by Camryn Rhys
Christina scoffed at her and struggled against her captor. “You know nothing of our life here.”
“He locked you in that room, Mama.” Gabriel’s voice was tight, but he didn’t look at his mother. “He was going to kill you, just like he was going to kill them.”
“He would never have killed me,” she screeched. “He loved me.”
Gabriel thrust Christina into Hannah’s arms and, from behind her, Rain’s loud voice echoed up the stairs. “Hannah? Everything okay down there?”
“We have a live one,” she shouted back. “Or two.”
Rain was down the stairs in a flash and the women struggled hard against them.
Christina began to thrash and cry, and Rain grabbed her, hard.
Gabriel held down on the younger one, Luna, while she pushed at him.
With a flash of his hands, Rain had fished something out of his pocket and secured it around the wrists of the older woman. A tiny black swath went across each wrist and secured her hands behind her.
“Hold her,” he said, thrusting the woman at Hannah.
Gabriel had the younger woman in his grip and Rain grabbed another set of restraints, similarly securing her.
“There,” he said, pushing her back at Gabriel. “Let’s get them both down to the beach. Is there anyone else in the building?”
“That was the last room,” the bare-chested man answered, holding his sister in his hands.
“Can you take her?” he asked Hannah, raising one eyebrow. “I need to be able to carry…Niko.”
“What are we going to do with…my father?” Gabriel asked, his words halting.
Rain looked down the long, dark hallway, face tense and drawn. He spat on the ground and growled, “Leave him.”
Him. Rossi.
She’d used the gun she hated. Taken a life. Broken her oath as a doctor. Clear as day, Hannah remembered the moment when all of that had fallen away. The moment when she’d heard Rossi threaten them and her mate would’ve died if she didn’t act. And she had.
Without hesitation.
One second of self-doubt.
One second of uncertainty, and he would’ve known she was there. Heard her. Sensed her. They were all wolves.
They could feel each other from a hundred feet away. She’d been lucky he hadn’t reacted to her presence. That he’d been too caught up in his malicious hatred to notice Hannah step up behind him.
She pressed her lips together as unshed tears gathered in her eyes again, but now wasn’t the time for them either. “We need to get moving,” she said, gesturing for the other woman to climb the stairwell first.
Hannah held Christina’s arm as they walked, like the woman was her prisoner. They brought up the tail end of the lone line weaving itself across the clearing and into the trees.
Flashlight beams bounced along the moving tide of children. She picked up a struggling toddler in front of her and situated the baby on her hip. At this pace it would take them at least thirty minutes to reach the inlet.
Viper struggled through the forest with Duke’s arm around his neck. If he concentrated on Hannah, he could feel where she was walking behind him, like her magick was a beacon he could center on. She was in the back of the trudging group.
They made slow progress through the forest, stopping only to swig water from their packs. There were so many children. They didn’t have food and water for this many.
For being such a big group, the mood was surprisingly quiet. Certainly, the kids who’d been in the room with them had witnessed horror, maybe not for the first time in their little lives. Even though he’d seen Rossi fall, had seen the flash of the bullet and heard the dead weight of the body, he still didn’t believe it was really over.
Rain and Colt had been communicating over the comm channel, talking through the evacuation plan—which had morphed from the tiny numbers they’d anticipated, to now the possibility of rescuing more than a hundred people.
And prisoners.
The children may have been innocent, but some of the guards had been aggressively complicit. Who knew what kind of crazy awaited them on the beach.
They came to the road that led down to the beach and stepped out onto the cleared path.
Dani walked in front of them, holding Maria’s hand with heavy limbs that seemed weighted down. The girl held the hand of a younger boy who had dark, ruffley hair, and wore a white nightshirt that hung down past his knees. None of them had shoes on.
Viper’s stomach turned over when he thought about what was behind him. So many children, kept captive. Locked in their rooms with siblings. Probably never seeing the out-doors, except in picture books. But maybe they didn’t have books, either. Rossi was more warden than father.
Their young lives would never be the same.
“Jeez, dude,” Duke moaned and sagged against him. “If you go any faster, you’re going to be dragging me behind you.”
He paused, re-situating his friend’s arm around his neck. “If you weren’t such a slow-ass bitch, we could go at the normal pace.”
Duke’s laugh was caustic. “You know there are like a hundred kids behind you.”
“Yeah, well, good thing they don’t speak English.”
“You don’t know that.” The smile was evident in his friend’s voice, but Viper wasn’t taking the bait.
He wasn’t in the mood for a sarcasm rally.
“What’s your twenty?” Colt’s voice came over the comm.
Rain answered, and Viper could just hear his real voice echoing over his radio voice. “We’re five minutes out. Coming in slow.”
“I just took the last of the girls from the barracks over to the landing strip.” Colt cut out with a buzz of static.
“Any prisoners?” Rain asked.
“Ten total.”
“We have two more.”
Viper’s ears perked up at that. Two prisoners? He didn’t remember prisoners. Only children. He whirled around, but the moonlight wasn’t bright enough to shine all the way back to the end of the group, and all he saw, besides people he recognized, were tiny heads.
“Come on, Vipe.” Duke winced. “I need to get to the boat.”
The kids began to stream around him and he finally turned back to the road. He didn’t like not being able to see Hannah. Even feeling her physical presence wasn’t enough. He needed something deeper. He needed more.
“Fine, you whiny bitch,” he grunted and kept walking.
“Language, dude.”
“English.”
The tree-line melted away into the night, and the moonlight cut a path along the ocean water. The beach, at last.
He increased his pace again, chancing Duke’s complaint, and hurried toward the feel of sand under his boots.
Colt stood at the base of the ramp that led up to the boathouse, waving his hands.
Viper kept pushing his pace until he reached his buddy. “Take Duke,” he said when they reached the end of the sand and the wood clomped under his foot.
“We have another boat,” Colt thumbed over his shoulder. “Come with me.”
He touched Dani’s shoulder and pointed down the pier. “Go with him. They’ll get you guys off the island.”
Maria halted hard, pulling Dani back before they could touch their feet onto the pier. “We can’t. If we try to get on a boat, we’ll die.”
“You won’t die,” she said with almost no emotion in her voice. “We fixed it so you can leave.”
“But Nana always told us…” The little girl shook her head and backed away. Many of the kids behind her followed suit.
“We made it safe for you to leave,” Dani said, tugging on the girl’s hand. “You’re not going to die. I promise you.”
The little girl’s lip trembled, and she kept shaking her dark hair back and forth like her dissent alone could stop it from happening.
Suddenly, Hannah’s calm voice cut through the protests of the children. “Look, honey. Maria.” Hannah brushed past Viper and he smelled
that scent of hers again.
The coolness, the spice of her hair. It was like a balm to his soul.
Maria’s eyes flew up to meet Hannah’s. “We can’t leave,” she said, her voice still wavering.
“Watch, watch me.” Hannah put her hand on the little girl’s face and smiled. “I have Christina with me, and we’re going to go first. You know Christina, right?”
“Nana?” the girl said. “Yes.”
“She has the same implant that you have. The one that you think is going to kill you. But I promise you, we shut it off so it can’t ever hurt you again. Okay?” She knelt in front of the girl. “I’m going to take Christina to the boat so you can see that it won’t hurt you. Okay? Because she has the exact same thing inside her that you have, that was put there so you couldn’t leave.”
Maria’s lip quavered, but she nodded.
Viper reached for Hannah’s hand as she released the girl’s cheek, and made eye contact for the briefest of moments. Her touch warmed him and he found himself smiling at her.
It’s over.
She gave him the most peaceful, most reassuring smile, and released him with a squeeze. She pulled the old woman behind her, down the pier, watching the little girl the whole time.
“See, Maria?” she said. “See how she’s okay?”
Hannah walked past the wooden rail that jogged off to the boathouse door, and kept stepping carefully. All of the kids had gathered behind Maria, not stepping onto the ramp.
The sound of her footsteps was almost eerie in the darkness. Like the whole scene was still some surreal dream.
At the end of the pier, the boat waited, and the lights shone out across the ocean, giving just enough light to the wooden dock that they could all see her climbing onboard a big, white yacht with the old woman in her hands.
Colt took the woman and pushed her onto the boat.
“See?” Hannah held up her empty hands. “Christina is fine. And you will be fine, too. Now, come down here to me so I can take you on the boat.”
The older kids in the front exchanged skeptical glances, but Maria stepped out, her little jaw quavering. Her bare foot made barely any noise on the wood, and Viper held out his hand to her.
She swallowed and took it.
“That’s right,” Hannah said. “Come here, to me.”
Maria ran forward and emotion took Viper’s breath, holding him silent for a long minute. He watched the girl sail into Hannah’s arms and throw her arms around Hannah’s neck, and relief flooded his entire body.
The other children began swarming onto the pier, streaming past him.
They were going to get off the island. He’d saved them.
His team had saved them.
Hannah.
Hannah had saved them all.
Chapter Nine
Viper unloaded the last of the children onto the mainland beach and glanced around at the scene in front of him.
Using Luther’s boat, they’d managed to get everyone over in two trips. But now the beach was crowded with huddled groups of children and young girls.
He had no idea what they were going to do with them all.
The sun had begun to rise up over the mountains behind Choaca, and the morning was almost like a spell. Until he’d seen the first rays of light for himself, he still wasn’t certain they’d really see it again.
Rossi was dead, many of the guards were dead. The island was evacuated. Not everyone had survived. But Hannah was safe.
Hannah.
It was hard to believe that, only twelve hours ago, he’d been blissfully unaware of the fact that his mate was somewhere out there in the world, coming for him.
Fate was a fucking bitch sometimes.
He pulled at the sleeves of his combat jacket and saw the edges of the tattoo in the full light. It was so much like his father’s.
Viper had nearly forgotten what it was like to look at the mate bond tattoos. So many dark mornings, he’d been huddled under a desk with his little brothers, and all he could see of his parents were their hands and their legs, and those tattoos.
The yelling above him, the fighting, the beating. It’d all happened mostly out of sight, but those tattoos had been the handcuffs that wouldn’t let his mother leave his father. The thing that had always made her insist they had to stay. All of them.
His father was the alpha, after all, and a wolf, and when he wasn’t drinking, he was a good man.
But that hadn’t mattered.
The tattoos had always represented jail to him. Death. But one new sunrise, and all he could think about was that Hannah had these same tattoos under the sleeves of her shirt, and she belonged to him.
And he belonged to her.
He searched the beach for her, and found her already kneeling with a group of children, offering them some of the MREs from the Rangers’ packs.
Poor kids. Hope they like teriyaki.
“What are we going to do with all of them?” Gonzales said from over Viper’s shoulder.
“Not sure.” He signaled to Rain, who had laid out the dead bodies under cover, up the beach from where everyone had congregated. Closer to the landing strip.
“I counted one hundred and twenty-two total.” Banner’s deep voice was full of frustration. No one wanted to think about what that meant. One hundred and twenty-two children, young women, and soldiers, who’d been held prisoner by Rossi or brainwashed by Rossi. They’d all need new homes, maybe new packs.
“How many of those are kids?” Viper asked.
“Eighty-seven.”
“And how many did we lose?”
Banner shrugged. “Given how many were in the one barracks, I’d say we lost about thirty.”
“And then the guards who were killed.”
“And the guards,” Banner repeated.
Gonzales whistled.
Rain jogged up to them and signaled for Warrick and Young, who bounded across the beach. Everyone had unloaded their weapons and packs, and they moved much faster without the weight. It felt strange, still, to be done with the mission and defenseless. Ready for debrief.
“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.” The commander crossed his arms. “I’m waiting to hear from the alpha council what they want us to do with all the children.”
The cool morning air turned sour in Viper’s mouth as the enormity of it all settled into his mind. They’d just rescued a family, bigger than most of the packs he knew, from years of isolation. “Shit,” he whispered. “I mean, who’s even their alpha?”
“I don’t know,” Rain said. “It wasn’t Rossi, though. You would’ve been able to sense it if he was an alpha, and he wasn’t.”
“We’re gonna have to get some answers from somebody.”
Gonzales thumbed behind them, toward Choaca. “That Damon kid was answering our questions in the boat, at least. But Alex took him to the hospital with Vadik and Andrea. He wanted to stay with his sister.”
“Damon?” Viper asked.
“One of the guards.”
Rain pointed along the beach, where the sand ended and the landing strip was visible through the trees. “I asked Colt to set up some tents up there. I think our only option is going to be to start debriefing everyone. I need you guys to get some sleep. Four hour shifts. Whoever’s awake will be helping me with information gathering and debriefing. And I’ll call in to Julianna, and see if we can get some real food out here for everyone.”
“I’ll help Colt with the tents,” Warrick said, clomping off through the sand.
“Good,” Rain called after him. “Then you and Colt and Young take the first shift sleeping.”
“What about us, boss?” Hannah’s voice was soft behind Viper, and sent chills through him. She was so calm, and so quiet, she was like a wave of peace washing over them, keeping them all sane.
Or maybe it was just him she was keeping sane.
Viper moved aside to make room for her in the circle. When she stepped in beside him, his first instinct was to pull h
er into his body, but he couldn’t do that with all of his buddies around.
They couldn’t know yet. Until the debrief was done and they were on a plane home, nothing was really safe.
“Have you had a chance to look at the wounds yet?”
Hannah nodded. In the growing sunlight, she glowed. Her features were so delicate, so arresting. He would’ve been hard-pressed not to stare at her openly when they first met if he could have seen her like this.
He might’ve been able to ignore the magick in the dark, on the island, but it was irresistible now. There was no arguing; she was obviously the most beautiful woman ever created.
And that he wanted her.
She was already his.
God. His.
That’d take some getting used to. And the way the light played on her cheeks, the way her eyes lit like fiery coals in the morning sun… dammit. It was a good thing they hadn’t met in the daytime. He would’ve been killed for sure, distracted by Hannah.
“I want you to be with me when I question the two women,” Rain said. “Viper, you, too, in case we have to restrain them.”
Hannah and Viper followed him across the beach, back toward the boat, where the two women sat huddled together, under a big, spidery tree.
The older woman let out a hissing hush when they approached.
“Can I look at your hand?” Hannah asked in cautious Spanish, holding out a palm to the old woman.
Christina clutched the appendage to her chest. “No,” she said.
“My mother just wants to return home,” Luna said, stroking the old woman’s back and avoiding all their gazes. “And so do I.”
“We just have some questions for you, and then we can talk about that.” Hannah knelt on the ground in front of them and looked up at Rain and Viper, forcing her eyes down to indicate they should do the same.
Viper almost laughed.
These two women were prisoners. And they’d participated in holding children captive. Interrogation techniques told him they’d be more likely to talk if he intimidated them. Not sit on their level. But when Rain knelt down and took a seat next to Hannah, Viper followed suit.