Her Wild Hero

by Paige Tyler

  “Wait a minute.” Tate looked like someone had pulled the floor out from under him, then hit him with an axe handle. “Stutmeir was on the DCO’s payroll? We funded his frigging research? How is that even possible? Stutmeir and his doctors were torturing people.”

  Landon traded a quick look with Ivy, but she shook her head. Kendra knew what that look meant, and Kendra couldn’t blame her. There were obviously some things that Ivy wasn’t ready to share, and the fact that she’d been one of the people Stutmeir’s doctors had tortured was one of those things.

  Tate dropped into the cheap, swivel desk chair. “And now, these same people have started a whole new hybrid program?”

  “Or maybe some other group within the DCO,” Ivy said. “We just don’t know for sure.”

  Landon leaned back against the counter and crossed one booted foot over the other. “It can’t be a coincidence that this is the exact part of Costa Rica where the DCO decided to send you guys. If there was a single rogue group within the DCO doing all this, they wouldn’t have sent you down here.”

  Kendra understood where Landon was heading at the same time Tate did.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “So, the traitorous group of bastards in the DCO who employed Stutmeir got wind that a second group of traitorous bastards had a hybrid lab in this general area, then manipulated events to get us sent here.”

  “You and Declan said you thought someone had us conducting a grid search for something,” Kendra pointed out. “Now we know what it was.”

  Tate nodded. “This lab.”

  “They were probably hoping the doctors would get nervous and abandon ship,” Ivy said.

  “But instead, the second group of traitorous bastards at the DCO decided to accelerate their program, and used your team to test their hybrids,” Landon added.

  “But the commander of the security force went nuts and took over the operation,” Kendra finished. “God, that sounds absolutely crazy.”

  The muscle in Tate’s jaw flexed. “So, what the hell do we do now?”

  “First, we search every inch of this compound,” Landon said. “I want to see if there’s anything here that might tell us who from the DCO funded this program. Next, we collect information for Zarina. She’s going to want to have details on these hybrids—pictures, blood and tissue samples, copies of any important-looking research. Maybe it will tell her who stole it from the archives. Last, we collect up everything that’s left—every scrap of paper, every piece of equipment, and all the bodies—then we burn this place to the ground. I don’t want anyone being able to use this particular hybrid process again. These hybrids weren’t perfect, but they were better than the first group we ran up against. If these were second-generation hybrids, I don’t ever want to face a third generation.”

  Kendra had to agree with that. “What do we do when we get home? There’s going to be a debriefing.”

  “We tell the truth, or as close to it as we can get, anyway. That the camp and everything in it went up in flames during the fight with the hybrids,” Landon said. “Until we know for sure that we can trust John, he gets nothing.”

  She hated lying to John. But if Landon was right about her boss, telling him what they really learned could get a lot of people killed. “And after that?”

  “We figure out who really pulls the strings at the DCO,” Landon said. “This hybrid program might have started with John or Dick—or hell, maybe both of them—but my gut tells me that someone on the Committee is involved, and we need to find out who.”

  Kendra’s stomach churned. Going after the Committee made sense, but it was also the nearest thing to suicide she’d ever heard.

  Kendra continued to pore over everything in the lab alongside Ivy and Landon while Tate rounded up the other guys so they could search the rest of the buildings. Landon was just calling John for a pickup when Kendra heard Clayne’s voice outside. She hoped that meant Declan was back, too.

  Tossing Ivy the flash drive with everything she’d found in her section of the lab, Kendra ran for the door. She sagged with relief when she saw Declan standing with Clayne…and Tanner? She hadn’t expected to see him as part of this op. At the moment, though, she was too focused on Declan to wonder what the DCO hybrid was doing there.

  Pulse racing, she closed the distance between them in record time and threw her arms around him in front of everyone. She was so happy that he was back safe, she didn’t realize he hadn’t put his arms around her. She immediately stepped back to search his face.

  “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Maybe you should let Derek take a look at you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “But he’s a medic,” she insisted. “He can—”

  “I said I’m fine!” Declan growled.

  Kendra jumped. From the corner of her eye, she saw Clayne give her and Declan a curious look. She bit her lip. “Okay. I just thought…”

  Declan’s expression softened. “I know. And I’m sorry. But I’m fine, Kendra. Really.”

  Was he? Because he sure as hell didn’t seem fine to her. She nodded, blinking back tears.

  “Okay, troops!” Landon called as he and Ivy came out of the lab. “We’ve got a pickup in two hours. Let’s torch this place and get to the landing zone.”

  Kendra turned back to Declan, but he’d already walked over to join Tate and the rest of his team. She tried not to be hurt. He and Tate were like brothers. It made sense they’d want to catch up. She and Declan would talk on the flight home. As she watched them disappear into the building where he and Marcus had fought to the death a few hours ago, though, she couldn’t help feeling that what she and Declan had shared had somehow been broken.

  ***

  Kendra sat staring off into the dark interior of the C-17 cargo aircraft that was taking them home, slowly going over the last several hours and trying to figure out what had happened between her and Declan.

  She’d hoped to talk with him on the way back to the States, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Declan had been withdrawn and quiet since they’d left the jungle-shrouded labs yesterday morning. In fact, he didn’t say more than two words to her the entire time.

  Landon had pushed them hard to get to the extraction point on the Panama border that he’d set up with John. With all the injured people they were moving, not to mention the rucksacks full of hybrid DNA samples and lab reports, it had been damn hard getting to the clearing by the deadline. But no one had complained about the pace. They’d all been more than ready to get out of that damn place. She’d tried to stick near Declan during the hike out, but he’d disappeared into the forest, saying he wanted to make sure no one was following them. The excuse had seemed logical at the time, but with the way he’d been acting since, she now knew it had probably been a made-up excuse.

  Two helicopters from the Panamanian Air Service had been waiting for them in a small clearing when they got to the extraction point. Her heart had crumbled a little more when Declan had gone out of his way to make sure he was on the other helicopter after she’d been buckled into the first one.

  It hadn’t gotten any better after they were quietly dropped off at some private facilities near the edge of the Panama Pacific International Airport. The place had food, showers, and doctors to take a look at their wounded. Everyone had laughed and joked as they cleaned up and got some warm food, but Kendra hadn’t felt like doing either. The only thing she’d wanted to do was spend some quiet time with Declan. Unfortunately, he’d disappeared the moment they’d landed, saying something about needing to rest and heal up. She didn’t have the guts to go after him, not if he was going to snap at her again.

  She hadn’t seen him again for six hours, not until they all boarded the C-17 Globemaster John had rerouted to their location. Even then, Declan had immediately headed to the back of the plane. The aircraft had been almost empty, and yet the place he’d chosen to crash was about as far away from her as he could get.

  A short time after
leaving the Panamanian airfield, she’d walked back to check on him, but he’d been in a deep sleep. It was obvious that Declan was still avoiding her for some reason, even if that meant sleeping all the way back to the States.

  Kendra continued to replay the last few hours of their time in Costa Rica, looking for that one thing she’d done that had pushed him away, when Ivy slipped into the seat beside her.

  “Hey, girlfriend,” Ivy said softly. “I thought you’d be sleeping like everyone else, especially after the week you’ve had.”

  She shrugged. “I guess I’m too tired to sleep right now.”

  Ivy didn’t say anything for a while, probably assuming she would continue. But Kendra didn’t feel like chatting. Not about what was really bothering her anyway. She would tell Ivy about everything soon enough, but now wasn’t the right time.

  “You okay?” Ivy whispered. “Did something happen out in the jungle you haven’t told me about?”

  Yeah. She mused silently. I fell in love with Declan. But even though Ivy was her best friend, those weren’t the words that came out. “I’m fine, really. I’m just thinking about what we’re going to have to do when we get back. With John, I mean.”

  She could feel Ivy’s gaze on her in the darkness and figured her friend knew she wasn’t really being honest. But Ivy was intuitive enough to know that if Kendra wasn’t ready to talk, she shouldn’t push. She heard Ivy shift in her seat, then sit back with a sigh.

  “I know it’s going to be hard for you to sneak around behind John’s back, but you understand why we have to do it, right?”

  Kendra wanted to get Ivy focused on another topic of conversation, but she honestly didn’t like this one any more than the previous. At least she could talk about this subject, though.

  “Yeah, I understand why we have to do it,” Kendra admitted. “I just wish we didn’t. John has always been someone I looked up to. I have a hard time believing he’s behind any of this.”

  “Me too,” Ivy said. “But the fact is, we rarely know people as well as we think we do. And sometimes the people we think we know the best are the ones who can surprise us the most.”

  Ivy told her about the plan she and Landon had come up with to follow John, maybe even put a tracking device on his car, but Kendra wasn’t really listening. Instead, she was thinking about what Ivy had said about how the people we think we know the best can surprise us the most.

  Maybe that was the case with Declan. Maybe she didn’t know him nearly as well as she thought she did, even after everything they’d gone through out in that jungle.

  Chapter 15

  Ivy couldn’t believe that she and Landon were actually conducting a surveillance operation on John. After all the red tape their boss had gone through to get them down to Costa Rica, then back out, it just seemed wrong. But Landon was right. If John was clean, that was great, but if he wasn’t, they needed to know. Because their lives were being put at risk every day in the normal course of their jobs. If John was working another agenda, —possibly with people on the Committee—then the risk they were facing was even greater. One way or the other, they had to know for sure. She’d always thought of John as one of the good guys, but there was simply too much at stake to have blind faith in anyone right now.

  As soon as they got back home, she and Landon bugged both his office in DC and at the training complex, as well as his car. In addition, they’d also followed him every night after work since getting back from Costa Rica. They figured that if he was going to communicate with anyone about what happened in Central America, he’d do it right after they got back, as all the traitors scurried around trying to cover their butts. While she and Landon were watching John, Clayne and Danica were watching Dick.

  John didn’t leave the training complex until nine, but unlike last night, this time, he didn’t go straight home. Instead, he headed toward DC. Ivy assumed he was going to the office in town, but he took the Crystal City exit, then pulled into a twenty-four-hour parking garage.

  “Great,” she muttered as Landon parked along the curb a few hundred feet from the garage. “That connects to the shopping center. He could be going to any restaurant from there. Or the Metro.”

  She and Landon had just started down the street when their boss walked out of the garage and headed down the sidewalk along Crystal Drive in the opposite direction. But instead of going into a restaurant like Ivy thought he might, he walked directly to the Water Park and sat on the edge of the fountain.

  Ivy and Landon stopped outside the steak house on the opposite side of the street and pretended to look at the menu. She frowned as John pulled out his smartphone, then leaned forward with his elbows on his knees to read it.

  “Okay, that’s not suspicious at all,” Landon said softly. “No one sits outside to check his messages in forty-degree weather. I don’t care how nice that fountain is.”

  It was nice, but Ivy agreed with her husband. “It looks like a predesignated meeting place to me.”

  She and Landon could only stare at the menu for so long before someone got suspicious, so after five minutes, they wandered to the next building. Ivy pretended to look at the dresses on the mannequins in the store window while Landon kept an eye on John. So far, no one had joined their boss.

  “You think he made us?” Landon asked.

  Ivy opened her mouth to reply when she caught a scent that made her head whip around. She sniffed the air, trying to pinpoint where the smell was coming from, then turned until she was pointing in the direction they’d just come from a few minutes ago. The wind was coming into her face from that direction, which explained how she’d picked up such a weak scent. Someone was watching them from upwind of their location.

  Landon’s hand was already on the gun under his coat. “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “A shifter, I think. But I’ve never smelled anything quite like it before.”

  Landon glanced at John. Their boss was still sitting on the edge of the fountain engrossed in whatever he was looking at on his phone. “That may be who John’s here to meet.”

  “If the shifter catches our scent, he might bolt,” Ivy said.

  She and Landon quickly walked off the main street and ducked into an alley between a restaurant and the shopping center. They could still see the fountain from where they were, but between the nearby Dumpster and the swirling wind, she didn’t think the other shifter would be able to pick up their scent.

  A few seconds later, a tall man in an overcoat walked slowly down the opposite side of Crystal Drive. He stopped at a few stores but didn’t go inside. Like he was window shopping—or checking for a tail.

  “Is that the guy you smelled?” Landon asked.

  She shook her head. “I can’t be sure. The wind works against us as much as for us back here.”

  They edged closer to the entrance of the alley as the man continued down the street. He stopped and leaned one shoulder casually against the wall at the entrance to the running trail, hands in his pockets, his eyes locked on John.

  “What the hell?” Landon asked. “Is he here to talk to John or not?”

  Ivy didn’t have a clue, but a few moments later, the man abruptly turned and started back down the street the way he’d come.

  “Shit,” Landon swore. “Stay on John. I’ll follow Overcoat.”

  Ivy caught his arm. “I don’t get a good feeling about the guy in the coat. We either follow him together or stay with John.”

  Landon didn’t argue. Or hesitate. “We follow Overcoat then.”

  They waited until the man passed the alleyway, then slipped out to follow him. At the crosswalk, he moved over to their side of the street, then continued heading toward where they’d parked. A few blocks later, he turned off Crystal Drive onto a smaller side road.

  She and Landon got to the corner just in time to see the man turn again, this time darting into an alley. Then they heard the sound of running feet.

  “Shit,” Landon muttered. “He made us a
lready.”

  Chasing a guy, especially one who might be a shifter, when they didn’t know a damn thing about him probably wasn’t the smartest thing in the world, but she and Landon didn’t have much choice. This whole op was a bust if they didn’t get a good look at him.

  She and Landon cautiously peeked around the edge of the building. The alley was a dead end. Overcoat was nowhere in sight. Ivy pulled her weapon. Beside her, Landon did the same. Since she had a better sense of smell, her husband let her lead the way, but he stayed close. Ivy’s nose led her straight to the back corner of the alley.

  She shoved her gun in the holster at her hip. “He climbed the wall. I’ll go after him.”

  “Not without me,” Landon said. “I don’t have claws, remember?”

  “But I do,” she reminded him.

  Her husband scowled. “I don’t like it. This could be a setup.”

  She’d already considered that. “I know, but my kitty senses aren’t tingling. First hint of trouble and I’m off that roof like a shot. I promise.”

  Landon’s jaw flexed. “Okay. But be careful.”

  “I will. Head around to Jefferson Davis to see if he comes out that side.”

  Landon kissed her hard on the mouth, then disappeared down the alley.

  Ivy extended her claws just enough to get a purchase on the cracks between the bricks, then climbed. She got to the top of the three-story building thirty seconds later. That was more time than the strange smelling shifter had taken to scale the same building. Whoever the guy was, he was a better climber than she was, and faster, too.

  His scent was easy to pick up on the roof, mostly because it was so unique. Ivy pulled her SIG and followed it, careful to scan the rooftop as she went.

  The trail didn’t lead to Jefferson Davis like she thought. Instead, it led her along the rooftop parallel to Crystal Drive. She was forced to cross several low walls and navigate around a couple of HVAC units before she ran out of buildings. She leaned over the edge of the roof she was on. Below was a cross street between Crystal Drive and Jefferson Davis. There were hardly any street lamps, and no stores to speak of. No one would have seen the guy climb down. He could be five blocks away by now.