Her Perfect Mate

by Paige Tyler

  Zarina held the cup while she drank. “I haven’t seen her since we arrived. She played along at first, but once she realized what Stutmeir was trying to create, she refused to help anymore. I think he killed her.”

  Ivy figured as much. “Has Stutmeir said what he plans to do with the shifters? Maybe mentioned who he works for?”

  Zarina shook her head. “I don’t know who he works for. Only the German doctor, Klaus, is privy to that information. All I know is that he’s not completely satisfied with our work. Stutmeir wants perfect soldiers with superhuman strength and animal attributes like yours but without all the violent impulses and control issues every hybrid we’ve created has.”

  She jerked around to look at the guards at the door, but they weren’t paying attention. Could it be possible their hearing wasn’t as well developed as a real shifter’s?

  “How many shifters—hybrids—are here?”

  Zarina offered her another sip of water. “Thirty, maybe forty. When we started having success with the test subjects he’d kidnapped, Stutmeir turned his own soldiers into hybrids.”

  That was a lot to go up against. But she only had to fight off enough to kill Stutmeir and the doctors. And help Zarina get to safety. She owed the woman that much.

  Ivy felt the bindings around her ankles begin to tear, and her heart leaped. Another minute or two and she’d be able to start on her wrists. “How did you create them?”

  “Using animal DNA.” She shook her head. “I didn’t want to do it, but I was afraid they’d—”

  “That’s enough, doctor.”

  Ivy froze at the sound of the man’s voice, almost dropping the piece of metal. She must be imagining it. She had to be.

  Zarina stiffened. “I’m just giving her something to eat.”

  Booted feet crossed the floor. “You did your good deed for the day. Get out.”

  The woman gave her an apologetic look. “I’m sorry. Be careful. This man is cruel in ways you can’t imagine.”

  Ivy didn’t need to be told that. She was well aware just how sick and depraved her ex-partner could be. What she didn’t know was what he was doing with Stutmeir.

  She palmed the piece of metal and lifted her head to look up at Jeff. He stood in front of her, legs spread, arms crossed over his chest, an arrogant smirk on his scarred face. The memory of what he’d tried to do to her on that rooftop in Mexico came rushing back, and she had to fight to quell the rising panic. She forced herself to forget she was tied up and half naked as she glared at him.

  “You’re still as ugly as I remembered.”

  “And you’re still as much of an animal as I remembered. I thought cats were supposed to land on their feet. Guess not.” He grinned. “Of all the freaks the DCO could have sent, it had to be you. It’s like Christmas and my birthday all rolled into one.”

  Ivy didn’t ask what he meant by that, but she could guess. The bra and panties she was wearing suddenly seemed even more revealing. “You told Stutmeir about the EVAs, didn’t you? That’s what gave him the idea to make his own.”

  “I might have. I can’t take all the credit, though. He heard rumors about a shadowy black ops unit that had operatives with amazing abilities for years. I merely filled in a few details and shared what I’d learned about your DNA.”

  “And helped him kidnap scientists and doctors who could make shifters out of humans.”

  “That too.” Jeff shrugged. “We tried to track down natural shifters—start our own version of the DCO, you could say—but freaks like you are hard to find. Have to hand it to the DCO. They’re damn good at spotting you in a crowd. And the ones we did find? Let’s just say they weren’t too interested in joining our ranks.”

  She strained at the tape around her ankles and felt it tear a little bit more. “So you killed them?”

  “Guilty again.”

  Ivy bit back a growl. Trying to rape her had been bad enough, but using what he’d learned at the DCO and selling it to the highest bidder was beyond low. He was as much of a terrorist as the people he’d once sworn to fight.

  “But enough about everyone else,” he said. “You’re really the center of attention here. And from what I hear, you had quite the eventful night. Let’s see. First, you get your partner killed—the second one, or so I’m told. Then you’re poked and prodded like a lab rat. And to make things worse, you find yourself tied up and defenseless in a room with the one man who hates you more than any other woman in the world. I’d say things aren’t going so well for you right now.”

  Ivy bared her teeth, hissing as she showed him her fangs. She might be tied up, but she refused to let him see how afraid she was. “I should have killed you when I had the chance instead of simply making you uglier than you already were.”

  His mouth twisted in a sneer. “But you didn’t. And you’re going to be real sorry about that.”

  She opened her mouth to tell him to go to hell, but Jeff drew back his foot and kicked her hard in the side. She fell over, gasping for breath, sure he’d broken a rib or two. She curled into a ball to protect herself from another kick, but it never came. Instead, Jeff dropped down beside her. He grabbed a handful of hair and yanked her head back.

  “I’m going to finish what I started on the rooftop in Mexico, bitch. And this time, there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.”

  Wanna bet, asshole? Ivy lifted her bound hands to rake her claws across Jeff’s face, but he caught her wrists, shoving them over her head and pinning them to the floor. He cupped her breast in his other hand, squeezing painfully.

  Ivy growled. She’d die before she let this bastard touch her.

  She strained her legs and almost cried with relief when she felt the last of the tape tear away. She twisted her body until she got one of her legs between their bodies. Letting the claws on her toes extend, she shoved him away, raking him from stomach to groin. He howled in pain and fell back. The second he did, she leaped to her feet and threw herself at him, clawing at his throat with her bound hands.

  Jeff got his hands around her wrists before she could do any real damage. “Fucking bitch. Someone should have declawed you a long time ago. Guess I’ll have to do it myself.”

  Letting loose a snarl, she bared her teeth and bit down on his shoulder. She felt her fangs crunch down onto bone. She’d rip out his throat if she had to.

  Ivy lunged, going for the jugular, but hands gripped her, pulling her way before she could sink her teeth in. She fought, snarling and kicking out with her feet, but the hybrids were stronger than she was and subdued her within seconds.

  “Sedate her!” Stutmeir ordered. “With a double dose this time. We’ll be leaving in a few hours and I don’t want her waking up before we get to the new facility.”

  Klaus hurried forward, syringe in hand. She couldn’t let them drug her again. Ivy hissed and struggled against the men holding her, but she was like a doll in their grip. Klaus actually laughed as he jabbed the needle in her arm.

  Ivy whimpered, not with pain but frustration. She felt the drug coursing through her body, pulling her back into unconsciousness. She tried to fight against it, but it was useless. Everything went black.

  ***

  It had to be the longest night of Landon’s life.

  After talking to Angelo, he’d thought about going to the storage unit and picking up some weapons so he wouldn’t feel so unarmed, but he didn’t want to miss seeing Stutmeir if he left the ski lodge. The ex-Stasi had been one step ahead of the authorities the whole time, so it made sense he’d be leaving soon since his hideout had been compromised.

  Instead of going to the storage unit, Landon was in an ambush position in some trees off the small, twisting road that connected the lodge with the main highway. Confronting Stutmeir and his pack of rabid science experiments would be suicide, but he’d do it in a heartbeat if that was the only option he had left. Any
thing to save Ivy.

  If she was still alive.

  The thought was like a punch to the gut, and for a minute, he couldn’t breathe. If he thought like that, he’d go crazy. Then what good would he be to Ivy? She needed him to be on his game, not acting like a raving madman.

  He tightened his grip on the knife. He never should have left her. He should have cleared out the atrium with that grenade, tracked down the animal who’d taken her, and killed the son of a bitch with his bare hands. Of course, if he had the foresight to go in with more firepower in the first place, he wouldn’t need to use his bare hands. He would have been a walking arsenal. He sure wouldn’t have had to run and leave Ivy at the mercy of a man like Stutmeir, either. Then again, Ivy wouldn’t be in that position if Landon had realized she’d zoned out and tackled her before she jumped over the railing.

  If he got her back—when he got her back—he was going to make sure he never let anything like this happen ever again. He’d pay more attention to her moods and be more aware of when she was at risk from the very animal instincts that made her so valuable and dangerous to others.

  He promised himself another thing, too. When he got her back, he was going to tell her how he felt about her. He hadn’t told her before because he didn’t know exactly what it was he felt. Or maybe he had and had just been too stupid to recognize it. Man, self-recrimination was a freaking bitch on PMS.

  Landon glanced at his watch. 0615. He couldn’t put off leaving any longer, not if he wanted to meet up with his reinforcements.

  At least there hadn’t been movement from the ski lodge. Maybe Stutmeir thought he was safe there. Maybe the German thought he and Ivy had attacked his hideout without backup or follow-on forces. From what Landon had read in the guy’s file, Stutmeir wasn’t that stupid.

  Unless Ivy had tricked Stutmeir into believing that. The idea was comforting. It meant she was alive and well and controlling the situation.

  He looked at his watch again. He really needed to go.

  Landon had to drive like a maniac to get to the self-storage unit by 0800. The DCO had picked the last unit of the last building, so it was highly unlikely someone at another unit would be able to see what was inside it. Even so, he pulled the Jeep around to block the doorway just in case.

  Landon was opening the first of the two security locks when a vehicle crunched to a hard stop beside the Jeep. He glanced at the car and saw Buchanan silhouetted behind the wheel. He could practically feel the big man glowering at him.

  He started to turn back to the lock but stopped when movement in the passenger seat caught his eye.

  Buchanan got out of the car and slammed the door, looking as pissed off as the last time Landon had seen him.

  Landon dropped his hand down to the top of his knife and spread his legs, centering his weight as the shifter strode toward him.

  He was so intent on Buchanan, he completely forgot about the second person in the car until a woman spoke.

  “We talked about this, Clayne. Don’t even think about it.”

  Buchanan growled low in his throat but grudgingly stopped at the sound of Kendra’s voice.

  Landon frowned as the blonde closed the car door and hurried over to them. “What the hell are you doing here, Kendra?”

  “I’m here to make sure you two stay focused on the right enemy instead of trying to kill each other.”

  Buchanan took a threatening step toward Landon, his lip drawn back in a snarl. “If Ivy’s dead, I will kill you.”

  If Ivy was dead, Landon wasn’t sure he’d stop Buchanan from trying. He bent to open the second lock.

  “What the hell happened?” Buchanan demanded.

  Landon gave them a brief synopsis, starting with sneaking into the lodge and finishing with his header off the cliff. He left out the part about Ivy zoning out, saying they’d gotten separated and that he wasn’t able to get to her before she’d gotten captured.

  “So you just up and fucking left her without a fight?” Buchanan swore under his breath. “What are you, a fucking coward? The only thing that should have stopped you from going after her is a bullet through the spine—if you even have one.”

  Landon ground his jaw. The words hurt like hell, not because he cared what Buchanan thought of him, but because they were exactly the same things he’d been saying repeatedly to himself all night long.

  “I tried!” An image flashed in his head of Ivy lying on the floor, half conscious, begging him to run. His gut twisted. “Fuck, don’t you think I tried? I couldn’t get to her, dammit.”

  The shifter growled, fangs glinting in the early morning sunlight.

  Landon swore. He might need Buchanan’s help, but he wasn’t going to listen to his rantings to get it. If the shifter wasn’t going to help get Ivy back, he’d do it without him. He didn’t have time to waste trading insults. He needed to get back to the lodge. Problem was Buchanan didn’t look like he was going to walk away until this thing between them was resolved.

  “You want a fight, shifter?” Landon pulled his knife. “Let’s fight.”

  He braced himself, waiting for Buchanan to take a swipe at him, but Kendra darted forward, putting herself between them.

  “Stop it, both of you!” She held up her hands, her eyes narrowing as she looked from him to Buchanan and back again. “What the hell is wrong with the two of you? While you’re wasting time yelling at each other, Stutmeir could be doing God only knows what to Ivy. Put your damn dicks back in your pants and think about her.”

  Buchanan flushed and retracted his claws, his yellow eyes going back to their normal color and clouding with pain. Turning on his heel, he walked away, then stopped and turned back. He pinned Landon with a glower. “Why didn’t you follow DCO rules and kill Ivy as soon as it looked like she was going to be captured?”

  What the fuck kind of question was that? “Seriously? I can’t believe you’d ask me that when you know we slept together.”

  “You’re banging her. So what?” Buchanan snorted. “That doesn’t explain why you didn’t pop her.”

  Landon stared at him, speechless. Why had he thought Buchanan might help? The man was too warped to give a shit about anything.

  He shoved his knife into its sheath and turned back to the storage unit. “Forget it. If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “What wouldn’t I understand?”

  Landon ignored him. He opened the second lock, then lifted the door.

  Gravel crunched under Buchanan’s boots as the shifter crossed the parking lot. “What. Wouldn’t. I. Understand?”

  Landon swore silently. He turned to face the other man. “That I’m in love with her, you fucking idiot.”

  The first time he said those words out loud, it should have been to Ivy, not this asshole.

  Landon didn’t wait to see what effect they had on Buchanan. He didn’t care. Right now, he needed to rework his original plan—where the shifter used his keen sense of smell to track down Ivy so they would get her away from Stutmeir before the ex-Stasi knew they were onto him and decided to eliminate her—because that one was shot to hell. He walked over to the far side of the unit and picked up the M4 that was on the shelf.

  “Do you even have a plan to get Ivy out?”

  Landon looked over his shoulder to see Buchanan opening one of the crates on the floor. “What? You’re in now?”

  The shifter pulled an M203 rifle/grenade launcher combination out of the box. “That depends on the plan.”

  Outside, a vehicle pulled up to the unit and stopped.

  “Who the hell is that?” Buchanan growled, looking around for the ammo that went with the weapon he was holding.

  “Relax.” Landon put the M4 back on the shelf. “It’s only some reinforcements.”

  Landon ignored the frown Buchanan gave him and walked outside. He’d spent half the night praying A
ngelo would be able to round up one or two more guys from the team, so he was shocked to not only see Diaz, Mickens, and Griffen, but Marks, Deray, and Tredeau, too. He shouldn’t have expected anything less, but it still brought tears to his eyes.

  “As soon as Angelo said you and Ivy were in trouble, we were all in.” Diaz’s face turned apologetic. “Everyone else would have come too, but Johnson needed to keep a few of the guys with him to give us a legitimate cover story for coming out here on short notice.”

  Landon frowned. “What cover story is that?”

  “We’re supposedly doing survival training at Fort Lewis,” Tredeau explained.

  Landon looked at Angelo. “You told Johnson you needed to go out on a completely unauthorized training op, and he didn’t flip out?”

  “Nah. I knew he wouldn’t.” Angelo shrugged. “You’re his commanding officer. Former commanding officer, anyway. He’d do anything for you. Besides, it was either talk him into coming out here with us or go AWOL—which we would have done if he’d said no, by the way. Top didn’t even ask why you needed us. He just told me to get the team together and meet him at the airfield. By the time we got there, he was waiting on the ramp of a C-17 with that cigar shoved in his mouth. No idea how he did it, but he got the battalion to agree to a no-notice training exercise. He’s got the rest of the A-team at Fort Lewis taking up space to make it look good.”

  Landon was speechless. He knew his team was incredible, but this was too much.

  Buchanan grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. “Sorry to rain on the reunion, but who the hell are they?”

  Leave it to the shifter to spoil the moment. “Guys from my old Special Forces team. We needed help; they came to help.”

  Buchanan swore. “Ivy’s life is in danger, and you bring in a bunch of half-trained snake eaters to rescue her? Are you trying to get her killed?”

  Landon shoved the shifter’s hand away. “Dammit, Buchanan. This is more than we can handle by ourselves. When we go in that lodge, we’re going to be facing twenty-five trained killers, maybe more.”