“I do say so.”
Chase stayed quiet, but the set of his shoulders was tight and stiff. He was pissed off. And he clearly wasn’t going to say why unless asked. They didn’t talk about their feelings; that was just not how they did business. They weren’t women. But he had always been more of the gentle giant type, despite his abilities on the battlefield. Chase had the hardest time embracing who they had become to survive, and he sure as hell didn’t revel in it the way that Savage did.
But if Hunt didn’t ask about this little issue now, then it would just come up at some point when he was even less in the mood to deal with it.
Hunt took one last look at the feeds, but the house was empty. Just like it had been for the last few hours. “What’s your fucking problem?”
“You ever hear that quote by Nietzsche, the one about fighting monsters?”
“Never heard of it,” Hunt lied.
“He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
The little hairs on the back of his neck stood up. “What the hell are you talking about, Chase?”
“We’re trying to do something noble here, taking these fuckers down. But it takes a monster to fight monsters. Who will we be when this is all over? Any better than the men who we’re trying to stop?”
“They turned us into monsters,” Hunt said, voice dark. “And they’re going to pay for it. Everything we’ve done has been necessary.”
And Sophia hadn’t yet gotten a true look at the monster inside of him…what he became when he lost control. His little displays of temper, even the way he’d cruelly mocked her, were like little release valves on the beast inside. But eventually it would want its turn to play. They had to be done with this before that happened.
“And who’s to say that the men who did this to us don’t feel the same way?”
A tide of anger rose up in him at that. “Don’t you dare compare us to them. You saw the same thing I did in that hellhole. How can you even imply we’re anything like those fucking sadist scientists?”
“Haven’t you seen Star Wars? Each step is a small one, further and further into the dark until the light is so far away that you’ll never find it again.”
Chase never maintained a conversation this long and his gaze was unwavering as he regarded Hunt. He’d always been a serious guy, but something had clearly come over him. But Hunt was too angry now to let it go.
“So what, we should just leave the men, our men, still out there to be tortured and sold as slave labor for corrupt mercenary groups? You saw what was happening out there.”
This was the stuff that they didn’t talk about. The memories that they’d forced themselves to forget. Even when he almost thought he’d succeeded in scrubbing it from his mind, he would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with the sounds of tearing flesh and screams ringing in his ears like it was still happening all around him.
The memories that he forced himself to forget had just found a new home in his nightmares.
The experiments were either humiliating or brutally painful. Some subjects had been deliberately exposed to virulent diseases to test what the serum would do to increase resistance. Now, they all knew exactly how many hours it took to choke to death on your own blood because they’d been subjected to many excruciating nights of listening to others suffer through it.
In one particular experiment, pieces of them had been cut off a little bit at a time to test their ability to regenerate. All of it without the benefit of an anesthetic.
A motive for profit underlined all of it. The investors in the project wanted to create super-soldiers without the handicap of a conscience that they could sell to the highest bidder. And ultimately, men like the senator were the only ones who ever really profited. Hunt would tear the man apart with his bare hands before he gave up.
Chase had bowed his head, giving Hunt time to come back from that dark place in his mind. “What we’ve done to that girl—”
“Is nothing compared to what we might still have to do.” Sophia was innocent, but at some point every horrible motherfucker that ever lived had been innocent. Hitler didn’t come out of the room a murderous dictator. With Senator Reynolds for a father, she was lucky that she got to live in a world without hate and fear for as long as she did. “There’s no other way.”
“You know exactly what I mean.” Chase’s gaze moved to the camcorder sitting on the table next to the computer. Such an innocent piece of hardware but capable of so much damage.
Hunt could practically hear the direction of the other man’s thoughts. “It was her idea.”
“You didn’t have to enjoy it.”
A brief, cold smile touched Hunt’s lips. He wasn’t going to feel bad about making a virtue out of necessity. The way her half-hooded eyes met his as she sank to her knees had kept his beast at bay enough that she hadn’t gotten hurt. It had been enough to distract him completely from the darkness, if just for a moment.
He raised a mocking eyebrow at Chase. “Is that what your fucking problem is?”
“Do you remember what happened to those female soldiers they brought into the compound?” His voice was soft. “The ones who begged and pleaded for mercy. Do you remember what was in store for them?”
“There’s a huge difference. I’m not gonna harm a single hair on her head if I don’t have to.” Hunt didn’t like being compared to the monsters who had watched those women be torn apart without lifting a finger to aid them. This situation was completely and utterly different. The girl would only get hurt if he had no other choice. “As soon as the senator gives us what we need, Sophia can go home. Safe and sound.”
Chase’s gaze turned sharp. “Sophia.”
At some point, Hunt had stopped thinking of her as the girl, or as someone not quite real. They were supposed to keep their distance, remain emotionally uninvolved. You never name a pig that you were about to send to slaughter. It just fucks your head up when the end inevitably comes.
This wasn’t a good sign.
“Tell you what, you take the lead in dealing with the girl,” Hunt said, finally. It was the best solution, for her and for him. It wouldn’t do either of them any good for him to forget himself and get too close. And the little pull he felt when he was around her was getting harder and harder to ignore. “It shouldn’t be long now, anyway.”
Chase looked surprised but then curtly nodded his agreement. “Okay.”
Hunt didn’t like how quickly he’d agreed. The fucker hadn’t even bothered to fight him on it. “It doesn’t matter, either way.”
“Of course not,” Chase replied evenly. “Whatever you think is best.”
The look on Chase’s face reminded Hunt of his old man. Like all he wanted to do was say I told you so, but managed to just barely keep it in. Asshole. It kind of made Hunt want to smash him in the face, but he resisted the urge. There’d been enough violence for the time being and Chase wouldn’t fight back just to prove his point.
Chase was down with all that holier-than-thou shit.
Without acknowledging the win, Chase went back to messing with the computer parts. From the more relaxed set of his shoulders it was obvious that he was pleased with himself. Fucker.
Hunt forced himself to let it go. It was probably for the best that he didn’t spend any more time with Sophia. Thinking about her made his head cloudy. He couldn’t forget about what was important for even a moment. The less that he had to deal with her, the better off both of them would be.
“Fuck!”
He heard him yell just before Savage burst into the room, sending the door crashing back against the wall with the force of his entrance.
Savage looked frantically around the room until he saw Chase and Hunt staring at him. His eyes were so wide that they were white all around the edges and his pupils had shrunk to tiny points.
“We’re burned!” Savage pushed past and started
grabbing pieces of equipment. His bug-out bag, a military-grade black duffel that was almost as long as he was tall, was already slung over his shoulder. “We have to get the fuck out of here.”
Hunt rapidly rose from his chair and backed up. The choice was to willingly get out of the way or be caught in the tornado of movement. “What do you mean, we’re burned?”
“I mean that we have ten minutes, maybe fifteen on the outside, to scrub this place and get out of here. The police band is lit up like it’s the goddamn Fourth of July. They’re moving fast and headed this way. Somehow the senator must have gotten tipped off to our location.”
Hunt wasted a few precious seconds to check the camera feeds. The senator’s house seemed to be quiet and empty. “Are you sure? We’d know if he made any calls. The phones are tapped.”
“The guy’s evil, not stupid. He has to know we wired up the place.” Savage shoved the laptop into the bag, but left the rest of the setup behind. “But we can talk more about it later. Maybe after we manage to get away. Unless you want to have this conversation between the bars of a prison cell.”
Chase had already begun methodically dismantling his equipment and packing anything essential.
And Savage did have a point. Hunt’s mind started running through what he could get done in less than ten minutes. They had a secondary weapons cache in the trunk of the car, so he wouldn’t worry about grabbing anything besides the sidearm he always kept within arm’s reach, if not actually strapped on his body. Chase and Savage would take care of the electronic equipment.
“What about the girl?”
Chase paused his movements for a split second, but then resumed his work without answering. Savage glared at him.
“What about her? Leave her here. We can’t take her with us on the move.”
“Why not?”
Savage dropped the circuit board he was holding and turned on Hunt, expression incredulous. “You can’t be serious.”
“Without this girl, we have nothing.” Hunt tried to sound reasonable, like his position was entirely rational. But part of him just didn’t want to leave the girl behind. “No information and no leverage. Without her, we’re back to square one. Worse even, with the cops breathing down our necks.”
Savage was already shaking his head. “No, man. Too risky.”
“Hunt is right,” Chase said, surprising him. “Without the girl, we have nothing. She comes with us.”
He felt a little burst of pleasure, but quickly suppressed it. This was business. Sophia was just a means to an end.
“I’ll grab her up and meet you at the car,” he said before either of the others could volunteer for the job. Chase raised an eyebrow but didn’t refute the order. As much as he might disagree with their methods, Chase was more concerned with salvaging as much of his precious equipment as possible.
“Five minutes,” Savage snapped. Like he was the one in charge of shit. Hunt wanted to knock him down a peg or two, but there wasn’t time. Later, he’d kick his ass from here to next Sunday.
Sophia was sitting quietly on the floor when Hunt strode back into the room. She looked like a deposed queen who had lost her throne but refused to bow down to the new king. Despite the need to hurry, he automatically slowed down a little when he caught sight of her. Just so he could look at her for a little longer. He accepted that part of him was just sick. If this girl was a drug, then he was hopelessly addicted.
Her body stiffened when he got close. She stared up at him as a slight tremble ran through her. She acted like a mouse hiding in the grass, if she could just stay still long enough then the hawk wouldn’t realize she was there.
But he didn’t have time to sit and think about how much he liked her helpless. They had to get the hell out of there.
When he bent down to undo the cuffs at her ankles, Sophia looked up at him with wide eyes. She didn’t say anything, just watched as he quickly worked on the shackles around each ankle and unwrapped them from the steel support beam.
“Get up,” he said sharply. “We’re leaving.”
She rubbed the spots on her ankles where the metal must have irritated her skin. “Where are we going?”
He wrapped his hand around her upper arm and used it as leverage to haul her to her feet. “No questions. Get moving.”
She stumbled ahead of him as he propelled her forward with a hand at her back. The building was likely a maze to her, with its mixture of barely finished rooms and missing walls. It wouldn’t have been out of place during the climax of an action movie, all abandoned and industrial. But it had been a base of operations and a home to them for the last six months. He was sorry to leave it behind.
Chase and Savage were already in the car with the engine running when they reached the street after the five flights of stairs. He shoved her unceremoniously into the back seat of the car and slid in beside her. It felt pretty similar to the last car ride that they took together, except this time she was conscious.
“Let’s go,” he yelled.
Savage gunned the engine and peeled out from the curb. Chase put a restraining hand on his shoulder and the car slowed down to something closer to the speed limit. The last thing they needed was to get pulled over in a routine traffic stop.
The sound of distant sirens rang through the air. The sky was dark enough that Hunt could make out the flash of red and blue lights between the gaps of the buildings. But there wasn’t anyone following behind them. It looked like they had managed to get away with less than a minute to spare.
“How the fuck did they find us?” Savage asked, his knuckles white as he gripped the wheel. “I had us completely dark. Pulled power from a building down the block, redirected signals on all the equipment, and every message we sent was encrypted. It doesn’t make sense.”
Sophia sat next to Hunt with her back ramrod straight, body quivering with suppressed tension. She was like a rubber band pulled taut and about to snap.
She looked terrified. But she didn’t look surprised.
Hunt had the first inkling of a terrible realization. It was one that shouldn’t have surprised him—or hurt, for that matter—but it managed to do both.
“You,” he said.
Wide eyes turned toward him as her face drained of color. More fear, but the resigned kind that knew it had been caught.
Her arms rose up in a defensive motion when Hunt move swiftly toward her, but he batted them away. His hands searched her quickly and methodically, covering every inch of skin but not in a way that was meant to be arousing. His grip on her was restrained, but merciless. There was nothing sexual in the way his hands moved over her body, sliding up under her shirt and then moving down around the waistband of her shorts.
He was looking for something.
The little watch was stuck in the side of her sock, a place that it hadn’t occurred to any of them to check. It was one of those exercise things that checked your pulse and tracked your GPS signal so you knew how far you’d gone on a run.
A fucking GPS signal.
“This is how they tracked us down.” Hunt met Savage’s gaze in the rearview mirror, holding up the device so the other man could see it. Chase turned around in the passenger seat and his brow knit together when he saw the thing in Hunt’s hand.
“Little bitch,” Savage hissed. But his voice was as full of grudging respect as it was anger.
Chase just shook his head silently and turned back to watching the side mirror, obviously intent on staying alert for anyone following them.
Hunt smashed the device hard against the window. The shatter-resistant glass was enough of an immovable object that the watch face fractured in his hand. He slammed it down one more time just be safe and then rolled down the window. The watch disappeared into the night as he tossed it out.
It was gone, along with her last chance to escape.
As crazy as it sounded, Hunt felt betrayed. Logically, he knew he’d do the same thing in her position: use every tool in his arsenal to get away. But that didn
’t stop the completely inexplicable hurt and more understandable rage from rising up in him.
Chase was right. He let this girl get too close. She was their enemy and he was an idiot for ever believing that there could be something more.
Maybe they should have left her. This mission had already been fucked fourteen different ways. The senator might just let his daughter be killed before he’d give away any of his secrets. The best thing might be to just let her go and figure out another way to get find Project Alpha
Fuck this girl.
He resolved at that moment to never let emotions get in the way of common sense. It was obvious that she’d do whatever it took to get back home. It would be stupid of her to do anything else.
Hunt had to be smart, too. When he looked at her, all he needed to see was a piece of meat—a bargaining chip on the table.
She still stared at him as he rolled the window back up, watching him like she wasn’t sure what he was going to do to her and likely thinking the worst. Her gaze didn’t hold his and seemed to flit over different parts of his face. It was like she wanted to turn away, but couldn’t.
And then he made the shocking realization that should have occurred to him a long time ago. They were in too much of a hurry to get their gear and get away. Not that that was an excuse, but the fact remained just the same.
They had never put the masks back on.
Chapter Ten
Sophia could practically see the wheels turning in Hunt’s head.
Now that her grand rescue plan had been so easily aborted, there wasn’t much reason to hope for escape. She didn’t even know where she was. They were on a highway, but rolling hills of green trees rose into mountains on the horizon, so she knew they weren’t going south. The car passed a sign for I-81, so West Virginia maybe. But it seemed like there were dozens of miles between the highway exits and even more than that, between any signs of civilization.
Even if she managed to get away from them at this point where would she go? Who would help her?
They’d been in the car for what felt like hours. None of these awful men had talked much, but the one next to her kept staring at her like she was a puzzle he wanted to figure out. He was the one who’d worn the Jason mask. She could tell from his voice.
Hunted by the Feral Alpha Page 9
