The building ahead of them was surrounded by a barbed wire fence that was slowly being reclaimed by nature. Trees leaned against the fence in some places, shoving the wire into the earth. In other places, vines rose up to strangle the wire.

For all appearances, the facility had been forgotten. Anya’s stomach did several flips. She had a feeling that the facility had not been forgotten. There was no way that GOE had flippantly abandoned a facility where disastrous experiments had taken place.

“We need to be careful,” Anya reminded her mate.

Luc glanced down at her, his trademark smirk not helping settle her anxious bones.

“You’re going to get us killed,” she grumbled.

The smirk fell. His hand touched her back and she leaned into it. Maybe her father didn’t like it, but he understood. Nathan Forrest was ready to welcome the bronze skinned dragon man into their family. It had opened a door for Anya that she’d been so desperately trying to keep shut. She had her mate and her family.

But, she also had a feeling this supposedly abandoned facility was waiting to take both from her. By all means, it was only a building, but it loomed before her like a portent she couldn’t shake. Luc reached up and pulled the wire fence open with his dragon strength, the lock and chain that had been keeping it shut snapping and flying into the uncut brush. The gate swung open to let them in. Ahead, the entrance of the facility looked like a dark maw, ready to devour them.

Was that what it had looked like for the dragons that had been dragged here against their will? Her chest tightened and she reached for Luc’s hand. The glass of the front doors was dark and almost impossible to peer through. Pressing her face to the dark glass, she could see the familiar shape of a receptionist’s desk. GOE didn’t change up their designs that often, she thought.

Luc reached ahead of her and grabbed the door handle. It took a moment, one hand on the handle and the other on the second door, but the lock finally snapped and the door swung open. The smell of dust and rot greeted her. She almost couldn’t tell what the second smell was. It was so faint, just the barest hint of something foul, but it was Luc that picked it out immediately.

He slapped his hand over his nose and reeled back. “There’s something dead in here.” His voice was muffled behind his hand.

Anya looked ahead and swallowed. If Luc was going to get any answers, they needed to see what was hidden in here. “I can go on ahead by myself.”

“No way in hell,” Luc growled before stepping back up to her side.

 

***

 

As soon as he stepped over the threshold, Luc’s stomach turned. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was that made his stomach uneasy. Perhaps it was the smell of death and decay that lingered in the air. Perhaps it was the idea of finding one of his parents amid that smell that gave him the feeling.

Either way, his headstrong, because that was the best way to describe Anya, mate led the way and he felt no other choice but to follow her. If not to follow her lead, then to protect her from whatever situation she might get herself into.

Luc had never been inside a GOE facility, but Anya walked through the space like she’d been there before. She easily navigated around the front desk and confidently led the way through the halls. Their eyes scanned closed doors and open doors, searching for evidence of what had gone down here. By all means, it looked like a normal facility full of offices and conference rooms. It didn’t look like the kind of place where dragons had been dragged for illegal experiments.

“You’d think that there would be more graffiti or evidence of teens trashing the place. Don’t teens like abandoned buildings? It’s a human gene that kicks in during the adolescent years. There should be crumpled beer cans and little notes on the wall that say ‘Sally plus Jonny Four Ever’. Right?”

“The barbed wire on the gate might be keeping them out. This is also a little off the beaten path for a teenager.”

Anya nodded. It was an expression that said she’d hear him, but her wandering gaze over the space around them said she didn’t quite believe him.

Luc was starting to wonder if they’d made a mistake. They knew, without a doubt, that the Guardians had kidnapped dragons, but maybe they hadn’t been brought here. What was the chance that a facility so close to the Territory was the place where all of that had gone down? Luc’s lips pressed together.

His hope was sinking.

They moved from room to room, Anya’s feet leading them down paths familiar to her. Luc knew his mind should have been on the task ahead of them, should have been dissecting the queasy feeling in his stomach. Instead, it had returned to the house and the whispers his mate had shared with Isaac before he’d woken.

“What did you have to talk to Isaac about this morning?” Luc blurted out the question.

Anya paused to look back at him, one eyebrow raised. Luc watched her draw a slow breath before responding and it drove him mad. Was she formulating a lie? Had she already moved on from him?

“I gave him some last-minute directions,” was all Anya said in response.

Luc growled. It was all he could manage as the images of Isaac and his mate tangled together flashed through his mind.

Anya sighed, turned to him, grabbed a fistful of his shirt, and pulled him down for a long kiss. When she pulled back, she met his gaze with her own, steady one. “Do you trust me?”

Did he? Luc had a feeling that his beast was being more territorial than untrusting in that moment so he nodded.

“Alright, then trust me on this. I did it for us.”

“That isn’t cryptic in the least,” Luc said with sarcasm. Anya only responded by waving her hand in the air after she turned away.

Luc trusted her. Whatever the two of them had been doing this morning, he knew it was necessary. He only wished she was willing to be more forward with him. Why keep what she’d done a secret like this?

Luc’s mind raced while they crept deeper into the empty facility. They needed to find the records room and then get out. He didn’t know how much longer he could stand the smell of rot and the queasy feeling in his gut while his beast growled and paced. All at once, it was maddening.

After a while, it began to feel like Anya was meandering. Her pace slowed as she took in every detail like something was wrong.

“This isn’t right,” Anya said, almost to no one in particular as she looked around. “This is almost the same exact floor map as the facility where my father works. Everything has been the same right up until this point.”

They stood at a dead end. It seemed like a glitch in the floor planning. If anything, it felt as though there should be at least a mop closet here. But, they stared at an empty expanse of wall.

“Okay, so they fixed this mistake in the second facility.” Luc shrugged. The empty wall meant nothing to him.

Anya, on the other hand, was running her hands over the empty wall. Her brows were knit together in confusion. Luc wanted to grab her by the shoulder and tell her to stop being so weird about a wall, then something clicked. Anya’s nails sank into a crease in the wall. She dragged it down the dingy yellow wallpaper until the outline of a door appeared.

Luc stepped up, reaching for the top corner of the wall paper and tore it down. A smooth, knob-less door appeared. Luc’s stomach did a flip that sent waves of nausea through him.

“Why was this hidden?” Anya asked. She pressed on the door to no avail. After that, she jammed her nails into the crease and tried prying it open.

“Step aside puny human.” Luc used humor to cover the feeling that was making him begin to shake. His mate stuck her tongue out at him, but she did as he said. It should have been a simple feat, kicking the door open with his long legs, but it took two tries before the locking mechanisms broke. When he was done, he felt out of breath. It was a strange sensation that he shouldn’t have felt.

Dragons were hardly ever out of breath. He’d only ever seen Liana heave after one of her marathon runs around the Territory. He’d reached that once or twice after running from a prank gone wrong, but never this easily.

That should have been Luc’s first hint that something was very wrong with this place. He should have noticed that his beast was quiet. It wasn’t keeping an eye on Anya, ever conscious of her presence. Luc was so caught up in what was going on outside his body, that he didn’t see what’d been happening inside him.

The door leaned inward at an awkward angle, never able to sit straight again. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t like they were going to try to cover their tracks. No one had been here in years, if the thick layer of dust on the floor was any indication.

“Flashlight?” Anya motioned for Luc to pull the handheld light from the backpack between her shoulder blades. He slapped it into her open palm, light flooding the stairs before them moments later.

Luc sucked in a deep breath, trying to steady his unsettled stomach before descending into the darkness. Anya gave him one last glance back to make sure he would follow before pushing ahead. Luc told her he would always follow her and he would, even if his body told him to leave.

Was he nervous? Was that the feeling that gripped him? Or, was he expecting the worst? He had for years. There was no way to expect that their parents were still alive. It seemed unreasonable to expect such a good outcome after the pictures he’d seen.

“This definitely is not part of the current facility,” Anya said as they descended the stairs. She paused. “As far as I know, it isn’t. Who the hell knows what else they’re hiding.”

She was right, Luc thought. There could be a similar basement beneath the current facility. The stories of ‘deported’ dragons were varied, like an urban myth that no one could agree on. Instead of randomly grabbing dragons, GOE might be using the ability to ‘deport’ dragons to keep harvesting their kind.

The beam of the flashlight swept over another small lobby. There was a simple desk in one corner. Papers lay over it, seemingly blank. Nothing important would have been left behind. Then again, the Guardians had left behind the whole facility.

The smell of rot grew stronger, making Luc’s stomach turn. He could no longer separate his anxiety from the sickness growing in his stomach. There was something wrong, he thought. Something very wrong. But, his mate was already pressing forward.

Luc wanted to turn and leave. He wanted to tell her that nothing was more important than their safety, which was surely forfeit if the kept moving forward. Anya was impatient. She was constantly ten feet ahead of him, sweeping the beam of the flashlight over everything for only seconds before moving on.

The lobby led into a narrow hall lined with doors. Narrow windows, the glass panes sandwiched with a wire mesh, offered a glimpse into examination rooms. There were stainless steel tables and light rigs that hovered over them.

Luc tried a few of the door handles, but they were all locked. Instead of staying to break the locks, he chose to catch up to his mate. She was searching for a record room. There had to be a room dedicated to the files they’d found on the computer. If they could find the paper files and take them home, they’d have a better understanding of what was going on.

Luc and his brother could have closure.

Maybe, if they wanted to take it further, they could show the world what GOE had done on U.S. soil. It was a stretch, one he would have to talk over with his mate, but it was a possibility. It, perhaps, depended on how angry Luc was when they were finished.

“Something feels weird,” Luc acknowledged finally. He couldn’t tell if it was inside of him or something outside of him, but there was most certainly something wrong as they stepped into a wide room filled with neatly placed desks.

His mate twisted to look back at him in the dark. Luc could make out the faint furrow of her brow in the dark. Her eyes surveyed their surroundings once again. Luc watched her face soften through the dim light.

“There’s no dust on anything,” she whispered.