Epilogue

“How the hell did this happen?” Rebecca Brannon demanded, flipping through the contents in the folder in front of her on the table.

“They pitted two hybrids against each other in a cage in front of a room full of cell phones,” William Hamilton said. “The results were inevitable.”

His gaze was locked on the CNN news feed playing on the projection screen at the front of the conference room. The volume was turned down, but she didn’t need to hear the sound to know what the panel of so-called experts were saying. It was the same crap they’d been rehashing for days.

“I wasn’t talking about the fiasco out in Washington State,” she said with a sigh. Why the hell had she appointed him director of the DCO? Then she remembered. Because he was easy to control and relatively loyal. Valid reasons, she supposed, but possibly shortsighted. “I was referring to what happened in Maine. How is it possible that Tate Evers just happened to be in the same part of the country as Mahsood and our daughter, and you didn’t know about it?”

William dragged his gaze away from the news to lift a brow at her. “You don’t believe it was coincidence he was on vacation and merely thought he’d stumbled onto a hybrid experiment gone wrong?”

Rebecca didn’t believe for a moment that William bought that ridiculous story. “That would be easier to believe if he and that local deputy hadn’t made such a mess of your team of highly trained mercenaries. The ones you insisted were the best money could buy.”

William shrugged. “They are. They ultimately succeeded in the task we hired them to do. They took care of Mahsood. That’s what we sent them there to do, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but they missed the opportunity to deal with our daughter,” she pointed out. “Leaving her free to cause problems later.”

William ran his hand through his salt-and-pepper hair, his brow furrowing. “They’ll find her. Now that they know she’s back in the States, it shouldn’t be difficult for them to track her down again. They said she’s little more than a wild animal.”

Rebecca wasn’t so sure of that last part. The mercenaries he had hired obviously wrote their report to make their minimal accomplishments out to be more than they were, while implying that Ashley had simply gotten lucky. Reading between the lines suggested their daughter had been completely in control of herself and in the process of tracking Mahsood down, almost certainly to gain information. What information, Rebecca wasn’t sure. She didn’t doubt it was somehow connected to a mother-daughter reunion in the very near future.

She shuddered at the thought.

“So, beyond your disappointment with the situation in Maine, do you have any idea how we’re going to deal with this crap out in Washington State?” William asked.

Rebecca glanced at the image of Tanner on the screen, his red eyes and three-inch long fangs on full and obvious display. Damn, he was terrifying when he looked like that.

“I was hoping the media would have moved on to something else by now,” she admitted. “That some terrorist attack in Europe or an embarrassing tabloid article involving some idiot politician would distract them. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. I’m considering planting a few false sightings of these ‘monsters’ around the U.S., then making sure they turn out to be fake. By the time the dust clears from that, no one will remember the events that started all this, much less think shifters and hybrids are real.”

William opened his mouth to say something, but whether it was to agree or not, Rebecca didn’t know, because Landon Donovan and Ivy Halliwell walked into the conference room.

“I think it may be too late for that,” Ivy said.

Rebecca cursed silently. She’d forgotten that shifters could pick up a quiet conversation from half a building away. What else had the woman heard? Did it really matter? Landon and Ivy already knew more than they should. In fact, they were the ones who’d almost certainly sent Evers up to Maine. She’d have to deal with those two as soon as this current crisis was taken care of.

“What do you mean by that?” she asked, hating having to drag it out of them.

Landon might be the deputy director, but Rebecca didn’t like the idea of the man knowing something she didn’t.

He reached over and grabbed the TV remote from the table, flipping through several channels until he reached some footage of a reporter standing in front of some kind of security gate with a microphone in her hand and the bright lights of a camera in her face. The sound was still turned down, but the big banner across the top reading “Breaking News” was impossible to miss.

“What am I looking at?” Rebecca demanded.

Ivy folded her arms. “Recognize the gate behind her?”

It took Rebecca a few moments, but then it hit her. She frowned. “Isn’t that the main gate here at the training complex? What the hell are they saying?”

Landon turned up the volume, and she and William sat there stunned as the reporter described how she was standing in front of the entrance to a secret federal organization known as the Department of Covert Operations, also known as the DCO.

“How the hell…?” William started.

Landon’s jaw tightened. “It gets worse.”

Rebecca couldn’t imagine how that could be possible, but then the eager reporter began talking about how the DCO paired animal-like shifters and hybrids with military and law enforcement agents to conduct dangerous, even illegal, missions all over the world, including places like Washington State. As the woman spoke, a collage of personnel records of various field agents, human and shifter alike, appeared on the screen. Tanner’s was first in line, followed by Landon’s and Ivy’s and at least a dozen other operatives who were currently in the middle of classified operations.

Those photos disappeared to be replaced with ones of William Hamilton and the members of the Committee. Rebecca gasped as the reporter named her as the leading force behind the DCO and its effort to siphon off millions in taxpayer’s dollars for at least a decade to run the unsanctioned government organization.

“Oh God,” she whispered. All the work she’d done over the past twenty years to get here was falling apart in front of her eyes. “How could they have uncovered all this information so fast?”

“The intel section is still trying to figure that out,” Landon said. “They think the information was leaked by someone in human resources.”

William cursed. “How much more info do they have?”

Rebecca noticed he was looking a little pale. She couldn’t blame him. She’d pulled him into this to be little more than a figurehead, and now it looked like accepting the position was going to cost him more than he’d ever imagined.

“We don’t know, but I think we can expect it to get worse,” Ivy admitted, looking a little worried herself.

Rebecca took a deep breath. “What do we do to get in front of this? How do we contain it?”

The grim expression on Landon’s face told her everything she needed to know before he said a single word.

“Over the past few days, we’ve watched the country lose its collective mind over the existence of shifters and hybrids and the fact that the world they thought they knew is a lie,” the former Special Forces soldier announced. “Tonight, they’ve learned a covert government organization not only knew about shifters and hybrids but has been using them to conduct missions in secret around the globe.” He snorted. “There’s no getting in front of this, Rebecca, and there’s no containing it. Every secret this organization has fought to keep hidden has been exposed. The only thing that matters now is what happens next. And we’re going to have to deal with the fact that it won’t be us deciding how this plays out. It’s going to be those people out there.”

On the screen, a crowd of angry people had already started gathering at the gates of the DCO.

Rebecca stared at the TV. How were any of them going to survive everything coming their way after this?