by Vivi Andrews
Rachel barely heard her.
Was he still angry with her? Did he ever wonder what had happened to her? Did he ever think about her? She couldn’t seem to stop thinking about him. Trapped inside her lab, day after day, forced to work for the devil just to keep on breathing.
She’d discovered she liked breathing. Another defining moment.
Often it was him she thought about as she worked to further the Organization’s cause against her will. She hoped he would respect that she was doing what she needed to survive, but couldn’t help fearing he would prefer she had eaten a bullet instead.
“You and I are going to get to know one another better,” Madison went on, apparently having tired of waiting for a response from her. “Plenty of time for that when we get to your new lab.” Rachel looked up at that and Madison smiled. “We’re moving you. You have twenty-four hours to pack your research.”
Rachel bit her tongue and held her breath until Madison’s near-silent footsteps faded and the door whispered shut behind her. Only then did her brain latch on to her last words like a drowning woman gasping for air.
They were moving her. Did that mean Noah was coming here? Did they know something about the shifters’ plans? Or was it just a precautionary measure? They were careful, doubtless evacuating all the locations the infamous Hawk might know about.
She was more than a little surprised they hadn’t moved her to the C Blocks to try to get the information out of her. She was too valuable to be tortured, apparently. Just like she was too valuable to be killed. Her unique understanding of shifter reproductive science was the only thing keeping her alive.
Rachel scanned the lab, mentally prioritizing each item, deciding what to pack first. As tempting as it was to tell the Organization to screw themselves and smash every instrument in her prison, she knew the only ones who would suffer from her tantrum would be the shifters who would be put through the same tests all over again to reclaim any data she destroyed.
She hadn’t been allowed to have any contact with her patients, which wasn’t much of a surprise. Ever since she’d woken up in this lab after Noah’s escape to find Madison eyeing her with her chilly gaze, her low voice calmly explaining how disappointed she was in Rachel, she’d known things weren’t going to be like before. She wasn’t the Organization golden child anymore. She was a traitor. A prisoner.
She stood, the anklet weighing heavy against her left ankle. It had been locked around her ankle when she woke up that morning with Madison standing over her.
Think of it as house arrest, Dr. Russell. This lab is your house.
And if I leave?
Thirty seconds later, boom. You’re an amputee. Don’t try to leave, Dr. Russell.
Her life stretched out in front of her—days and nights locked in this lab, or another one just like it in another facility. Unless Noah came for her. That was what she dreamed about each night on the cot tucked against the far wall. Noah bursting into the lab, armed to the teeth, bristling with strength and purpose as she’d seen him that night in the hotel. Not as she’d last seen him, emaciated and staggering, each step a struggle as she rushed him through the sterile Organization halls.
She dreamt someone would rescue her, just as she’d rescued over a hundred shifters, but she, better than anyone, knew the odds, and they weren’t in her favor.
She didn’t bother going to her cot to collect her personal items—there weren’t any. She wondered, sometimes, when the nights were long and the whirr of the lab equipment kept her awake, what had happened to her things at her condo. The photos and keepsakes she’d brought from her parents’ house when her mother passed could be gathering dust in her empty apartment. All of her bills were set to autopay and she’d practically lived at her work before she was forced to literally live at her work, so it could be months or even years before anyone realized she wasn’t in her condo anymore. Or had the Organization swept in and collected all her things so it would look like she had moved? Had they taken her things, moved them to some storage unit somewhere filled with the possessions of the hundreds of shifters they’d kidnapped over the years?
The Organization had chosen well when they hired her. No one would miss her.
Sure, she’d had occasional email contact with friends from college and med school, but everyone had grown up and grown apart, gotten busy with their own lives, their own families and practices. Her schedule had never made it easy to cultivate friendships outside the Organization and with her family gone, who would even notice she wasn’t around anymore?
No one, apparently.
It was a sobering thought. Thirty-two years on the planet and if she simply vanished off it, no one would know or care. That wasn’t what her life had been supposed to be. This wasn’t who she was.
She shook away the depressing thought. There was no sense dwelling on it now when she should be packing. She had a lifetime to dwell on it when they got her to her new prison, wherever that was. Though wherever it was, she was sure it wouldn’t be on any of the hard drives she’d smuggled out with Noah. They were taking her beyond his reach.
Rachel rubbed her fist against her sternum, pressing against the ache there. She hadn’t forgotten the look of betrayal in his eyes when she’d jabbed him with the needle. The idea that he would fight his way into an Organization facility just for her…ludicrous.
But still she hoped for it, with the part of her soul that still believed in miracles.
The lights flickered and a fraction of a second later, the building shuddered.
Rachel stumbled, bracing herself against the wall as the room went dark. Power failure alarms began beeping insistently on the machines around her and emergency fluorescent lighting kicked in, casting the room in an odd, muted orange glow. In the distance, several floors above her head, a siren began a cascading whoop.
“Noah.”
It had to be him.
And she couldn’t go to him. She couldn’t help. She couldn’t do a damn thing, trapped in her lab while all of the machines seized from lack of electricity.
“Oh no. No no no. Not the incubators.”
She raced over to the large, box-like machine, but it was still humming softly, the lights on the status panel a comforting green, indicating the battery backup had kicked in. Rachel offered up a quick prayer of thanks. She hadn’t been able to see patients, but her work continued nonetheless. Test-tube shifters were the Organization’s current goal. Once they could breed them, they were convinced they could be trained—as even the youngest shifters they had captured seemed resistant to Organization training. Her two mandates were to produce a viable shifter fetus—something the Organization had yet to achieve—and to develop a gene therapy to activate shifter abilities in humans. All of her research pointed to the second mandate being impossible, so she focused her energy on the first, working slowly, methodically, showing only enough progress to keep them from killing her, and guarding the biological resources she was given. Any ova that failed to fertilize was another shifter female being subjected to having her eggs harvested—so Rachel treated the test-tube products in the artificial wombs like gold.
It had been instinct to run and check on them. But if Noah had really come for her, none of that mattered.
She listened intently, trying to pick out the sounds of battle, but she was too deep in the bowels of the building. From things other doctors had let slip when they were brought in to consult with her, she knew she was at least three floors below ground. Any fighting on the surface was well beyond the range of even shifter hearing.
Were the shifters winning? Was Noah all right? She paced in the tight confines of her lab, imagining the Hawk striding through the halls, her white knight with piercing yellow eyes. The Organization security forces would flee before him—
Pop! Pop pop pop!
Gunfire. That was gunfire. Goose bumps spread across her arms. She retreated to
the back of the lab, the phrase fish in a barrel echoing ominously in her mind as the sound came again and again. Rachel crouched down, wrapping her arms around her knees and closed her eyes to focus her hearing.
A door splintering. Another burst of gunfire. Closer this time. Right next door. Shouts—pain, shock, anger—then silence. Deadly, chilling silence.
The sequence repeated across the hall. Door, gunshots, shouting, silence.
Someone was systematically working their way through the lower level labs, shooting everyone he found.
That couldn’t be Noah, could it? He was fierce, but this was something else. Something cold and—
The door to her lab cracked under the force of a blow from the outside. A second strike and it sheared off the hinges, ricocheting off a centrifuge and smacking to the ground.
The man who filled the doorway was like something out of a horror movie. Blood covered him in a fine mist, but Rachel had a feeling none of it was his. One side of his face was ridged with heavy, ugly scars and his eyes were utterly devoid of emotion. The Hawk was a warrior. This man was a killer.
Her heart stopped beating, as if it knew what was coming and didn’t want to waste the effort of a last few beats. “Please,” she whispered.
The muzzle of the gun lifted, aiming unerringly for her face. “Sorry, sweetheart. I don’t do requests.”
Chapter Eight
Where the fuck was she?
Adrian cursed under his breath as he stalked through the halls of the Organization base. He’d been so sure she would be here. It was the biggest target they’d struck so far and from the schematics, it seemed to be the most scientifically oriented. When she hadn’t been at either of the first two prison-like holding areas they’d taken out, Adrian had become convinced she was being forced to work at one of the labs. Today, when they’d surrounded the building, he’d felt that itch, that little scratch between his shoulder blades that screamed to him that she was here.
He’d been so fucking sure. So where the fuck was she?
He strode past Grace, who was baring all-too-pointy teeth at any of the scientists who threatened to step out of line as she herded them into an office. In another office, Mateo, their computer specialist, was mining the system for information while the team leader Kye guarded his back, keeping track of the rest of the team via his earpiece.
“Hawk,” Kye called out as he passed. “Dominec isn’t reporting. He was supposed to be checking the maintenance area on the lowest level for stragglers. Go check on him.”
There was a particular weight behind the words that Adrian didn’t have to question. Dominec was unstable on the best of days and the last few missions had only widened the visible cracks in his sanity. Adrian didn’t know how the tiger had gotten his scars. He didn’t particularly want to know—but he knew Dominec personally blamed everyone and anyone related to the Organization for what had happened to him.
If he wasn’t also a one-man SWAT team, they never would have brought him with them on the missions, but he was too much of an advantage to leave behind.
Adrian jogged down the stairs to check on their resident psycho. From the stairwell, he could hear the distant pop-pop-pop of gunfire and he swore under his breath. “Shots fired,” he snapped into the coms, doubling his pace.
The hall below was no maintenance area. Clearly another research area that hadn’t been on the schematics, it was painted in orange fluorescent light and blood. Dominec stood halfway down the hall over the remains of a door, covered in a fine red mist that indicated he’d taken the time to get up close and personal with at least a few of the bodies lying lifeless on the floor. He hadn’t noticed Adrian yet, too fixed on whatever target he’d spotted inside the room he’d just breeched.
“Please.”
A sudden surge of adrenaline made Adrian’s muscles twitch. He knew that voice.
He couldn’t have flown down the hall any faster if he’d gotten his wings back.
“Sorry, sweetheart. I don’t do requests,” Dominec sneered—
And Adrian slammed into him broadside, striking the wrist of his gun arm with enough force to shatter the bone of a human. It wouldn’t break Dominec’s, but it did force his hand to open so Adrian could strip him of the weapon, before they hit the ground. He twisted quickly, pressing the advantage surprise had given him, and planted his knee on Dominec’s carotid artery, the gun shoved hard against his temple.
“This one is mine,” he snarled, with all the animalism of a rabid wolf, the calm, distant hawk totally subsumed by the need to stake this claim. “Understand?”
Dominec gurgled unintelligibly—he probably couldn’t say much with Adrian kneeling on his larynx—but his claws snapped out.
If he chose to use those claws, this could go to hell in a hurry. Adrian couldn’t win against the enraged tiger. He knew that. It was only because Dominec had been distracted by his own bloodlust that he’d managed to take him down at all. If the tiger went on the offensive, Adrian would have to pull the trigger—and while he might not like the crazy bastard, he didn’t want to do that. Especially since he wasn’t sure what that would do to his relationships in the pride. He couldn’t afford to piss off the Alpha. Roman had recently taken over the top position in the pride and while he thought Roman liked him, that probably wasn’t enough to let it slide if Adrian killed a shifter to protect an Organization doctor. Even the Organization doctor who had gotten them the schematics.
“Mine,” he growled again.
Dominec’s eyes were fully feline and Adrian reached for the battle calm, curving his finger more securely around the trigger. The tiger didn’t look like he would mind dying, and Adrian was willing to do him the favor of taking him out, if that’s what it took.
The door to the stairwell at the end of the hall banged open.
Their struggle had taken them through the doorway into the lab. They couldn’t see whoever had arrived, but they both heard Grace’s disgusted, “Dominec, what the fuck?” as she took in the carnage in the hall.
The tiger’s claws retracted, his eyes going human.
“Get off me,” he grunted, when Adrian shifted enough of his weight off the knee bearing into his throat that he could speak.
“No one touches her but me,” Adrian reiterated, but he got to his feet, even helping Dominec to his—though he didn’t go so far as to return the gun.
Grace’s footsteps slowly approached down the hall, checking in the other rooms as Adrian would have done if he hadn’t heard Rachel pleading for her life.
A soft rustle of fabric came from the far side of the room, but he didn’t look at her, his focus still locked on the feral tiger. “Kye said you weren’t reporting.”
Dominec shrugged—he’d never shown much appreciation for authority. “I was busy.”
Busy killing half the scientists on the Organization payroll.
A little whimper from the far side of the room finally called Adrian’s gaze in that direction. And again it happened. The sight of her hit him like a punch.
Big chocolate eyes, rich brown curls, and that aura of innocence and hope. The building seemed to shudder around him—she could move his fucking world—then a piece of rubble fell from the ceiling and he realized it was actually shaking.
Rachel cowered against the wall and unwanted emotion surged up, a conflicting mess of feeling that was distinctly unwelcome in the middle of an op—including a bizarre unnatural rage that she hadn’t run into his arms. His true mate would have. He should be relieved she hadn’t distracted him during his altercation with Dominec, but all he felt was irritation that he’d saved her life and now she was looking at him like she wasn’t sure whether he was her savior or her doom.
The hell of it was, he wasn’t entirely sure himself.
He’d pictured her bruised and battered, tortured himself with images of her torture.
There wasn�
��t a mark on her.
He’d thought she would be chained and restrained, helpless and vulnerable. A quick glance confirmed there wasn’t even a lock on the door.
Every hair was in place. She was clean and healthy and whole. And the longer he looked at her—looking so fucking good—the more his rage built.
He’d come to save a prisoner and here she was, not a prisoner at all. One of them all along. He should have fucking known.
He spoke without taking his eyes off her. “Dominec, go check in with Kye. I’ll bring her.”
He expected the tiger to snarl at him on principle—Dominec wasn’t exactly known for taking orders—but his scarred face tipped into a lopsided smirk. “She is pretty damn hot. I’m not sure I should leave you alone with her. Who knows what could happen?”
“You were about to kill her,” Adrian reminded him with little more than a growl.
“It would have been a clean kill. There’s honor in a clean kill.”
Not for the corpse. “Go.”
Dominec propped a hip against a lab table. “I think I’ll stay.”
Adrian knew better than to tangle with the tiger, but the urge to dig his talons into the unscarred side of the bastard’s face was fierce enough his knuckles ached—but nothing happened. His shifting was still fucked to hell and back.
Light, quick footsteps continued down the hall and Grace appeared in the doorway, tranq gun in one hand, Glock in the other. She stopped abruptly when she saw Dominec lazing there as if they were about to have tea. Adrian used her momentary focus on the tiger to move, quick and subtle, putting himself between Rachel and both Dominec and Grace.
The lieutenant frowned. “I would ask if you boys were playing nice, but I’ve seen the evidence to the contrary—” Grace broke off, her gaze landing on Rachel. Her expression went instantly and completely blank. “Is that her?”
Adrian gave a minute nod, his body tensing instinctively, weight rolling to the balls of his feet. He trusted Grace, but if she had orders he didn’t know about…he wasn’t taking any chances.
