by Lara Adrian
“We were able to trace the mining company back to TerraGlobal,” Rio added. “But that’s about as far as we’ve been able to get. We know TerraGlobal has lots of layers. It’s just taking too damn long for us to peel them away. Meanwhile, Dragos digs himself in deeper, every minute farther out of our reach.”
“You’ll get him,” Jenna said. She tried to ignore the little kick in her heart rate that urged her to strap on a couple of weapons and lead the charge. “You have to get him, so you will.”
“Yeah,” Rio replied, his scarred face drawn tight with determination as he nodded in agreement and glanced down into Dylan’s eyes. “One day, we are going to get that son of a bitch. He’s going to pay for everything he’s done.”
Under his strong arm, Dylan smiled sadly. She burrowed into his embrace, trying unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn.
“Come on,” he said, brushing some of her loose red waves out of her eyes. “You’ve been putting in a lot of hours on all of this. Now I’m taking you to bed.”
“Not a bad idea,” Renata said. “Nightfall is going to come early, and I’ll bet Niko is still testing out new rounds in the weapons room. Time to go collect my man.”
As she said her good-byes and headed out, Dylan and Rio, then Savannah and Gideon did the same.
“You want to come hang out with Kade and me for a little while?” Alex asked.
Jenna gave a mild shake of her head. “Nah, I’m okay. I think I’ll stay here for a few minutes, unwind a bit. Been a long, strange day.”
Alex’s smile was sympathetic. “If you need anything at all, you come find me. Deal?”
Jenna nodded. “I’m fine. But thanks.”
She watched her friend slowly turn and disappear up the corridor. When there was nothing left in the room but quiet and solitude, Jenna stood up and walked over to the wall of maps and charts and sketches.
It was admirable, what the Order and their mates were trying to do. It was important work—more important than anything Jenna would ever have come in contact with in rural Alaska, or anywhere else for that matter.
If everything she’d learned the past couple of days was true, then what the Order was doing here was nothing short of saving the world.
“Jesus Christ,” Jenna whispered, struck by the enormity of it all.
She wanted to help.
If she was able—even in some small way—she had to help.
Didn’t she?
Jenna paced around the war room, a battle of her own waging inside her. She wasn’t ready to be part of something like this. Not when she still had so much to figure out for herself. With her brother dead, she had no family left at all. Alaska had been her home her entire life, and now that was gone, as well, a part of her prior existence erased to help the Order preserve their secrets as they pursued their enemy.
As for her future, she couldn’t even begin to guess. The alien matter embedded inside her was a problem she never could have imagined, and no amount of wishing was going to take it away. Not even Gideon’s mental brilliance seemed capable of extricating her from that tangled complication.
And then there was Brock. Of all the things that had happened to her between the invasion of her cabin home by the Ancient and her current, unexpected—although not unbearable—embrace by everyone in the Order’s headquarters, Brock was proving to be the one thing she was least prepared to deal with.
She was nowhere close to ready when it came to the feelings he aroused in her. Things she hadn’t felt in years, and sure as hell didn’t want to feel now.
Nothing in her life was certain anymore, and the last thing she needed was to involve herself any further in the problems facing the warriors and their mates.
Nevertheless, Jenna found herself drifting over to the computer workstation on the desk nearby. She sat down at the keyboard and brought up an Internet browser, then went to one of those free email sites and created an account.
She opened a new message and typed in the address of one of her friends with the Feds up in Anchorage. She asked a single question, an inquiry to be looked into confidentially as a personal favor.
She drew in her breath, then hit send.
CHAPTER
Twelve
In the showers adjacent to the weapons room, Brock reached around his back and cranked the temperature setting from hot to scalding. Hands braced on the teak door of the private shower stall, head bent low to his chest, he welcomed the searing pound of water that sluiced over his shoulders and down his naked back. Hot steam roiled up all around him, thick as fog, from his head to the tiled floor at his feet.
“Christ,” Kade hissed from a couple of stalls down from him. “Two solid hours of hand-to-hand sparring wasn’t enough punishment for you? Now you feel the need to boil yourself alive over there?”
Brock grunted, slicking his hand over his face as the steam continued to gather and the heat continued to batter his too-tense muscles. He’d found Kade in the weapons room with Niko and Chase after he’d dropped his gear in his new shared quarters with Hunter. It seemed reasonable to expect that a hard few rounds of blade work and hand-to-hand training would be enough to exhaust some of his restlessness and distraction. It should have been, but it wasn’t.
“What’s going on with you, man?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Brock muttered, pushing his head and shoulders farther under the scalding spray.
Kade’s scoff echoed in the cavernous shower room. “Like hell, you don’t know.”
“Shit.” Brock exhaled the curse into the mist that wreathed his head. “Why do I get the feeling you’re gonna enlighten me?”
There was a hard squeak of a spigot handle, followed by the bang of Kade’s shower door as he stepped out and walked into the connected dressing area. A few minutes later, Kade’s voice sounded from the other room. “You ever going to tell me what happened last night down in Southie at that meat-packing plant?”
Brock closed his eyes and blew out something that sounded like a growl, even to his own ears. “Nothing to tell. There were loose ends. I cleaned them up.”
“Yeah,” Kade said. “That’s what I guessed had happened.”
When Brock lifted his head, he found the warrior standing across the way from him. Kade was fully dressed in a black shirt and jeans, leaning back against the opposite wall. His steely silver gaze narrowed, knowing.
Brock had too much respect for his friend to try to deceive him. “Those humans were scum who thought nothing of harming an innocent woman. You expect that kind of brutality to be condoned?”
“No.” Kade stared, then gave a sober nod. “If I found myself face-to-face with anyone who’d laid a finger on Alex, I’d have to kill the bastard. That’s what you did, isn’t it? You killed those men.”
“They were hardly men,” Brock ground out. “They were rabid dogs, and what they did to Jenna—what they thought they could get away with—probably wasn’t the first time they’d hurt a woman. I doubt Jenna would have been the last. So, yeah, I put them down.”
For a long time, Kade said nothing. He just watched him, even after Brock stuck his head back under the furious pound of the spray, feeling no need to explain any further. Not even to his closest friend in the Order, the warrior who was like kin to him.
“Damn,” Kade murmured after a lengthy silence. “You care about her, don’t you?”
Brock shook his head, as much in denial as it was to slick the water off his face. “Lucan gave me the responsibility of looking after her, of keeping her safe. I’m only doing what’s expected of me. She’s another mission, no different than any other.”
“Oh, yeah. No doubt about that.” Kade smirked. “I had a mission like that up in Alaska not too long ago. Maybe I mentioned it to you once or twice?”
“This is different,” Brock grumbled. “What you and Alex have is … not the same at all. Alex is a Breedmate, for one thing. There’s no threat of getting serious with Jenna. I’m not the long-term type, and she’s human, besid
es.”
Kade’s dark brows knit into an intense frown. “I don’t think any of us can be sure exactly what she is now.”
Brock absorbed the truth of that statement with a renewed sense of concern, not only for Jenna, but for the Order and the rest of the Breed nation, as well. Whatever was happening to her, as of today, it appeared to be accelerating. He couldn’t deny that the news of her blood work changes troubled him. To say nothing of the fact that the damned bit of alien matter was actively delving deeper into her body, infiltrating on a level not even Gideon seemed prepared to combat.
Brock blew out a low curse under the punishing deluge of the shower. “If you’re trying to make me feel better about all of this, feel free to stop anytime.”
Kade chuckled, clearly enjoying himself. “I don’t expect you’ll be having any heart-to-heart talks with your new roomie, so this is me, showing you I care.”
“I’m touched,” Brock muttered. “Now, get the fuck out of here and let me scald myself in peace.”
“Gladly. All this talk of missions and women reminds me that I have important duties of my own that I’ve been neglecting back in my quarters.”
Brock grunted. “Give Alex my best.”
Kade merely grinned as he saluted him, then strolled toward the exit.
After he was gone, Brock lingered under the water only a few minutes longer. It was late in the day, but he was too wired for sleep. And Kade’s reminder about Jenna and her changing biology had his mind churning.
He toweled off, then got dressed in a gray T-shirt and dark jeans. He stomped into his black leather boots, feeling the sudden urge to head back into the weapons room and blow off more steam until nightfall, when he could finally escape the compound again. But working up a sweat hadn’t done him much good the first time; he doubted it would do anything for him now.
Uncertain what would take off his edge, Brock found himself stalking down the central corridor of the compound, toward the tech lab. The halls were quiet, deserted. Not surprising for the time of day, when the mated warriors would be in bed with their females and the rest of the headquarters’ occupants would be getting some rest before patrols rolled out at sundown.
Brock probably should have been thinking about that, too, but he was more interested in knowing if Gideon had turned up anything more about Jenna’s blood work results. As he entered the stretch of corridor that would take him to the lab, he heard movement in another of the compound’s meeting rooms.
Following the sound of shuffling papers, he drew to a pause outside the open door of the Breedmates’ mission command center.
Jenna was alone inside the room.
Seated at the conference table, several manila file folders fanned out before her and a couple more stacked neatly at her elbow, she was bent over a pad of paper, pen in hand and thoroughly engrossed in whatever she was writing. At first, he didn’t think she knew he was there. But then her hand paused halfway down the page, her head lifting. The soft brown layers of her hair shifted like silk as she pivoted to see who was standing in the doorway.
That had been his cue to duck away fast, before she saw him. He was Breed; he could have been there and gone before her mortal eyes could register his presence. Instead, for some idiotic reason he had no interest in examining, he took a step inside and cleared his throat.
Jenna’s hazel gaze went wider when she saw him.
“Hey,” he said.
She gave him a brief smile, looking more than a little caught off-guard by him. And why shouldn’t she be, after the way he’d left things with her the last time he saw her? She pulled one of the file folders over and set it on top of her notepad. “I thought everyone had gone to bed.”
“They have.” He walked farther into the room and made a quick visual scan of the information spread out on the table. “Looks like Dylan and the others have managed to recruit you already.”
She shrugged, a weak denial. “I was just … looking at a few things. Comparing notes on some of the files, jotting down a couple of my thoughts.”
Brock took a seat in the chair next to her. “They’ll appreciate that,” he said, impressed that she was lending a hand. He reached for the notes she’d been writing. “Can I have a look?”
“It’s nothing much, really,” she said. “Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh pair of eyes.”
He glanced at her crisp, precise handwriting that filled most of the page. Her mind seemed to operate in the same organized manner, based on the logical flow of her notes and the list of suggestions she’d made for investigating the missing persons cases that Dylan and the other Breedmates had been pursuing for the past few months.
“This is good work,” he said, not flattery, just fact. “I can tell you’re a damned good cop.”
Again the denying shrug. “I’m not a cop anymore. I’ve been out of it a long time.”
He watched her speak, heard the regret that lingered in her voice. “Doesn’t mean you’re not still good at what you do.”
“I stopped being good at it a while ago. Something happened, and I … I lost my edge.” She looked over at him then, unflinching. “There was a car accident four years ago. My husband and my six-year-old daughter were both killed, but somehow I survived.”
Brock nodded faintly. “I know. I’m sorry for your loss.”
His sympathy seemed to fluster her somewhat, as though she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. Maybe it would have been easier for her to talk about the tragedy on her own terms, without the knowledge that he’d already been privy to the information. Now she looked at him uncertainly, as though she feared he would judge her in some way. “I … struggled to accept that Mitch and Libby were gone. For a long time—even now—it’s hard to know how I’m supposed to move on.”
“You live,” Brock said. “That’s all you can do.”
She nodded, but there was a hauntedness to her eyes. “You make it sound easy.”
“Not easy, necessary.” He watched her pick idly at a broken staple on one of the reports. “Is that why you resigned from law enforcement, because you didn’t know how to live after the accident?”
Staring at the cluttered table space in front of her, she frowned, silent for a long moment. “I quit because I couldn’t perform my duties anymore. Every time I had to report for a traffic violation, even a fender bender or a blown tire, I would be shaking so badly by the time I reached the scene, I could hardly get out of my vehicle to offer help. And the truly awful calls, the serious accidents or the domestic disturbances that often ended in violence, left me sick to my stomach for days afterward. Everything I’d learned in training and on the job had been shattered when that tractor trailer full of timber crossed the icy highway and plowed into my life.” She glanced over at him then, her green-brown gaze as tenacious and unflinching as he’d ever seen it. “I quit being a cop because I knew I couldn’t do my job the way it needed to be done. I didn’t want anyone who relied on me to possibly pay for my negligence. So, I resigned.”
Brock had respected Jenna’s courage and resilience from the moment he first laid eyes on her. Now the meter on his opinion of her had just climbed up another notch or ten. “You cared about your work and the people who depended on you. That’s not a sign of weakness. That’s strength. And you obviously had a great deal of love for your job. I think you still do.”
Why that simple observation should strike a nerve in her, he didn’t know, but he’d have to be blind to miss the flare of defensiveness that sparked in her eyes. She glanced away as though realizing her slip, and when she spoke, there was no anger in her voice. Only a flat sort of resignation. “You know a lot about me, huh? I guess there isn’t much that you and the Order don’t know by now.”
“Alex gave us the basics,” he admitted. “After what happened in Alaska, there were things we needed to know.”
She grunted. “You mean, after I started talking alien gibberish in my sleep and became the unwilling ward of the Order.”
“Y
eah,” he said, remaining seated as she stood up and walked away from him, arms crossed over her breasts. He noticed she’d completely given up the cane Tess and Gideon had prescribed for her, and her injured leg put only a mild limp in her step. “I see your gunshot wound must be healing up all right.”
“It’s much better.” She tossed him a vague nod over her shoulder. “Actually, it didn’t seem that serious to begin with.”
Brock inclined his head as though he agreed, but he recalled all too clearly just how serious the gunshot had been. If she was healing at an accelerated rate, he guessed the DNA replications Gideon had discovered might have something to do with that. “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” he said, thinking she probably didn’t need any reminders about the unknown matter that was integrating with her body.
Her gaze lingered on him, softening. “Thank you for what you did for me last night—coming to find me, and getting me out of that awful place. I think you saved my life. I know you did, Brock.”
“No problem.”
God, he hoped she would never learn the details of just how savagely he’d dealt with her assailants. She wouldn’t be thanking him if she’d seen him in action that night, or if she’d witnessed the vicious way he’d slaked both his bloodthirst and his fury on the pair of lowlife humans. If Jenna knew what he was capable of, she’d no doubt view him in the same way she did the Ancient who’d attacked her.
He didn’t know why that should bother him like it did. He didn’t want her to equate him to a monster, at least not so long as he was tasked with watching over her for the Order. She needed to trust him, and as her assigned protector, he needed to make sure that she did. He had a job to do, and he wasn’t about to lose sight of his responsibility.
But the issue with Jenna went deeper than that, and he knew it. He just didn’t have any intention of dissecting it—now or anytime in the foreseeable future.