Her Dark Half

by Paige Tyler

  Trevor didn’t miss the knowing look Ivy and the other shifters gave him. They almost certainly smelled his scent on Alina and hers on him. Not that Trevor cared if anyone knew he and his partner were sleeping together. Everything that happened at the warehouse only reinforced the connection between him and Alina. The entire time he’d been fighting Jake and the two hybrids, all he could think about was Alina’s safety. She was quickly becoming the most important thing in his life.

  “When did you guys become partners?” Landon asked. A former captain in the Army Special Forces, he’d taken on a leadership role the day John had recruited him into the DCO.

  “About a week ago,” Trevor said.

  No one seemed surprised by that. Each of them had fallen for their significant others just as fast.

  Ivy smiled. “Well, it’s good to see that you two are working out so well together. Though I’m not sure how Ed and Jake are going to take that.” She must have seen Trevor wince, because her eyes filled with concern. “What’s wrong? They’re okay, aren’t they?”

  Alina exchanged looks with Trevor. “It’s complicated,” she said. “It might be better if we wait until Adam gets here to explain it.”

  Since Adam didn’t show up on cue like Trevor hoped, he used the time to catch up with everyone. The most shocking thing was learning Kendra had given birth to the twins while a gunfight had raged a few feet away.

  “I helped deliver them,” Tanner said proudly as Alina fussed over Noah and Chloe.

  Trevor did a double take at that.

  “Please,” Zarina said. “He held Kendra up so she could push and nearly passed out doing that. He would much have preferred the babies to come out nice and clean and already dressed in their onesies.”

  Tanner shrugged unabashedly. “Yeah, maybe. But I also held Noah while you delivered his sister. I did a really good job of that.” His mouth curved as he looked at the baby boy Kendra was holding. “He likes me.”

  “Yes, he does,” Kendra agreed. “Which is important, since I plan on calling you and Zarina when we need a babysitter.”

  Tanner went a little pale, which made everyone laugh. Even Noah and Chloe seemed to find it amusing.

  The lion hybrid was still trying to explain why he wouldn’t be a very good babysitter when Adam walked in.

  “Sorry I’m late.” He offered his hand to Alina. “I’m Adam.”

  She regarded him thoughtfully as they shook hands. “It’s nice to meet you finally. I’d introduce myself, but something tells me you know a lot more about me than I know about you.”

  “You’re right. I do.” Adam looked at Trevor. “You sounded worried on the phone. How bad is it?”

  “Really bad.” Trevor looked pointedly around the room. “Before we get into that, are you sure it was a good idea to bring us all here?”

  Adam shrugged. “After seeing that video on Thorn’s new hybrids, we knew we’d have to make a move on the farm as soon as we know where it is and what’s going on.”

  Trevor frowned. “Who’s we?”

  The words were barely out of his mouth when he picked up a familiar scent coming from the hallway. At first, he thought he was imagining it, but then he saw the other shifters stiffen, like they smelled it, too.

  It was impossible.

  Then John Loughlin walked into the room.

  Everything seemed to stop, Trevor’s heart included. He’d seen the damage the bomb had done to the director’s office. How the hell could John be alive?

  But he was.

  Trevor glanced at the other people in the room to make sure they were seeing the same thing he was. Everyone was staring at John with a stunned look.

  Trevor was so focused on John that he didn’t see the beautiful, dark-skinned woman and little girl who couldn’t be more than ten with him, or the big bull of a man standing behind them like some overprotective bodyguard. Trevor had run into the guy while on that mission in Maine, so he knew the man was a hidden shifter. While Trevor had no idea what kind of animal DNA was in this guy’s system, he was willing to bet it was something big. And if Trevor didn’t miss his guess, the woman with John was a hidden shifter, too.

  “How…” Ivy whispered, tears in her eyes.

  Before John could answer, she ran over and hugged him. John’s arms went around her, his eyes a little misty, too. After a moment, Ivy pulled away to look at him.

  “Why did you let us think you were dead?” she asked.

  John gave her a small smile. “Once I introduce you to some very important people, I think you’ll understand.”

  Turning, he took the dark-skinned woman’s hand. Tall and slender, she had long, dark, wavy hair and the most intriguing blue-gray eyes Trevor had ever seen. As John wrapped his other arm around the little girl’s shoulders, Trevor realized her eyes were the same unusual color.

  “Everyone, I’d like you to meet my wife, Cree, and my daughter, Boo.” John glanced over his shoulder at the big man. “And this is Morgan.”

  If Trevor had been stunned before, it was nothing compared to how he felt now. Realizing that John was alive was a shock to the system, but hearing that he’d been married long enough to have a kid Boo’s age? That damn near bordered on insanity. How the hell had John been able to keep that a secret from an organization full of highly trained spies and covert agents for so long?

  “How can you be alive?” Dreya asked, finally putting into words exactly what everyone else was thinking. “Braden and I were there. We saw you walk into the building right before it exploded.”

  John glanced at Adam. “I have Adam to thank for that. If he hadn’t shown up when he did, I’d be dead right now.”

  Adam inclined his head. “It was luck more than anything. The weekend before the bombing, my people picked up some chatter on the wiretaps we had on Thorn and his security team. Nothing obvious. Mostly a lot of code speak and double-talk. When we thought John might be in trouble, I went to the complex to warn him. I smelled the explosives the moment I walked in, so I grabbed him and got him out of there.”

  “What about Olivia?” Landon asked, his voice uneven and a little hoarse.

  Adam shook his head. “She must have been in another part of the building, then gone into John’s office just as the bomb went off. If I’d known she was there, too, I would have tried to save her.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why you didn’t tell us you were alive,” Trevor reminded John.

  John exchanged looks with his wife, who in turn glanced at their daughter. After a moment, she shook her head.

  “Perhaps we should take the rest of this conversation downstairs,” John said. “There’s a lot more we need to talk about, and this isn’t the best place to do it.”

  Cree pressed a kiss to her husband’s cheek. “Boo and I will stay up here and play some video games.”

  When Morgan seemed torn between staying with Cree and Boo and going with John, she laughed and swatted him on the shoulder. “Go downstairs. We’ll be fine up here.”

  After giving her hand a squeeze and Boo a hug, John led the way out of the room and down the hall, Adam at his side. Suddenly stopping in the middle of the corridor, Adam pressed his hand to the wall. A moment later, a section of it slid back, revealing a set of stairs. Trevor followed him down the steps along with Alina and the others.

  “Do the people who own the building know this is here?” Alina asked Adam over her shoulder.

  “I own the building,” Adam said when they reached the bottom. “The apartments upstairs provide good cover for all the people who live here. Plus, we’re close to the DCO.”

  By close, Adam meant ten blocks from the DC office.

  “How long have you been here?” Landon asked when he and Ivy caught up with the rest of them.

  “About five years,” Adam said. “I purchased the building shortly after leaving the DCO, but
it took time to build all this.”

  “All this” turned out to be a huge underground operation center that was bigger than the one the DCO had. There had to be thirty shifters manning the computers and digital map boards. One of them, a tall, slender, graceful woman who’d accompanied Morgan on the mission in Maine, walked over to whisper something in Adam’s ear. Adam nodded, then grinned at her. She smiled in return, cupping his jaw in one elegant hand before walking back over to check something on the computer.

  “Who’s that?” Trevor asked.

  “Milan,” Adam said before leading the way to the big conference room on the other side of the room.

  “Is he always so talkative?” Alina asked as they followed.

  “No,” Trevor said. “Normally, he’s worse.”

  Once in the conference room, Trevor and Alina took a seat around the table with the other DCO agents, then waited for John to begin.

  “First,” John said as he moved to stand at the head of the table. “It was my decision to keep you in the dark and let you think I was dead. Adam was against it from the beginning, but I insisted.”

  “Why?” Kendra asked.

  Of all of them, Kendra had worked the most closely with John. Keeping a secret like this from her had to hurt.

  “Because I’m not naive,” John explained. “Thorn chose to take his shot at me on the DCO complex because that was the easiest place to get to me, but he could just as easily have set that bomb in my apartment building. If he had, Cree and Boo and a lot of other innocent people would have died. I simply couldn’t take that chance. As far as Thorn and the rest of the world was concerned, I was dead. I decided to let him think that, both for the safety of my family and because I thought it might finally make Thorn tip his hand.”

  “I’m fine with that,” Ivy said. “But you could have told us. We’re your friends.”

  John gave her an apologetic smile. “I intended to tell you eventually. As soon as the heat was off you or when we figured out what Thorn was up to.”

  Trevor wasn’t thrilled with John’s decision or his explanation of it, and from the looks on the faces of his coworkers, neither were they. But he understood why John had done it. Back at that warehouse, he would have done anything to get Alina out of there safely. He hadn’t thought twice about jumping out of a second-story window, even though he hadn’t known what would be waiting for him on the ground.

  “Well, since Dreya and I had to sneak back into the United States, I’m guessing we’re not here because the heat is off us,” Braden pointed out. “Does that mean you’ve figured out what Thorn is up to?”

  John looked at Trevor and gave him a nod.

  Trevor gave him a nod in return. “Before I get into Thorn and his insane schemes, there’s something I’d like to ask first. What started all this?”

  John frowned. “All what?”

  Trevor gestured around them, taking in the conference room and the command center beyond. “All this. Why is it here? What does it do? I know Thorn did something horrible a long time ago, but what was so bad that it put all this into motion and made you and Adam spend the past decade trying to put him in jail?”

  On the other side of the table, Landon nodded. “I’d like to know that, too.”

  John regarded them thoughtfully, studying them one by one as if trying to decide whether they could handle the information. Finally, he looked at Adam and nodded.

  “Most of you have probably already figured out by now that I used to work for the DCO,” Adam said. “What some of you may not know is that I was the first shifter the organization recruited and that Frasier led the team I was placed on. In fact, he was supposed to be my partner.”

  Trevor didn’t miss the way Adam emphasized the word recruited. From what he’d heard, Adam had been given a choice between a lifetime in a foreign prison where he’d never see the light of day again or working for the DCO. Adam had chosen the latter.

  “I wasn’t thrilled with the situation, but I tried to make the best of it,” Adam continued. “At first, it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. The ten-man team I was on did some good things and stopped some bad people. But then one night in June of 2003, we slipped into a cozy, little mansion outside Roanoke, and everything changed. We’d been told before the mission that the man who owned the house was a cold-blooded killer selling military weapons secrets to China. The plan was to move in and execute him before he had a chance to take any of us down. I admit, killing people was something I was used to, so I didn’t think too much about it. But the moment we walked in and I picked up the scent of children, I knew they’d lied to us.”

  When Adam fell silent, John picked up the story. “The house belonged to Walter M. Collins.”

  Trevor frowned. “Why do I recognize that name?”

  “Collins was an up-and-coming congressman for the state of Virginia,” John said. “While he’d made a name for himself in the House, he was exploring the idea of running for Senate. With his military background, voting record, and charisma, he had a good chance of unseating his rival in the upcoming election.”

  “Thorn,” Landon surmised.

  Adam nodded. “Thorn sent us in there to execute a political rival, plain and simple. When several of my teammates and I refused to do it, Frasier and the men who sided with him turned on us. Frasier shot me in the back, then wiped out the rest of the team. Worse, he executed Collins, his wife, and their three children.”

  Damn. Trevor had known Frasier was a piece of shit, but kids? There wasn’t a level of Hell low enough for a man like him.

  “By the time I recovered,” Adam continued, “Frasier and Thorn had convinced everyone I’d gone rogue and killed the Collins family and my teammates on my own.”

  “I found out what happened and helped get Adam to safety,” John said. “At the time, we had no proof Thorn was behind any of it, but I had my suspicions.”

  “I wasn’t interested in proof,” Adam said, his voice almost coming out as a hiss. “I was going to hunt down Frasier and tear pieces off his body until he told me everything I wanted to know, but John convinced me to do it his way. That’s when I made the decision to start my own organization. Originally, we just intended to keep an eye on Thorn, but now, we watch over the DCO, trying to step in when they do something they shouldn’t and picking up smaller missions they can’t be bothered with. Depending on what you learned, maybe we’ve finally reached the point where we can stop Thorn once and for all.”

  Trevor was silent as he let everything sink in. Adam and John had been patiently waiting for more than ten years to catch Thorn doing something that’d put the asshole in jail for life to make him pay for ordering the execution of a politician and his family. Trevor wasn’t so sure he could have been that patient. But now, they knew where Thorn’s new hybrid army was being built, and they knew what he intended to do with them. All they had to do was stop him and make sure the man didn’t weasel out from under all of this.

  Leaning forward, Trevor explained everything he, Alina, and Tanner had learned, starting with the video on Thorn’s hybrids.

  “They’re nothing like any hybrid we’ve ever seen before,” Trevor said. “Somehow, Thorn’s doctors have figure out how to counteract the rage. While I’m pretty sure they don’t hear and smell as well as shifters—or Tanner and Minka, for that matter—that disadvantage is more than outweighed by the increase in strength, speed, and their ability to withstand injuries. They’re damn near indestructible now.”

  When Tanner went on to explain how he learned the location of the farm in North Carolina, Adam stepped in to say he already had some of his people in the area watching the place.

  “It’s very well protected,” Adam added. “None of my people could get close without risking detection, but there’s a lot of activity going on. They’re mobilizing for something big.”

  “They’re planning to start a war,” Tr
evor said, telling them everything he and Alina had learned at the warehouse earlier that day.

  While everyone was stunned to hear what Thorn planned to do with his squad of hybrids, they were even more shocked when Trevor told them about Ed and Jake.

  “Shit,” John muttered. “I thought Jake was perfect for the DCO when I hired him.”

  Without knowing exactly how many hybrids they were up against, not to mention the other security Thorn was sure to have there, it was difficult to come up with a solid plan to raid the farm in Millers Creek. They didn’t have much of a choice, though. It was still easier to strike there than try to stop them in Ukraine.

  “We’re going to be heavily outnumbered,” Landon pointed out.

  “I’ve already got that covered,” John said. “I’ve contacted your former Special Forces team, Landon. They’re sending as many people as they can. I have a helicopter picking them up now.”

  Trevor grinned. John was always one step ahead.

  They were looking at the maps Adam’s people had made of the farm, trying to figure out how to get in and take down the hybrids when they didn’t know a damn thing about the place, when an alarm suddenly went off.

  Trevor looked up to see three big TV monitors in the command center he hadn’t noticed before light up. On them, a group of men dressed in black stormed into an office, automatic weapons blazing.

  Adam cursed and ran for the door of the conference room just as Trevor realized the office on the monitors was the same one he and Alina had been in a few hours ago. The people getting shot were Adam’s shifters. And one of the shooters was Frasier.

  “Shit,” he said. “They found us.”

  Trevor had been worried this would happen. There were too many people and cameras in this part of DC to hide from all of them.

  He and the others raced up the four flights of stairs after Adam, weapons drawn. But by the time they got to the main level, Frasier and the other men were gone. Out on the street, people were screaming. Clayne, Danica, Dreya, Braden, Angelo, and Minka took off after Frasier and his buddies, but Trevor instinctively knew it was a waste. The assholes were almost certainly in vehicles disappearing into the crowded DC traffic.