It didn’t take long to reach Operations. In point of fact, it didn’t take long to walk across the entire camp. The part that was habitable, anyway. Built way back when, it had been abandoned for years before the Project had come along. Most of the buildings were still uninhabitable, apart from a main core around the central hub.

Well, inhabitable was a relative term, she thought as she passed the Lycan kennels. They’d thrown up some silver-banded steel fencing and let the dogs loose in what amounted to little more than huge dog pens. Her lip curled again as she passed, the stench wafting toward her on the night breeze. She wouldn’t be surprised if they had to send someone in every day to muck them out.

“Freaking animals,” she muttered, unable to keep her prejudice to herself. Before she’d become changed, she hadn’t had any feelings one way or the other about Bloods or Lycans, other than the fact both freaked her out. They were all the same to her. People who’d been willing test subjects or those unfortunate enough to be infected. She hadn’t counted on the fact that when the Project ran out of willing test subjects, it created its own.

And she certainly hadn’t counted on the rush of complete and utter hatred the first time she’d seen a Lycan after her infection. Anger had welled up from her very core, as though her soul itself rejected the idea of the creature in front of her. Her fangs had dropped, despite the sedative they had her on, and it had taken all her self-control not to rip its throat out right there.

“Sorry?” The corporal leaned forward trying to catch her whispered words, a look of puzzlement on his face.

She shook her head and waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “It doesn’t matter.”

Still, she shot a glance over her shoulder at the dark and silent Lycan pens as she walked through the door into the office. As far as she was concerned, every one of them should be put down. Taken out to the edges of the camp where they buried all the failed test subjects and shot point-blank in the back of the head with a silver bullet.

Hell, she’d offer to do it herself.

“Ah, Major. So good of you to join us.”

Colonel Nathan Fitzgerald looked up with a smirk as Antonia entered the control room. Amusement glinted in his deep-set eyes, as though he knew she’d been pulled from her bed, and the power he had over her filled him with petty glee.

Deliberately, she blanked her expression and gave him a poker face to look at. She didn’t like Fitzgerald, and she was sure the feeling was mutual. He was the sort of inbred, jumped-up son of a senator who never had to fight for anything in his life. A person for whom life opened doors by dint of association, who his parents were, rather than for anything he’d done or achieved himself. For a kid from the rough side of town who’d dragged herself up and fought for every chance she’d gotten, it was sickening. He made her sick.

He was also a bully. Rather than using his rank and position in the Project for good, for the technological and scientific advance that could be the only reason the government would do what they did to their own people, he used it to reinforce a whole new set of prejudices and racism based on his own opinion.

“As always, I live to serve.”

Her voice, calm and collected, revealed nothing of her bitterness as she quoted the Project’s motto back at him. Live to serve. In other words, Your ass is ours. If we can bring you back as something else, we will, and you’d better be fucking grateful.

He wasn’t intelligent enough to read between the lines and figure out the sarcasm. Yet another worrying lack in a full-bird colonel.

“Good. Just make sure you remember that.”

He pushed away from the planning table and looked her straight in the eye. Everything in Antonia went still. She recognized that look. The “you’ve fucked up” look.

“Of course, sir.”

He had a pen in his hand, fiddling with it. Click-click. His thumb hit the end in a rapid-fire motion. Click-click. The pen nib appeared and disappeared. Click-click. The sound reverberated through her skull like the double-tap from a rifle. The tension in the room rose several notches as the other staff with them faded out of view. No one wanted to get between the colonel and his victim.

Antonia stood her ground and gave him a rattlesnake look. Her best. It made people…human people, that is…uncomfortable as hell. Something in their brains clicked on when she looked at them like that, and ramped their survival instincts up to maximum. Full-Bird Fiztgerald was just too fucking dumb to realize the danger signs when he poked at the tiger with a stick.

“I have always run this camp with fairness and equality in mind, no matter what ethnic or species origin our staff are…”

Great, she was getting the equality and diversity speech. Someone, please shoot her now.

“But we do have to have some rules. Do you know what the most important of those rules are, Major?”

Time to play dumb grunt. She fixed her gaze to the wall behind Fitzgerald’s shouldered and answered with an ambiguous, “Sir!”

It was a rhetorical question. He smiled, a particularly oily and smug expression she wanted to wipe off his face, preferably by knocking his teeth down his throat. Which she’d enjoy also ripping out.

“Our most important rule, given the different species on site, is to preserve the integrity of the human gene pool.”

His irritating voice matched his smile. Patronizing and smug as he used big words as if she wouldn’t know what he was talking about. Even if she didn’t, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of asking what he meant.

Her fixed look didn’t waver. “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

“You’ve not been a good girl and obeyed the rules, though. Have you, Major?”

That shocked her out of her rigid contemplation of the plaster behind him.

“Sir? I’m not sure what you mean.”

A frown furrowed her brow as she looked him directly in the eye. A mistake. Those dark orbs set in heavy flesh that would turn into unhealthy-looking jowls within a few years glittered with a level of malevolence that took her aback. Malevolence aimed solely at her, yet not personal at all. Not only was she a woman in uniform, which was bad enough according to the camp’s grapevine, but she was no longer human. And he hated anything not human.

“Oh, I think you know exactly what I mean.”

The pen clicked again, four times. She wanted to ram it down his throat. Sideways.

“You’ve been fraternizing with some of the camp staff. The human staff. We have witnesses.”

She couldn’t help it. At his words, she barked out a laugh, a short, sharp sound of bitter amusement and surprise. She didn’t fraternize. Hell, most of the time she didn’t even smile. She’d rather tear most people’s throats out than initiate conversation.

“Witnesses? To what?” She demanded, forgetting momentarily that he disliked being challenged. “Who are they?”

Fitzgerald waved his hand dismissively. “That doesn’t matter. This infraction will go on your permanent record. If any more occur, action will have to be taken.”

* * *

The screams died into whimpers of pain, which became chokes. Lillian stood where she’d been ordered behind the cabinet, flattened back against the wall. At first she’d been about to argue at his high-handed order, but then the gun had gone off.

All she could see was the furrow in the opposite wall. The bullet had taken the plaster out before burying itself in the wall at the end of the corridor. She’d helped deal with suicidal and violent patients, ones who struggled with the world in general and their place in it.

Being shot at was completely out of her realm of experience.

Men who weren’t men, who sprouted claws the size of bread knives that could shear a man’s hand off at the wrist, were completely out of her realm of experience as well.

Right now she’d like her realm of experience to include being at home, tucked up in bed with a nice, safe chick flick in the DVD player. Which told exactly how out of her element she felt since she hated chick flicks with a passion. She favored action movies or the occasional horror. Watching horror, however, and taking a starring role were two completely different things.

She paled as the choking was interrupted by hideous cracking sounds. One after another, like rhythmic gunshots. She flinced with each crack. Without looking, she knew what was happening. In her mind’s eye she could see the guards stiffening as their spines curved into the terrible arch Walker’s had made. Arching until mere human anatomy gave under the strain and their vertebrae cracked, one after the other.

In fact, screw the chick flick. Right now she’d just settle for not being here in a corridor where men were dying. With the distinct likelihood she would join them in the very near future.

Oh my God. She had to get out of here. No matter how pretty Harper’s words were, how much she felt they’d connected, he was a dangerous man…wolf…something. No matter how disenfranchised with the establishment a person was, there were ways and means of expressing your displeasure.

Killing people wasn’t one of them.

The bone-crunching sounds stopped. Holding her breath, Lillian edged away from the wall and peeked around the cabinet. Jack stood a little way down the corridor, looking down at the two bodies. Like before, both lay in the middle of an ever-widening pool of black, brackish blood. She could smell the stuff from here. A chemical, wrong smell.

He stood between her and the entrance to the ward. Beyond the door behind him lay safety and more men with guns. Big guns. But first she had to get past him.

Still clad in the hospital gown, butt peeking through the gap, the mint green fabric was splattered in blood. His hands at his sides had reverted to normal, not the hideous claws she’d seen when she’d risked a glance around the corner. Just in time to see him do a slice and dice job on the first guard’s hand.

A hand that lay a few feet away, the gun still in its grip. Funny that even when separated from the body, the hand had retained its last conscious position, finger curled around the trigger.

She needed that gun. Whether or not it would do any good against whatever Jack was, she didn’t know. But being armed gave her a better chance of getting to the end of the corridor and out that door.

The fact that she’d never shot a gun in her life didn’t cross her mind.

He still looked at the bodies, his head down between the broad width of his shoulders. They heaved, as though he were struggling for breath. Concern wrung her heart as she looked at the gun and back at him. Was he hurt? Had the guard shot him?

No, she’d definitely only heard one shot. There hadn’t been time for a second before…she swallowed, the sound painfully dry…before he’d sliced the man’s hand off.

Go, go, go, go… Her heart pounding, she forced herself into action. Legs bunched under her, she propelled herself out from behind the cabinet and toward her target. Shoulder slamming into the wall, she half slid down it as she grabbed up the gun and the severed hand. A small part of her brain yammered away as she tore the still-warm fingers loose and dropped the hand. Clinical waste, she told herself. Not even an amputated limb since the body it belonged to was rapidly cooling, sans heartbeat, on the floor.

Her hand closed around the cool metal of the grip, her finger on the trigger, as if she’d used a gun every day of her life.

“Stay right where you are,” she ordered, and tried to ignore her hand shaking.

He turned his head, his outline a silhouette against the light from the far door. His nostrils flared, but he didn’t leap into action as she expected. She’d seen the speed he moved at. Way too fast to be human.

Arms out at his sides, which pulled the hospital gown in all sorts of interesting directions, he turned slowly to face her. She tightened her grip on the gun, trying to stop the tremble in her hand. Holding it tighter didn’t work; the muzzle wobbled like Jell-O at a kid’s birthday party.

“I mean it, freeze! On the floor, now!”

Her words had no effect. Instead of lying down as she’d ordered, he started to walk toward her instead. Fear raced through her body like a herd of wild horses.

“Shoot me if you need to, Lillian.”

His voice was soft and gentle, filled with a tone that wrung her heart. As though he could meet hordes of armed guards with his bare hands and win, but that he couldn’t, wouldn’t, stop her.

“I don’t blame you if you did. You’ve seen some of what I am, what I can do…” The gap between them shortened, his pace slow but inextricable. She took a pace back.

“And it gets worse. I’m the monster they made me, the creature of death and destruction they wanted. I’ve killed far more than these two. I’d like to say it was under orders…under the influence of the drugs they pumped into me…but it wasn’t. I didn’t know when I signed up what they were going to do. How it would change me.”

Another step toward her, then another and another. Suppressing a whimper of fear, Lillian backed up, but he walked, talking all the time. Shoot him, her instincts screamed, but she couldn’t. The pain in his rough voice wound around her heart, held her in thrall until her back hit the cold wall behind her.

“But I liked the killing. I liked letting this…” he thumped his chest, “…thing out. I had nothing to live for.” He reached her, walking right up until the muzzle of the gun rested against his chest. Right over his heart.

“Until I saw you. You’re perfect, sweetheart, everything I want…an angel I don’t deserve. They…” He threw a snarl over his shoulder at the fallen men. “They knew what was coming if I got out. But if you choose to pull the trigger, I won’t stop you. The bullet won’t kill me—you’ll need to shoot me in the head as well.”

He smiled at her, sadness and something else…acceptance and another emotion she couldn’t, didn’t want to name, shining in his eyes. “Do it, sweetheart, let me have peace.”

His words, the look in his eyes, reached right into her body and didn’t just tear her heart out, they threw it on the floor and stomped on it for good measure. There was so much pain and resignation in his changeable eyes, seeing it brought tears to hers.

Just looking into his face, looking into his eyes, she felt as if she could see his soul. The soul of a man, not an animal. The animal the military scientists had put into him. That soul called to her, as though something in his gaze reached deep within her and flicked a switch. Trust flowed through her as she lowered the pistol.

Whatever he was, everyone deserved a second chance. But she’d keep hold of the pistol, just in case.

 

Jack held his breath as Lilly pressed the loaded pistol into the flesh of his chest. She was scared. Her beautiful eyes were wide, and her heart pounded so loudly he was surprised it didn’t deafen her.

Her lip trembled, and she caught it between her teeth. The sight of that plump, pink flesh caught between her blunt, white teeth sent a bolt of lust through him so strong it almost brought Jack to his knees.

Fighting the urge back, he looked deep into her eyes. He saw the instant she made the decision that she couldn’t pull the trigger. Relief, sharp and immediate, flooded his system as he reached out and gently removed the pistol from her shaking hand.

“Hey, it’s okay, babe.” He caught her easily as she sagged against him. Shivers racked her slender frame. He smoothed a big hand down the soft fall of her hair. Tiny and delicate, she fit perfectly against him, as though her body had been made to complement his.

His perfect mate.

“Sweetheart, I know this is a lot to take in, but we have to get moving.” He hooked a finger under her chin to bring her eyes up to his. They were dilated. Shock. He recognized the signs. In truth, it amazed him she was holding up so well. Most women would have been a nervous wreck by now, but not his Lillian.

Gritting his teeth at the typical male reaction of his body, he eased away from her. She was already in shock, and they weren’t out of the woods yet. The last thing she needed was to be confronted with the crass needs of his body. The animal inside him would push her up against the wall and take her here and now, with bodies and blood on the floor around them. The man in him refused to do that.

“Walker sent an alarm, they’ll be sending in a clean-up team. We have to get everyone out of here before they arrive.”