Her Dark Half

by Paige Tyler

  “Oh God, Fred. Not you, too,” she whispered.

  She got her arms around his shoulders and tried to settle him to the rough concrete as gently as she could. Still holding on to her gun with her right hand, she used her left to put pressure on the wound that was soaking the front of his jacket with blood. Those two assholes had shot him before turning tail and running.

  Fred looked up at her, a mix of pain and fear in his gray gaze. He tried to talk, but no words came out. Tears in her eyes, Alina rocked him and murmured that it was going to be okay, even though she knew it wasn’t. As Fred died in her arms, she wondered if the Agency would ever tell his wife and kids what had really happened to him. She doubted it. That wasn’t how they worked.

  She was just easing him to the floor when she realized Jodi was still shouting at her over the secure radio channel to tell her what was happening.

  Alina reached up to adjust the volume on her wireless earbud, not sure what the hell she was going to tell Jodi, when she realized she wasn’t even wearing her earbud anymore. It had gotten dislodged in the fight. She had no idea where it had gone.

  And yet she could still hear Jodi’s voice.

  She looked around and saw a radio lying on the floor near one of the dead shooters. It was too big to be one of theirs, but Jodi’s voice was coming out of it loud and clear.

  That’s when everything hit her. The prerecorded voices designed to lure them into this room, the way the well-armed attackers had known exactly when to ambush them, the low-tech rebels having access to a CIA-encrypted radio frequency, and Wade never showing for the mission. A mission he’d set up almost completely on his own.

  Wade had betrayed them. He never showed because he’d set them up to die.

  Heart pounding, Alina ran out into the hall and snatched the radio off the floor. This ambush might not be over.

  “Jodi, get out now!” she yelled into the radio as she ran for the front entrance, her heart hammering in her chest. “The mission is compromised. Communications are compromised. Cut and run!”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Then, “What about Fred and Rodney?”

  “Dammit, Jodi. Go now!”

  More silence. “Understood,” Jodi finally said, and it tore at Alina’s heart to hear the fear in her voice. “Falling back to rally point Charlie now.”

  Alina almost stepped into another trap outside as the two shooters who’d disappeared earlier stepped out of the darkness and started shooting. She fired off one shot to make them duck, then darted back into the safety of the alcove.

  “Negative, Jodi,” she said into the radio as she peeked around the concrete corner of the entryway to make sure the men weren’t coming toward her. “It’s not just the operation that was compromised. It was the team. Don’t use any rally points, safe houses, transportation assets, or money drops that were set up for the mission. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  There was a moment of hesitation, then, “I understand. Good luck, Alina. I hope I see you again.”

  “You will,” Alina promised.

  She heard the pounding of footsteps over the radio and knew Jodi was on the run.

  Alina shoved the radio in her jacket, then stepped out to face the two men. If they still had their radios, they’d know Jodi was making a run for it. Alina would be damned if she’d let them kill Jodi, too.

  She walked across the street, ignoring the downpour as she aimed slow, steady shots at the corner of the building the two men were hiding behind. That kept their heads down until she was close enough to put herself right in their sights, encouraging them to come at her.

  They obliged, stepping out and lifting their Russian-made automatic weapons. She put the first man down before he got off a shot. But the second one was ballsy, standing his ground and taking time to get a bead on her. He fired first, the round of his AK-47 tearing through her jacket, skipping along the left side of her torso, ripping open the side pocket, and spilling her confiscated radio to the street.

  The pain of the wound—and that of Fred’s and Rodney’s deaths—sharpening her focus, she put a 9mm ball round right through the center of the man’s chest. He bounced back off the wall behind him, then tumbled to the wet ground.

  Only after she was sure they were dead did Alina finally lower her gun. She put it away, clutching a hand to her side as she bent forward to collect the radio. She’d intended to pick up the radio and toss it in the bushes along with her weapon, but then she heard a thump and clang of a heavy metal door on the back side of the apartment building. Alina breathed a sigh of relief knowing her friend was going to get away, but then she heard another sound that was impossible to mistake for anything other than the pop of a silenced weapon going off.

  Alina sprinted for the front door of the apartment building, slamming open the door and racing down the hall as fast as she could. She still had a hundred feet to go when she heard Jodi’s soft voice over the radio.

  “Screw you, Wade.”

  There were several more pops, then silence.

  Alina ran as fast as she could, but it took her a few minutes to find the door that Jodi had shoved open. It was tough, because the building was large and had at least two exits on each side of it. When she finally found her friend, Jodi was curled up in a ball beside a big trash can. Wade was nowhere in sight.

  It almost looked like Jodi was sleeping, but the hand she had clenched to her stomach was all the proof Alina needed to know she wasn’t.

  Alina gently rolled her friend away from the trash can to find she was already dead. Two shots to the stomach and three to the chest. Since Jodi had cursed Wade before she’d died, the son of a bitch must have shot her in the stomach first just because it would hurt, then followed up with the kill shots to the chest. After he’d let her suffer a bit. He’d always been such an asshole.

  Sitting on the wet ground, Alina wrapped Jodi in her arms, squeezing her tightly as she finally let the tears come. A part of her knew she should get out of there before the police showed, but she couldn’t make herself move. She needed time to cry for her friends before she let them go.

  Slowly, anger replaced the horrible, soul-crushing sorrow. While she was furious with Wade, she was mad at herself, too. She should have seen this betrayal coming. She’d always had some reservations about him, but instead of trusting the instincts that had been screaming at her from day one that Wade was a piece of crap, she’d gone along with the flow, assuming the Agency wouldn’t have hired him if he was dirty. That assumption and lack of faith in her instincts had gotten the three most important people in her life killed.

  Sirens echoed in the distance, but Alina ignored them. The police would congregate around the industrial building first, securing the perimeter, searching for survivors, trying to make sense of the scene, and talking to witnesses from the apartment building. They wouldn’t get around to searching back here for a while.

  So she stayed where she was, hugging Jodi to her chest as she made a solemn promise to all of her teammates that she was going to do whatever it took to track Wade down and make him pay for what he’d done. No matter how long it took or what bridges she had to burn to make it happen, she was going to find Wade, and she was going to kill him. And no one was going to stand in her way.

  Chapter 1

  Quantico, Virginia, Present Day

  “The director wants you in his office ASAP.”

  Trevor Maxwell glanced up from the hot dog he was eating to look at the guy standing in front of his table. Short and stocky, the man was regarding him like something to be scraped off the bottom of his shoe. Trevor resisted the urge to bare his teeth in a snarl and took another bite of his hot dog. He wasn’t really hungry, but at least lunch was a pleasant break from the monotony of an otherwise miserable day. And the cafeteria served damn good hot dogs.

  Unfortunately, he’d had a lot of miserable days at
the Department of Covert Operations, the secret government organization where he worked. It came with being labeled a traitorous freak.

  “You have a problem understanding what ASAP means?” the man asked, a buttload of attitude lacing his words.

  Gaze never leaving the man, Trevor slowly finished chewing, then swallowed. “It means Dick Coleman wants me in his office as soon as possible. I’ll go just as soon as I finish eating. Because I couldn’t possibly leave before that.”

  The man looked like he wanted to say something snide in reply, but when Trevor let his eyes glow coyote yellow and his upper canines slide out far enough to extend over his lower lip, the guy quickly changed his mind.

  “Whatever,” the man muttered. “Your funeral.”

  The comment probably would have come across as more ominous if the asshat hadn’t shuddered before walking away. But hey, the people who had been brought into the DCO lately didn’t have a lot of experience with shifters, and seeing a man sprout claws and fangs—not to mention flashing gold eyes—was a bit much for a lot of them to deal with. Most of the other people around the cafeteria were regarding him with the same mix of hatred and revulsion. It wasn’t only the muscle-headed thugs Dick—or rather Thomas Thorn, the man Dick answered to—had hired lately. The agents who’d worked alongside shifters like Trevor for years were throwing him dirty looks, too.

  Trevor supposed hating shifters was sociably acceptable now that John Loughlin, the former director of the DCO and de facto champion of the organization’s shifter program, had been killed when a bomb had exploded in his office.

  The day John died, everything had changed. Now the covert intelligence organization the man had spent more than a decade building from the ground up was quickly falling apart from the inside out.

  One look around the cafeteria proved that. It was lunchtime, yet you’d never know it from the handful of people scattered around the room shoving food in their faces as if they couldn’t wait to be somewhere else. The place used to be filled with agents, analysts, and other support personnel at this time of day. While there’d always been some who were antishifter in the DCO, their numbers had been more than offset by those who realized the good that people like Trevor and his kind brought to the organization.

  Somehow, John had perfected the concept of pairing shifters with highly trained covert operatives. People had said it would never work, that shifters were little more than animals and couldn’t be trusted to work in a team environment, much less be given missions critical to national defense. John had proven the doubters wrong, fielding teams that had accomplished things that should have been impossible.

  But John’s death had led to a complete change at the top of the organization, and the new regime was blatant in their opposition to all things shifter. These days, there were probably half as many people working for the DCO as there had been a month ago. Trevor couldn’t blame them. Why stay when Dick’s first act had been to announce that the very shifters John had trusted had conspired to murder him? There hadn’t been any proof of course, but then again, when had that bastard Dick ever let something like proof get in the way of what he wanted? Hell, he’d barely let John’s seat get cold before sitting in it.

  Trevor seriously doubted that anyone with an ounce of intelligence believed any of the supposedly rogue DCO agents had been involved in John’s death. But when those twelve men and women who formed the backbone of John’s shifter program had gone on the run within hours of his murder, people either accepted they were guilty as charged or smart enough to know they’d never be able to prove their innocence before they were eliminated.

  Either way, lots of good agents had read the writing on the wall and bailed. The moment they were gone, Dick had filled their positions with trigger pullers who spent most of their time chasing the rogue shifters or sitting on their asses.

  It made Trevor wonder what the hell he was still doing there.

  Trevor was still contemplating that—and whether to get another hot dog—when two men walked into the cafeteria and immediately headed for his table. Considering there was a twenty-foot-deep buffer zone of empty tables around Trevor, that might have put him on guard, but since they were among the few friends he had at the DCO, he turned his attention to the plate of french fries just begging to be eaten as Jake Basso and Jaxson West slid out a couple of chairs and joined him.

  “Not a good idea for you guys to be seen with me,” Trevor said between bites. “Not only could it be hazardous to your career, but it might end up getting you killed.”

  Jake, a former Navy SEAL and technically still a member of Trevor’s counterintelligence/counterespionage team, reached over and snagged a fry off the pile with a laugh. Since Trevor’s team had essentially been disbanded, Jake wasn’t anything but a good friend and coworker now.

  “What career?” Jake asked. He was a big guy with dark-blond hair, blue eyes, and a slightly crooked nose thanks to a fight he’d gotten into in high school. “I haven’t done anything but clean weapons at the firing range since everything went to hell around here. I think I’d appreciate someone trying to kill me just to relieve the boredom.”

  Yeah, Trevor guessed Jake’s career was already shot. Thanks to him. Something else for Trevor to feel crappy about. But Jake was damn good at his job, and his SEAL background would ensure that he’d land on his feet, even if he wasn’t likely to use anyone around here as a reference on his résumé.

  Jaxson West, on the other hand, was kind of screwed. As the DCO’s head of security, he’d answered directly to John when it came to securing both the training facility here on the back side of Quantico as well as the main DCO offices in downtown DC. Given that his boss had been assassinated on his watch—and that Dick hated his guts—Jaxson was in serious trouble. Dick would see that the man was blackballed in the covert community just because he could. But looking at the big, dark-haired guy sitting there so relaxed, you’d be hard-pressed to know the man was counting the days to unemployment.

  “You hear anything from Lucy?” Trevor asked.

  Jaxson grabbed a handful of fries. “No. But then again, I never expected to. The only reason she stayed at the DCO was because of John. With him gone, there’s nothing to keep her here.”

  Even though he tried to cover it up, Trevor knew Jaxson was hurt that Lucy had walked away from the DCO without ever saying a word to him. He’d been closer to Lucy Kwan, the feline shifter that John had found in China, than anyone. Trevor had always assumed Jaxson and Lucy would end up together.

  Who knew? Maybe she’d come back someday. It wasn’t like she had to worry about anyone trying to hang the traitor label on her. No one in the organization, not even Dick, would be dumb enough to accuse the petite Asian woman of anything. While she might look like the sweetest angel ever, she was the most cold-blooded, ruthless killer the DCO had ever employed. And that was saying a lot, considering the kind of people the organization had associated with over the years.

  “You should have gotten more fries,” Jake pointed out as he snatched up the last half dozen or so in one big hand.

  Trevor chuckled. “If you’d told me you’d be joining me for lunch, I would have.”

  Jake shrugged. “I wasn’t planning on it. Jaxson and I were heading down to the pistol range to burn off a little stress when one of Dick’s new muscle-headed asshats walked past us muttering about the damn freaky shifter in the cafeteria. Since there are only three of you guys still hanging around and the others are too new to possess the ability to piss people off quite like you, we figured we’d stop in and say hi.”

  “That was mighty kind of you,” Trevor said. “I think.”

  “You haven’t heard from Ed since I talked to you last, have you?” Jake asked.

  Trevor frowned at the name. Ed Vincent, a former Air Force Pararescue, had been the first man John had teamed up with Trevor when he’d come to work at the DCO eight years ago. Jake had j
oined them a little while later, and since then, the three of them had traveled the world, covering each other’s backs more times than Trevor could count. When John had been murdered, Ed had up and left without saying anything to anyone, not even Trevor and Jake. Clearly, Ed hadn’t been as tight with him and Jake as Trevor had thought.

  “Nah, I haven’t heard from him,” Trevor said. “Maybe once he gets settled.”

  Jake nodded but looked doubtful. “Maybe. How about Tate Evers? He and his guys have been gone for weeks.”

  “He called about a week ago from a little town just inside the Panamanian border called Cerro Punta,” Trevor said. “Dick has them down there scouring the jungles of Costa Rica and Panama, chasing down rumors about hybrids that might have survived the fighting back in November.”

  Jaxson shook his head. “Hunting for hybrids in the middle of the jungle without a shifter to help them track is insane. It will take months.”

  No kidding. Hybrids were man-made versions of shifters, and the ones the DCO had fought with down in Costa Rica had been almost rabid. That was what happened when people tried to use science to create something rare and unique.

  “I think that’s the idea.” Trevor picked up his bottle of Gatorade and took a swig. “The real DCO teams are out chasing ghosts so they won’t get in the way of the so-called investigation into John’s murder.”

  Jake snorted. “Dick has to know those idiots he has gallivanting all over the globe earning frequent flyer miles have no chance in hell of catching a shifter.”

  “True that,” Trevor said.

  Thank God.

  Not that Dick was truly the one giving Tate’s team or any others their orders. The person really pulling the strings was Thomas Thorn.

  Since its inception, the DCO had been run from behind the scenes by a shadowy group called the Committee, a nebulous collection of eight current and former House and Senate elites who’d held powerful positions on their respective intelligence panels. While nothing had officially changed within the Committee’s structure, John’s death had scared most of them so much that they’d gladly ceded most, if not all, of their authority to one of their members—Thomas Thorn. Which was a mistake, since Thorn was almost certainly the man who’d had John killed.