Blackjack Bears

by Amelia Jade

  “Time to go,” Mila urged as they still stood around.

  “Let’s go,” Pierce said, not waiting around any longer. Coincidentally it also didn’t give any of his brothers, all of whom were older, time to protest.

  He jogged from the room and back out into more white-washed hallways.

  “Is everything in this fucking place white?” Gavin muttered as they moved down the hallway as fast as Mila could keep up.

  “Yes,” he replied. “It’s rage-inducing, isn’t it?”

  There were mumbles of agreement from all sides.

  Up ahead a door opened and two guards stepped out into the hallway. They looked up at the clattering of boots on the floor. Eyes widened in alarm and the pair tried to bring their guns to bear, but they were caught completely unawares. Pierce was between them before they could react.

  He grabbed the nearer man and bodily threw him at his partner. The pair went down in a heap and he leapt after them to finish the job. A swift punch and both of them went limp.

  The whole encounter had taken perhaps a second.

  Mila knelt next to them, but Pierce wasn’t waiting around. He kept moving down the hallway. Moments later alarms began to blare throughout the hallway.

  “Well, I guess someone discovered we were missing,” Kassian quipped.

  Two doors opened up in the hallway ahead, and men in all black gear began emerging. They were in various states of undress, and only one of them had a gun on him. He was, fortunately, obscured by the men in front of him.

  “Remember, no killing!” Pierce reiterated to his brothers.

  After that, they were among the humans.

  It wasn’t a fight.

  The Koche brothers went through the two-score human guards like a bandsaw. Bodies flew everywhere, impacting on walls, the ceiling, and with each other. Pierce pulled his punches and kicked with a fraction of the strength he could muster. Bones broke, he was sure of it, having heard and felt some go. But in seconds the twenty human guards were on the ground, moaning in pain or flat-out unconscious.

  Either way, they were no longer a threat.

  “Well that was easy,” Gavin crowed. “I’m not even breathing hard.”

  More footsteps sounded, and half a dozen men came around the corner ahead of them. Pierce swore. They were almost at the exit into the underground. A few more seconds and they would have been piling into Mila’s SUV and making a clean getaway.

  Now they had half a dozen armed and aware guards between them and the door.

  “They aren’t armed,” Kean said, speaking at last.

  Pierce followed his brother’s gaze and realized he was right. None of them had guns. Or knives. They also moved with a deadly grace. More of a confident amble than anything a human could manage. Their steps had a predator’s look about it.

  “Did someone else send a rescue squad?” Maximus asked, casually kicking out with his boot as one of the humans on the ground stirred back to consciousness.

  The body jerked and then lay still once more, the chest slowly rising and falling.

  “I don’t think they’re here to rescue us,” Pierce said as the six of them came down the hallway at a slow, measured pace, not rushing into combat.

  “Well, shit. A real fight then,” Kassian growled happily.

  The alarms continued to make a racket. Pierce looked over at Mila. “We’re going to have to fight them,” he said. Then quieter, “These are the special surprise you’d heard rumors of, aren’t they?”

  Mila looked unhappy. “It would appear that way, wouldn’t it?”

  A shout sounded from behind them. More human guards.

  Mila knelt, and began to roll one of the unconscious guards onto another.

  “What are you doing?” he hissed, glancing in front of them where the approaching shifters continued to close.

  “Making a barricade,” she snapped. Then he saw her pull a gun from her vest and begin sending darts down the hallway, sending the oncoming guards scrambling for cover.

  “That’s my mate,” he growled happily, and his muscles twitched as he piled half a dozen unconscious bodies together with a swiftness Mila could never have matched.

  “I’ll hold them off,” she said. “You go kick some ass.”

  He bent down to kiss her, earning him a surprised cry, muffled by his lips.

  “I love you,” he stated fiercely, and then charged back up the hallway just as his brothers engaged the enemy shifter team.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Mila

  “I love you too,” she said, hoping he’d heard her over the increasing sounds of fighting.

  A dart abruptly appeared in the leg of the body she was using as cover, the six-inch-long metal sliver quivering violently as it dispelled its momentum into the body around it.

  Her eyes narrowed and she rose up swiftly, firing three shots at three targets. Two of them jerked as they were hit, but the other was already moving before she fired and the dart must have gone wide.

  There were half a dozen men in the hallway behind them now. Apparently her estimate of twenty-four guards was inaccurate.

  Of course it was. That was the number of guards on hand before they had five rather angry shifters imprisoned here. Why wouldn’t they increase the number?

  Angry at herself, Mila moved to the side of her barricade, sliding out from cover to lean against the far wall. She emptied the magazine down the hallway, firing as fast as the gun could manage. Seven darts went zipping down the hallway, sending everyone for cover.

  She pushed off the wall and back behind her blocking bodies. Shots rang off the wall and she felt the living flesh of her blockade vibrate as several darts hit it as well.

  Tossing the emptied gun away, she took the second one from her belt. Looking around, she saw another weapon lying on the ground where someone else had dropped it. Snatching it, Mila rose and began to fire both guns down the hallway. Guards dropped left and right before her onslaught.

  But there were more behind them, and something tugged at her side and spun her around.

  Mila let her legs collapse out from under her and she disappeared back behind the barricade once more.

  Frantically she felt for the dart that must have hit her in the side. The tranquilizer was working fast, because she couldn’t feel any pain whatsoever. The whole side must be numb. Her fingers encountered the dart at last and she looked down at it.

  “Oh fuck,” she said, sighing in relief.

  The dart had caught her thickly padded shirt, catching in the material. It was the force of that that had spun her around, not of the dart embedding itself into her side.

  Without taking another second to ponder her luck, Mila shot back to her feet. This time she steadied her aim before firing. The onrushing human guards had thought she was down and out for the count, so they had been focused on closing with the shifters in an attempt to take out Pierce and his brothers, without missing and hitting one of their own.

  All of which meant that when she popped back up from behind the stack of bodies, none of them were prepared for a target so close. Three guards went down in the first seconds of the fight, and she continued to pump darts out. The gun in her right hand clicked on empty so she dropped it, switching to a two-handed grip. A dart whizzed by her head, pulling at her hair, but Mila just closed one eye and sent a dart into the exposed leg meat of the man who’d shot it.

  He collided and went down. That only left one guard. Mila pivoted slightly, focused down the barrel on the sights, and then let fly.

  The gun clicked, but nothing happened.

  “Shit,” she cursed.

  It was empty. The lone remaining guard had his sight on her, so Mila did the only thing she could think of. She threw the gun at him and then followed after it. Vaulting herself up and over the manmade barricade, she grabbed a knife as she went, sliding it from the sheath on one of the downed men. The blade gleamed in the bright white light, showing
her the slick wetness of the blade. It was coated with tranquilizer. All she needed to do was draw blood.

  The guard knocked her gun aside, but she was closing too fast behind it. He tried to take aim, realized it was a losing proposition, and instead used the weapon as a shield to block himself from her attack. He turned the blade left, then right, deflecting her strikes.

  Mila jabbed, then flicked her wrist around and out, trying to draw blood as she withdrew, but the guard was good. He let go of the gun with that hand, now only holding it by the slide, pulling his hand wide even as he danced back from her.

  With Mila going one way, her opponent the other, it created enough space for him to pull his own knife. He held onto the gun, trying to get a proper grip, but Mila glided back into the fight before he could. Her strikes came fast and furious, putting him on the defensive. He locked her up with the gun, but a swift turn and yank sent the weapon flying.

  It also opened her up to a return strike, but she flung herself to the side, narrowly avoiding his blade as he tried to open her up from stomach to sternum. Mila bounced off the wall and came right back at him, her arm moving so fast it was almost like a blur as she struck, pulled, struck again, like a snake in a frenzy as it tried to bite its prey.

  But fast as she was, the other man was her match. Eventually he began to counter her attacks, and then slowly went on the offensive himself. Now Mila was being forced back down the hallway. In moments her back touched up against the stack of bodies she’d been using for cover. All her forward progress had been lost.

  But as he pressed her back, Mila saw her opportunity. Instead of trying to go forward, she let him come in for the attack, then leaned back and flung herself up as hard as she could. Her back pivoted over the barricade and her foot came up, connecting hard with his knife-wielding hand.

  Mila flipped onto her back, landing heavily on the floor while the knife bounced off the ground nearby. The guard smiled as he reached for the holstered gun of the top body on the mound, thinking he’d won. But his confidence faltered as Mila returned his smile with interest.

  Then she flung the knife at him. He automatically brought a forearm up to deflect it. In normal knife combat that would have been the right move based on the situation. If he ducked or dodged, he’d lose his grip on the gun and they’d be back at square one. But his instincts had forgotten that this blade was covered in tranquilizer. It tore a long gash up his forearm that would bleed a fair amount, but wasn’t anywhere near fatal or even immobilizing.

  Except for the tranquilizer.

  “Fuck me,” the guard said as his entire body began to droop.

  Then he collapsed to the ground. Mila smiled and rose to her feet. All she had to do now was grab a gun and start taking out the attacking shifters, and they could get out of there. Then she could tell Pierce once again that she loved him, and was ready to leave all this double-crossing spy shit behind. If she was lucky, he might give her yet another chance. Not that Mila deserved it, but she desperately hoped that she might get it anyway.

  It was, after all, only hope which kept her going.

  But all of her plans were derailed as the cool metal of a gun barrel pressed itself against the flesh of her neck.

  “Don’t. Move.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Pierce

  His heart soared as he charged down the hallway, the words Mila had spoken ringing in his ears.

  I love you too.

  Perhaps, against all odds and all semblance of sanity, perhaps there was a hope for him and Mila after all. If the person he’d met, ate with, laughed with, and made love to was the real Mila, then he could learn to look past her actions. Once they escaped and things calmed down, she could explain everything to him, and he could perhaps come to terms with it. He knew he wanted to.

  As long as the person he’d met was the real Mila, and not a façade designed to get him to fall in love with her. If she’d been real, then she was still someone he could love. Someone he did love.

  Right now though, he needed to focus and go about securing the opportunity for that future.

  “Left right split!” he bellowed.

  His brothers, recognizing the call, moved to the side as he came storming through. They took their opponents with them, which left a very unprepared shifter in the center. Pierce hit him like a runaway freight train. The impact of two massive bodies coming together in a brutal hit echoed out through the hallway with a meaty thwack. The unsuspecting attacker took all of the force of Pierce’s momentum into an area about the size of his shoulder.

  The big body went flailing back down the hallway.

  There was no time to rest though.

  “Shit,” he swore, ducking below another blow. The small confines of the hallway meant only two shifters had been engaged against his brothers at any given time. Which left four—now three—shifters to turn their attention to Pierce.

  He avoided one blow, then another, desperately holding off. His brothers had heard his call, seen him go by. Which meant that any second now…”

  “Gotcha!” Kean gloated as he dove through the opening between Maximus and Kassian and went after one of Pierce’s attackers.

  Right behind him was Gavin, and the pair took the pressure of him almost immediately as they tackled their men down. Pierce searched for the fifth attacker.

  A fist snapped one of his ribs as it hit him from behind and to the side.

  Found him.

  The pain lanced through his body, but Pierce had been hit harder. He simply spun with the blow and lashed out with a back kick. The move seemed to take his foe unawares, and hit him right in the face. Blood sprayed everywhere as the solid rubber of his boot broke the nose in several places.

  Pierce wasn’t done though. He brought his leg down and beckoned for his foe to come forward. With red blood streaming down his face, bubbling as he opened his mouth to try and breathe through it, the now-enraged shifter charged Pierce.

  Which was exactly what he wanted him to do.

  Pierce spun out of the way, and the crazed shifter slammed right into the attacker facing Kassian. The pair went down in a heap, and Pierce delivered two swift blows to his face.

  A hand grabbed his upraised fist as he went for a third blow, and Pierce relaxed.

  “Okay, I get it, he’s down,” he said, turning to see which of his brothers had stopped him.

  The only thing he saw was a black-gloved fist rushing at his face. Pierce managed to yank his head to the side in time to avoid having his nose broken, but the blow sent him tumbling backward, taking out the legs of Maximus until he came to a halt. It also split the skin on his face, leaving a huge gash from just below his right eye all the way across his cheek and down to the bottom of his ear.

  Enraged, he sprang to his feet just in time to meet the charge of yet another of their attackers. Pierce ducked low, arms out wide, and wrapped the man up in a huge, aptly named bear hug. Then he squeezed.

  Hard.

  Ribs popped and cracked and the shifter yelled in pain as he tried to worm his way free. When it became clear he wouldn’t escape that way, he started to rain blows down on Pierce’s head. In response, Pierce simply flung his man down to the ground. The attacking shifter dented and cracked the tiled floor as he hit and then rebounded. Before his foe could move, Pierce then delivered a brutal kick to the side of his face. Teeth went flying as his jaw shattered into several pieces under the impact.

  Pierce dropped to the ground, his knees landing on the other man’s chest, driving the air from them. He rebounded back up from that and swiftly delivered a final steel-toe clad boot to the man’s temple. His eyes rolled back into his head, and he went limp.

  Pierce spun, looking for another person to fight. Blood sprayed from his face, leaving a gruesome splatter mark on the wall as he did.

  “Enough!”

  The voice rang out through the hallway, and all the shifters came to a halt.

  Followin
g the voice, he saw the old director holding the barrel of a very real-looking gun to Mila’s head.

  “One more move, and I’ll blow her brains out,” he said, his voice steady, only the slightest hiccup in it to indicate that he was nervous.

  Around him several more humans struggled to their feet, one obviously fighting off the effects of the tranquilizer dart as he blinked rapidly, trying to stand. Two others seemed ready to go, moving to flank their boss.

  “No you won’t,” Pierce replied calmly as he took in the situation.

  “I will too.”

  He sighed. “If you do that, then there is precisely nothing to stop us from ripping you into pieces,” Pierce said with exaggerated simplicity, as if explaining the situation to a toddler. “So you had better not kill her. What you should have been doing was taking her with you while you left. That’s the only way to make this work.”

  The old man glared at him. “I was getting there, you young idiot,” he snapped. “First I had to make you stop fighting like a bunch of savages. It’s called a progressive plan. You start with step one and work your way up to the conclusion. Now, if you act like a pretentious ass one more time, I’m going to blow a hole in her pretty little cheeks. Not a fatal wound, you understand. But it will hurt quite terribly, and rather disfigure her for the rest of her life. However long that may be.”

  Pierce’s muscles twitched with rage.

  “Try it,” the director goaded, pressing the barrel of the gun right to Mila’s temple. “I dare you. You won’t get to me before I pull the trigger.”

  “Perhaps,” Pierce said, not as confident of that assessment as the old man seemed to be. “Perhaps not.”

  Triumph entered his eyes, and the director began to back down the hallway, taking Mila with him.

  “You’re forgetting one rather important thing though,” Pierce said calmly, crossing his arms and leaning against one wall.

  Behind him he heard his brothers shuffling to protect his exposed back. Once the director was out of sight, or Mila was freed, the remaining Institute shifters would likely go on the attack once more. Pierce wasn’t sure how many remained, and he didn’t want to look over his shoulder to find out.