Chapter 19

Tanner watched as Declan went down under two hybrid attackers. A split second later, one of Thorn’s men swung an empty rifle at Danica, knocking her unconscious.

Up until now, Tanner had been too busy in hand-to-hand combat to pay attention to details, but he knew that more of his friends had already fallen. He wasn’t sure whether they were alive or dead. All he could say for sure was that they’d fought like hell. The Special Forces soldiers showing up in time to help wasn’t going to happen. They were all going to die long before then.

Something in Tanner snapped at that realization. Maybe it was the last little shred of his control, or maybe the silly notion of keeping his inner animal chained up didn’t matter when nearly everyone he cared about was dying around him. Either way, the barrier he’d been holding in place between himself and the beast collapsed, and the raging thing inside came charging out.

Roaring loud enough to shake the rafters of the gym, he charged at the largest concentration of hybrids left standing, vowing to kill them all before the end.

He tore into them with his claws, sank his fangs into shoulders and necks, and smashed bones to dust with his fists. He’d lost his weapon somewhere along the way, but he didn’t care. Using an M4 would have been beyond him at this point anyway.

Blood went everywhere, both his and that of those he killed. He didn’t care about that, either. Some part of him recognized that killing was something he’d always done well. He was better at it now than before he’d been turned into a hybrid, but even in those days long past, this was what he’d always excelled at.

When he heard an increase in gunfire from behind him, he spun and faced it, rushing toward it before he knew where it was coming from.

He tried to pull up when he realized it was Derek, Diaz, and the other SF soldiers, but stopping wasn’t an option. Lowering his head, he picked up speed, heading straight for Diaz.

The beast inside him was shocked when the soldier’s eyes flared yellow and he leaped aside at the last second with a snarl and a flash of fangs.

Shit. Diaz was a shifter.

No matter how much Tanner fought the urge, the beast inside simply wanted to kill. If it was Diaz, that was okay, too. If anything, the beast reveled at the thought of fighting someone truly capable of fighting back.

Suddenly, a heavy body hit him, tackling him to the floor. He tried to twist out of Clayne’s grip, but the wolf shifter pinned Tanner’s arms to his side, and he couldn’t free himself. Another body landed on him—Diaz—then another, and another, and another. They crushed him to the floor, and no matter how much he raged, they refused to let the beast move. The animal was trapped, just like Tanner, and the beast didn’t like it any more than he did.

Tanner realized then that the shooting had stopped. He supposed that meant everything was over. For everyone but him. His fight would never be over.

* * *

Trevor slid to a halt on the sidewalk as an enormous roar echoed from inside the gym. He threw a look of concern Alina’s way. He’d never heard anything so primal and enraged. If that was one of Thorn’s hybrids, he didn’t want to think about how badly it was going in there.

“We need to hurry,” he told Alina, but she was already running ahead of him toward the gym.

Trevor was so eager to get there, he didn’t realize the danger he and Alina were in until it was too late. By the time he smelled Frasier, the asshole had stepped out from behind the building they were running past and grabbed Alina, yanking her to his chest. He put his gun to her head with a smug smile.

“Now, how did I know we were going to find you here?” Frasier snorted. “I told Mr. Thorn we should have blown you up along with your boss. Of all the fucking shifters, my gut always said you were going to be the biggest pain in the ass. But he wouldn’t listen.”

Heart thumping in his chest and fangs extending, Trevor pointed his weapon at Frasier’s head, ready to take the shot the moment he got the right angle, but the man was too experienced to make it easy on him. The piece of shit was careful to keep himself hidden behind Alina. For the first time ever, Trevor had to question why his partner had to be so frigging tall.

The only thing Trevor couldn’t understand was why Frasier hadn’t already shot them both—unless he simply wanted to crow a little first.

Alina didn’t look as nervous as she probably should have been. Instead, she calmly stood there with an expectant look in her eyes, waiting for Trevor to do something to end this once and for all.

Yeah, well, she might not have been nervous, but Trevor sure as hell was. Frasier was a cold-blooded killer who wouldn’t think twice about shooting Alina. And there was no way Trevor could get a clean shot at him. Right then, he didn’t give a shit if Frasier shot him. Alina was the only thing he cared about.

“Did he just admit to killing John?” a familiar voice said as two other men stepped out of the same shadows Frasier had.

Trevor would have liked to say he was stunned to see Dick and Thorn, but he wasn’t. No matter how many times you flushed, shit always floated to the top. The two men carried weapons, though Dick didn’t look nearly as comfortable holding his. He didn’t seem to know where to point it, either, instead moving it back and forth between Trevor and Frasier.

“Damn right he was behind the bombing in John’s office,” Trevor said as he backed up a bit to keep all three men in his sights. “Are you seriously saying you never realized what the hell Frasier was up to? Didn’t you used to work for the NSA? Aren’t you supposed to know all the secrets? They blew up John’s office when they realized he was close to getting the evidence he needed to send Thorn away for life.”

Dick’s eyes widened as he snapped around to look Thorn. “Is that true? You had John killed?”

Thorn shook his head in disgust. “Of course I had him killed, you moron. Are you really that stupid? Or just that naive?”

Dick’s mouth tightened. It was possible the man might have said something that would have changed Trevor’s whole opinion of him, but he never got the chance, because Frasier took his weapon off Alina for a second and shot Dick twice in the heart.

Trevor quickly darted to the side, trying to get a shot at Frasier, when suddenly, a large shadow dropped down from the second-story roof of the building beside them, knocking Frasier to the ground.

As Alina stumbled to the side, Trevor leaped for her, but Thorn got there first, yanking her close to him and using her as a shield. Trevor aimed his weapon at Thorn while keeping an eye on Frasier.

The dark shadow that had dropped down from above resolved itself into Adam’s muscular frame. Frasier tried to get a shot at the huge shifter, but Adam ripped the weapon from his hand. In a blur, Adam leaned in and sank his fangs into the man’s neck. Frasier cried out in pain, but Adam released him almost immediately, pulling his handgun and quickly stepping back to cover Thorn from a few feet to Trevor’s left as if Frasier didn’t exist.

Trevor wasn’t sure who to cover—Thorn, who was trying to use Alina as a human shield, or Frasier, who was only a few feet away from his pistol lying on the ground.

Frasier took a step toward the weapon, but then froze, a bewildered expression on his face. After a moment, he slowly turned to look at Adam, his expression now one of fear. Then he started to shake. Just a little at first, but then more and more, until his whole body was spasming in what had to have been tremendous pain.

Adam didn’t even look at him. Not even when Frasier fell to the ground and convulsed so hard that blood appeared at the corners of his lips where he’d bitten himself. Frasier opened his mouth, but no sound came out. It was like his throat was paralyzed. A moment later, he went still as the last breath left his body.

“You’re supposed to be dead!” Thorn shouted, looking at Adam. “Frasier killed you.”

Adam’s eyes swirled orange and gold, the pupils elongating to slits. “He failed.”

“It’s over, Thorn,” Trevor said, interrupting the happy reunion between the two men. “There’s no getting out of this one. It’s either jail for the rest of your life or a box in the ground. You need to decide quickly—or I will.”

Thorn slowly backpedaled toward the parking lot, dragging Alina with him. “That’s not going to happen. I’m walking out of here, and you’re going to let me go. Or I’m shooting her. And don’t even try to pretend you don’t care about her. You missed one of the bugs I left in her bathroom. I heard everything you said to each other. Very touching, but also useful to me. Back away, or I’ll kill her right now.”

Trevor hesitated. He couldn’t do anything that would risk Alina’s life. She was too important to him.

Alina suddenly caught his eye, and he knew what she was going to do even before she did it.

He opened his mouth to stop her, but it was too late for that. Alina stomped down on the top of Thorn’s right foot with the heel of her tennis shoe. At the same time, she brought the edge of her hand down in a groin strike, smashing the former senator so hard in the balls the man’s eyes went glassy and his face paled. Before Thorn could move, Alina reached up and grabbed the arm he had wrapped around her shoulder and neck, twisting it away from her body and torqueing his wrist until the bone broke. Then she lunged forward, rolling across the ground.

Trevor took the opening she gave him, putting a single bullet between Thorn’s eyes.

Alina scrambled to her feet as Thorn tumbled to the ground. Trevor ignored him and rushed over to her, pulling her into his arms.

“Are you okay?” he asked, looking at her closely to make sure for himself.

Having her at the end of a gun barrel so many times in one day was too much. If it happened again, he was going to lose his fucking mind.

She nodded and kissed him. “I’m good. Thanks for backing me up on that and with Wade, too. I never did get a chance to tell you.”

“Always,” he said simply, meaning it in every sense of the word.

“The shooting has stopped in the gym,” Adam said softly, as if reluctant to interrupt them.

Alina turned to look at him. “Do you think that’s a good thing?”

Adam shrugged. His eyes were back to their normal color. “I guess the only way to know is to go in there.”

As they left the three dead men behind, Trevor couldn’t help glancing at Frasier. His body was still twisted into that bowstring taut position he’d been in before, two small punctures on his neck. They had barely leaked any blood. In fact, they looked almost harmless.

“Is your bite poisonous?” Trevor asked Adam as they made their way to the gym.

“Apparently,” Adam said.

Trevor would have loved to hear more, especially about what kind of frigging shifter Adam was that allowed him to do something like that. But then another thought struck him.

“How do you…you know…kiss a woman with a mouth like that?”

Alina shot Trevor a look like he was crazy, but Adam chuckled.

“Carefully. Very carefully.”

* * *

“What the hell are we going to do with her?” Alina whispered to Trevor as they sat back against one of the walls in the gym, her gaze on Sage, who was presently curled up in Staff Sergeant Derek Mickens’s arms, sleeping. “It’s not like Derek can hold her like that for the next three days until we figure out what to do with the hybrids and other prisoners we had to put in her room.”

Trevor sighed and wrapped his arm around her, pulled her closer. “One problem at a time. Sage is calm right now. That’s as much as we can ask for at the moment.”

He was right. They’d dealt with enough problems for one night. Seeing so many of his friends seriously injured had taken a lot out of Trevor. He might have been trying to act like he wasn’t upset, but Alina knew he was hurting. Sighing, she turned her gaze back to the feline hybrid and the only person who seemed to be able to keep her calm and accepted they couldn’t solve every problem in one night.

It had taken hours for the chaos inside the gym to calm down enough for Alina to take a breath and allow herself to think for one second that maybe everything was going to work out okay. Maybe everyone they knew and cared about would make it out of this alive.

She, Trevor, and Adam had entered the gym carefully after dealing with Thorn, fearing the worst. But while the fighting was over, that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything left to be done.

First, there were the injured to care for—and there were a lot of them. No one had gotten through the battle unscathed. Declan had been clawed up so badly, he was in some kind of self-induced deep sleep hibernation mode that scared the hell out of Alina. He looked dead, but Trevor assured her he was healing and would be fine.

Danica had just regained consciousness a few minutes ago but still had a concussion. Minka, Dreya, and Braden were nursing broken bones. Jaxson had suffered multiple knife wounds and a dislocated shoulder. Clayne’s thigh had been ripped open from knee to hip, nearly to the bone. And even though Alina had no idea how it had happened, Evan ended up with a gunshot wound to the shoulder. She hadn’t even realized he’d come to help. As if all that weren’t enough, Morgan was still passed out from losing so much blood.

Zarina had been waiting outside the gates of the DCO until the shooting had stopped, then rushed in as fast as she could. The Russian doctor hadn’t bothered getting the worst of the injured to the lab but simply performed surgery right there on the floor of the gym, starting with Morgan, then moving on to Clayne, Evan, and Jaxson, one right after the next like some kind of machine. Only after she’d gotten the seriously wounded stabilized had she moved them to the lab for X-rays, casts, and stitches. Landon had suggested calling in additional help, but Zarina had shaken her head.

“These are my patients,” she told him. “I’ll care for them.”

While Zarina had been caring for the injured, Alina and Trevor had focused on secondary concerns. First, they’d convinced the local police and FBI agents who showed up at the front gate that all the shooting had been nothing more than a big training exercise. Unbelievably, the BS line had worked, keeping the place from getting overrun with law enforcement types who would have had a serious problem understanding why there were so many people in the gym torn to shreds. Alina had no idea how they were going to hide this, but step one was keeping it quiet.

Then they’d turned their attention to another dicey problem. Several of Thorn’s hybrids and even more of his paid muscle had given themselves up, and no one knew what to do with them. Adam suggested they simply execute them, but neither Alina nor Trevor would allow that. Still, it wasn’t like they could cart them off to jail, either. Trevor had used the threat of jail to try to get Thorn to drop his weapon, but she had no idea what the charges would have been. Conspiracy to start World War III?

While Thorn’s men wouldn’t have been much of a problem in prison, did they really want to turn a group of intelligent and lethal hybrids over to the justice system? Alina could imagine the CIA getting their hands on them so they could start up a shifter-like program of their own.

But they sure as hell couldn’t let them go, either. As Alina had already learned with Sage, the DCO didn’t have cells for holding prisoners, especially ones who could tear through walls with their fists. Left with no choice, Landon’s Special Forces buddies had herded them into Sage’s makeshift prison. Now they had nowhere to put the feline hybrid.

While Sage had held it together and even protected Jaxson and several of the analysts, after watching so many people get hurt, she’d lost control and started lashing out at anyone who came near her. If Derek hadn’t been there, who knew what would have happened?

But like Trevor said, one problem at a time.

“To tell you the truth, I’m more worried about Tanner than Sage,” Trevor said softly.

Alina glanced at Tanner. He wasn’t physically injured beyond a really nasty bite wound on one of his arms, but the mental wounds he seemed to be suffering from were obviously severe. Right now, he was sitting on the floor by himself, his gaze fixed on the bodies of the men and hybrids he’d torn to pieces after he’d completely lost it. The expression on his face was so empty and lost, it was painful to see.

She couldn’t imagine what he was going through. Sage might have lost control, but she’d never tried to hurt any of the people she knew. The same couldn’t be said of Tanner. According to Landon, Tanner had turned on Carlos Diaz. The only reason Diaz had survived was because he was a shifter. While no one blamed Tanner for what happened, his actions still weighed heavily on him. Alina knew from experience that pain like Tanner was feeling couldn’t be eased with a few words. He was going to have to deal with it on his own—at least until he was ready to let someone help him.

As if he’d been having those same thoughts, Tanner slowly stood up and headed for the front entrance of the gym. He must have felt Alina’s eyes on him, because he stopped and looked at her as if wondering whether she might try to stop him. Part of her wanted to, but she knew deep down that he needed some time to get things straight in his head. After a moment, Tanner turned and walked out.

On the other side of the gym, Landon and Ivy were arguing with Diaz. Alina couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it seemed to be getting heated.

“What’s that all about?” she asked Trevor.

He followed her gaze, then chuckled. “Diaz thinks he was turned into a shifter because he was bitten by a hybrid last year. Landon and Ivy are trying to convince him that isn’t possible and that if he’d give Zarina a sample of his blood, she could confirm that for him. Diaz doesn’t seem thrilled with the idea.”

Alina studied the Special Forces soldier. “Is that possible? Could he have been turned from a hybrid bite?”

“No. He’s a full-blooded coyote shifter through and through. I’ve known since we went on that mission to Tajikistan together months ago.”

Across the gym, it looked like Diaz had finally agreed to do what Landon and Ivy wanted, because he nodded.

Alina looked at Trevor. “You mention that mission to Tajikistan a lot. You ever going to fill me on the details?”

His mouth edged up. “As soon as the situation here is stabilized, why don’t we head back to your place? That way, we can lie around in bed for the next few days and spend a lot of time filling each other in on all the things we haven’t got around to.”

She liked the idea of spending a few days in bed with him. But there was one thing that made her hesitate.

“Are we going to find that other bug Thorn mentioned first?” she asked. “Just in case there’s still someone listening on the other end.”

Trevor chuckled. “We can do that. Or we can give them something really good to listen to.”

“I vote for option one,” Alina said.

He shrugged. “Whatever you say.”