A soft knock on the door interrupted them. Now wasn’t the time to deal with anyone else. With slow, measured movements, Peren reached out and took hold of the handle. She opened the door hesitantly, worried it was Lukian and then she’d have to deal with Missy yelling at the man she thought was a ninja-Rambo-stranger, not just yelling about him. That wasn’t an argument she was in the mood to have.
Seeing it was only Melanie, Peren exhaled, some of the tension in her shoulders slipping away. Dark circles had formed under Melanie’s normally vivid blue eyes. Her long blonde hair, which usually never seemed out of place, was going in all directions, as if Melanie had not even bothered running her fingers through it, let alone one of the brushes Lukian had supplied all the women. Melanie pushed past Peren sluggishly and moved over to sit on one of the chairs at a long rectangular table that made Peren wonder if meetings were held in the room.
“Mel, guess what our little buddy did,” said Missy, a hand on her hip and a sarcastic look on her face. “Or rather who.”
Melanie’s gaze met Peren’s, though Melanie’s eyes seemed vacant. “What did you do?” Her tone lacked any real interest.
Something was amiss.
Evidently, Missy sensed a problem as well. She stopped pushing to tattle on Peren and instead shot a look of concern in Peren’s direction.
“Mel?” asked Missy, her voice barely there as she eased closer to their friend and touched Melanie’s arm.
Melanie turned her focus back to Missy. A sinking feeling started in the bottom of Peren’s gut. She knew without asking that something bad had happened; she just wasn’t sure what it was. She pulled out one of the chairs and sat next to her friend.
“What’s wrong, honey?” she asked, placing a hand upon Melanie’s thigh.
Melanie turned a set of glassy eyes on Peren and spoke slowly. “I…I had sex with Lance last night.”
“Something must be in the water,” Missy grumbled, and Peren shot her a nasty look.
“He was just… I mean, well, he wasn’t… Oh shit, he was hot and I wanted him.” Melanie focused on Peren. “I got him. I got more than just him. We fucked three times before it happened.”
Peren and Missy shared a perplexed expression before they inched in closer to their friend. It was Peren who spoke first. “When what happened?”
Melanie stared at the floor, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. “You won’t believe me if I tell you.”
“No, sweetie, it’s okay. We’ll believe you, go ahead,” Peren coaxed, stopping only for a minute because she suddenly felt the heavy weight of someone’s gaze on her. She glanced around the large meeting room but saw nothing out of the ordinary. No one was with them.
Melanie took Peren’s hand and squeezed it tight. “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but I swear to you…Lance changed during his orgasm.”
“Changed?” Peren questioned.
Missy leaned back in her seat, a look of righteous indignation on her face. “Yeah, psycho-paramilitary freaks tend to do that. I bet he flipped out on her. I told you these guys were bad news.”
Peren gave her another nasty look and pulled Melanie closer to her. “He changed how?”
“His mouth widened and then his shoulders moved up. Hair, dark black hair, sort of appeared all over him and the worst part was his teeth—they were huge. He looked like—” She gasped. “Like he was going to tear me apart after he fucked me and eat me. Like an animal would. Not like a person.”
“Oh, this is ridiculous,” Missy said, standing up so fast that her chair tipped over. Something in her voice was off as if she wasn’t as shocked and appalled as she was pretending to be. “He obviously slipped something in your drink at the club and you were hallucinating.”
Melanie wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Hallucinating? Yes, maybe, but it felt…it felt so real.”
Missy waved her hand in the air, dismissing the idea. “Well, you don’t have a mark on you, and since you’re sitting here telling us this, he couldn’t have eaten you.”
Melanie nodded. “Yes, you’re right. When I got up this morning, he was lying next to me in the bed, normal. I…yes, it must have been something in my drink.”
Peren felt the penetrating gaze again and then smelled the faint scent of musk. Lukian. She felt like he was standing in the room with her, next to her, all around her. She closed her eyes for a minute and could have sworn she felt someone moving within her thoughts—as if they were no longer her own or private. As quickly as the feeling came, it left. She turned her attention back on her friend and patted her leg.
“Yes, you were tired and had too much to drink. Lance didn’t slip you a thing. You were half in the bag when we got to the club and you’ve been running on empty with finals lately. I’m guessing the stress of all that, combined with alcohol, left you a little off.” She hoped her lie would soothe her friend.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“You changed during sex?” Roi rounded on Lance.
Lukian could sense Roi’s rage. Hell, Lukian even agreed with it, but he couldn’t let him kill Lance.
“Calm down,” he said sternly.
The room stopped buzzing with an overabundance of testosterone, and all eyes turned to him. He was their captain, their leader, and he was expected to fix this.
Wilson took a step forward and tipped his head. “Sir, maybe it would be best if we just eliminate the women. They know too much and—”
Lukian went to strike him, but Roi beat him to it, hitting Wilson first, followed closely by Lance and then Green hitting the man as well. He could understand Lance’s concern. He’d smelled Lance’s desire for the blonde one the minute he’d laid eyes on her. Roi was a different story. The self-proclaimed playboy rarely thought of women as anything more than objects. He’d been surprised to find Roi sleeping on the hallway floor outside Missy’s locked room when he woke. Roi had been mumbling in his sleep, something about being a pig’s asshole.
Lukian still wasn’t sure what that had been about. All he knew was they had another problem. Lance had clearly lost control and shifted after Lukian had glimpsed him having sex with the blonde. And the blonde had seen the whole thing.
Shit.
Green pulled Roi off Wilson and turned his attention back to Lukian. “Perhaps full disclosure? It would ease their suspicions, and if they understand the stakes, they may choose the lesser of two evils.”
“Captain, if I may. Wilson might have a point. I don’t want to hurt ’em. They’re sweet girls, but to risk the secrecy of the team? Of supernaturals?” Jon said softly from the other side of the room, his Southern accent showing through.
Lukian spun and glared at him, his nostrils flaring, his wolf wanting to be free to slaughter the man for even suggesting such a thing. “No one will be hurting any of the women. Is that understood?”
“But the red-haired one…Jen or something? She was our target. We should at least hand her over to Colonel Brooks. Maybe he could figure out what to do with the other two,” Wilson said, wiping his bloodied mouth. “I’m not saying it’s a great idea, but it is an idea.”
“Her name is Peren, and she’s my mate!” Lukian roared.
Every gaze in the room landed on him. The silence was deafening. It was Roi who stepped forward first. “Brother, tell me that you didn’t mate with her. Tell me that you didn’t offer her your seed and bite her.”
Lukian stood silently as he stared through the two-way mirror separating his team from Peren and her friends. She was still holding her friend to her, trying to comfort her. He knew she’d sensed him reading her, scanning her thoughts, and that was another sign that she was his true mate. Not that he needed any more signs. The writing was not only on the wall, the deed was done.
She was now marked and claimed.
His mind flashed back to his moment of release in her—when he filled her body with everything he had to offer, his teeth sinking into her tender flesh, sealing the deal that she would be his forever.
“Your silence speaks volumes, Lukian,” Roi spat. “If she gets pregnant, she will die. What do you have to show for it then? How could you take a human mate? Tell him, Green. You’re always lecturing us about the dangers. Tell him!”
Green stepped forward and cleared his throat. “Umm, here’s the thing. I did some additional tests on Peren this morning. She’s less human than we are.”
Roi and Lukian turned to Green.
He continued, “I told you about the vampire DNA in her and what I thought might be Fae…and well, you told me about her surviving a shifter attack when she was younger. So it’s obvious she carries a bit of shifter in her as well, but…”
Green glanced at Lukian, looking scared that his commander and friend would kill the messenger. Lukian nodded to him, wanting more than anything to hear what he had to say.
“Peren shows signs of having every known form of shifter DNA in her blood, along with several midlevel demons. The most shocking of all is that they have all meshed together. The only conclusion I can come to is that the same genetic engineering and splicing techniques used to create the I-Ops were used here, but it was all raw—base form kind of stuff. I’m not sure, but I think she could shift into upwards of thirty creatures and more than likely has the same powers as most vampires. She, of course, is unaware of any of this. I could sense that during the testing.”
Green had the gift for reading truths. It was typically reserved for wolves and vampires, but somehow Green had developed it. If he said Peren was unaware of her condition, then it was true. No one in the team would question him. They’d come to rely too heavily on each other’s strengths to start doubting them now. The question that was plaguing Lukian wasn’t if Peren knew what she was, but how she came to be in the first place. Someone out there knew full well what she was and wanted to put an end to her.
But why?
Lukian stormed past his friend and went straight for a burner cell to call Brooks. He pressed the send button and waited for Brooks to answer.
“Mission is complete, Colonel,” Lukian said, his voice never betraying his emotions.
There was a moment of silence on the other end. “Very well. I’ll expect a full briefing in the morning.”
Lukian ended the call and tossed the phone aside. Not one of his men questioned him. He didn’t think they would. He looked back at the mirror to stare at the three beautiful women who had gotten themselves tangled up in a mess they couldn’t possibly understand.
This isn’t fully about them, he thought, his mind still racing.
He couldn’t help but think back to his time in the laboratories with Peren’s father. They had worked side by side in stabilizing the creation of an elite fighting team. There had been at least three tries prior to theirs—that Lukian was aware of. He suspected there had been more he wasn’t told about. All were unsuccessful. Synthetic serums had been used to try to re-create the DNA and induce change. Most of the men had died. Others had been left broken in some fashion and labeled Outcasts.
He turned and looked at the five men standing near him. Each had been carefully screened. It had been determined that all had traces of supernatural abnormalities in their blood prior to the start of the experiments. Somewhere in each man’s family history there had been an event that no one talked about. Lukian had spent well over a hundred years roaming this earth and had come into contact with more immortals than he cared to count. He was able to round up enough pure blood samples for Dr. Matthews, and that had helped stop the senseless deaths. His team had known the risks before they went into the testing and they knew the consequences.
All but one from his team had survived. Roi had been selected as a backup initially. He’d been an alternate candidate. The man prior to him had been given too much of Lukian’s straight blood, and the effects had been devastating. Parker, the man in question, had been unable to control the changes, lost his mind, and escaped. They’d searched for him for the last twenty-five years, but he’d managed to drop off the face of the earth. The chances of him surviving had been so minimal that continuing to spend money and man-hours in search of him was ridiculous.
Deep down Lukian began to worry that everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours had been orchestrated to bring them to this point—and that they were merely puppets being toyed with by a master manipulator. Someone wanting to call the shots.
He hoped he was wrong.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Peren eased closer to Melanie on one of the oversized sofas in the safe house living area. Lukian had explained the home was never used and had been set up, like many, to be somewhere he and his team could go should they have the need. This apparently counted as having need. She’d not been able to get much out of Lukian on just what type of team he and his men were, but she had her suspicions. They were probably military. At least she hoped that was the case. She didn’t want to allow her mind time to race on all the other possibilities. She had enough strange things happening in her life. She didn’t need to add conspiracies to the mix.
Whatever they were, it must have paid well because the safe house was large and decorated with high-end furniture. The men all had clothing here as well and had managed, between the lot of them, to materialize sweatpants and t-shirts for all of the women, as well as toiletries.
The safe house felt homier than Peren’s actual family home. One of the men had selected a movie for everyone to view and it was currently playing on the big-screen television. It was about people driving fast in cars. She didn’t exactly get the appeal, but the men seemed to enjoy it.
Missy refused to sit. She’d been agitated from the moment they’d pulled into the safe house’s driveway and hadn’t let up since. Not that Peren could blame her. Everything was crazy and none of it made a lot of sense.
Missy glanced toward the clock on the wall, again, and then stared boldly at Lukian. “You said you’d give us a ride home nearly four hours ago. We’d call for a taxi but your goons have our cell phones and this place doesn’t have a phone.”
“They aren’t goons,” said Peren in a tone she hoped would defuse the situation.
“Not true,” said Lance. “Roi is a goon.”
“And then some,” added Missy.
Lukian’s gaze landed on Peren. She hadn’t confessed to her friends about the wolves in the woods outside the bar or the beast man who had dragged her by her hair and licked her before hurting her. She’d not even fully confessed everything to Lukian. Kyle had been the only one she’d ever trusted with information about men who could shift into wolves, and he was gone. She couldn’t tell her friends and have them look at her as if she was crazy. They did that enough already since Kyle had vanished. No. She’d been as vague as possible about the entire ordeal, hoping they’d just trust her enough to remain at the safe house and stop asking questions.
Unfortunately, Missy was a question master. By day she was a system analyst, and apparently, in her off time she was an interrogator, because she had a never-ending supply of questions and the intimidating stare to back them up. She zeroed in on Roi, who had been sneaking peeks at her all day between making snide comments that only served to piss her off. Peren was stunned Missy hadn’t beat the crap out of the guy yet. Missy narrowed her gaze on Roi. “I’m hungry.”
Roi leapt to his feet and nearly tripped over Lance in the process as he made a play for the hallway. Lance caught him and steadied the guy. “Take it easy.”
The man she’d heard Wilson refer to as a color came around the corner and paused, his gaze on Lance and Roi. “Tell me Roi isn’t trying to kill Lance now too. It’s all we can do to keep him from going after Wilson nonstop.”
“That is true, Green,” said Lukian with a nod.
A man who was lying sideways in a recliner, his feet draped over the edge, grinned and waved at the group. He blew on his knuckles. “That is right, folks. I’m normally the center of his pissed-off attention. Now I’m competing against Ms. Personality over there.” He motioned to
Missy who, in turn, flipped him off. “Case in point.”
Roi moved around Lance, heading in the direction of the kitchen. He returned within seconds, looking winded and holding a menu in one hand. His gaze locked on Missy. “How about Chinese takeout in honor of Missy?”
Peren lowered her head, unable to look at the mess Roi had just talked himself into. Without looking up, Peren nodded, already knowing what was coming as she rubbed her temples. Her friend was going to go off on the man.
Missy choked out a snort. “Why would Chinese food honor me? I’m half-Vietnamese, dickhead.”
Wilson cracked up, laughing so hard he squeaked, nearly falling from his chair.
A tall blond with off-putting amber eyes stepped into the room. He’d been scarce at the safe house, and the few interactions Peren had had with him, he’d been quiet and reserved. He seemed so somber and serious that Peren wasn’t sure what to expect. As he raised a plastic weapon and fired directly at Wilson, leaving a bright orange suction cup dart stuck to Wilson’s forehead, Peren smiled wide.
Wilson yanked the dart off and threw it at the man. “Jon, isn’t that getting old?”
“Not even a little,” said the man, a Southern accent showing through.
Lance high-fived Jon. “Nice. I told you it was fun. That has been the best four-dollar purchase I’ve ever made.”
Missy looked Roi up and down, ignoring the other men’s playfulness. “You’re still a pig’s asshole.”
Roi flashed a bad-boy grin and took off for the kitchen again.
“Ten bucks says he’s trying to find a menu with Vietnamese cuisine featured on it,” said Wilson, shaking his head.
Lance and Jon pulled their wallets out. Lukian growled and then the men put their money away.
Lukian glanced at Missy. “My apologies for Roi.”
“It’s not your fault he’s annoying.” Missy put her hand out to Jon and motioned with her fingers for him to surrender the dart gun. He did and then armed her with darts as well.
Immortal Ops: New & Lengthened 2016 Anniversary Edition Page 9