Chapter 5

“I don’t care if Dick said you’re already certified for fieldwork.” Sabrina Erickson pinned Trevor with a look before turning her glare on Alina. “The two of you need to spend some time training together as a team before you get into the field and find out you have zero chemistry, because it’ll be too late to do anything about it then. You’re going to sweat now so you don’t have to bleed later.”

Beside Alina, Trevor grabbed his paintball gun from the table and grumbled something under his breath about hating training officers who spouted clichés. Alina hid her smile as she loaded her own paintball gun. Sabrina was a force of nature, that was for sure.

The woman had intercepted her and Trevor in the cafeteria an hour ago and joyfully informed them they’d be training all morning. Trevor had protested, saying he had some leads related to the bombing he needed to run down. Alina noticed he hadn’t said we have leads to track down, which confirmed her assumption he planned to bail on her. Even though she knew there was a serious trust issue between her and Trevor, it still bothered her anyway. She hated not being trusted. It made her feel like the enemy. Like Wade.

The trim, athletic training officer hadn’t batted an eye but simply smiled sweetly at Trevor and informed him that he could hunt down leads to his heart’s content—after she was done with them. Something told Alina she was going to like this woman.

So they’d spent an hour at the pistol range, where Sabrina had each of them blaze through almost five hundred rounds of ammo with their issued sidearms, then come over here to the shoot house.

“You’ll be doing a scenario involving a hostage,” Sabrina explained.

Alina glanced up from loading another paintball. The black-and-silver gun had a long, slender barrel sticking out the front, a plastic tube full of bright-pink paintballs attached to the top, and a small bottle mounted below the handgrip. It looked like something out of a Star Wars movie and probably cost more than her car.

In all the time she’d been in the CIA, she’d never fired a paintball gun as part of her training. Hell, while she’d done a lot of tactical room clearance, she’d never taken part in any kind of hostage-rescue training either. That wasn’t part of her normal CIA mission, so she’d never spent any time on it.

“Jaxson and Jake will be playing the part of the opposing forces,” Sabrina continued. “You’ll need to deal with them as well as any pop-up targets in the house in order to reach the hostage. The pop-up targets will make the alarms on your vests go off if you fail to take them out in time.”

Trevor snorted, earning him a frown from the training officer.

“Something funny?” Sabrina asked.

He shrugged as he slipped a few extra tubes of paintball ammo into the cargo pocket of his uniform pants. “You realize I’m a shifter and that I can get through this scenario easily, right?”

Sabrina’s lips curved. “Maybe, maybe not. We’ll see. Besides, the objective for this training is for both you and your partner to make it through and rescue the hostage. If you get through but Alina doesn’t, you start over. Teamwork—remember?”

Trevor scowled at that but didn’t say anything.

“I’ll be watching from the overhead catwalk,” Sabrina called over her shoulder as she headed into the house. “The training event will start when the alarm rings the first time. If you haven’t completed the course before it rings a second time, you fail and have to start over.” She turned and gave them a pointed look. “By the way, keep your goggles on at all times. I wouldn’t want anyone to lose an eye in there.”

Okay, maybe she wasn’t going to like this woman, Alina decided as she slipped her goggles down from her forehead. She got the feeling Sabrina had a trick or two up her sleeve for dealing with Trevor and his shifter abilities.

At first glance, the building looked like a normal, everyday house, albeit in need of a fresh coat of paint. Then Alina realized there were no windows on the second floor and that the glass in the first-floor windows was bulletproof. The walls were probably reinforced as well. She hadn’t seen many tactical training shoot houses in the CIA. This kind of stuff was normally reserved for special operations forces. At least she and Trevor weren’t using live ammo. That would have been a little crazy. Then again, crazy seemed to be kind of the norm around here.

After Sabrina disappeared inside, Alina turned to Trevor and held up the paintball gun. “What the heck do I do with this thing? I’ve never fired one before.”

If Trevor was surprised by that admission, he didn’t let on. “The gas pressure bottle under here propels the paintballs when you pull the trigger,” he said, pointing it out with his finger. “The tube on top holds ten paintballs. Think of it like a magazine and reload accordingly. People who do this paintball stuff seriously use containers that hold fifty to a hundred at a time, but the training officers rarely let us get away with that.”

“I don’t know why,” she quipped. “I personally always like to have a lot more ammo than I think I’m going to need.”

Trevor smirked but didn’t laugh. “This is the safety. It operates just like the one on your normal sidearm. Just take the weapon off safe and pull the trigger when you’re ready to fire.”

Without another word, Trevor turned and headed for the door of the shoot house.

“Don’t you think we should talk about how we’re going to do this before we go in there?” she asked, hurrying to catch up with him. “This could get ugly if we don’t have a plan.”

He shrugged. “I’ll take the front of the room as we go in. You cover me and deal with the back side of the room. It shouldn’t be that complicated. I’ll be able to smell and hear Jake and Jaxson long before we get to them.”

Alina opened her mouth to ask what the heck he expected her to do while he was sniffing around like a bloodhound when a loud buzzer went off.

Trevor lifted his foot and kicked in the door with the heel of his boot.

Alina cursed and followed him inside. The first room had three doors leading off in different directions but was otherwise empty. Before she could even begin to wonder which room they should start with—or why the hell the place smelled like a litter box that hadn’t been cleaned in a week—loud music filled the house.

She did her best to ignore both the blaring techno beat and the god-awful stench, moving quickly to cover the blind spots to the left and right of the door they’d come in. It would have been a lot easier if she’d been working with a partner who was interested in communicating—and working as a team.

Fortunately, the first room was clear, so the fact that she had no idea which direction Trevor was going to move as he crossed the threshold didn’t come back to bite them in the ass.

Alina shook off her irritation, waiting for Trevor to figure out which direction he wanted to go. He paused, and she assumed he was sniffing for a clue. There were three doors to choose from. But then she realized he was standing there with a pissed-off look on his face.

“What’s wrong?” she shouted.

Trevor cursed. “It’s Jake. The damn guy knows exactly how shifters work—me especially. Between the loud music and cow piss he dumped all over the place, he’s taken away any advantages I have. I can’t hear or smell a damn thing.”

“Cow urine?” Frowning, she looked around and realized the floor and walls were suspiciously wet. “Okay, that’s officially gross.”

“The clock is ticking, people!” Sabrina called out from the dark catwalk above them. “Get a move on before you get the hostage killed!”

Alina looked questioningly at Trevor.

He shrugged. “I guess we do this the old-fashioned way.”

Heading for the closed door on the far side of the room, he kicked it open, leaving her no choice but to scramble to catch up. She turned her attention to the right side of the room just as a man-shaped silhouette popped up from the floor with the picture of a bad guy with unkempt hair on it.

Alina aimed her gun and squeezed the trigger twice in rapid succession, popping the target right in the center of the chest with pink paint. She was thinking the gun was surprisingly accurate when two more colorful splats hit the same target, even though it was her responsibility.

She threw Trevor an irritated look just as a green paintball exploded in the center of his chest. She spun in the direction the shot had come from, only catching a brief glimpse of a dark-haired man as he jerked back around a corner and disappeared. A split second later, she felt something smack into her upper back.

Crap on a stick.

She didn’t have to see the green paint dripping on the floor to know she’d been hit. All because she hadn’t been paying attention to anything except how annoying Trevor was. Her new partner had gotten her shot!

“Don’t bother starting over!” Sabrina shouted. “You haven’t made it far enough even to count as a good beginning. Keep going.”

Trevor growled and wiped his hand across the green dye painted all across his chest. His eyes were blazing yellow, and she could see the tips of his fangs extending over his lower lip as a rumble of anger continued to vibrate out of his chest.

He slammed his foot into the center of the next door, completely ripping it off the hinges and sending it flying across the next room.

Alina blinked. Apparently, Trevor had a temper. Well, at least after getting hit with a paintball. She couldn’t blame him. She was damn pissed—not to mention embarrassed—they’d been taken out so easily.

She followed him but was once again forced to scramble to try and cover her partner, knowing the whole time she probably couldn’t trust him to do the same for her. Instead of working as a team, they were two people trying to work through a shoot house scenario completely on their own.

As expected, the results were a complete disaster.

Alina and Trevor moved from room to room, so worried about Jake and Jaxson they missed nearly every pop-up target in the house. The damn alarm buzzer on her vest rang nearly nonstop, and on those rare occasions when she was able to focus on her surroundings enough to hit the targets, Jake or Jaxson would pop out of the nearest doorway and smack them with a green paintball.

“You two are never going to make it through this house unless you start to work as a team!” Sabrina cajoled from the catwalk. “You need to stop worrying about your own butt long enough to cover your teammate’s back. That’s the only way this is going to work.”

Even though Alina knew Sabrina was right, she still had the urge to shoot a few paintballs in the woman’s general direction on the off chance of hitting her.

On the upside, Sabrina didn’t tell them to go back to the start. Why bother? They were doing so poorly, it wouldn’t have helped anyway.

As she and Trevor continued to move through the house, they did a better job of shooting the targets, but when a flash of movement from the left caught their attention in the fourth room, both of them turned that way, leaving their right flank wide open again. Jake stepped out and popped both of them, then darted out of sight before either of them could react.

Alina let out a sound of frustration that rivaled Trevor’s growls. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Sabrina called a halt to the exercise.

By the time they reached the room where the hostage dummy was seated at a table with a picture of an angelic little kid taped to its face, Alina was more than ready for the training to end. She and Trevor needed a reset. Hell, they needed to get outside and talk over the possibility that they might be the worst team in the history of covert operations.

Alina was so focused on that, she didn’t see Jake until he slipped up behind her and draped one arm around her shoulder and neck, yanking her back against him. At the same time, he put the barrel of his paintball gun against her head.

“Drop your weapon, Trevor,” he called loud enough to be heard over the music. “You two are toast.”

Trevor spun around, pointing his weapon in her direction. For a moment, Alina thought he was going to say the hell with it and start blazing away. But before her partner could decide one way or the other, Jaxson slipped into the room behind Trevor and pointed his paintball gun at Trevor’s back.

“Drop it, Trevor,” Jaxson said. “Seriously. It’s over.”

Trevor’s eyes blazed bright with fury. He wasn’t the only one. She’d never performed this poorly in any training she’d ever attempted, not even when she was a rookie going through the academy at Quantico. She hated getting beaten like this, all because she and Trevor didn’t trust each other.

This crap had to end.

Alina caught her partner’s eye and held it. She and Trevor hadn’t been working together long enough for him to read her body language, so she hoped he realized what she was doing. Because she flat-out wasn’t going down without a fight. She was about to do something crazy, and if he didn’t play his part, she was going to get a splat of bright-green paint to the side of the head.

She relaxed against Jake, like she was giving up. At the same time, she tossed her paintball gun to the floor, slightly to her left. Far enough away that it was out of easy reach but close enough for her to get to it when she had to.

The moment she felt Jake loosen his hold the slightest bit, she moved. No hesitation, no concern for what Trevor might or might not do. She just reacted, stomping down on top of Jake’s right foot with the heel of her boot. At the same time, she brought the edge of her right hand down in a groin strike, whacking Jake in the balls. It wasn’t as hard as she could have hit him—she didn’t want the man writhing on the floor in pain—but it was enough to make him jerk away. Protecting the family jewels was as instinctive for a man as breathing.

Reaching up, she grabbed the hand he had draped over her shoulder, twisting it away from her body and torqueing his wrist until she swore she heard it creak. He had no choice but to let her go…or let her break his wrist.

Alina lunged forward and to the left just as Trevor’s gun went off. Hitting the floor, she tucked into a roll then grabbed her paintball gun and came up shooting.

Jaxson had been caught off guard by her sudden move, and he wasted half a second trying to decide if he should shoot her or Trevor. That delay cost him. Alina came up on one knee and popped him three times in the chest.

She continued moving, spinning around to face Jake, not sure what she would find. But she was delighted to see him standing there where she’d left him, a fluorescent pink paint splat right in the middle of his forehead. He looked pissed.

She turned to confirm that Jaxson was down as well and found Trevor regarding her, his gaze both thoughtful and approving.

“See how well it works when you trust each other?” Sabrina called from the catwalk. “Took you long enough!”

Alina ignored the training officer, focusing on Trevor as he continued to study her intently. It was impossible to say how she knew it, but something had just changed between them.

“Don’t stand there looking all impressed with yourselves!” Sabrina shouted. “Head back outside so we can see if you can be a team for more than ten seconds at a time. And Jake, wipe that paint splat off your face. You look ridiculous.”

Alina and Trevor made their way toward the front door. As she screwed another pressure bottle onto the bottom of her paintball gun, Trevor motioned toward the building with his chin.

“How about we try something different this time?” he suggested. “You take lead, and I’ll cover you.”

She didn’t answer right away, wondering if there was going to be a catch. When there didn’t seem to be one, she nodded.

“Okay. I can do that,” she agreed.

Before she could say anything else, the start buzzer went off again.

Alina shoved open the front door with her shoulder, forcing herself to trust her partner. They moved from room to room much faster this time, dealing with pop-up targets and the occasional appearance by Jake and Jaxson. Sometimes, they missed a target and got dinged for it; other times, Jake and Jaxson got them. But throughout the whole thing, she and Trevor worked together and covered each other. By the time they rescued the hostage, she and Trevor were that much closer to becoming a real team.

It was crazy how good that made her feel, considering that, according to the director of the DCO, Trevor was the enemy.

* * *

Trevor hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he and Alina walked into the Pizza Place in nearby Dumfries and he breathed in the aroma of garlic and freshly made tomato sauce coming from the kitchen. Damn, he could eat a whole pie himself.

He and Alina had finished up training two hours ago, then spent another thirty minutes hanging around talking with Jake and Jaxson before getting cleaned up. Alina had been fine with grabbing something for lunch at the DCO cafeteria, but Trevor hadn’t felt like sitting there while his coworkers stared at him like he was some kind of freak. Plus, this place made fantastic pizza.

Spotting an empty booth toward the back of the dining room, Trevor pointed it out to Alina, then gestured for her to lead the way.

The excellent food wasn’t the only reason he’d wanted to get off the complex. He also wanted to talk to Alina in a setting a little more private than the cafeteria. This morning’s training had made him curious about her. Once again, he had this crazy feeling he’d pegged her all wrong.

They both ordered iced tea when their server came over to drop off their menus. Alina glanced at hers for all of five seconds before looking at him.

“You want to split a medium pepperoni?” she asked, her expression hopeful.

“Let’s make it a large,” he said. “I’m pretty hungry.”

Their server brought their drinks, then disappeared with their order, leaving an awkward silence in her wake. Trevor added sweetener to his tea, searching for the best way to start the conversation. Across from him, Alina suddenly seemed very interested in the old pictures mounted on the wall above the booth.

Damn, this was so much easier when he was teamed up with Jake and Ed. Then again, training with them had been a whole hell of a lot less difficult, too.

This morning had been ugly, at least at the start of the shoot-house exercise. He was man enough to admit that a good portion of the blame for that train wreck rested squarely on his shoulders. Yeah, he’d been thrown for a loop by Jake’s trick with the noise and cow urine, but the biggest reason they’d done so poorly was because they’d flat-out refused to trust each other. With his shifter hearing and sense of smell taken out of the equation, he’d been dependent on Alina to watch his back as they’d moved through the house, but his suspicions of her made that leap of faith impossible.

It had taken Alina doing something extraordinary, like putting her complete faith in him and risking a paintball to the side of the head, to get him to realize he was being stupid. Dick might have hired her, but that didn’t have to define her. Maybe that’s what his gut had been trying to tell him. Maybe there was more to Alina than the job she’d been hired to do. While he wasn’t ready to trust her completely, he’d at least give her a chance.

“I guess you like pizza, huh?” he asked lamely, finally breaking the silence that had gone from merely awkward to seriously uncomfortable.

Alina turned her attention away from the photos on the wall to give him a sheepish look. “Yeah. When I was growing up, Friday was pizza night at our house. Mom and Dad made a big event out of it, so I always associate pizza with family and good times.” A smile curved her lips. “Now, it’s my number one go-to comfort food. My freezer is stuffed full of them, and the front of my fridge is covered in magnets from all the local delivery places.”

Trevor sipped his iced tea. He’d always considered pizza the ultimate food. “Were you being serious yesterday when you said your parents don’t know what you do for a living?”

Alina’s eyes sparkled with mischief as she shook her head. “I was just messing with you. Of course my parents know I worked for the CIA. Though to be truthful, they refuse to talk about it.”

He was about to ask for details, but their server came over with their pizza just then. It was an absolutely drool-worthy collection of cheese, pepperoni, and excess grease. In other words, perfect. The woman placed the big pizza on the table between them along with plates, utensils, and a load of napkins.

Trevor contained his curiosity about Alina’s family while they each helped themselves to their first slices of pizza. He watched in amusement as she used some of the paper napkins to soak up the excess grease, then practically emptied half a bottle of Parmesan cheese on her slice.

“You plan on having any pizza with that?” he teased as she poked the slice a few times with a fork as if she thought that would help all the added powdered cheese stay in place.

Alina shrugged. “I like Parmesan cheese on my pizza. Is that a crime or something?”

“Nope, not a crime at all.” He picked up his slice and took a few bites. “Back to your parents. What’s the story behind them refusing to talk about you being in the CIA?”

Alina hesitated long enough to take a bite of her own pizza before answering. “My family is what you’d describe as politically active. They’ve been involved in state and city politics for generations. City council, state senate and assembly, state cabinet positions, campaign management and fund-raising—you name it, and someone in my family has done it. With my background, everyone assumed I’d go into politics, too.”

He snagged another slice of pizza and sprinkled some Parmesan cheese on it. “You didn’t want to?”

“Actually, I did. I never saw myself running for office, but I thought about doing the behind-the-scenes stuff, maybe managing a campaign or working on someone’s staff. I even went to college for political science.”

“How did you go from being a poli-sci major to joining the CIA?”

She ate a few more bites of her pizza, nibbling all the way down to the back of the slice but not eating the crust there. When she was done, she tossed the pizza bone to the side and got another piece, drowning it in powdered cheese.

“There was a small Agency recruitment effort on campus,” she explained. “A lot of my friends didn’t want to have anything to do with them, but I went and listened. This was sometime in 2003, and the intelligence failures of 9/11 were all anyone talked about those days. What they told me changed my entire outlook. I signed up a few months later and went straight into the CIA right after graduation. With my background, I thought I’d be doing analyst work, but I ended up in the field instead.”

Trevor had still been in the army at that time and clearly remembered what those years following 9/11 were like. Those events had changed a lot of people’s outlooks.

“What did your family think of your career choice?” he asked.

Alina sipped her iced tea. “My brothers and sister weren’t thrilled, but they respected my decision. But when I told my parents I was joining the CIA, well, let’s just say they were disappointed. I think they had visions of me running around the world, inciting coups, toppling governments, kidnapping people, and assassinating world leaders. There was a period of time in the beginning when both of them stopped talking to me.”

Trevor winced. “And now?”

“It’s better,” she admitted. “But now, when I visit for the holidays, my profession is strictly off-limits. I don’t talk about what I do, and no one brings it up.”

Damn. That sounded really screwed up. “Must make for some tense dinners.”

She laughed. “Not as bad as you might think. I love my family to pieces, but sometimes they act as if the real world doesn’t exist. They’re comfortable believing everyone and every situation, anywhere in the world, can be handled through reasonable political debate and a nice, civil voice. You and I both know that, sometimes, things don’t work out like that. My family would simply rather not talk about those things. They’re comfortable not knowing what I do, and I’m comfortable not telling them.”

Alina might have seemed cool about the whole thing, but the slight elevation in her heart rate told Trevor she wasn’t as chill with her family’s opinion of her chosen career as she might try to suggest. He could get that. Family was family. If you knew they were disappointed in you, it was hard to act like it didn’t matter.

“Are you from the DC area, or did you move here after the DCO hired you?” he asked.

“I grew up in Sacramento, but the Agency had me based out of DC for the past five years. I have an apartment in Del Ray, near Reagan National.”

He reached for another slice of pizza. “Del Ray? That’s practically at the end of the airport runway. You don’t mind living near all that noise?”

She shook her head. “It’s not that bad. I don’t even notice it anymore. Besides, it was really convenient while I was in the Agency, since I practically lived in the airport.”

He chuckled. “I feel ya. Sometimes I think it’d make more sense to live in an RV. That way, I could park it at the airport whenever I go somewhere. Any plans to move closer to the DCO training complex at Quantico so you won’t have to deal with that morning commute?”

“No. I like my apartment, and my neighbor is my best friend. No way am I going anywhere.” She shrugged. “Besides, I still have no idea if this gig in the DCO is going to work out. It would be stupid to move then find out I don’t like the work that much.” She motioned at him with her half-eaten slice of pizza. “How about you? Do you live near Quantico?”

“Yeah. I have an apartment in Woodbridge that I was lucky enough to get into called Kensington Place. I can stumble to my car ten minutes before work and still make it there in time.”

She blinked. “I’ve heard of that place. It’s kind of fancy, isn’t it?”

“It’s a little pricey, I admit. But shifters do get a bonus over the regular GS wage scale. The DCO actually found the place for me.”

She laughed. “The perks of having fangs and claws, I guess.”

Trevor didn’t sense a trace of bitterness in her words, which was what he usually got from a lot of the other regular agents working in the DCO when they found out that the freaks got paid more than they did.

“Okay, now that you know all about me, what about you?” Alina asked. “How’d you end up in the DCO?”

He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “It’s a long story.”

She gestured at the pie in the center of the table. “We still have half a pizza left to polish off, so feel free to take your time.”

“Well, in that case, I suppose I should start with the fact that I was born to be a cop,” Trevor said, grabbing another slice.

Alina lifted a brow. “That seems like a tough burden to put on a newborn, don’t you think?”

He chuckled. “I’m serious. My dad, uncle, all three of my brothers, and my sister are all cops in Portland, so I’m not exaggerating when I say my life was planned out for me. From the time I was ten years old, it was a given that I’d either go in the army and serve as an MP, then get out after my first tour so I could become a cop like everyone else in my family, or I’d go to the local junior college and get my associate’s degree in criminal justice, then get a job as a cop like everyone else in my family.”

Alina made a face. “Crap. And I thought my life had been tightly scripted out for me. That had to have been a little claustrophobic.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” he agreed. “But it turned out that in my case, I had even fewer options than that. See, I was a wide receiver for our high school football team, and I was good enough to get some attention from the local universities. I got a couple of looks from recruiters at both Oregon and Oregon State during my junior year, and everyone was talking a full scholarship if I could make it through my senior year without getting injured. I have to admit I was kind of psyched about going to a big school and playing in front of thousands of fans. Unfortunately, my mom and dad weren’t planning on letting me get near any of the big schools. They’d already locked their sights on Western Oregon University. It was only an hour and a half from home, and it offered a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and a full scholarship. Dad was practically salivating at the thought of his youngest son hitting the detective ranks before the age of thirty. So at that point, even the military was off the table.”

“I’m hearing a but coming,” Alina said, taking a bite of pizza.

“Yeah. It was definitely coming.” He waited for their server to refill their teas and leave before continuing. “Because in between my junior year and senior year of high school, I went through my first shift. In a flash, my whole life changed.”

Alina stopped chewing and swallowed quickly. “Wait a minute. I naturally assumed you were born a shifter. It didn’t happen until you were seventeen? Did something happen to bring it on or whatever?”

“I was born a shifter, but shifter abilities usually don’t start appearing until sometime in our late teens.”

She nodded in interest, pizza apparently forgotten. “Did you freak out that first time?”

He snorted. “Hell yeah, I freaked. I thought I was turning into a werewolf or something.”

“So how did it happen?” she asked, her eyes bright with anticipation. “Did you wake up in the woods naked under a full moon, or was it something really scary like finding yourself raiding the fridge and eating raw meat in the middle of the night?”

Trevor laughed. Those were exactly the kind of snarky questions he would have asked if she was the shifter and he was the curious normal guy.

“You watch way too many movies,” he said.

Her cheeks took on a slight flush, and he had to remind himself this was his partner he was talking to, not a woman he was dating. That was tough to remember, since he couldn’t help but notice how damn sexy Alina looked when she blushed.

“It wasn’t anything that dramatic,” he finally said, taking mercy on her. “I woke up in the middle of the night dripping with sweat. Every muscle in my body was worn out like I’d just finished running a marathon in full pads and a helmet. I went into the bathroom to throw some cold water on my face. Then I looked in the mirror and…well, I guess you can imagine how seeing fangs and claws could be a little tough for a seventeen-year-old to deal with.”

“Did you tell anyone? Your parents or brothers or sister…a friend?”

He shook his head. “No. I thought I was turning into a monster. There was no way in hell I was going to tell anyone.”

She frowned. “That must have been difficult to keep secret.”

“Tell me about it.” He washed a bite of pizza down with a swig of tea. “When you first shift, it can take a while to gain control. I was on the verge of sprouting fangs and claws whenever I smelled a girl, got nervous or frustrated or angry, even when I got hungry. I hid it the best I could and tried to act like nothing was going on, but everything went to crap when I showed up for football practice and blew past the fastest cornerback on our team like he was standing still.” He shook his head, remembering it like it had been yesterday. “That’s when I knew I couldn’t play anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because someone would have figured out something was going on with me. Or assumed I was on performance-enhancing drugs. Plus, it seemed wrong playing football when there was no one who could keep up with me.”

Alina looked at him in surprise. “Wow. That’s a mature way to look at the situation for a high school kid. There’d be a lot of seventeen-year-olds who would have tried to take advantage of those physical abilities to make themselves look good.”

“Yeah, that was me,” he quipped, “very mature for my age.”

“So what’d you do?”

“What could I do?” He transferred another slice of pizza from the tray to his plate, then reached for the Parmesan cheese. “I dropped out of football and started hitting the science classes pretty hard, hoping to figure out what the hell was happening to me. When that didn’t work, I made the decision to get the hell out of town before anyone noticed how much I’d changed. I joined the army and headed to basic training the day after I graduated from high school. I signed up to be an MP, which was something of a consolation prize for my dad. My mom was a little freaked out, though. This was back when everyone thought Iraq was hiding nuclear and chemical weapons and the UN inspectors were being denied access to all kinds of suspicious facilities. Mom thought we’d be going back to war any day and was sure I’d get pulled into it. That didn’t happen, but she was a mess at the time anyway.”

“I think it’s nice that your mother worried about you so much.” Alina’s voice took on a wistful tone. “My mom knows what I do is dangerous, but since we don’t talk about it, she treats it like a tree that falls in the forest.”

“If there’s no one there to hear it, did it really make a sound?” Trevor finished for her.

“Exactly.” Alina sipped her tea. “How did you manage to keep your shifter side hidden in a whole unit full of MPs?”

“It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it’d be.” He took a bite of pizza, chewing before answering. “Being completely exhausted throughout basic training helped, but mostly, I got better at controlling both my abilities and my emotions.”

“How long were you an MP?”

“A few years,” he said. “As I got better with my abilities, I started getting good at figuring out when people were lying to me. They start sweating, their breathing gets all erratic, their heart rate spikes, their muscles tighten up—stuff like that. When I was assigned to Fort Carson in Colorado, I ended up catching a couple of high-vis bad guys, including a contractor who was trying to drive out the gate with a trunk full of classified documents. My commander put my name in for a transfer to CID—the army’s criminal investigative command—and the next thing I knew, I was reassigned as an investigator at Redstone Arsenal, a big R&D base in Alabama, where they had me watching for civilians and contractors trying to steal government secrets.”

“O-kay. Don’t take this the wrong way, but that sounds boring as hell.”

“Some of my coworkers thought it was,” he admitted. “But for me, it was always about getting into that other person’s head and trying to figure out what they were going to do before they even decided to do it. Besides, my dad was over the moon about it. He figured I’d get out of the army soon, and he’d be seeing a detective in the Maxwell family in the very near future.”

“I hear another but coming,” she said.

Trevor chuckled. “You’re getting good at this. Yeah, my skills got me noticed by some people in DC, and I was transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency without ever being asked whether that was something I wanted to do. I was put on a team responsible for tracking down traitors selling military intelligence and the foreign agents trying to recruit them.”

“So basic counterespionage and counterintelligence?”

He nodded. “Yup, spy versus spy.”

She continued eating. “What did your dad think of that?”

“He wasn’t thrilled. I liked it, though. Up until that point, I’d been limited to one little base, waiting for a government employee to do something stupid. But with the DIA, I went all over the world, anywhere there was a threat against the Department of Defense. I enjoyed the freedom to pursue just about anyone I wanted. And as a shifter, I was very good at finding those people.”

“What changed?” she asked. “How did you end up in the DCO?”

“What changed? Nothing really. That was the issue.” He shook his head. “No matter how many criminals I caught, no matter how much good I did, I knew in the back of my mind that I could never be myself. I was a freak, and I could never let anyone know it. I was alone in a sea of people. That was a shitty thing to have to live with, and there was a part of me that was unhappy as hell. I was seriously close to saying screw it and moving back to Portland to be the cop that my parents always wanted me to be.”

“And then?” Alina prompted.

“And then John Loughlin found me.” Trevor tried to ignore the stab of sorrow that came with saying his boss’s name but wasn’t very successful. “He found me and helped me realize that I wasn’t a freak, that there were other people like me, and that I didn’t need to keep living in secret. It was the most amazing thing anyone had ever done for me.”

Alina’s face clouded. “And then someone killed him.”

He swallowed hard. “Yeah. Someone killed him. The only reason I’m still at the DCO is so I can figure out exactly who did it and make sure they pay.”