Chapter 12

“Crap, these guys are good,” Alina said, watching through a set of night-vision binoculars as two men got to work on the heavy-duty lock of an earth-covered bunker five hundred feet away from where she and Trevor hid behind a similar bunker. “They’ve broken through three high-security locks in less than five minutes.”

“And since this area isn’t being overrun with MPs, I’m guessing they’ve disabled the alarm inside each bunker as well,” Trevor added. “Which means they’re better than good—or they have the frigging security codes.”

Alina turned her attention away from the dozen men in army camouflage who were working fast to load four large military cargo trucks with crates of ammo and looked at Trevor crouched beside her in the darkness. “You seriously think someone on this base gave these guys access to military weapons?”

Trevor shrugged. “My source said there might be high-level military personnel involved. Considering how easily these guys slipped on base, the fact that there was nobody manning the gates of the ammunition supply point, and the way they seem to know exactly which bunkers to break into to find what they’re after, I’d say he was right.”

Alina itched to ask Trevor who the hell his source was but restrained herself. By including her on this mission, he was obviously willing to extend the proverbial olive branch to her. She wasn’t going to push her luck now and mess everything up. She’d said she was going to do whatever was necessary to win his trust. Right now, that simply meant trusting him first.

“I don’t know. We didn’t seem to have any problems slipping onto the base, either,” she pointed out. “Maybe they bought their fake IDs from the same place you got ours.”

Trevor chuckled softly. “Somehow, I doubt that.”

She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. Not surprising. Trevor might have trusted her enough to bring her along, but that didn’t keep him from being tight-lipped about the mission, especially about who’d given it to them. He’d simply shown up at Sage’s prison dorm and told Alina he needed her help slipping onto an active duty military installation on the off chance that a group of thieves might show up and steal some military weapons.

At first, she’d thought he was joking. She couldn’t understand why the DCO would send the two of them onto an army base to confront people who sounded an awful lot like terrorists. What the heck did Dick expect them to do?

But on the drive up to the sprawling military research and development base located two hours north of DC, it dawned her on that this probably wasn’t a DCO mission at all. She wanted to ask Trevor if this had something to do with Thorn but decided to trust him. After everything she’d seen the past few days, trusting Trevor was becoming easier by the minute. She hadn’t trusted anyone in a long time and had been afraid she never would again. She was glad to see that wasn’t the case.

“We need to move closer,” Trevor whispered. “See if we can identify who these people are and what they’re taking.”

“Then what?” she asked. “Are we going to try to take them down?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “We’re seriously outnumbered, so I guess it’s going to depend on how heavily armed they are. If we have to, we’ll stick a tracking device onto one of their vehicles and see where they lead us, then call in the cavalry once their guard is down.”

Alina nodded, liking the sound of that. She wasn’t thrilled about letting these guys off the base with four truckloads worth of ammo and explosives, but it was better than getting into a gunfight and losing.

She climbed to her feet and followed Trevor around the back of the bunker they’d been hiding behind. As they moved in a wide circle toward the bad guys’ trucks, they used other bunkers along the way to conceal themselves when they could, keeping to the heavy shadows anytime they had to cross open ground. Hopefully, the men stealing the ammo were too focused on what they were doing to notice anyone sneaking up on them.

Alina would have preferred to have the SUV closer, in case they either had to run like hell or chase someone, but it would have been too risky, so they’d left it half a mile back. As they approached the trucks, Alina checked out the scene with her night-vision binoculars, looking for any details she could see. That’s when she realized there was something odd about some of the crates the men were loading into the trucks. She wasn’t an expert on army munition containers, but she’d seen enough in her former job to know there was something unusual about the stuff they were stealing.

“Why do those ammo boxes look bigger than the U.S. ammo containers I’m used to seeing?” she whispered to Trevor as they both dropped to one knee.

Trevor’s eyes flared vivid yellow, then went back to their normal color. “Because they’re foreign.”

“What do you mean, foreign?”

He didn’t take his eyes off the scene in front of him. “You probably can’t see the writing from here, but I can. It’s Russian. Mostly infantry type stuff—small arms ammo, hand and rocket-propelled grenades, and explosives.”

Okay. That didn’t seem right. “What’s Russian ammo doing in an American depot?”

“The army stores lots of foreign ammo at Aberdeen,” he explained. “It’s held for intelligence exploitation, to train Special Forces teams, even to support overseas operations conducted by our allies in places like Syria and Iraq.”

Huh. She’d never thought about where ammo like that was stored.

They moved closer, but after a few dozen feet, Trevor put out his hand to stop her.

“What is it?” she asked softly.

Trevor sniffed the air, then looked at her, his eyes glowing yellow again.

“I swear I smell shifters, but the scent isn’t quite right.”

Her jaw dropped. “Crap! If you’re smelling them, do we have to worry about them smelling us, too?”

He shook his head. “We’re approaching from downwind, so we should be good. But stay quiet. If I’m right and there are shifters here, we have to be worried about them hearing us.”

Up ahead, several of the men climbed into two of the trucks. As she and Trevor ducked down in the grass along the edge of the road, the vehicles cranked up with a loud rumble and headed toward the gate of the ammo area.

“We have to move,” Trevor whispered. “Before the other two trucks get loaded up and take off.”

Alina pulled her pistol out as she rose to her feet. She and Trevor picked up the pace, closing the last twenty feet between them and the nearest truck. It sounded like there were still at least half a dozen men on the other side of it. Maybe this was even crazier than she’d thought. What the hell were they going to do against six men, especially if one—or more—of them were shifters?

“Move a little closer, and see if you can get a good look at these guys while I plant a tracking device on the truck,” Trevor said. “Then we’ll pull back and follow them.”

She was in complete agreement with that plan. She made her way to the front of the big five-ton truck while Trevor headed for the rear of the vehicle. She was just about to lean down and poke her head around the high bumper when a tall figure stepped out from around the front of the truck right into her path.

She froze, her blood going cold.

Wade.

He was taller and broader than she remembered, but it was him. A hundred different emotions rolled through her all at once—shock, denial, anger, fear.

Wade seemed just stunned as she was, and they stood there for what seemed like forever, staring at each other. Then a slow smile spread across his face, revealing a mouthful of long fangs.

“I was wondering when we’d see each other again,” he said, his eyes flaring red.

Her eyes widened as his arm came up and he aimed his gun at her. She tried to get her weapon up in time, but Wade was so much faster than she was. Faster than she could imagine anyone being.

Something slammed into her side, knocking her off her feet just as Wade pulled the trigger. The bullet missed her, hitting the asphalt where she’d been standing.

She braced for impact, expecting to hit the pavement, but instead, Trevor tucked her to his chest and hit the ground rolling.

They ended up in the shallow ditch alongside the bunker access road. Trevor immediately came up to return fire against Wade and the other men who had raced to join him. Alina quickly got her act together and came up on one knee. For a second, everything flashed back to that same desperate and futile stand she and her old team had made in Turkey so many years ago. Even the zing of the bullets zipping right past them sounded the same. Any moment, Trevor would go down, just like Rodney and Fred and Jodi.

No, dammit! Things weren’t going that way. Not again.

Firing a few more rounds in Wade’s direction, she turned and put several bullets through the big gas tank mounted beneath the cab of the truck. Fuel sprayed everywhere, quickly followed by a whoosh of flames.

The men near the truck scrambled away as fire engulfed the vehicle. Wade pulled back, too, but kept shooting in her direction. She heard him growling in anger as he yelled at the other men not to kill her.

“She’s mine!”

Alina stood and moved toward him, climbing out of the slight protection of the ditch, screaming right back at the man who had killed her teammates three years ago. She had no idea what she was shouting. All she knew was she couldn’t let this man—this monster—get away.

Strong arms wrapped around her, yanking her off her feet and carrying her away from the burning truck. Some part of her mind recognized that it was Trevor, but she fought against him anyway, not understanding why he was trying to stop her from getting to Wade.

Then the truck exploded, picking up both her and Trevor and tossing them in the air like an angry giant. They hit the ground hard, slamming the breath out of her and sending pain jolting through her body. She felt the heat from the fire wash over her back a second later, making her wonder if her clothes might burst into flames.

She crawled to her feet, ignoring the ammunition in the back of the still-burning truck as it continued to explode, throwing metal fragments and flaming debris everywhere. There were two bodies lying near the center of the blast, but she doubted either of them was Wade. He was too evil to go down that easily. She moved to the side, in the direction he’d disappeared, trying to get an angle where she would have a shot at the bastard.

She caught sight of him climbing in the passenger door of the last truck as it pulled away. She fired the few remaining rounds in her weapon, dropped the magazine, reloaded, then started to fire again as fast as she could. She put at least nine rounds into the cab of the rapidly departing truck, sure she must have hit Wade at least once.

“We have to get out of here!” Trevor shouted, taking her hand and yanking her farther away from the burning truck, the fire, and the ammo that was still cooking off in the flames like giant pieces of popcorn.

She knew he was right. If one of the chunks of steel zipping out of the flames hit them, they’d be dead. Even realizing that, it was damn hard to let him pull her away.

She kept shooting as they backpedaled away, putting one round after another as it disappeared from sight, praying she’d hit something in the cargo area and make it explode just like the first one had.

No such luck.

When she ran out of ammo, she practically screamed in frustration. She looked at Trevor. “Should we chase them?”

He shook his head. “No. By the time we get back to our vehicle, they’ll already be halfway across the base. Besides, we’re both out of ammo. What would we do if we catch them, throw harsh words at them? We need to get out of here before the MPs show up and start wondering what the hell happened here.”

Dammit. She’d had Wade right in front of her, and he got away. But she nodded and started jogging with him toward their vehicle.

“At least tell me you got the tracking device into their truck,” she said.

“Damn right,” Trevor said. “Unfortunately, I attached it to the underside of the truck you decided to blow up, so I don’t think it’s going to help us very much.”

“Crap on a stick!”

He glanced at her as they ran. “I’m guessing you know that guy pretty well?”

“Yeah, you could say that. He got my entire CIA team killed a few years ago. I’ve been hunting him ever since.”

Trevor looked at her in surprise, his expression suggesting he was waiting for her to say more. Instead, she saved her breath so she could run faster. This wasn’t the right time or place for a conversation. They needed to get the hell out of there.

When they got to the SUV and climbed in, Trevor cranked the vehicle, then floored it, spinning through the grass and squawking the tires as they reached the asphalt, and racing for the gates of the ASP.

“Silly question, but I’m guessing that guy wasn’t a hybrid when you were working with him back in the CIA?”

“No. I think I would have noticed the fangs. They kind of stand out.”

“Yeah, they do.”

He didn’t say anything else for a while, not until they were out of the ASP and hauling ass through the narrow back roads that crisscrossed these remote parts of Aberdeen. Only when they were far enough away from the ammo depot and weren’t likely to get rolled up in whatever perimeter the MPs might put around the area did Trevor finally look at her.

“You’re probably not going to believe this, but we actually got what we came here for tonight.”

Alina frowned. “I’m not sure if you noticed, but those guys got away with a lot of ammunition and explosives.”

“Yeah, they did,” he agreed. “Three truckloads worth without us getting a tracking device on them. And the guy you were trying to kill got away, too. I know that bothers you even more.”

Alina couldn’t stand hearing that last part. “Yeah, don’t remind me. Just explain how you think we got what we came here for.”

“Because, while I would have liked to stop those guys from escaping and get the man who killed your teammates, at the end of the day, we were sent here to get a look at these people and figure out what they were doing. We did that—and more.”

“We did?”

“We know they were stealing Russian ammunition, you know the man who was running the operation, and we have undeniable proof the theft was conducted on the orders of Thomas Thorn.”

She stared at him as they entered the main part of the base, then pulled off the road as MP vehicles and fire trucks sped past them, heading the other way. She was suddenly tired of not knowing what was going on in this organization…and on this team.

“What the hell does Thomas Thorn have to do with any of this?” she demanded. “Why does he want Russian ammunition, and how the hell is Wade connected to him? And for that matter, who sent us on this mission to begin with? Because it sure as hell wasn’t Dick. And when the hell were you planning to clue me in to all these damn secrets you’ve obviously been keeping from me from the beginning?”

After the emergency vehicles passed them, Trevor could have pulled onto the road and kept going. But instead, he sat there. “You’re right. I have been keeping a lot of secrets from you. Something tells me you’ve been keeping more than a few of your own, too. We can’t do that anymore. It’s time we go somewhere and have a discussion we probably should have had the first day we met.”

* * *

“I can’t believe Dick bugged my apartment.” Alina glared at the tall glass filled with water and micro listening devices that was sitting on her kitchen counter. “That bastard.”

“We can’t be sure it was Dick,” Trevor pointed out as he picked up the glass and tried to count the number of bugs that had been planted around his partner’s place. He quickly gave up—it was like counting gumballs in a vending machine. If Alina had this many hidden microphones in her place, he could only imagine how many his apartment contained. “It could just as likely have been Thorn who ordered it. Though I do have to agree with you on one point—Dick is a bastard.”

They’d only learned about the bugs because Trevor had called Adam on the way back from Aberdeen to give him an update on what had happened there and tell him that they were heading to her apartment.

“I’m going to tell her everything,” Trevor had added.

“You know her apartment is probably bugged, right?” Adam had pointed out.

“Any chance you can do something about that?”

“I can,” Adam had said. “As long as you realize you’ll be tipping Dick and Thorn off that you’re onto their surveillance. That may cause complications for both of you later.”

Trevor was aware of that. But he and Alina needed to get a lot of stuff out in the open, and the best place to do that was somewhere she’d feel comfortable.

“Understood,” he had told Adam. “Think you can have the place swept within the hour?”

Adam had assured him he would.

“What was that about?” Alina had asked when he’d hung up.

That was when he’d told her that her place had almost certainly been wired for sound from the moment she’d accepted the job at the DCO.

Needless to say, she hadn’t been happy about it. Muttering under her breath, she’d texted her friend Kathy and said she was coming home but that she’d need some privacy for the night so she and Trevor could deal with some stuff, then asked if Kathy could keep Molly for a bit longer.

“How do we know this friend of yours was able to find all the bugs?” she asked now, taking the water glass from his hand and giving it a shake.

He took the glass back from her and set it firmly on the counter. “Adam, and the people he employs, are very good at what they do. If they say the apartment has been cleared, it’s clear.”

She regarded him thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded. “I guess that brings me to my next question. Do you work for Adam? Is he the one who’s been sending us all over the place the past few days?”

Alina had been patient on the drive back to DC, asking a few questions but essentially waiting until they got back here to get into anything serious. He supposed now was finally the time to talk about it. But looking at Alina, her face and hair smudged with black soot from the fire, her clothes torn and burnt in places from the flying debris and the impact of being thrown to the ground, she looked tired. Judging by how slowly she’d walked up the stairs earlier, beat up as well. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t concerned about her. It was all he could do not to pull her into his arms. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his cargo pants instead.

“Maybe you should get cleaned up first,” he suggested.

Alina didn’t say anything, and for a moment, Trevor thought she might take him up on his offer, but then she shook her head.

“Not yet. We need to talk and get everything out in the open first. We’ve been hiding the truth from each other long enough. We can worry about cleaning up later. Right now, I just want to know what’s really going on.”

He nodded and motioned her over to the small table in the corner of the kitchen. He would have preferred the couch, but both of them were too dirty for that. They’d make a mess of her nice furniture if they sat there.

“First off, no, I don’t work for Adam. He’s a friend of John’s and had been working with him for years, trying to find something that would put Thorn in prison. When John was murdered, Adam continued to try to find that evidence.”

“Evidence of what?” Alina asked. “I keep hearing all this innuendo implying Thorn was involved in John’s death, but if John and Adam were after him for years, he must have done something else. What’s behind all this?”

Trevor shrugged. “I have no idea where it all started. I’ve heard some rumors that make me think Thorn broke the law around the time the DCO was getting started. I’m not sure what it was, but it was bad enough for John and Adam to commit themselves to putting the man away. I’ve only picked up on that kind of stuff recently, of course. John had kept most of us out of his personal war with Thorn, probably thinking it would keep us safe.”

“What changed?” Alina asked. “Why suddenly pull you into it?”

“Tajikistan happened,” Trevor said. “John called and yanked me out of the mission I was on in Jakarta, telling me to get my ass to southern Tajikistan in time to help Landon, Ivy, and some other DCO agents take down a hybrid research station. It’s a long story, but the short version is that we confirmed Thorn had been behind the hybrid program from the very beginning. He’d been funding the project with money skimmed from the DCO’s budget for years. He’s the one who gave the order to start experimenting on shifters to see what made them tick and to kidnap doctors and scientists like Zarina to further his research, and when his people came up with the first hybrid serum, he was the one who ordered they use it on innocent people. We have no way of knowing how many people died during that testing, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to say it was probably a couple hundred.”

Alina flinched. “Tajikistan? That’s where you rescued Sage, right? Thorn turned her into a hybrid?”

Trevor nodded. “Yeah. Out of all the people injected with various strains of the serum in Atlanta, Washington State, Costa Rica, and all across the globe, we know of only three who lived—Tanner, Sage, and a DCO agent named Minka Pajari.”

“I’m having a hard time believing someone so evil could still exist in the modern world.” She shook her head. “How is it possible no one has ever been able to pin anything on Thorn? I know he’s a former senator and head of a weapons manufacturing company, but still, you’d think the DCO would have been able to make something stick by now.”

Shit. She really had no idea.

“The DCO was started shortly after 9/11 by eight powerful senators and representatives who called themselves the Committee,” he explained. “The existence of the Committee and the identities of the people on it are closely guarded secrets. Those eight people control all the money that flows into the DCO and dictate what missions the organization will pursue. They’re the real power behind the scenes, and with that almost unlimited power, there’s damn near nothing they can’t do.”

On the other side of the table, realization dawned on Alina’s face.

“Thorn might be a former senator and CEO of Chadwick-Thorn, but he’s also the senior member of the Committee,” Trevor continued. “He’s pulled the strings within the organization from the very beginning. That’s why John and Adam were never able to get him on anything. Thorn is rich and powerful and has an entire covert organization full of agents at his beck and call to make sure he’s always ten steps ahead of everyone who comes after him.”

“Thorn is crooked, and he’s in charge of the DCO?” Alina asked in shock. “How the hell did that happen?”

Trevor shrugged. “Thorn is one of those assholes who does what he wants simply because he can. And as far as what he wants, that seems to be hybrids.”

“But what does he want the hybrids for?” She chewed on her lip as she considered that. “What’s he trying to gain? Is this some twisted plan to get more agents for the DCO?”

“That’s the part we haven’t figured out,” Trevor admitted. “He’s been working on creating a perfect man-made shifter all this time, spending millions of dollars and throwing lives away like they’re nothing, and we don’t have a clue why. I’m willing to bet that whatever his endgame might be, we’re getting close to it. Tonight proves it.”

“You mean Wade, don’t you?” she asked softly. “He’s Thorn’s perfect man-made shifter.”

Trevor nodded. “I think so. The other day, when I left you to take care of Sage, it was because I got a tip that Thorn was holding a classified meeting with some people. We were able to slip a listening device into the conference room and heard his scientists announce they’d solved the hybrid problem. They’re in the process of creating a whole squad of the damn things at a location they called the farm. These new hybrids are highly trained, deadly, and completely loyal to Thorn. The ones we saw during the briefing looked exactly like Wade, right down to the mouth full of extra teeth and red eyes. Wade definitely smelled different from any shifter or hybrid I’ve ever sniffed before, too. Like a blend of both. I think that guarantees Wade is one of Thorn’s new pets.”

“And you honestly don’t have a clue what Thorn’s going to do with these new hybrids?”

“No. But if he felt it necessary to get John off the playing field—and go to all the effort he’s expended trying to wipe out almost every shifter the DCO has—it must be big.”

“What can we do to stop him?”

Trevor lifted a brow. “You sure you want to get involved in this, now that you know who—and what—you’ll be facing? You’ve probably figured this out, but Thorn isn’t exactly the kind of man you want to piss off unless you’re ready to go all in. You take a swing at him and miss, and you probably won’t get another chance. John found that out the hard way.”

He’d known from the first day he met Alina that she wasn’t the kind of woman to run from a fight, so he wasn’t surprised when she nodded.

“After seeing Sage and understanding what Thorn did to her—and people like her—I’m ready to take my chances against him,” she said. “If that’s not enough, the asshole has Wade working for him. No way in hell I’m walking away from that.”

His gut reaction was to tell her there was no way in hell he was letting her walk into it. But he couldn’t do that. She was a trained field agent, the same as he was. Even so, the thought of her being in danger like she was tonight made it suddenly hard to breathe.

“Okay,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure you were going into this with your eyes wide open.”

She reached up to push her hair behind her ear. “So what do we do first?”

“Mostly, it’s a waiting game at this point. I have a lot of people working on this, and we’ve given them a lot to work with.”

“What do you mean?”

“Adam and the analyst you saw the other day—Evan—are looking into the Russian ammo angle, Wade’s involvement, and Thorn’s new hybrid squad to see if they can come up with anything to tell us what he’s planning,” Trevor said. “While they’re doing that, Tanner is trying to learn where Thorn’s hybrid farm is located. Plus, we still have Larson going through the DCO employee files to see if he recognizes anyone from the morning of John’s murder. In addition to that, I have an FBI contact named Tony Moretti out in Sacramento doing forensic work on the remains of the bomb I sent out there. With all those people digging, someone is going to find something soon. We just have to give them a chance.”

Alina gazed at him thoughtfully. “You realize that I’ve just learned more about the DCO and what’s going on around here in the past ten minutes than I have in the past four days, right?”

Trevor winced. “Yeah, sorry about that.”

She shook her head. “Don’t be. Dick hired me to spy on you. And even though my a-hole radar was pinging on high alert every time he said something, I still bought his crap. So if one of us owes the other an apology, it’s me.”

Trevor’s mouth edged up. “There’s enough blame to go around, so let’s just call it even and go from here, okay?”

Alina smiled, and he felt something stir in his chest. Damn, the woman had a strange effect on him.

She leaned forward a little, resting her chin on her hand. “What changed? What made you start trusting me when you were so sure I was on Dick’s side?”

He opened his mouth to answer, then realized he didn’t know.

“I’m not sure,” he finally admitted. “I guess it’s one of those instinctive kind of things. I kept getting the feeling you weren’t the person I thought you were. And after seeing you risk your life to go after Wade, that’s when I knew it was time to trust you.”

Alina gazed at him for a long time, and he felt his heart pound faster. Did she realize he was holding back a good portion of the story, that it wasn’t just the way she’d thrown herself into a fight that had tipped the trust scale in her favor but the fact that he’d started feeling something for her? Or that it was the most powerful thing he’d ever felt and growing stronger by the minute?

“Well, thanks, whatever the reason.” Alina reached across the table to cover his hand with hers. “Knowing that you trust me is more important to me than you can imagine.”

Trevor looked down at her hand. She had beautiful fingers. Long and graceful, like the rest of her. She casually ran them back and forth over his knuckles, then slowly laced them through his. His heart thudded so hard in his chest, he could hear it.

He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Trust is pretty important to me, too.”

Suddenly, his gums and fingers started to tingle like they did whenever he was on the verge of an uncontrolled shift. Shit, that hadn’t happened to him since those early days in high school.

He probably should have pulled his hand away. That would have been the smart thing to do. But at that moment, he wasn’t worried about doing what was smart. He was only interested in doing what his instincts told him was right.

What the hell was it about Alina that had him acting like this? And more importantly, did she know the effect she was having on him?

He lifted his head to see her smiling at him.

“Trust is definitely a two-way street,” she agreed. “I think it’s time I tell you everything.”