping. You and me. I know you have no reason to trust me right now, but why would I lie about this?”
Why? A thousand whys instantly jumped into his head—not butterfly puzzle pieces but a hive of angry bees.
To fuck with him. To trick him into revealing something. To trick him into shifting so they could observe it. Hell, he wouldn’t put it past the Organization to actually let him go so they could follow him and use him to capture other shifters.
Rachel must have seen his doubt. Her expression hardened. “I’m not lying, Noah. Hawk. Whatever you want me to call you. I’m sorry about what happened before—more sorry than you can know—but it was for the greater good. I hoped you would understand that.” She shook her head. “We don’t have time for begging forgiveness right now. They’ve begun to suspect me. You’re my last extraction. Please just let me help you.”
She reached for him again and this time he let her touch him, let her hands close around his upper arms and guide him to the edge of the bed where he tried to put weight on legs as wobbly as a newborn fawn. His stomach pitched violently and he cursed under his breath, digging deep, dredging up all his will and every last reserve of shifter strength and it was barely enough to get him vertical.
She muttered something and dove into the backpack at her feet. She straightened with a syringe in her hand and Adrian jerked back so fast he collapsed back onto the bed.
“It’s energy!” She raised both hands like he’d told her to stick ’em up. “Artificial strength. You’ll feel like Superman for the next couple hours and then you’ll crash harder than ever, but we have to get out of here. Understand?”
“No drugs,” he growled in his raked-over-glass voice, swallowing hard to keep his stomach from sending its contents up to visit with his tonsils.
“You can’t run. You can barely stand and we don’t have time to wait for you to recover. It’s this or a lifetime in Organization custody and that life sentence might be pretty darn short since they were planning to transfer you to the torture division.”
“No drugs.” He thought he managed to say the words aloud, but it was hard to tell—even her face wasn’t steady anymore, dancing like a fucking Cheshire cat’s.
She sighed. “You can hate me later.” She moved fast—it couldn’t have been shifter fast, he knew she was only human, but it seemed shifter-fast to his muddled senses. The syringe was needle-deep in his thigh before he could blink and then warmth was slithering through his body on a strange, invigorating tide.
“I already hate you,” he tried to say. But it was working.
Strength. Fuck. She hadn’t been kidding. This stuff was incredible. It did almost nothing to clear the cobwebs from his mind, but damn if his body didn’t feel like it was puffing up like Captain freaking America. His stomach settled and the quaking left his legs. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see his muscles visibly swelling, but when he looked down he was still the same wrecked, shriveled bag of bones.
“Put these on.” He recognized the light-weight sweats that she tossed at him from the corner cabinet. They were standard “exercise” wear for the captives during endurance experiments.
He was tempted to throw them back at her, but he really was starting to feel like Superman. If he could overpower her, perhaps he really could escape. And if it really was September, he was going to need something warmer than a bloody half-shredded T-shirt when he did.
Adrian quickly changed, not giving a thought for modesty. Dr. Russell blushed and averted her eyes and he snorted as he pulled on the sweats. “Nothing you haven’t seen already, sweetheart.”
“Hurry up,” she said, making a point of checking her watch rather than looking at him. “We have sixteen minutes left to get clear of the building.”
“Let’s go then.” He crowded up behind her. He’d never been in the habit of using his height to intimidate, but he found he loved the way she flinched when he towered over her.
She darted toward the door, swiping her access card and tapping a number sequence into the panel until it beeped and clicked open. She silently held up a finger and he stayed back, stayed quiet. He may not trust her any farther than his atrophied muscles could throw her, but he’d ride this out and see how far it would take him. Whether she was really rescuing him or just playing at it to mind-fuck him, it didn’t do him any good to balk now. So he played along.
She poked her head out into the hallway, then opened the door all the way, nodding to him to follow her as she darted into the hall. He stayed on her six, the instincts of a lifetime in special ops making his fingers itch for a weapon even as he hurried silently in her wake.
The facility wasn’t large, he quickly realized. Two short hallways, two quick turns, and they were at a door marked EXIT in bold red letters.
The intercom crackled. “Dr. Russell, please report to security. Dr. Russell to security.”
Rachel stiffened, sucking in a sharp breath at the sound of the impersonal female monotone floating through the hallway and all of Adrian’s doubts coalesced into an angry knot of certainty.
Another trick. That’s all this was. Another fucking game. He didn’t know why he’d believed, even for a second, that Rachel might be helping him. That he might actually be able to get free of this place. He longed again for his missing talons, for blood dripping from them.
He wouldn’t go back to the cell. He’d make them hunt him through the short white corridors of the outpost like a rat in a maze first.
Focusing his eyes was still a challenge, but he managed to home in on her face, saw the decision form, the determination settle there. She pivoted, swiped her card over the panel next to the exterior door and let out a soft sigh of relief when the door beeped twice and popped open.
She grabbed him by the shoulder and shoved him through the opening into the shadow of the building. Disorientation shuddered through him. Sunlight. He didn’t know why he’d been so sure it was night, but the sunlight filtered through the trees and cool breeze rode the air. A fall breeze. Jesus, he really had lost months in there. The trees were pines, the slope rising behind the building steep enough to qualify as a mountain. He had to be three hundred miles from the city where he’d been taken, but for all he knew it was closer to two thousand. Dorothy, we aren’t in Vegas anymore.
A backpack hit him square in the chest, the backpack he hadn’t noticed Rachel carrying. “Remember, schematics, roster, financials.”
“What?” He clutched the backpack automatically.
Frustration suffused her face. “Haven’t you been listening?”
The words, he remembered. The butterfly words. Had they been important? Then he realized she was speaking again, these words quick and angry, a hive of bees.
“Three hard drives. Schematics and locations of Organization facilities, a roster of all known shifters, and financial records of all Organization dealings. You have to get them to shifters who can use them to bring the Organization down.”
Tracking devices, probably. So the Organization could locate the largest and most organized shifter opposition.
“Repeat it back to me. Schematics, roster, financials.”
He didn’t for a second believe that was what was in the bag, but he parroted obediently. “Schematics, roster, financials.”
“One more time.”
“Schematics, roster, financials. I’ve
got it.”
“Good.” She threw a glance behind her, back into the building where the intercom crackled again with another request for her to report to security. “We’re in Wyoming. Northwest corner of the state. Near Cody.”
Something in him shuddered at the thought. Shit. That had to be nine hundred miles. Nine hundred miles they’d transported him without his knowledge. Like so much luggage.
She pointed to a small black dome in the eave above the door, standard surveillance camera. The building was smaller even than he’d thought. Just a few hundred square feet when he’d always envisioned the Organization facilities as bigger than the Pentagon.
“The cameras should be offline for another six minutes. They only go a hundred feet past the tree line and the motion sensors were deactivated because they kept tripping for local fauna. Get into the forest and you should be clear.” She put a hand over the backpack. “Run, Hawk. Run like hell.”
“So you can hunt me?” He didn’t realize he’d growled the words aloud until he saw the hurt flicker briefly across her face, but she didn’t reply to the jab. All business, his Rachel.
“We’re getting out, Noah. This facility is backed up to a National Park and they won’t want to draw the attention of the rangers, so you should have the advantage. I’ll buy you as much time as I can and be right behind you. By now they’ve figured out I’m not entirely on the straight and narrow. Hopefully they’ll be too distracted by me to come after you right away. When I can get clear of them, I’ll post to the old message boards.”
“You expect me to believe you would sacrifice yourself for me? After everything you did to me?”
Irritation flashed in her warm chocolate eyes. “It was never about you,” she snapped. “None of it. Now go.” She slipped off her watch and grabbed his wrist, putting it on him. “Four minutes.” She placed a hand over the backpack he still held to his chest, almost as if it was a child she was praying over. “Make it count, Noah.”
She went up on her toes so quickly he didn’t have time to react before her lips were pressed, soft and sweet, to his. He jerked away, tempted to spit out the taste of her, but she was already whirling, bolting back inside, the door clanging heavily shut as she left him there, quite literally holding the bag.
Adrian cursed.
He knew it was all a trick, all a lie. The Organization bitch would never have released him into the wild. He was probably carrying enough tracking devices to be seen from space—if that even made sense. His brain felt like it was three-quarters mush. Luckily his instincts were still online, and they were urging him to run like hell. Even if he was being used as bait, he could be bait that got the hell away from here. He ran.
Chapter Four
There were certain defining moments in a person’s life, moments that gave you the opportunity to test your true nature and see if you were really the person you thought you were. In a crisis, would you save the day or be a lump of useless, shocky flesh? You never really knew until you were tested.
Rachel had often wondered if she would truly be able to sacrifice herself for others. Or if, when push came to shove, when it was the moment of truth, if she would give in to self-preservation and fight for her own survival instead.
When she’d first discovered that her “patients” at the Organization weren’t there voluntarily, she’d told herself the shifter captives wouldn’t be helped in any way by her disappearance—but she’d still called herself the worst sort of coward because she had let herself be cowed by the Organization’s thinly veiled threats.
She knew now that her bosses hadn’t been bluffing. She’d had colleagues vanish when they started asking the wrong sorts of questions. The local authorities had never investigated—the Organization selected their personnel carefully. No family attachments, unless they could be exploited as leverage. The preacher and his wife who had adopted and raised Rachel had both passed by the time she was recruited into the less-than-legal side of the Organization.
They were careful. No one would raise a ruckus if a scientist notoriously terrified of flying decided without warning to jet off to Mozambique to pursue a research grant. There was always a barely plausible story to explain the disappearance, and anyone else within the Organization who was thinking rebellious thoughts heard the warning in the faulty explanations. You could be next.
In the Organization there were two options—toe the line and advance, or rebel and vanish. So Rachel had toed the line, and told herself it was for the best, that through her treatment she was at least better for the shifters than some other less humane doctor might be. She told herself there was nothing she could do.
Until God had seen fit to give her an opportunity to prove her true mettle again.
It had been a clerical error. A glitch. A sign.
The shifter on her table had been very much alive, but somehow the file had been marked deceased. There were no additional transfer orders, no one who was expecting to receive this shifter for the next round of tests because as far as the system was concerned, the slim, dark-haired wolf was dead.
It had been convenient that the video surveillance systems had been knocked out in a lightning strike the day before, impulse to dress the woman in a spare pair of her scrubs, and pure luck that the guard at the gate hadn’t looked under the blanket in the backseat of Rachel’s car. That first time had been completely unplanned and her heart had been thundering out of her chest the entire time, but she’d done it. She’d saved a life. She’d proven that she wasn’t only a coward. She could be more.
So she’d begun planning and recruiting. Finding those who seemed dissatisfied within the Organization and cautiously approaching them. Computer techs, other doctors, even the occasional—rare—guard. They’d developed a system that wasn’t without risk, but it had succeeded. Five times. Ten. Rachel had been heady with the victory, but she’d still worried about what was happening to the shifters after she set them loose into the world. Some of them were so weak, so damaged. What was to say they wouldn’t be captured again?
It was one of the escapees—a young lynx with eyes too old for his face—who had given her the contact information for a shifter who could help them from the outside. Forged identities. Safe houses. Picking up where her operation left off.
Noah. Her hawk.
They’d worked together for years before they’d met, freeing over sixty shifters before that night in the woods when he’d stepped out of the shadows and straight into her heart.
Betraying him had been another of those defining moments. She could still feel the syringe in her hand. The wrongness of it. He’d had his back to her, gun in hand, ready to defend her with his life, if that was what it took, and she’d done it. Taken him down. Handed him over.
She told herself it was for the greater good. A thousand times she’d told herself that, but it still felt like a lie, even if she knew it to be the unvarnished truth.
The Organization had already known about him when they approached her to acquire him. They’d known that she was seeing him, but not that Rachel was involved in the shifter underground or even the extent of the Hawk’s involvement, as they called him. If they’d kept digging, it would have compromised the entire operation and endangered the lives of all the shifters they’d whisked to freedom, not to mention those they had yet to free.
All those lives had meant sacrificing one, so she’d done it. And hated herself every day since.
But today she got to make amends.
Madison’s voice crackled over the intercom again, demanding Rachel report to security for the third time, an edge of impatience creeping into her sedate intercom voice.
Sorry, Maddie. A little busy at the moment.
Rachel swiped her card over the access panel for the pharmacy storage, expelling a little gasp of relief when the door beeped and glided open. At least her card was still working; they hadn’t gone on full lockdown yet.
She made quick work of grabbing the vials she needed, shoving them into her pockets and filling syringes on the run as she trotted down the hall to the cells. The first cell door beeped and whooshed open, revealing a muscular Caucasian man with dark-hair just going to gray, unconscious and strapped to the bed. Rachel shot the Wake-Up Juice into his IV, jammed a chair in the doorway to keep the door propped open, and ran to the next cell. Hopefully he could get himself free of his own restraints because she didn’t have time to untie him.
Three cells later—one empty, one with a wiry African-American female and one with a slight Asian male who looked even more emaciated than Noah had—Rachel heard a distinctly feline roar from the first cell and changed direction, diving into the empty cell and pressing herself against the wall. She wasn’t wearing a lab coat—nothing to identify her as an Organization doc other than the fact that she didn’t smell like a shifter, but somehow she didn’t think the enraged cat was going to ask questions or care that she was the one who had freed him.
With a scrabble of claws against linoleum, the cat took off down the hall, a streak of tawny fur past the open doorway. As soon as the coast was clear, Rachel darted out of her hiding place and ran as fast as she could in the opposite direction—back toward the door where she’d left Noah.
How many minutes had it been? It must have been more than four, so why weren’t the alarms—?
As if on cue, the intercom squawked and a deafening siren began to wail, the agonizing screeches reverberating off the walls. A headache immediately blossomed between her temples—and she didn’t even have a shifter’s sensitive hearing.
She reached the door, swiping her card over the access panel, but the light stayed stubbornly red. She swiped again, frantically, but it was no use. Lockdown.
Rachel spun, pressing her shoulder blades back against the door. What now?
Her thoughts began to drift. Floating. Flying. Noah is clear. He had to be. If he’d gotten away, it would all be worth it.
