by Anya Nowlan
Kayla snorted, shaking her head.
“Yeah, I think she blamed everyone in my life for getting me down the ‘wrong path,’ even though I got on that all on my own. But I didn’t know that you’d call. Funny how life works, I guess.”
It wasn’t funny though. Not at all. She had to squeeze her hands together to quell the momentary rage within her that wanted to boil up. All this time, she could have been with Ryker and Rio and she hadn’t even known. Everything that happened could have… not happened!
“So I didn’t find you and I went on with life. I raised the boys in my hometown and I got a job as a tattoo artist at a dingy parlor. It was okay, enough money to live on because my mom let me stay with her. She loves those boys, you know. They’re great kids.”
At least they were, she thought, biting her tongue.
“Why aren’t they with you, then?” Ryker asked, and that question really did cut, like a dagger straight to the heart.
She propped her head on her hands, letting her fingers coil into her messy dark strands of hair. It was a struggle saying every word from there on out.
“I took them to daycare one morning. It was fine, nothing was different. They grew fast and they were getting really strong. The teachers kept telling me how they’d never seen lion cubs quite that adept and advanced at their age, that they were something special. I knew they were because they were your sons, you know? They had to be!”
Kayla grinned for a second, not looking up. She could imagine Ryker and Rio looking at one another, smiling proudly as they should.
“But I guess they told someone else as well, because that day, about two hours after I’d dropped them off, I got a phone call. Someone had kidnapped them, taken them straight out of the yard. Men wearing black. They just… came and took my babies.”
“Who?” Ryker asked, the tension so tight in his voice that Kayla thought his vocal chords might just pop in a second.
“I don’t know. That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out for years. I quit my job, I started working out… I’d been a small-time thief before I met you two, some burglary, some bullshit like that, so I went back to my roots. Got a gun, learned to shoot, learned to ask the uncomfortable questions. It became really clear real fast that no one was interested in helping a single woman with tattoos and piercings find her two missing lion cubs when I had nothing to offer but my gratitude.”
She bit her lip. Remembering those first few frantic months, when she’d been calling everyone she could think of who could possibly help. The way the police basically brushed her off – ‘shifters are weird with their kids, probably their daddies came and took them’ was one of the most memorable lines she’d gotten – and how the groups who were supposed to help people like her were basically powerless still made her wince painfully.
“I started unraveling leads. I figured out about half a year later that it was a professional group who had kidnapped them. They specialized in shifter babies, selling them to the highest bidders. Lions and tigers are popular and dragons, of course, are the most sought after ones. They sell them to people who basically want pet shifters. It’s… sick. They call themselves the Shifter Snatchers. But by the time I figured out who they were, it was too late – Rylen and Rhamos had been sold to someone.”
Taking a deep breath, Kayla looked up. She met Ryker’s gaze first and then Rio’s, her gut twisting like she was on a roller coaster. Her eyes didn’t fill with tears this time. She’d cried all the tears she had to cry – or so she hoped – over the years and now all she had was her rage and her desire to find her boys.
But this was all new to Ryker and Rio. Not only did they have to cope with the fact that they were fathers, but they had to come to grips that someone had dared take their babies as well. The determination that flashed over the expressions of both men, their eyes turning that terrifying gold for a moment, would have chilled anyone to the bone.
No one wanted to be on the wrong side of two extremely pissed off werelions out for blood.
“I’ve been chasing down leads ever since. Whenever I think I’m getting close, another wrench is thrown in my path. I’ve gotten really good at dealing with failure, though.”
The joke didn’t feel funny and no one laughed. Her humor had become drier as the years passed and as her hope of ever finding her sons grew fainter and fainter. Yet she would never give up. It was out of the question, completely.
“How do you know Spade?”
“Know him?” Kayla snorted, raising her brows. “He turned up in an alleyway in Chicago when I was about to get my ass beat by a band of werewolf bikers for stealing some data from them about their gang – I thought they were involved with the original kidnappers. He kicked their asses and then basically told me that I can go with him or die resisting. I saw what he did to the six werewolves so I didn’t resist. Simple self-preservation, if you ask me.”
“So you don’t know him,” Rio said.
“I know that he doesn’t play nice and that he’s a giant douchewad, that’s all I know.”
The grins that broke out on Ryker’s and Rio’s lips told her that she’d gotten the right impression of their ‘boss.’ Not a popular guy by any stretch of the imagination.
“I’d like to say that I’d want to know him even less than I do, but then I wouldn’t have ended up finding you guys again,” Kayla added, brushing a hand through her hair and feeling how ragged her ponytail currently was.
No time for fashion and looking decent when she got abducted and flown between continents, unfortunately enough.
“We joined the Navy about two months after you left,” Ryker said, slicking his tongue over his teeth for a moment.
Kayla had to guess that he wished he could be smoking at that moment.
“From there, it was a short hop and a skip to be picked up by the SEALs and after that, we sort of lost our identities, for better or for worse.”
“But you’re not with the SEALs anymore,” Kayla said, frowning slightly.
The twins looked at one another, smirks gracing their rugged expressions.
“Yeah, well, you see – the US government isn’t that keen on keeping ‘psychopaths’ in their armed services. At least not when their agendas don’t line up perfectly.”
Rio air-quoted ‘psychopaths,’ which only deepened Kayla’s frown. Sure, the men she’d known had been on the wild side, but she’d never go that far in describing them.
“What do you mean psychopaths?”
“It’s best you don’t know,” Ryker said with a sigh, leaning back. “Let’s just put it like this – things didn’t get any better after you left, but they did get a hell of a lot worse. We got quietly discharged about two years ago and we’ve been with The Firm – Spade’s people – since then. And we’re on thin ice here as well.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Not a lot of ways people like us can use our skills, Kayla. We don’t have a lot of them to begin with,” Rio said.
That sounded like bullshit if she’d ever heard any. Rio had always been a talented pyromaniac in more ways than one. He was a strong chemist – luckily he never really got into making drugs, which would have been the easy way out – and brilliant at understanding composition and timing for chemical effects, which carried over into explosives.
Ryker, on the other hand, could always build and fix just about everything. There was no way that there would be something broken or damaged if he was around to put it back together. Kayla remembered witnessing him rebuilding a car from stuff that was no better than scrap metal, and that was just one of his feats.
But those two had always been good at underselling their own skills. If they didn’t want her to know what else they’d picked up over the years then she was probably best off not knowing.
If it helps get back my boys…
“So what’s going to happen now?” Kayla asked, flicking her gaze from one Tyren brother to another.
Rio and Ryker shared another look, one that was
heavy with thought that Kayla couldn’t decipher quite as well as she’d used to in their dingy little apartment back in Delaware.
“Now we’re going to get our kids back,” Rio said, the familiar gold snaking through his hazel and orange eyes.
“Or we die trying,” Ryker added more ominously.
“It won’t have to come to that,” Kayla said, but she didn’t sound half as confident as she wanted to.
Game on.
Nine
Ryker
Ryker absolutely hated the fact that he had to leave Kayla behind with Spade’s trained monkeys.
He gritted his teeth as he rounded a corner, the desert heat beginning to die down now in the stark darkness of the evening. They’d staked out the compound for two days, which was difficult to do on completely flat, lifeless terrain, but what they’d learned had told them that it was best to hit the place at night.
Ryker could have told the squad that without wasting two days, of course. But his rational side deemed that perhaps he wasn’t in the clearest state of mind at the moment and it was best for everyone involved if he took a slight step back from voicing every single one of his opinions. Thinking that and doing it were two completely different things, of course.
“Lynx Six, moving in,” came Prowler’s comment as the second fire team was making their way into the building.
It wasn’t a very large complex, just three buildings and a medium-sized parking lot. It was made up to look like your average garden-variety lab or storage facility, with only a flimsy chain link fence around it and no guard towers. Over the last two days of scoping it out, they hadn’t even noted more than a couple of guards, and those guys had been very busy with hiding the fact that they had guns on them.
It was different from the usual Arctics operations, which were practically screaming ‘come murder us’ to anyone with half a sense. Shifter Squad Nine was usually happy to comply, as they were this time.
“Lynx Three, moving in,” Ryker echoed, waving Rio in after him.
They were split up into four distinct teams. Rio and Ryker were assigned going in through the south entrance, while Price and Prowler took the north one. Dice was going to clear the side-buildings and Thor was on the perimeter, keeping an eye on them all through the scope of his sniper rifle.
Ryker wasn’t entirely sure who he was expecting to get killed by more – The Arctics or Thor. Both looked like likely candidates.
It was no news to anyone that Thor wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about being here. Any mission that didn’t come with a wad of cash from The Firm, meaning anything to do with personal gain for someone on Shifter Squad Nine, came with marked indifference from Thor. With Dice, he had ended up ratting the squad out to Spade, which ultimately saved their asses, but no one had exactly forgiven him for it yet.
Nor were they going to any time soon. Not that there was any lack of issues on which to dislike one another, of course.
“Come on, get going,” Rio growled behind him, shoving him in the back lightly with the butt of his rifle as Ryker made quick work of the lock.
“Shut the fuck up or I’ll feed you that rifle for dinner,” Ryker snarled back, prompting another grumbling round of expletives from Rio.
So the Tyren brothers might have been a little tense that night.
The lock opened with a click through the combination of the little gadget Prowler had given him – a tool he’d built to deal with The Arctics’ locking mechanisms on laboratory doors – and some good old-fashioned elbow grease. Quiet as ghosts, an almost impossible feat for men of their size, Ryker and Rio slipped into the darkened corridors of the compound.
“What’s that?” Rio asked in a hushed tone as they snuck down the hall, hearing a low, steady humming sound coming from somewhere below them.
“Do I look like a clairvoyant?”
“Fuck you.”
Okay, so they were a lot on edge that night.
Both of them froze to the spot when a bout of gunfire sounded from the opposite end of the compound. Ryker glanced over his shoulder at Rio, who looked grimly determined. They nodded to one another and picked up their pace, moving through the building faster.
Spade hadn’t provided them with much intel. All they knew was that somewhere here, kept in this building, was Hank Jennen, the heir to the Jennen fortune, and hopefully Rylen as well. Hank was the son of Clint Jennen, a prominent werepanther business man. Clint Jennen made his riches by selling sporting equipment and he had been a lauded quarterback back in the day, one of the first shifter athletes to really make a splash.
If The Arctics didn’t have qualms about picking up that guy’s son, which created a media frenzy of no small proportion, then it was obvious that Ryker and Rio’s boys didn’t even make them pause for a moment.
That was going to be their mistake.
In the distance, Ryker heard pounding footsteps coming toward them. They stopped at the intersection of two corridors, flattening themselves against the walls as the lights came on. Dropping his gun to swing over his shoulder, Ryker grabbed the long hunting knife he kept in his boot and readied himself, Rio doing the same.
When the steps got closer, Ryker counting three pairs of boots, he sprung out from behind the corner and slammed the knife into the forehead of the first man he could grab. The blade crunched through skull and brain like it was going through flaky bread, blood pouring out of the man’s mouth and nose immediately. Ryker shoved him back, dislodging his knife in time to catch another guard coming toward him, deflecting a hit with his forearm.
Rio flung himself out then, tackling the third guard who got a hold of his gun at the last moment, emptying a barrage of bullets into the floor and walls all around Ryker. He felt one of them graze past far too close, probably leaving a burn streak on his thigh. It wouldn’t be the first one he got. He stopped counting the scars after his first active tour with the SEALs.
Ryker grabbed the man who’d come for him by the throat, slamming him up against the wall while Rio brutally pulled the gun out of the hands of the remaining man. Ryker could hear the sickening, squashing sound of the man’s face getting pummeled in with the butt of his rifle until not a single sound came from him anymore.
He grinned, eyeing the remaining man, being held up against the wall by his throat, Ryker’s arm fully extended as if he wasn’t expending any effort at all. He raised a brow as the suffocating werewolf was trying to get a handle on his gun, Rio disposing of it efficiently as soon as he stood up.
Sighing, Ryker fished out a cigar and put it between his lips.
“You don’t mind if I smoke, right, buddy?”
The last gargles of a man swiftly running out of air told him that he probably didn’t. Or at least that it wouldn’t matter in another minute or so.
He lit up the cigar and took a puff as Rio checked the bodies of the two men they’d taken down, patting through their pockets for access cards and anything else that might be of interest. Ryker didn’t miss how Rio snatched a nice watch off of the wrist of the guy with a large puncture wound on his forehead.
“So, here’s how this is going to go. Me and my brother here, we’re looking for two kids. Hank and Rylen. Rylen should look a little like the two of us, just not so jaded yet. Hank? Well, I think he might look like a spoiled brat. Ring any bells?”
More gurgling.
“You’re gonna have to loosen your grip a little if you want him to say something.” Rio noted conversationally, admiring a decent enough knife he got off of one of the bodies, looking at the sharpness of the blade.
“Oh yeah?” Ryker asked, taking another puff and blowing the smoke in the face of the man, who was practically blue in the face already. “Didn’t think of that.”
Suddenly, he let the man drop to the ground, almost allowing him to fall to his knees, but Ryker’s hand remained steadfast on his neck. The blond and blue-eyed werewolf – probably an elite guard of The Arctics, as they seemed to prefer allowing only the most ‘Aryan’ looking wo
lves to move up on the corporate-terrorist ladder – gasped for air. He sounded like a frog had gotten stuck in his throat.
“So, you going to talk to me or do I need to put you up there again?” Ryker questioned, jerking the guy’s head back so he could look him straight in the eye.
“Down below,” he gasped.
“What?” Ryker asked, squeezing a bit harder for a second.
“Down below. They’re down below, both of them. Jensen’s being held in 3A and that other kid sounds like someone in one of the tubes in 7A.”
“Tubes?” Rio echoed, looking at Ryker with a scowl on his expression.
“You sure?” Ryker asked, pulling the guy up on his feet.
“I’m fucking positive!” he growled, the fear of death and general dislike for suffocation apparently doing wonders to loosen a man’s vocal chords.
“Fine then,” Ryker said, inhaling the cigar smoke as he grabbed the knife from his belt and shoved it into the neck of the guard, slashing downward violently so blood burst out in a fountain as the man slumped over, pawing desperately at his neck. “It’s all about the angle, you know?” Ryker commented to Rio.
But neither one of them was really in a joking mood.
What the fuck have they done to my son?
Ten
Ryker
Ryker slicked his tongue over his teeth as he wiped the knife on his pants and then put it back in its sheath.
“Lynx Five, we have a possible location of the kids. Deck A,” Rio said, speaking into his headset before shouldering his gun and moving forward.
Ryker did the same. Darkness seemed to loom all around him and it had nothing to do with the shitty lighting scheme currently deployed in the compound. No, his mood was shot because not only was he on a fucked up mission to save his son – something that should have never become necessary – but some asswipe of a werewolf had just told him that he was being kept in a tube of some sort.