***
An unknown amount of time later the trailer came to an abrupt halt, spilling them both awkwardly to the floor. She heard Ajax bang up hard against something.
“Ow,” he said dully. The automatic nature of his response told her he wasn’t actually hurt, just more annoyed.
“So, what now?” she asked, straightening her clothes. Although her body had wanted to take things further with Ajax, the time and place just wasn’t appropriate. He had agreed, so the two of them had spent the next while in each other’s arms, simply enjoying the presence of the other. The ride hadn’t been long—perhaps twenty minutes to half an hour at most.
“We must be in the city,” Ajax mused. “There’s no way we could have made it outside the limits that quickly.
“They have to have some sort of base of operations there,” she agreed. “There was no equipment, nothing at the Shipyard. The whole place looked like a front just to trap us.”
“Or anyone else who made the connection between them and the missing shifters,” Ajax replied thoughtfully. “I wonder if perhaps that’s how they got Benjamin or some of the others. Luring them all out here, then transporting them inside something like this.”
She could sense his arms spreading wide to encompass their makeshift prison.
“It takes a lot to imprison a shifter. Military-grade steel would be one way,” she agreed.
“Yeah, you wouldn’t need to go to half the effort that this must have taken for a human. This was specially built for my kind.” Anger tinged his voice at the thought that whatever this agency was, they were targeting shifters.
There was a hiss, and the door behind them suddenly slid open, bathing the room in blinding lights. The pair threw up their hands up to cover their eyes, but that didn’t stop her from noticing the men that raced inside while they recovered their eyesight.
“They aren’t shifters,” Ajax muttered from next to her. “Just normal men.”
There were six of them, all dressed in black military style gear, holding rifles of some sort. Although Arianna wasn’t a gun aficionada by trade, but she had developed enough of an eye to tell that something was off about these. She couldn’t tell what was off, but they were not ordinary rifles. Something about the size and shape of the loading chamber was just…wrong.
She found out a moment later as the men pulled the triggers, following the sharp command of a seventh man who entered. Ari screamed, throwing up her arms to protect her face on instinct, even as a split second later she knew it would be a pointless gesture when the bullets slapped home.
Arms crossed in front of her face, she waited for what felt like an eternity for the blossoming of pain followed by darkness that she knew was to come. After a moment, she lowered them as a sound came from her right. She looked over at Ajax just in time to see him slump to the ground, half a dozen darts protruding from his body.
“Ajax!” she cried, lunging to his side, pulling darts out as fast as she could. She got four of them before two of the men pulled her off of them.
Without hesitation she stepped on the foot of the one to her right and reversed her direction. Whereas she had been struggling to get to Ajax, with her foot planted, she threw herself backward, driving her elbow up into the man’s face as hard as she could. Her arm went numb at the same time his jaw cracked closed. The man’s eyes rolled up into his head and he fell to the floor.
She knew the same maneuver wouldn’t work with the other man, but in the split second she took to contemplate what to do, he pulled a knife and whipped it up to her throat.
“Enough!” The seventh man, the only one not armed with a gun, spoke. His voice was like a whip as it cracked against his men and froze them all in place.
Even Arianna felt herself stop struggling as she focused on this man. Like his henchmen, he wore a mask and goggles, covering his eyes and face from her view so that she couldn’t identify him. Even his mouth was covered. He was speaking through some fabric.
“Get him out of here,” he commanded, pointing at Ajax. “And make sure he stays down.”
Arianna’s eyes flew open and she struggled to get free, the knife on her throat drawing some blood as two men stepped up and shot two more darts apiece into Ajax’s torso, before bending down to grab his arms and haul him quickly from the room.
“What the fuck do you want with us?” she snarled as the man holding the knife to her neck forced her to turn and face the leader.
He didn’t respond, but she saw his head tilt slightly as he eyeballed her. Then it turned rather forcefully to the man on the ground. “Get him out of here too. See to it that he learns a lesson from being so useless.” There was no malice in the man’s voice, but Ari couldn’t help but shudder at the thought of being “taught a lesson” by this man and his goons.
“Where’s Benjamin?” she shouted, trying both to get his attention and to change the subject. “What have you done with him? Where is he?” She struggled against her guard. “Tell me!” she all but screamed at him.
Still the man gave no reply to her demands.
“What should we do with her?” That was the man holding the knife to her neck.
In response, the leader stepped closer as he continued to evaluate her. “She has strength, even if she’s not one of them,” he replied. “Perhaps enough strength to make our plans succeed. I think we’ll turn her over to the doctors.”
“Very good sir,” the man said. After another moment, one of the men from earlier returned. Or perhaps he was a new one. She had no idea; they all looked the same to her.
“If you’re going to kill me, at least do it like a man and show me your face,” she snarled as they began to hustle her from the chamber.
A flick of the leader’s hand froze her two guards in place. She felt an icy, sinking sensation in her stomach as he turned to regard her once more.
“Kill you?” He laughed.
For some reason Arianna had expected his laugh to be an evil, maniacal howl. Instead, he just sounded like any normal man. She wasn’t sure now which would have been worse.
“I don’t want to kill you!” he told her, shoulders still shaking with laughter. “No, my dear. The farthest thing from it. I want to make you better.”
The near-fervent, near-hiss of his voice as he spoke the last word was more unsettling than anything she had experienced yet. She knew right then that whatever it was this man had in store for her, she didn’t want any part of it. They must be experimenting on shifters, and they wanted to use her as a guinea pig for what they had learned.
Not good.
The knife had disappeared now that two of them were holding her still, and Arianna tried to take advantage of that. She made a weak, limp-sounding noise and pretended to faint in their arms. One of them wasn’t quick enough in readjusting his grip on her arm, and she tore it free, spinning in place to slam her clubbed fist into the original guard’s face. She connected enough to dislodge his mask, but she couldn’t make out any features besides his cheekbone.
“Enough of this,” the leader said, and Arianna heard a hiss followed by a sharp burst of pain in the square of her back.
The pain faded quickly as cold numbness spread across her body.
“Ajax,” she tried to say, but her lips no longer worked. The sound was just mumbled garbage as she crashed toward the floor. She prepared for the blackness that would have to come.
But as it closed in, her vision dimming around the edges, a figure resolved itself in her mind.
Ajax.