She threw herself between one really big angry guy and the rifle he was pointing at Damon. “Stop!”
The big soldier looked down at her. His face was black with some kind of paint. The whites of his eyes showed harshly against the dark skin and they were cold…calculating.
“Who the fuck are you?” he snapped.
Owen raised his gun and the other soldier mirrored him.
There were too many. Too much tension.
Vadik was going to implode again at any moment. The man was stretched to thin and in too much pain through his connection with his mate.
“Where’s Luther?” Vadik asked, surprising Clara with his even tone. The strain was there, he was just doing a good job of tamping it down.
“How do you know Luther?” The big guy at the front asked.
“Vadik? Is that Vadik? Let go of me you big oaf!” A familiar female voice called from outside the guard post.
A few moments later a small wisp of a woman covered in tattoos slithered through all the stony guards.
She met Clara’s gaze and smiled in recognition.
Clara grabbed Maggie’s arm. She was the one who’d taken Faye. She and Luther had saved her. They’d come back, just like they’d promised. “How is Faye?”
Maggie paused, her eyes glassy. “She didn’t make it, Clara. She never made it off the dock. I have to help Andrea.” She shrugged off Clara’s hand and hurried toward Vadik and Andrea. “Oh, gods! Banner, get your ass over here and gimme one of those wound packing powder thingys.”
Clara struggled to breathe. Faye died on the island. Never made it off? It wasn’t fair. She’d fought so hard to give them a chance and still her father had somehow managed to win. He always won.
“Stand down, men.” The big guy lowered the rifle aimed at her face and held up a fist. The rest of his team followed suit. He crossed the room to Andrea and pulled several small packets from various pockets on his vest.
“Can you help her?” Vadik asked.
Owen moved to her side and they stood next to Damon while the soldier attended to Andrea’s arm.
“Hold on. Where’s Young? He’s got the big packet of woundseal,” the big one said.
Another of the soldiers walked out into the night, calling Young into the dark.
Clara gasped when Damon gently grabbed the back of her collar.
“Hold still. I’ll get this off of you.” Two sequential metal clicks followed his words and sure enough…the collar fell into two pieces. He handed it to her and then moved to Owen’s neck. After removing Owen’s he placed the small metal square in her hand. “Run this over the face of the collars. There are two small magnetic locks that will slide out when you do.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, leaving them both and moving toward the people bustling around Andrea and Vadik. She needed to get their collars off too. Before anything else happened.
She reached out toward Vadik’s arm. He turned to her before she touched him. Opening her other hand, she held up the magnet. “Run this over the face of the collars. They have magnetic locks. Damon helped.” The last two words were barely a breath. But she needed him to know that her half-brother had chosen a side.
That he deserved a second chance.
They all did.
Owen ran his hand along the bare skin of his neck. Two years, that collar had been his life. Whether wolf or man, it had grown and shrunk with his body, stayed with him always. But it was gone. His heart bumped against his chest.
He was free.
Clara was free.
He pulled her into his side and wrapped his arms around her. They’d escaped the hunt. They had escaped the collar. If they could only escape the island, they would know true freedom.
Vadik took off Andrea’s collar, and then his own, while one of the Rangers poured a powder over her wound.
A short, dark-haired woman with two full-sleeve tattoos turned the discarded collar over and over in her hands. “What the hell is this, anyway?”
His jaw worked as the words rolled around inside him. Torture. Cage. Hunt. But he couldn’t put them together anymore. It felt like, if he said them out loud, he might wake up from whatever dream he was in, or whatever end-of-life hallucination must be taking him. Because they couldn’t possibly be escaping.
“They’re enchanted collars that my fa—” Damon began, but a hard look from Vadik stopped him. “That Rossi used to control the wolves in the cages.”
“Cages?” the little woman spat the word out with as much disgust as Owen felt building inside him.
“What the hell was he doing with wolves in cages?” one of the Rangers asked, coming inside the building and hanging on the door frame.
“He was hunting us.” Owen kept his voice low. “Men would come in to the hunting ground, armed with these rifles that could blow your head off at twenty paces. And the collars would make us shift into wolves so he could kill us.”
The silence that cascaded around the small, packed building was deafening. No one responded, or made a wise-crack, and Owen watched it really sink in to everyone’s features. Even behind all the war paint, he could see the nausea. The anger.
Even the one who’d been tearing open little silver packets and pouring them into Andrea’s wounds had stopped moving. They were all going to be sick, no doubt.
“Each hunt, they’d get to kill one wolf.” He slipped his hand to his neck and rubbed at the new skin. “He turned some of us. Some of us were wolves already. But whenever there was a hunt, the cage doors would open and we’d be on our own until the collars shifted us and the shooting started.”
Still, no one responded. Probably because there were no words.
On the ground, Andrea groaned and Vadik looked up from his prostrate position. His hands were on her before the big Ranger could warn him off.
“Careful. That’ll only stop the bleeding if you let it sit.”
But Vadik had her head in his hands and pushed off the hulking man. “Andrea. Andrea. Listen to me, love. We’re going to get you to a hospital. You’re going to be fine.”
The Ranger stood and looked at his buddies. Owen had seen that expression before. It was the same way his partner used to look at him when they stood over a family member who couldn’t accept that their loved one was going to die. It was resignation, pity, anger. But it was unmistakable.
“What happened to her, anyway?” one of the Rangers said in a low voice.
Owen pointed at the floor on the other side of Vadik, where the hunter’s rifle had been dropped and all but forgotten. “The hunter winged her, trying to get us to shift.”
Another Ranger raised his gun into ready position. “Where?”
“We killed him.” He held Clara tight. “It was him or us.”
“Hey, no one holds it against you, buddy.” The Ranger clapped him on the back. “We just wanted to make sure he’d been neutralized.”
“We need to get her out of here,” Vadik said, pulling Andrea into his arms. The big man who’d fixed her held out his hands to take her, but Vadik pushed him off and stumbled to his feet. “I’ll take her.”
“We have to wait for Rain.” The Ranger beside Owen touched something on his communicator. “Alpha leader, do you read?”
“If we retrace our steps to the beach, we can meet him,” the woman said.
Another of the Rangers grabbed Damon’s shoulder and pushed him forward. “We’re not really taking this one with us, are we?”
“Cool it, Warrick.” The big Ranger pushed at the man’s chest with his gun. “Maggie says he’s good to go, that’ll be enough for Rain.”
All of the Rangers froze at once, hands on their ears. The man next to Owen glanced up at the tattooed girl. “Ranger down.”
Someone wrestled Damon out of the building and the Rangers filed out, with Maggie walking near Vadik, as though she was ready to catch him if he fell. She appeared to know him.
Clara tried to rush ahead when they took Damon out, but Owen grabbed her and pul
led her into his side. “Don’t,” he whispered.
One of the Rangers took up the rear behind him. “Let’s go, we have to move.”
Owen pulled Clara out of the building, leaning down to her. “You can’t put yourself in front of Damon anymore.”
“But he’s my brother.”
“To him, he’s the enemy. If you align yourself with him, you’re going to be the enemy.” He held his breath for a moment, all-too-aware of the Ranger over his shoulder. “I can’t lose you, Clara.”
“You won’t.” She touched his arm as they followed the group out into the half moonlight and ran across the higher terrain of the island, looking out across the topography of the nightmare they’d lived.
They had to get off the island. That was the only thing that mattered. He didn’t care about Damon or Vadik or Andrea or anyone, when it came down to it.
There was only Clara.
Chapter Ten
RAINIER DUBOIS
* * *
Rain held the muzzle of his M4 against the guard’s temple and glanced at Luther. “Do you have the cuffs on him?”
Luther nodded and put the first guard on his stomach. “I swear to you, they’re coming out of nowhere.”
“They must have walkies or something, then.” He drilled the guard’s dark eyes with his own. “Do you have walkies?”
The man didn’t answer and Rain repeated himself in Spanish. Still, no answer.
“We’re on our way to you,” Warrick’s voice came through the communicator in his ear.
Rain raised a tentative finger and clicked it on. “Roger that.”
Luther finally got cuffs on the second guy and Rain dropped his weapon, stepping back.
It was the third time they’d been jumped by guards, and he still wasn’t sure they’d caught the last guy. But they couldn’t afford to chase down any more of them. They needed to regroup and get the prisoners down to the beach.
And they had to take Brown. The first of the Rangers to fall.
“The last time I was here, they had walkies. But I don’t see them on these ones.” Luther put the second guard on his stomach, next to their dead companions. He kept one foot on the kid’s back.
Rain was sick of killing boys. Fifteen or sixteen was one thing, but these boys… the ones that had finally surrendered… they were too young.
His hands itched to get around Adrian Rossi’s neck and squeeze. He’d been planning how he’d kill the asshole for months. He wanted to see it happen. Slowly. To watch the man’s eyes as he died. To know that the bastard knew that they’d won.
To know that he’d avenged his friend’s life.
Donovan climbed to his feet, groaning with each movement. “Where are they?”
“On their way.” Rain pulled the first boy to his feet. “You’re coming with us, kid.”
“They probably don’t speak English,” Luther said, but Rain ignored him. He didn’t care if they could understand him. They were coming off the island. Everyone was coming off the island.
“Let’s start taking them down to the beach.” Rain pushed the boy out in front of him. “Luther, you get the other one.”
He moved out into the darkness. This whole mission had made complete sense until he saw the first boy’s face. They couldn’t kill any more of these guards, whether they were pointing guns or not. He’d seen men go to Afghanistan and Iraq and come home from having killed kids—real kids—and never be the same. He didn’t want that for his Rangers.
Not for the Black Wolves.
Rain clicked on his comms. “Bravo team, what’s your twenty?”
A crackle in his ear and Duke’s voice said, “At the house. Half the upstairs has been blown away by the bomb.”
“And Rossi?”
“We haven’t seen him yet, Commander.”
Voices sounded behind him and Rain whirled around, his gun up. When his hands left the boy’s shoulders, the kid ran off through the trees.
Rain yelled after him, telling him to stop, once in English, once in Spanish. But the boy wasn’t stopping. And he was done shooting kids. “Let him go,” he said to Donovan, who started to clamor after him.
The wounded civilian froze.
Through the trees behind them, Banner crashed ahead with a limping guard in-tow. Must have been the one Luther wounded. The young man had a wide, frightened face, but Rain could see echoes of Elise and Marco in his features.
One of Rossi’s children. Were they all Rossi’s children?
Behind Banner came a man in black pants, carrying a black-haired Andrea VonBrandt, with Maggie at his side.
Warrick and Young brought up the rear, behind a red-haired girl in a short white dress, and a mostly-naked man in a loin cloth.
Rain shook his head. This was one for the books. “Who are all these people?”
Maggie slipped her arm around Luther’s waist and hugged him. She pointed to the redhead. “You remember Clara? She brought us Faye.”
Luther reached and Clara crashed into him, tears in her eyes. She looped one arm around his neck and one around Maggie’s. She was babbling something about Faye that Rain couldn’t understand.
“This is one of the Rossi kids,” Banner said, pushing the limping guard ahead of him. “He surrendered to us. Or so she says.”
Rain couldn’t tell if he meant Maggie or Clara, but he looked the boy over. “You. Boy. You’re coming with us.”
Warrick and Young slung Brown’s body between them without a word. There were never words when they lost one of their own on mission.
There would be time for words when they got him back to North Carolina. But now, they needed to get all these people off the island.
“To the beach, everyone.” Rain signaled them onward. “We have a couple of people who need medical attention.”
Banner fell into step beside him and the cool, crisp air passed over them as they walked. He’d want to know what happened to Brown.
Rain didn’t want to say the words.
He died at the hands of a ten-year-old boy. Twelve at the oldest. The same boy that was now dead on the forest floor, by Brown’s own bullet.
Rain didn’t want any of those words to pass through his lips. And even though he’d have to give a full report to Cap when he got back to base, he wasn’t sure how he was going to explain the night’s events without feeling like it had all been a dream.
“When we get to the beach,” Rain said at last, “You signal Colt and let’s get Andrea and Donovan on the first boat.”
“We need to get them directly to the dock at the Puerto Villa,” Luther said from over Rain’s shoulder. “Julianna can get them to a hospital without raising any attention from the police. She still has pull.”
Banner’s grimace was visible, even in the dark morning air. “Rossi’s daughter?”
“They’re all Rossi’s daughters.” Luther thumbed backward. “Doesn’t make them evil.”
Rain glanced back at the redhead, walking beside Maggie. Did Luther mean that the redhead was Rossi’s daughter? She certainly didn’t look like Elise or Marco. At least, not obviously. Maybe the nose. Maybe the shape of the cheekbones. But she didn’t have the patrician look that Marco and Elise had.
“How can they all be Rossi’s kids?” Banner grunted. “I’m itching to get my hands on this bastard.”
“We all are,” Rain added.
When they got down the hill, to the edge of the bush, before the beach, Banner stopped to signal Colt, and they all started to plow through the sand.
Vadik ran ahead, crashing into the surf and running until he was at the edge of Alex’s boat. He deposited Andrea inside and climbed in after her.
“Send Donovan with Maggie,” Rain called out, over the crashing of the tide. “Colt, I want you to take Luther with you and take these two.” He pointed at the guards. “Young and I will head back up the beach and rejoin Duke at the house. They still haven’t pinpointed whether or not Rossi died in the explosion.”
Vadik glanced up
, his eyes wide. “The bomb?” He shook his head. “Rossi didn’t die in the bomb. He was down by the hunting ground, having some woman cast a spell on me.” He pointed at the limping guard. “He was with us. He knows where Rossi is.”
Rain grabbed the young man and hauled him against the side of the boat, sloshing him in the water. “You know where Rossi is?”
The boy nodded.
Clara called out, hanging out the side of the boat. “Don’t hurt him! He’s my brother. Please! He cooperated.”
Rain ignored her cries and pushed him harder against the side of the boat, bearing down on him with all his weight.
The boy grunted and his face scrunched up in pained lines.
“Where. Is. Rossi?” Rain hissed at him.
The young man shut his eyes tight and turned his head. “I don’t know.”
The water continued to whoosh around them, pushing the boat up and down behind their bodies, in the dark waves. Banner was pushing the two handcuffed young men out of the waves while Colt pulled them in.
“How can you not know?” Vadik crawled to the end of Alex’s boat and got down in the boy’s face. “You remember me? The man you tortured, and turned into a wolf, and left me to be killed by a psychotic hunter?” His accent got thicker as he kept talking. “Your father was with us. Where the fuck is he?”
“Damon!” Clara cried out, lunging for him. But the half-naked man caught her around the waist and kept her inside the boat. “Damon, tell them where he is. You promised you’d help.”
With watery eyes, Damon looked at Vadik, then at Rain. “He won’t be at the villa. We were at the power station, trying to get it back online.”
Rain’s heart skipped and thumped almost to a halt. “The power station, back online,” he repeated.
“That’s impossible,” Vadik said. “We blew it to the sky.”
“He was still trying,” Damon insisted. “Geraldo has a generator in the bunker and they’re going to try to restart the security system.”
“Boss, Bravo Team is at the house. They’ve likely got it cleared by now. Rossi has to know that he’s lost.” Banner pushed the younger guard into the boat as Warrick and Young loaded Brown’s body in and climbed up.
Broken Wolf: Moonbound Series, Book Seven Page 20