Administrative Control (Immortal Ops)

by Mandy M. Roth

  She could hardly believe this was all happening. He stared down at her and remained in place. “I love you, Jeneathea.”

  *

  Asher had not known paradise such as this in his lifetime. He couldn’t remember the last woman he’d bedded, but he did know she wasn’t anything like Jinx. He’d only just entered her and already he wanted to spill his seed, bathe her womb with it and make her claim him in return.

  Her pale flesh held no sign of having been marked by him but other supernaturals would sense his claim upon her. They’d know she had a man.

  “Mine,” he growled out, his cock being held tight in her body, his balls painfully hard and wanting to come. “Jinx, say it.”

  She ran her hands down his sides and cupped his ass cheeks as she lifted her legs higher, locking her ankles behind him, making him go deeper inside her.

  He nearly exploded.

  He felt the hair on his arms sprouting and knew his torso was now covered in hair as well, his shift starting even though he tried with all his might to keep it at bay.

  “I’m yours, Asher,” she said, tugging on him, bringing his mouth to hers, helping to chase away his beast and sate it to its darkened corner, at least for today.

  Her magik slammed into his and he felt it then—the tiny threads binding between them, signifying their commitment to one another and that they had a bond that would never be broken. Losing control of himself, Asher grunted as his ball sac drew up and seed erupted from his cock.

  He held himself in his mate, allowing his first release in centuries to take as long as it wanted to take. Jinx smiled against his neck and he stared down at her, realizing that she was now fully his wife.

  “I love you.”

  She grinned up at him. “Took you long enough to admit it.”

  Asher kissed her forehead. “To you. But I admitted it to myself within an hour of first meeting you.”

  Jinx pushed on his chest and he eased off her, his cock drawing from her tight body. She shoved him onto his back and unbuttoned his shirt the rest of the way and then slinked up and over him, drawing off his pants fully as well.

  Her gaze raked over his naked form and she crawled off him long enough to remove the rest of her clothing as well. She kissed his upper thigh as she moved up and over him with a slow, seductive crawl. The temptress showered additional kisses over his legs before coming to his cock and drawing it into her mouth. It hardened at once at the feel of her expert mouth.

  Asher reached for her but she shook her head, her mouth full of him as she moved her head up and down, her hands coming to his shaft. As a shifter male he required very little in the way of downtime between sexual escapades, and he’d never been more thankful to see that hadn’t changed.

  Dammit.

  His woman had a gifted mouth. In no time flat he was moaning and grabbing at the bed sheets. He was on the verge of exploding when she pulled her mouth free from his cock and slid her body over him—taking him deep into her once more.

  Jinx swiveled her hips on him, pulling more and more pleasure from him. He could feel her feeding from their mating energy. A rosy glow set in her cheeks and she looked even more beautiful than she had. Thrusting up, he rammed himself deeper into her. Her mouth formed an O, her pussy fluttering on his cock.

  He knew she was coming just from the feel of her wrapped around him. When her eyes shifted colors to a vibrant green he knew then that her succubus side was out fully and filling itself to the brink.

  Good.

  Asher arched and pumped harder as Jinx rode him. She clawed at his chest, exciting his shifter side, and he roared, his mouth changing shapes, his teeth lengthening as he pushed up and stilled, coming once again.

  Jinx tossed her head back and cried out, her nails digging even deeper into his flesh. “Yes!”

  He grabbed her and pulled her down onto him, holding her, their bodies still joined. Her red hair fanned out all around them and he smiled, loving having her in his arms. “Tell me you’re happy about us.”

  “Asher, I have been in love with you since I was barely legal. It’s safe to say I’m the happiest woman on earth right now.” She kissed his chest. “But I’m guessing you’re going to make me leave here and go home with you.”

  He nodded. “You guessed right.”

  She opened her mouth to protest and Asher put his finger to her lips. “Jinx, Helmuth is teamed up with something ugly. I will have men assigned here to watch over the club and I’ll have the cleanup teams here within the hour, but you aren’t staying. Period. I want my wife with me. We’ve spent enough time apart.”

  She smiled. “Okay. For now.”

  Chapter Eight

  One Week Later…

  Immortal Ops Headquarters, Virginia

  Asher leaned against the conference room wall, watching as his men argued amongst themselves like children. The rest of the team had flown in as quickly as they could get the private jet off the ground. He had to admit he enjoyed their banter. It meant they were a true team. A group of men who trusted one another with their lives.

  This new information would change things. It would make them question the authority before them. Make them wonder if they could trust anyone—including him.

  “Don’t make me tell your wife,” teased Wilson Rousseau as he waggled his brows. The wererat DNA in him had been an initial concern to Asher when he’d been brought into the fold with the organization. Fringe shifters—ones who were comprised of species one would not normally find naturally in the paranormal community—tended to be volatile.

  Wilson had a good head on his shoulders and had the most control over his shifter side. The man had proved himself a vital member of the team more than once. He also seemed to be the biggest instigator among the men. Currently, he was goading Roi into a fight or something close to one.

  Roi was almost too easy to bait. Hot-tempered and nearly as alpha as they came, he tended to punch first and question later. He was a good operative so he got away with more than most. All the Immortal Ops team did.

  Roi lifted one of the conference room’s oversized leather chairs and made a move to go at Wilson. The entire ordeal was too comical to break up and Asher knew the men needed to blow off some steam. This was better than the time the team had decided to destress by rigging an old bus with explosives and driving it into a hostile’s hiding hole.

  The paperwork on that one had been a nightmare. Not to mention Asher had to spend an entire weekend sitting before a bunch of humans who had been brought into the fold on the existence of supernaturals, and who all thought they knew best how to try to control the men.

  Of course, the humans had no idea who sat among them. They thought Asher one of them—a mortal.

  They’d thought wrong and his men would tell them no different. The I-Ops could be trusted with his secret.

  Roi chased Wilson around the conference room table several times, with the chair still above his head, when Lukian entered the room, colliding with Roi. There was growling and then Roi was flat on his ass, the chair to his side, his blue eyes wide.

  Lukian glared down at a man Asher knew Lukian thought of as a brother. There might be some roughhousing but, in the end, Lukian wouldn’t kill Roi. He’d just rough him up a bit. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Trying to kill Wilson,” said Asher, still leaning against the wall, but now crossing one ankle over the other. He picked at one of his well-manicured fingernails, amusement barely hiding under his even façade.

  Lukian groaned, his shoulders slumping. “Again?”

  Wilson laughed and sat in his seat, folding his hands and placing them on the conference table as if he were a total angel.

  No one was buying it.

  Wilson had a longstanding history of instigating.

  “Where is Green?” asked Lukian.

  Asher adjusted his tie and took his seat at the head of the table. “Green is working on something in the labs for me.”

  Roi stood and righted the chair b
efore sitting in it. He flipped his shoulder-length black hair back and glared at Wilson before schooling his expression and looking at Asher. “Sir, tell me he isn’t looking for what would cause a DNA pet project to do what we saw done on that pier? Because I don’t think I want to know any of us are capable of that.”

  “I am,” said Asher.

  Roi looked him over slowly. Asher had explained to his men what he was and he’d even confessed the truth of whose son he was. “But you didn’t do that. You didn’t do anything close to that, sir.”

  “And you’ll understand if I don’t tap into my powers for fear I will one day become that.”

  All the men nodded.

  Lukian pressed a thin smile to his face. “We’re here for you, sir. You know that, right?”

  “And I thank you for that.”

  Lukian sighed, running a hand over his face. He appeared tired. “I thought at my age, I’d seen everything.”

  Laughing, Asher remained in place. “Lukian, no offense, but you really haven’t seen shit.”

  “Are mermaids real?” asked Wilson. He put his hands up. “Hey, I figured while we’re on the subject of shit we thought was fairy tales, I’d ask. I’d like to think I’m not the only man here who, prior to being mated, had some really great erotic fantasies built up about being stranded on a deserted island with a harem of mermaids at his disposal.”

  Lukian covered his eyes and grunted. “Dumbass.”

  Asher smiled and nodded. “Oh yeah, they’re real.”

  “Bullshit!” yelled Roi, standing and making his chair fall over once more. He blushed. “Um, no way. Really?”

  “Really. Though they’re rare to find anymore. And some of them are bat-shit crazy.”

  Lukian eyed the colonel. “I think you’re screwing with us.”

  Asher flashed a wide smile. “I think you’re right.”

  Lukian touched his friend’s arm. “Sit before you break something.”

  Asher watched the men, enjoying the sense of brotherhood that came from what they did.

  “What the hell are we doing here, exactly? Krauss behind the pier slaughters?” asked Roi, sitting without bothering to try to appear calm. “I’m sick and tired of the German prick. How can one man older than dirt evade us?”

  “First,” said Asher, “you have no idea how right you are. Krauss is much older than he even appears. Trust me, gentlemen, he’s seen more days than all of you put together.”

  “No,” said Lukian, shaking his head, touching a chair. “Really?”

  “Really.” Asher remained standing.

  A tall red-headed giant of a man entered the room. His shoulder width was enough that he filled the doorway. With as large and fit as he was, he looked like a total badass. Asher knew the man could be when called for, but was actually gentle by nature.

  He smiled at the man. “Green. Good of you to join us.”

  Green held a set of folders in his hands. “I gathered up what you asked for, sir.”

  “Thank you,” said Asher. “Please see to it each man has one.”

  Green passed out the folders and then took a seat. Asher didn’t need to see what Green had brought. He’d memorized it. Jinx and Aneta had gathered so much intel that they made a lot of agents within PSI look incompetent from their sheer lack of producing anything close to this magnitude of information.

  Sex could get just about any information out of anyone.

  He thought about his wife. She was currently tucked safely away in his home here in Virginia, pissed that he’d forced her away from her club but happy to be with him. They were still working out the kinks of what would become of her club without her being there to run it full time. Aneta was more than capable and Asher had a strong sense that Jinx would hand the keys over to her trusted friend.

  Asher had seen to it that PSI operatives were assigned to the club to watch over it, making sure Helmuth didn’t send any more surprises.

  Asher looked to his men as they pored through the information before them. It was overwhelming. He knew.

  “What the fuck am I looking at?” asked Roi, the severity of it all sinking in.

  Wilson glanced at Roi’s files as if his were somehow different from the ones before him. He covered his mouth with one hand and then pulled it away, shock evident on his face. “There is another team of I-Ops? There are others like us? Engineered supernaturals?”

  Roi pointed to another page. “The Outcasts didn’t die in the fires? Where the hell are they all and what is our government doing with them?”

  Asher exhaled slowly. “I’m digging for information on them. So far, Weston Carol is the only one who has surfaced enough to gather any details on.”

  Green cleared his throat. “Weston was a good man. We were told he died on the operating table after complications from the genetic altering.”

  “We were fucking lied to,” breathed Wilson. “A lot.”

  Green touched the filed before him. “I can see keeping some details from us in the start—in case we too snapped mentally or were captured or something. But we’ve been at this a long time. We’re stable.”

  “Speak for yourself,” managed Roi, finding at least some humor in a humorless situation.

  Lukian remained strangely quiet and Asher knew why—he was pissed. He’d been led to believe the surviving Ops were the only ones remaining. So had Asher. Everything they’d been told had been a lie. It didn’t sit well with Asher either. “Why didn’t you tell me the minute you had all this cross your path?” asked Lukian in a hushed tone. The tension in his shoulders showed with abundance.

  Asher knew Lukian’s reaction came from somewhere much deeper than simply being lied to. Lukian’s DNA had been used during the attempted creations of various Immortal Ops Teams. Prior to Lukian’s arrival they’d lost many good men. Men who volunteered in hopes of serving their country at an entirely new level. They’d not banked on the hand they’d been dealt, or the fact the survival rate during early testing stages was nearly zero percent.

  Weston had been one of the men to receive Lukian’s DNA. The Ops had seen what could happen to an Outcast—Parker had ended up twisted and mentally unstable. None of them wanted to think Weston met that same fate.

  “Because no matter what, I knew you’d take this bad. It gets worse,” said Asher.

  “Meaning?” Lukian’s eyes fluttered shut momentarily.

  “Preliminary reports on the Seattle bloodshed are pointing in the direction of some Outcasts,” said Asher. He didn’t want to be the bearer of the news. No one in their right mind would. This wasn’t information anyone wanted to hear, let alone a man whose DNA had been used.

  Wilson lowered his head, his temper coming through. “You mean the brave men who signed on for this but ended up dead because of the fuck-ups of the scientists? They end up slaughter on a pier and we find out how many days later?”

  “Hey,” injected Green. “Colonel wasn’t here for any of that. You know as well as I do that he wasn’t part of the organization when we were created. He came on after. And, they weren’t the slaughtered, Wilson. From what we’ve been able to gather, they might very well have been the ones doing the killing.”

  Wilson gasped.

  “I don’t know what I know anymore,” said Roi, thumbing through the files. “Missy once asked me if I was I-Ops Team One or Two. I thought she was nuts. But she was right.”

  Asher nodded. “She is the reason I asked Jinx to put an ear to the ground to start with. I started digging for more information after Missy’s intel came past my desk. I didn’t find anything, but that was the problem,” Asher admitted. “I should have found something. The very fact there was nothing, no mention of the Outcasts, no anything, it made me wonder who was doing what to try to clean up everything to do with the Ops teams.”

  “This has to go high and deep,” said Lukian. “And no, I don’t blame you.”

  “We should call Jon back in,” said Wilson. “He was close to Weston. He’ll want to know he’s
still alive.”

  Asher put his hands on the back of the chair before him and looked at his men. Jon had finally called in, letting them all know he was fine but that he needed more personal time. Asher couldn’t have agreed more. “Jon is where he needs to be. His head isn’t in the game. He could get himself killed. None of us want that. Besides, you all need to go to the last page of the files before you. I think you’ll understand why we can’t recall Jon right now.”

  Lukian flipped to the last page and gasped. “He’s alive?”

  “Who?” asked Wilson, looking as well. He leapt back in his seat. “We buried him. We were all there.”

  “We buried what we thought was Lance’s body,” said Asher, his tone solemn. He couldn’t let the rage inside him out. He knew as much but his anger burned deep.

  “Our government did this?” asked Roi. “They fucking switched bodies and did what with Lance?”

  “Not our government,” said Green. “Read more. Krauss and Molyneux were behind it. This is one thing we can’t pin on the men in charge.”

  “Christ, you’re telling me Krauss has had Lance all this time?” asked Roi, his skin pale as he looked as though he were about to be sick.

  “I’m telling you that information before you is all I have. I’m done keeping secrets from you,” returned Asher. “You know what I know.”

  “Are we going through the proper channels to get him back?” asked Lukian, an edge to his voice.

  “Fuck no,” answered Asher. “Not until we know who in those channels can be trusted. From this point on, we’re on the same lockdown that PSI is. We keep our friends close and we bring in people we trust fully. No one else. Got it?”

  The men nodded. “Yes, sir,” they said.

  “Now, let’s get out there and meet with contacts and informants. General Newman and I are going to pool resources and see what else we can find out. I’m tired of being on the defensive. It’s time we formulated a plan and got ahead of this all.”