by Vivi Andrews
The people who worked for the Organization could generally be divided into three categories, in Rachel’s experience. Those who were paid to be there—typically the guards who got off on the power and barely veiled sadism of their jobs. Those who were coerced to be there through threats or blackmail—often scientists and doctors with unique specialized knowledge, like Rachel herself. And the third, most terrifying subset of Organization employees—the True Believers. Like Madison Clarke.
“Rachel!” As if called up by the thought of her, Madison came striding around the corner at the end of the hall, her long legs eating up the yards between them. From a distance, looking at Madison was like looking in a mirror. They were a similar height and build, but Madison was more muscular, her brown hair curlier, and on closer inspection her features were a little too pointed and sharp to fall within the boundaries of the classical beauty that an accident of genetics had given Rachel. A scattering of tattoos on her left wrist, the back of her neck and her collarbone leant Madison’s appearance an edginess that contrasted Rachel’s own feminine, southern style. Rachel had always found her eyes too hard and her intensity a little terrifying.
“I didn’t know you were going to be here today,” Madison called as she approached.
Because I’m not technically authorized to be. It wouldn’t take much for Madison to figure that out. The fudged clearance marker would fool a lazy gate guard who wanted to get Rachel’s phone number, but it wouldn’t hold up against Madison’s scrutiny for a second. She was too smart and too much of a stickler for protocol.
The guard handed back her badge and buzzed her through, obviously satisfied now that Madison had proven to know her. Rachel quickly pocketed the incriminating badge and moved to meet Madison halfway.
Her mouth was dry, but her prepared cover story came easily. “I heard the avian was being transferred. We never did manage to get sperm samples. Be a shame to waste the only avian we’ve ever had in captivity.”
“You need the Hawk?” Madison came to a stop in the middle of the hallway, casually blocking Rachel’s way. “Isn’t your access to him restricted?” she asked, too sweetly.
Maddie knew damn well that Rachel hadn’t been allowed within fifty feet of him since she’d assisted in his capture. Not your concern, Dr. Russell. Tend to your own work and leave the Hawk to us.
Rachel swallowed around the knot in her throat. “Special circumstances. The breeding program is high priority.”
“I suppose. Though you’re going to have a time getting samples out of him now. I just dosed him. He’s doped up to kingdom come at the moment.”
She’d expected as much. Drugging the shifters was standard operating procedure at the Organization. Unless lucidity was required for a test, they were kept so out of it they couldn’t fight their restraints or try to maul their captors. Much. She’d known he would be surfing a chemical cocktail—which was why she’d brought a pair of syringes to shock him out of it—but she could hardly admit as much to Madison.
“Depending what he’s on, I might be able to get my samples without waking him,” she said instead.
Maddie chuckled. “I might be able to get my samples,” she mimicked, imitating Rachel’s accent with eerie perfection.
Madison had always had a disturbing chameleon-like tendency to try on other voices—one she frequently engaged to manipulate shifters desperate to hear from loved ones they’d been separated from. Blindfolded and bound, shifters would hear the voices of their loved ones—pleading, crying or sometimes even playing the role of torturer. The skill had made Madison a cornerstone of the C Blocks interrogation teams. If she’d been with the Hawk, had his inquisition begun already?
“You must love your work,” Madison snickered in her own voice.
Rachel bristled, but kept her expression placid. “It pays the bills.”
Madison snorted. “Look at you, all righteous and disapproving. You feel sorry for them, but we’re doing good work here, protecting the human race from these creatures. If the world at large knew about the shifter threat, they would thank us for our work. They’re animals, Rachel. I know they can seem very human at times and it’s easy to get attached to them, but thinking of them as real people is a mistake. It doesn’t pay to be soft with them. It’s like having a pet tiger—you have to maintain control at all times or you wind up like Siegfried. Or was it Roy?”
She didn’t seem to want an answer, so Rachel ignored the question. “The avian?”
“Hm? Oh, right. Down this hall, first left gets you to the cells. You want number five.” She smiled, catty and snide. “Good luck, Doc.”
“Thank you.” When Madison stepped to the side, Rachel strode past her, hyper conscious of every movement. She was good at this game after years of practice. Don’t walk too fast. Don’t look guilty or try too hard to look innocent. Breathe normally.
Even when it felt like a semi was parked on her chest and her lungs refused to expand all the way.
She didn’t breathe any easier when she was around the corner and out of sight. With Madison here, her entire plan was a thousand times riskier. The guards could be counted on to do the bare minimum, but Madison was a different beast. And a much more frightening one.
Rachel paused in front of number five.
Thanks to the computer tech now on her way to Costa Rica, the code she punched into the access panel both opened the door to the cell and sent an “upgrade” into the security system that would play hell with their video and audio surveillance systems for the next half hour. They would have privacy. Provided Madison didn’t come to investigate.
Rachel stepped into the room and the door slid shut behind her. Only then did she let herself look at the figure on the bed—and a soft, horrified cry escaped her lips.
“Noah.”
It wasn’t his real name. It had been too dangerous for her to know his real name when they first met as two links in the underground railroad to free shifters from Organization captivity. She’d picked the name for him that first night she’d seen him in person, loving the way his firm, unsmiling lips had twitched up at the corner when she teased him about rescuing enough shifters to fill an ark.
They’d already been corresponding for nearly three years by that point, working together to free the shifters being held and experimented on by the Organization—Rachel on the inside, Noah whisking them to freedom once she got them out. Nearly seventy shape-shifters disappeared into the night and wiped from Organization records. She’d often wondered, during that time, what her counterpart looked like. She’d built up an image in her head of a knight in shining armor, glowing with goodness like some Arthurian legend.
When she had finally met him in person, he hadn’t looked at all like she’d expected. He was supposed to look so good. Honest and wholesome and pure. Like all the good deeds he’d done, all the lives he’d saved, would have shaped his face into soft, easily trustable lines. Her Galahad. But no, from the very first glance it was obvious he was dangerous. Hard. Chilling. His extraordinary yellow eyes harsh and unyielding.
In retrospect, it had been naïve of her to expect him to be anything else.
His face was all angles and edges. Every mannerism quick and sharp and purposeful, a predator in the guise of humanity. He was tall, with a lean narrow build and the slight hunch to his shoulders that some tall men developed to adapt to the shorter world around them. His hair was dark and cut short, in an almost military style, as if he’d never quite gotten away from his Special Forces background.
Her partner. Her counterpart on the outside. The man she’d secretly hoped would be so much more.
For all his fierceness, he had only ever been gentle with her—and with the dozens of shifters they had worked together to rescue. Firm. Commanding. But never cruel.
Cruelty was more the Organization’s forte.
It showed in the wasted figure lying on the bed, drugge
d out of his mind. He’d never been heavy, but now he was so thin his skin seemed stretched over his bones.
She’d promised herself, when she pushed that syringe into his back at the hotel, that she would do everything in her power to make sure he wasn’t hurt in Organization custody, but her access to him had been all but nonexistent. Whatever they’d done to him had wrung him dry and left him a shell of himself.
Her hawk. She hadn’t known what kind of shifter he was—hadn’t known about his fame as the Hawk in shifter circles, until the Board of Directors had called her in and insisted she help capture him. Avian shifters were rare to the point of near myth, but it was easy to visualize him as a bird of prey. It fit him. Her Noah. Her hawk.
His eyes were bandaged, but his file indicated it was more to blind him than to protect his eyes. She set the syringe aside and quickly set about removing the gauze. Without the bandages his face seemed even more hollowed out, the shadows darker and more menacing. She let her fingers linger along the line of his stubbled jaw. “What have they done to you?”
Blinking back the moisture in her eyes, she reached purposefully for the IV snaking out of his arm, sliding the backpack off her shoulder and pulling out a syringe. Shifters and humans were physiologically different in thousands of ways, but the pharmaceutical mix in this syringe was as close to an adrenaline shot to the heart as she could get. In the chemical trials it had never failed to wake up a shifter. And it woke them up fighting.
Hopefully he didn’t try to kill her.
She hesitated, fidgeting with the needle.
One syringe had broken his trust. Could this one bring it back?
She couldn’t be sure how quickly she could bring him out of his drugged stupor or how soon he would be able to move, let alone run. So many variables.
So many unanswerable questions. And one louder than all the others.
What if he didn’t cooperate at all?
She’d done so much to destroy his trust he might—quite understandably—refuse to do anything she said. He may try to slice her open with his talons as soon as he was lucid enough to shift. And if he did, could she blame him?
Rachel pushed down the plunger.
Chapter Three
“Noah.”
His eyes flew open, blood surging through his system like fighter planes being launched off an aircraft carrier—though his thoughts still swam with the syrupy fog of the drugs.
The light was brutal, harsh and painfully bright, but when he squinted that vicious light wrapped lovingly around a chocolate brown curl. A curl that fell forward to rest against the sweet curve of a familiar cheek, caressing a face that made his chest ache.
His heart shuddered in his chest. Rachel.
Adrian wasn’t a beast—his animal side had always been as distantly calculating as the man—but even the civilized hawk had to bite back a growl. If only he could have called his talons, slashed them through his bindings, raked them across that creamy cheek. The fantasy was so vivid he could almost smell the blood.
“Noah, we haven’t much time. I need you to focus for me.”
He was breathing hard, strangely energized even as the world continued to bend and warp like a Dali painting. He locked his eyes on her face, fighting for coherency. Why was he being allowed to see her face now? And why was she calling him Noah again? It had been “Hawk” for months. What was this new game? She’d told him the next time he woke up he’d be in the information extraction department—what strange torture was this?
“Can you hear me, darlin’? We don’t have much time.”
Something about the endearment helped him focus on her eyes. He fucking hated her eyes. The dewy compassion in their dark chocolate depths. The regret. The strain that pulled at their corners. The silent pleading for him to forgive her.
Never in this lifetime, sweetheart.
“Fuck off,” he said—or would have, if his throat hadn’t been stripped raw with rusty nails—the drugs always dried him out. The words were a sick croak.
Rachel ignored him, weaving in and out of his field of vision in a rush of movement that made his world blur and spin. He heard a rattle of medical instruments as she pulled a tray up next to the bed. The snap of a surgical glove. The smell of talcum powder. A scalpel gleamed in her hand.
Ah, and now we get to the torture.
She was talking, but the words seemed to warp into one another. The world did the wave again and he closed his eyes in self-defense, though the sensation of movement didn’t abate. This made the worst hangover he’d ever had feel like a walk in the park, his body a thousand raw nerves.
He felt her touch then, feather light, undoing the strap pinning his shoulders to the bed, cutting away his shirt to expose his chest to the chill, overly air-conditioned air. Her fingertips were cool and sure against the fevered warmth of his skin and his body reacted, even through all the drugs.
Fantasy. That’s what this was. Even after her betrayal, she still infiltrated his dreams with her soft voice and softer hands. She might be a soulless bitch, but she was still the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life. And she kissed like her mouth had been made for him alone. He hadn’t forgotten that.
“I’m sorry. This is going to hurt.”
Yep. Definitely a dream. Everything would be sweet and sultry and erotic until the moment she apologized and stabbed him in the back. His subconscious knew this routine. It was a well-worn path.
Adrian didn’t bother opening his eyes, waiting for the inevitable prick.
But the pain wasn’t the jab of a needle followed by a rush of oblivion.
Something sharp sliced into his upper chest, just beneath his clavicle and he hissed, jerking against his bonds, his eyes flying open only to be assaulted by the angry light and swirling world again.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her face once again floating above him. “We don’t have time to do this the gentle way. I would have done it while you were unconscious, but I didn’t think you’d trust that I’d taken it out unless you saw it yourself.”
Fingers probed into his chest, nails scraping beneath his collar bone and he would have shouted, would have screamed, but his throat was still too raw to form the sounds. Beneath the haze of pain he felt a jerk, a rip, and then her bloody hand rose between them, her expression grimly pleased. “There. Done.”
She stripped the bloody gloves, wrapping them around something that looked like a hearing aid with dangling cords dripping bits of his gore. Had she just pulled that out of his chest?
“I’ll patch you up better when we’re clear, but for now this will help.”
Clear?
Something warm and slimy smeared over the wound, stinging briefly before leaving a soothing numbness in its wake. He fought to hold on to the pain. Numb was bad. Numb was a precursor to oblivion.
He felt her fingertips, so cool against the itchy heat of his skin, tugging on the bindings at his wrists. Loosening them? No, that couldn’t be right. They never moved him unless he was drugged to hell and back. She wouldn’t be untying him.
The restraint on his left wrist came free with a jerk.
She was.
What the hell?
He heard that name again. Noah. She was speaking, he realized. Had been for some time. He tried to tune in to the words floating around his head like butterflies, but for a moment all he could make out was the pitch of her voice, low and urgent, the southern accent more pronounced than ever. He began collecting the butterfly words, putting them together like puzzle pieces.
“…only five guards…small outpost…lazy…believe what the computers tell them…your tracker here…cameras off-line…won’t even look…by the time the ‘upgrade’ program finishes screwing with all the primary surveillance systems we should be long gone. I hope. But with Madison here…”
His right wrist released and dropped limply to
the mattress. Through that same distant, shifting, butterfly-puzzle awareness, he felt her move to the foot of the bed and start on his ankles. “Can you walk? You have to walk. Or shift. If you can fly—dang it!” She hissed and he caught a flash of red before she shoved her finger into her mouth, sucking on the wound in a way that reminded him more of a little girl than a genius doctor. Her hands were back on his bindings almost instantly, though he saw lines of pain on her face—her face seemed to be the only fixed point in the Dali painting of his world. He felt a drop of moisture soak into the sock on his ankle, the fabric sticking to his sensitized skin. Was she bleeding?
“Can you sit up at all? How are you feeling? Dizzy? Nauseated?”
He felt like his mind had been put in a blender and someone had hit puree, but he managed to lever his upper body a couple inches off the bed, the effort of it pathetically intense. Then he saw her hands.
The fingernail on her right forefinger was bent back at a sixty degree angle, detached from the nail bed and bleeding a steady red stream onto the crisp white sheets, but she kept working steadily at his bindings using all her other fingers.
She freed the ankle strap with a soft sound of triumph. “Can you get the last one?” She started away from the bed, but he just looked at his hands—confused to find them free—and she made a low, impatient noise and returned to yank at the last cuff.
“This is taking too much time,” she murmured. “Madison probably already suspects me. For all I know, the Board could have dispatched a team as soon as my badge was scanned at the gate.” He had the feeling she was talking for her own benefit as much as his. Nervous chatter. Some people were like that during an op.
Was this an op?
Where had that thought come from? This wasn’t an op. It was a fantasy. Just a fucking weird one where his chest hurt like hell from where she’d cut something out of it and she’d accidentally ripped one of her fingernails off trying to free him. Not his usual brand of fantasy, but the subconscious worked in mysterious ways.