by Vivi Andrews
The African-American girl staggered out of her cell and collapsed, fingertips twitching.
At the end of the hall, a large predatory cat snarled. The cougar. Puma Concolor. No, that wasn’t right, that was the species name for the feline. This was a shifter. A much more dangerous beast.
I’m going to die. The thought hovered without a tether in her mind.
The cat lunged forward, his steps strangely awkward and clumsy.
Gas, she realized in that same tetherless, moorless way. Of course the guards would gas them. You don’t try to take a cougar in hand-to-hand combat. Or a hawk. Her knees buckled and she staggered, falling to all fours. The linoleum was chilled beneath her palms, gritty with tiny particles of dirt the janitors had missed.
The cat continued to rush toward her—probably less affected by the gas thanks to the Wake-Up Juice she’d injected him with.
Her dizzy thoughts spun, as if stirred by a lazy finger. She really should have expected this. There was a sort of justice in it. A symmetry.
She should probably be upset about this, she thought vaguely as her arms gave out and her cheek took up residence between her palms on the dirty floor. If the cougar didn’t kill her, the Organization would. She’d betrayed them and her employers did not take that sort of thing lightly.
At least Noah had gotten away. He’d taken the hard drives. The shifters had a shot now. They would know what they were up against. With the roster they could protect themselves, with the schematics they could fight back, and with the financials they could attack the head of the beast, go right to the source.
She really should be sad that she wasn’t going to be alive to see it, but as her thoughts finally fogged to match the lethargy swamping the rest of her body, she found herself…relieved.
She was done. Done with the Organization. Done with the intrigue. Done doing the wrong thing in the name of the right thing. Done pretending obedience and living in an isolation bubble where she couldn’t allow herself to confide in anyone or care about anyone because they would only become a liability. Only one thought disrupted the perfect relief, one fear as she realized these might be the last conscious moments of her life.
Had she been forgiven?
Sure, she’d explained, she apologized, but how much of what she’d said while she was untying him had he been able to process? She thought of them as still friends, still allies, she’d seen them as partners in one last grand rescue…
She still loved him.
More the fool her.
The cat was impossibly close now, teeth and claws at the ready. Moment of truth…
The cat leapt over her and threw himself against the barred door, claws scrabbling, but he had no more luck than she had. Trapped.
The alarm cut out with an aborted squawk, leaving her ears ringing with the silence. The cougar rumbled queasily and thudded to the ground, his hindquarters landing on her legs, the substantial weight pinning them down—not that she would have been able to move anyway. Her body was beyond her control. She clung to consciousness by her fingernails—and in spite of her desperate grasp it was flaking off and peeling away.
Footsteps rushed down the hall. Faces in gas masks loomed above her. Madison. She couldn’t see the features, but she knew one of them was Madison.
“Not smart, Dr. Russell,” the woman scolded, a malicious smile in her voice.
No. Perhaps she hadn’t been smart today. But she’d done right. She’d made amends. Noah was free.
Rachel’s lips curved in a smile as her vision went dark and the mortal world fell away.
Whatever happened next, Noah was free.
Chapter Five
Adrian dreamt of a soft touch on his brow and the sharp jab of a needle into his hand. He tried to jerk away but something pulled at his wrist, holding him down. More restraints. Another IV. Back at the Organization labs. Fuck.
“Easy now.” The voice was unfamiliar. Masculine. “It’s just fluids.”
“Rachel,” he groaned, without managing to drag his weighted eyelids up. Was she here? Was that her holding a cloth to his brow? Her hand on the needle?
“What was that?” the man asked.
Adrian tried to speak again, but his lips wouldn’t move and his mind went into a flat spin, sending pieces of his awareness flying off like leaves on a merry-go-round. Another unknown voice spoke into his silence, this one female.
“It’s Rachel, I think. He calls out for her all the time, though I haven’t figured out if he’s asking for her or cursing her.”
The male voice chuckled. “It’s a woman. Probably both.”
“Nice, Doc.”
“Don’t take it personally, Moira. You know I don’t think of you as a woman.”
“Just digging yourself deeper, Doc.”
“Hormone levels are still dangerously high. His body isn’t shaking off the effects of the drugs the way I’d like.”
Adrian tried to hold on to the words, the names, the information—if he could just hear a little more he might learn where he was—but the flat spin was accelerating now, more pieces of him flying off into oblivion as the merry-go-round twirled faster and faster, and he lost his grip on the world.
Time slid sideways. He woke again, sometime later. Or perhaps he dreamed. In the dream, he’d made it safely to Lone Pine. He had the vague sense of other people entering the room, one of them so massive he could only be the pride’s Alpha. Adrian tried to tell them about the backpack—he’d buried it somewhere, hadn’t he? Just in case it was riddled with tracking devices—but he couldn’t be sure how many of the words he was actually managing to get out in coherent order.
Then the carousel kicked into warp speed and he flew off into senselessness.
When the world fell back into place around him, the room was quiet, punctuated by the rhythmic whirring and beeping of medical monitors and the soft, regular breaths and steady heartbeat of someone a few feet to his left.
He opened eyes that felt gritty and saw an unfamiliar blonde woman sprawled out on the chair beside his bed, reading off a tablet.
His head was only throbbing—which was a relief after the tornado-like spin-cycle it had been going through every time he rose up to semi-consciousness for the last god-only-knew how many hours or days.
His limbs felt wrong—achy and shivery and chilled, like the cold was radiating from the bones outward rather than the skin in. His chest ached when he tried to breathe and his throat was so dry his own saliva burned like acid when he tried to swallow.
The blackness was easier. So much more comfortable. He wanted to sink back into it and let oblivion wash away the aches of his body, but something held him back.
“Rachel.”
The woman’s chin jerked up, gaze lasering in on his and her lips quirked up on one side in a wry, smart-ass grin. “Don’t you recognize me? I’m crushed. After all the lovely talks we’ve had.”
She stood, flicking the tablet onto the chair where she had been sitting and crossing to his bedside to examine him with a briskness that spoke of long experience even if her bedside manner was more go-fuck-yourself than Florence Nightingale.
“I’m Grace, you’re Adrian Sokolov,” she said, with that same aura of an often repeated routine. “I’m a lion—” She half-shifted her hand and wagged a paw at him, flexing her claws, “—and a field medic, as well as a lieutenant at Lone Pine Pride. That’s where you are. We found your sorry ass unconscious in the woods three days ago. Xander thought you were dead, but Xander’s a dumbass, so don’t take that personally. Someone pumped you full of all manner of nasty shit and you’ve been in la-la-land off and on for the last few days as it played hell with your limbic system, though you’ve been boring as hell for the last twenty-eight hours—very inconsiderate of you, if I do say so myself—because you’ve been in what Doc Brandt calls a healing trance or some such shit. Feeling b
etter now?”
“Much.” His voice cracked and she lifted a cup with a straw to his lips. He drank, his throat still raw as hell, but surprisingly, his answer wasn’t a lie. His body was drained, but his brain was working in nice linear lines now rather than whirling in spirals and circles.
“Good. You look less like hammered shit too. Though I wouldn’t try running any marathons just yet. And don’t freak if you can’t shift. You’re still recovering from the shit they pumped into you.” The woman—Grace, apparently—moved away from his bedside then, sitting on the arm of the chair she’d recently vacated.
She was tall and strong, as many lionesses were, with blonde hair just long enough to curve next to her chin and an average, angular face made extraordinary by her pale blue-gray eyes rimmed by blue so dark it was almost navy. He didn’t know many prides with female lieutenants, but she exuded strength and authority in a way that made the claim easily credible. One foot swung idly as she studied him with those incredible eyes.
Could this really be Lone Pine?
The Lone Pine Pride in Montana wasn’t far from the Wyoming border. He vaguely remembered trying to get here, dragging his body north.
The pride was the biggest and strongest in the country. If anyone could take on the Organization, it was Lone Pine. They were also one of the only prides in the world that didn’t treat non-lions as vermin to be exterminated with extreme prejudice. Non-lion shifters told stories about them the same way people talked about Shangri-La. As this distant perfect place where no one was ever persecuted or rebuffed, where shifters who didn’t have the protection of packs and prides could finally find safety.
A lioness could be held captive at the Organization and forced to impersonate a medic for Adrian’s benefit, but he’d trusted this woman enough to give her his full name and his instincts told him this was the real deal.
“We recovered the hard drives.”
Every muscle in his body tensed with Grace’s words—which, considering the state of his muscles, hurt like hell. He had only the vaguest memory of ditching Rachel’s watch and burying the backpack beneath a big rock. “Did you check for tracking devices?”
“Nah, we thought it would be fun to lead the Organization right to our door.” She rolled her eyes. “Of course we did. They were clean. Though even if there had been a tracking device you might have managed to drown it. The backpack was wet as a groupie at rock concert. Apparently you swam through an ocean or two on your way here. I didn’t know birds were into swimming.”
“We aren’t.” He frowned, trying to remember the details of his escape, how he could have gotten wet, but everything after the Superman juice wore off was a black hole. If the backpack was wet… “Were the hard drives salvageable?”
Grace pulled a face. “We have our best people on it, but the Alpha and his heir both want to pick your brain as soon as you’re back in the land of the coherent, which you certainly seem to be. You’ve managed to focus on me for almost five minutes now and you haven’t called me Rachel more than once.”
Rachel. If that was even her name. He had the move elusive snippet of a memory of overhearing a guard call her something else. But when he tried to grasp it, it slithered away as if it had never been. And maybe it hadn’t.
But the memory of her thrusting the backpack into his arms was so real he could almost feel the nylon. Schematics, roster, financials. If she hadn’t lied about that… No tracking device—that they’d found. She could really have been trying to bring down the Organization. Unless she was playing an even longer game than he thought. Schematics, roster, financials. If that was what was really on those hard drives…if the information was authentic…then she was innocent—at least of that—and he had left her there to…what? Be killed for her part in his escape?
“You have to access the information on the hard drives.”
“We’re trying.”
“Try harder,” he demanded. “Those hard drives may contain schematics of the Organization locations, rosters of every shifter in the Organization files and financial records of where they are getting their funding.”
Grace went preternaturally still. “Are you serious?” She must have read the confirmation on his face because she didn’t wait for a verbal response. “Don’t move. I’m getting Roman.”
Don’t move. As if he could.
Seconds after Grace blasted out of the room, the doctor walked in. He was tall with military short salt-and-pepper hair and surprisingly thick hands. The woman who trailed after him was petite and tawny-colored, her hair, eyes and skin all in muted shades of brown, with a round sweet face that would always be called cute though she looked a decade past the point of appreciating that word as a compliment.
No one would ever call Rachel cute. Stunning. Gorgeous. Heart-stopping.
“Adrian, how are you feeling?”
The doctor moved to the bed and immediately began checking the same vitals Grace had just checked, also running through a gamut of questions asking him how every inch of his body was feeling, as well as how many fingers he saw and who was president. Adrian responded automatically, listening with half an ear, the rest of his attention locked on the nurse. She was so quiet, so peaceful, he couldn’t imagine her as a lion. There was nothing commanding or regal about her. She was mild and almost servile, gentle and distinctly submissive. He’d heard that Lone Pine allowed non-lion shifters into their ranks, but seeing it for himself was still jarring.
As the doctor interrogated him, the woman bustled to the far side of the room and cracked the window. The sounds of a busy pride instantly rushed in to meet his ears. Layers of unfamiliar voices calling to one another. Children laughing, the rhythmic squeak of swings on a playground.
The Organization wouldn’t know enough to fake a soundtrack for his hawk hearing.
Jesus.
He was really here. Lone Pine.
It was a strange feeling, both welcoming and confining, being here with so many others of his kind—even if they weren’t exactly his kind. He’d visited a wolf pack or two and knew a little about the lion prides, but his parents had raised him in a secluded cabin, far from the company of other hawks, let alone other shifter breeds. Whether by nature or nurture, he had grown into a solitary man. The army had forced him into a community, but it had been that same combination of welcome and uncomfortable, and ever since his discharge he’d been on his own. Until Rachel had contacted him and he’d become part of her team. But even then, he hadn’t gotten invested with anyone besides her. He’d moved shifters efficiently, without getting attached. Vegas had been a perfect base of operations—the kind of place where lots of people vanished and popped up again unexpectedly, where no one looked too closely at anyone else.
Rushing footsteps announced the arrival of Grace with the big Alpha. Adrian vaguely remembered the man looming over his bedside, but little else.
The massive blond man radiated command as only a born leader could, but the doctor turned to the larger man with a stern expression. “Fifteen minutes, no more. No tiring the patient.”
With that, he and the nurse slipped out, the door clicking shut behind them.
Grace fixed Adrian with a don’t-let-me-down stare. “This is Roman. Tell him exactly what you told me.”
Wasting no words, Adrian explained to the Alpha what Rachel had told him. When he was done, the big man couldn’t have looked more stunned if he’d been hit in the face with a two-by-four.
“Holy shit,” he muttered under his breath, eyes narrowing. “How did you get all that?”
Adrian didn’t flinch at the Alpha’s obvious suspicion. He would have been an idiot not to mistrust such a gift. “I stole them when I escaped.”
“And they were just lying out where a stoned-out shifter would trip over them on the way out?”
The backpack hitting his chest. Brown eyes staring intently into his. “There was a doctor,�
�� he said, inexplicably reluctant to let them know about her. She was his. “A woman.”
“She helped you?”
Had she? His memories were so warped, but it seemed that she had, that day. But on another day, six months earlier, she’d betrayed him in the worst way. He couldn’t seem to accept her help this week at face value. There was too much history there. But the facts didn’t lie. “I think so. It’s hard to be sure. My memories are all jumbled up.”
“But you remember what’s on the hard drives.”
“She kept repeating it.” He remembered that much. The butterfly words. And if she really had helped him escape, what possible reason could she have for lying? Unless… “You checked my body for tracking devices?”
“Before we brought you back here.”
He lifted a hand, rubbing absently at the bandage on his chest where Rachel had dug something out. “And the hard drives? You had the backpack checked as well?”
“It was clean.”
Clean. No tracking devices. No ulterior motives. No tricks. She may have genuinely been trying to make right what she had done when she betrayed him.
He couldn’t seem to stop thinking about the lines of strain on her face, the hunted shadows in her eyes. She was in trouble—or a damn fine actress pretending to be. She had rescued him, but she was also the reason he was in Organization captivity to begin with. He refused to care about the extra stress on her face, the fear in her eyes. He had gone against his better judgment once for this woman and look where it had gotten him.
“I wondered if she was setting me up. Tricking me into escaping so I would lead them to Lone Pine. But I wanted so badly to get out of there, I didn’t even care if I was endangering all of you by coming here.” It was a miracle he’d found the place at all.
Roman surprised him by not railing at him for the risk. “We’ve heightened our security. So far there has been no indication that you were followed.”
“There won’t be.” Even if the Organization was coming for them. “They’re good at what they do.” He swallowed, his throat convulsing with the effort. “If they aren’t using me to try to get into Lone Pine, the information on the hard drives could be legitimate.” Or the information itself could be the trap. “But if they know I took it, they’ll begin moving people.” Moving Rachel. Imprisoning her. Torturing her. “If we want to have any chance of rescuing them—”
