“No signal?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Jessica replied, holding her phone up.

We’d only been trapped inside of the office for moments, but the adrenaline was pumping so heavily it felt more like hours.

Outside, just inches from me in the grand scheme of things, swarmed the soldiers of Jaeger-Tech.

I swallowed hard, considering our options. It didn’t take long. There weren’t really all that many open for consideration.

If Jaeger-Tech tried coming in through that door, I’d kill the women first, then myself.

I knew if it came down to it, I’d be willing to do it, too. I’d put bullets in all three of them, myself included. Better to give the guys something to avenge and mourn, rather than just turn themselves over to these monsters. Because that’s what all of them would do, and do it in a heartbeat. As rough and tumble as they seemed, they were just a bunch of sentimental morons sometimes.

After all, we’d be good as dead once they got us in their clutches—and it wouldn’t come painlessly. I’d seen the remains of the strikes they’d made on other packs. The burnt bodies, the destroyed homes.

That was just a fact.

I nearly leapt out of my skin as, behind me, the door reverberated with the severity of subwoofer.

“Guten tag, fraulines!” boomed the German. “How are we this fine day?”

The women all looked at me, like they were instinctively giving over leadership into my hands. Their hands were trembling, their eyes were wide and terrified. But they weren’t crying anymore, not even Ashley.

“Fuck off, kraut!” I shouted. “I know who you are! I know you’re just going to kill us anyway!”

“Nein, nein, nein,” he said, like he was trying to be jovial. “Why would we do that?”

“Then you just want us as bait for our mates!”

He laughed, the walls shaking like a mini-earthquake. His boisterous booms broke off a little, though, when he was interrupted by one of his soldiers.

“Should we just go in, sir?”

“You come in here,” I shouted. “I’ll put a bullet in each of us! I swear it. I might not have silver in this thing, but I can still kill myself if I have to.”

“Nein,” the giant said to his subordinate. “Vanessa,” he said after a moment, “why don’t you come out of there, hmm? Why not just make this easy on everyone?”

“Didn’t I already tell you fuck off, kraut?”

“Oh, you Americans. Always such language. So colorful and disdainful. What are you doing? Trying to hold us off while your husbands and boyfriends come here to save you? Are you waiting for the cavalry to arrive? Is that it?”

Chewing my lower lip, my legs shaking from fear despite my best efforts at controlling them, I looked around at the other women. Ashley was hugging herself, her eyes vacant and lost. Jessica was staring right past me at the door. Elise was pacing.

“How do you know they’re not already dead?” he asked. “Have you tried calling them?”

I frowned. So our cell phones being cut off was Jaeger-Tech’s doing. Okay. The men still knew where we were, and it wasn’t that great of a distance from the office to here. They could still get here in plenty of time to bust us out of this situation.

But if Jaeger-Tech took us alive, they could still use us as hostages to get to them.

The German giant laughed, the door shaking against to his rumbles. “So no answer then, ja?”

I just shook my head and mouthed the word “no” at the women.

“We’ll leave you alive,” he said in a sing-song voice, a futile attempt to cajole us out of them. “You’ll all walk away. Even you, Vanessa. You can just go back to your old lives, much wealthier than when this day started. I promise you. The council has more money than younglings like you could ever imagine.”

The council? I’d never heard that phrasing before, not in all my research about Jaeger-Tech, or into the rumors surrounding the hunters. Did he mean there was a bigger organization that controlled Jaeger-Tech? Were they the ones ultimately controlling everything behind the scenes?

“Vanessa!” the giant roared, striking the wall with either his hand or fist. The building shuddered under his assault, shaking dust down from the ceiling tiles as the wall crunched inwards a little to my right.

The four of us flinched in shock. The idea that something that powerful could actually be alive and walking on two feet was almost too much for my mind to bear. I swallowed hard, prayed a nonsensical prayer to whatever was out in the universe. Maybe it would actually reach something, and they’d send a message to Peter to get his ass over here.

Whatever guns Peter had, they weren’t going to be enough to bring this monster down. We needed the hybrid, and we needed it now. It was the only thing we had strong enough to counter this kind of creature. The only chance we really had.

Goddammit, if he’d only listened to me about all this months and months ago instead of just this fucking morning. Maybe we’d have been able to figure out how to shift him into that form if we’d at least been working on it!

Unfortunately, the time for my worrying about whether or not Peter would manifest the beast was long behind me. What was the point? We were doomed. Cornered like rats in a cage, surrounded on all sides by guns, men trained with military precision, and real life incarnations of hellish nightmares.

“We won’t wait forever, you know,” the giant grumbled to my back, vibrating my bones and insides with his quaking voice. “Remember, there’s never just one way to skin a wolf.”

I took a deep breath as I slowly blinked my eyes, my thoughts traveling out to wherever Peter and the men might be. Because even if Peter didn’t have the hybrid at his command, he and the rest of the pack were still our only hope. And if they couldn’t help us, no one could.

Which only meant we’d need to take our destiny into our own hands.