“You actually take time to think of these things?” Striker asked, pausing. “I think you might need laid, stat.”
“Offering again, asswipe?”
Striker shoved him playfully. “Once you had a taste of me, you’d never get enough.”
“I’m pretty sure I just threw up a little.” Duke snarled, allowing his jaw and teeth to change shapes, partially shifting into the mouth of a wolf.
Laughing, Striker did the same. He too was a born werewolf. Shifting forms was much faster and easier than non-naturals since they were born that way. For every perk of being a born-shifter, nature saw fit to add a “fuck you”. Like the bloodlust and having a true mate that the odds of finding were astronomically small.
Yeah, Mother Nature is a bitch.
He looked to Striker. Duke’s mouth returned to normal. “You look like a redheaded bear. You’re a shame to the pack. You plan to cut that hair at any point or shave that beard?”
“No.” He shook his head, sending his long auburn hair in every direction. “You think I’m sexy. Admit it.”
“Fuck off, Scot.” Duke shoved him out of the elevator as the doors opened. They didn’t make it too far before they found themselves standing in front of Captain Corbin Jones. Sighing, Duke pivoted and walked back into the elevator, holding the doors open with his hand. If the Brit was in this time of night, it could only mean one thing.
Something big had come up and there would be no drinking tonight.
Striker groaned. “Beer had our name on it.”
Corbin lifted a dark blond brow and followed them back into the elevator, his long sandy-blond hair pulled back tightly. Duke noticed most of the PSI-Ops kept their hair long. Probably had something to do with their ages—they were older than dirt and came from times when it was socially acceptable for men to wear their hair long. Well, that and none of them really gave a shit what people thought of them.
“It will have to wait,” Corbin said, his words clipped and polished. The Brit continued, “Boomer should be here any minute. Pack a bag. Paris has your names on it.”
“Dammit, Captain,” Duke said. “I hate to fly. And I hate Paris.”
“This time I’m with you on the hating bandwagon,” Striker added. “I hate Paris too. Been arrested more times than I can count there. Plus, they’re French.”
Corbin eyed them both. “Something wrong with the French?”
Duke punched in the code to go to the lower level. “I wouldn’t know where to begin with answering that, sir.”
With a laugh, Corbin nodded. “I could add to the list.”
“I bet you could,” said Duke.
“Hold on!” Miles “Boomer” Walsh yelled as he ran through the main lobby, bag in hand, a rifle slung over his left shoulder.
“Christ, tell me you didn’t walk through the streets with that.” Duke shook his head.
“Nah, was in my trunk. Didn’t unload it until I was parked in the lot here, you know, secret government facility and all.” Boomer’s hair was wet. When dry it had a strange mix of colors in it. Duke swore the guy had honest to God blue-black pieces in the mix. The panther in him showed more in human form than any other shifter male Duke had seen in all his years. Boomer’s eyes were violet and often creeped people the fuck out.
Not Duke.
He knew the man well. Knew Boomer, while earning his nickname for his love of explosives, had a heart of gold. The guy was tough yet would give his life for his fellow brothers in arms.
As a good PSI-Operative should.
Striker laughed. “Hey, how is your lady friend? You know, the hot little number at the zoo?”
“Dick,” Boomer said, shaking his head.
Boomer, while a born shifter, had an ugly past before he’d come to be what he was. From the little bit Duke had learned about it over the years, Boomer’s mother survived an attack by a werepanther when she was pregnant with him. He was born a panther shifter, to a mother who couldn’t control her urges and hated what she’d become. Corbin had mentioned once, when they’d all had too much to drink, that he’d been the one to pull Boomer from the situation when Boomer was barely a toddler. Duke wasn’t sure where Boomer grew up from there, but he did know it wasn’t with his biological mother.
Boomer was older than Duke yet hadn’t really aged past his late twenties. Duke leveled off around the age thirty-three. He couldn’t complain. Though, he did have the tiniest starts of white hair on his temples that had begun to grow right before his body decided he wasn’t going to age anymore.
Chicks seemed to dig it so he didn’t make too big of a fuss about it. And it wasn’t like he was about to go to one of those fancy salons and ask to get his hair colored.
No way in hell would that happen.
Getting old sucked and he was doing it a snail’s pace. He couldn’t imagine being human.
He nearly shuddered at the idea and he was nowhere near as old as some of the men on his team—what was left of it. They were two men down from their normal six-man teams and were adamant on refusing to accept any new ones. One was on a forced sabbatical, attempting to clear his head. Malik had seriously lost his shit recently and Corbin had ordered him to take personal time to try to sort out whatever the hell had crawled up his ass. Duke didn’t know what all had happened and figured it wasn’t his business to pry. He just knew Malik, or Tut as they’d nicknamed him, would be pissed when he learned they went on another mission without him.
The other man?
They’d been without for years now.
James Hagen.
They’d refused to accept any new team member when one of their own was accused of getting a fellow operative killed.
Duke never believed the rumors. James had a hot temper, but all the shifter males did and he was a great operative. He’d never willingly get another member killed. Not James. The man had been a doctor more than once in his long life of reinventing himself. He took his oath to save lives seriously. He’d never purposely cause the death of a fellow operative. It wasn’t James’s style. The fucking higher-ups didn’t seem to recognize that.
And now he was missing presumed dead.
“What up?” Boomer asked of Corbin.
Duke groaned at Boomer’s attempt to sound hip and young. While the men looked young and forever would, they were hardly spring chickens.
Corbin pushed the stop button on the elevator and then said nothing for a few seconds. “It’s James.”
Duke stiffened. When word had come last week that James had been taken months prior, Duke assumed the worst. He was positive he was about to hear that a man he considered a brother was dead and that it had been confirmed. They’d all been waiting for this day. The day they’d learn the fate of James. He’d been a member of their team since before Duke had even joined on. Then, ten years back, that all changed. They’d lost their team medic and a trusted friend who was like a brother to them. They’d all tried to bring James back into the fold. He managed to go off the grid. Until a year ago. Then he reached out to PSI to help a young girl that intel said he thought of as a daughter.
The girl ended up being Eadan’s mate, Inara, and she told them all that James had been taken by a van of masked men months earlier. They’d not been able to find out anything more regarding his whereabouts.
“He’s being held in a testing facility in Paris,” Corbin said.
Duke stopped and stared at Corbin, waiting for more information. He’d been held prisoner before and he’d prayed each day for death to come. Shifters, in particular, could physically take a lot of damage and heal again and again. Mentally, though? He knew what that kind of hell could do to a person’s mindset.
“It’s bad,” said Corbin. “The people holding him have ties to every known genetics evil genius.”
The men all shared a look. This wasn’t good. Not good at all. They’d seen some of the sick shit that went on in those types of places when they’d been dispatched to a secondary location the Immortal Ops had been unable to s
weep in Brazil. What they’d found had stuck with them.
“What condition is he in?” asked Duke, unsure he wanted to hear the answer.
Corbin looked at Duke and no words needed to be spoken.
Duke closed his eyes. “Fuck.”
“Word only just reached us about him and the intel is scrambled. The tech analysts are working as fast as they can to decrypt it but it’s sophisticated. Unlike anything we’ve run across before. From the little we could gather, we know the city and that he’s in bad shape, but we have very few ties to him beyond that. We do have a name—Mercy Deluca.”
“Enemy?” asked Striker, suddenly sober.
“At this point, yes, our analysts seem to think so,” Corbin responded. “She’s our target. We get to her, shadow her, if we can’t find James by normal means we use whatever force is necessary to bring him home.”
The men nodded.
Boomer squared his shoulders. “If it’s not something our techs can break, then how do we know the intel is good?”
“They had James’s code,” Corbin responded.
“What about King Tut?” asked Striker. “The Egyptian is gonna want in on this.”
Corbin shook his head. “Malik,” he said, correcting Striker for calling Malik King Tut again. It was too fun not to. Malik was literally from Ancient Egyptian times. The man was old as could be but didn’t look a day over thirty. “Is not to be brought in on this. He needs to get his head cleared or he’s of no use to all of us. Am I clear?”
“Yes,” they answered in unison.
Chapter Two
Donavon Dynamics Corporation, Paris location…
Mercy Deluca headed down the seemingly endless corridor of the sub eleventh floor of Donavon Dynamics Corporation. Fluorescent lights flickered softly, their hum sounding louder than it should. They were made to backlight what was meant to resemble windows, giving a false sense of where one was. Mercy’s senses had always been better than others’. She’d never been fooled, even before she’d learned it was an underground facility.
People had told her more than once in her life that she was very different—an out-of-the-box thinker. Her I.Q. was off the charts and that had a lot to do with how others perceived her and, frankly, how she perceived others. Her social skills seriously lacked as well. She’d tried very hard to mimic others growing up, doing her best to be a social butterfly, but her attempts fell short. Like her sophomore year of college when she’d finally been invited to a party and decided to go dressed in costume. She’d selected an orange sweatshirt and had stitched the sign for Pi on it. She’d been a Pumpkin Pi. No one got it. They thought she belonged to a sorority that wasn’t widely known and who had really ugly color choices.
Being brilliant was hard.
Maybe, had she a better skill set in the social department, she’d have noticed the Corporation’s tricks. She’d have seen the trap coming. As it stood, she hadn’t. She’d been blindsided. By the time she leaned the truth, she was in far too deep.
The Corporation was into some heavy things and only a few were legal. Those were just a front for all the bad. She’d not understood the depth of their reach or the scope of their operation when she’d agreed to work for them.
“Work for us,” they’d said. “Help make the world a better place.”
She’d fallen for the lure, hook, line and sinker. How could she have known that a corporation known worldwide as being leaders in the fight against sickness and disease was actually a giant front for mad men?
They’d wined and dined her, puffing up her ego, making a point to talk about how brilliant she was in her selected field. No bones were made about how she was one of the sharpest and most innovative biomedical engineers and that her medical degree only added to the total package. After having faced so much resistance to being so young while in college and the same when she graduated and began a job pursuit, she found this change welcome. Finally, someone had recognized her talents and saw within to her extreme potential. She’d wanted so desperately to do good and make a difference that she failed to see what was right before her. It wasn’t until she was locked in—just shy of signing in blood—that they’d revealed who and what they were.
Evil.
Men who hid behind fancy cars, expensive suits and a false sense of righteousness. Men who wanted to create a master race of super humans. Men who didn’t learn from the atrocities of the past but rather seemed hell bent on repeating them for their own twisted gain.
She was in now.
Part of their network of wrong-doing.
Trapped.
And she had other people to worry about. All the test subjects. They needed her help. If her life was on the line, it might as well be at risk for something good.
And freeing them would be good.
If she could only figure out how to do it.
She’d called the number Test Subject 87P had given her, but the jerk who kept answering the phone refused to put her through to someone who could possibly help her, or at the very least tell her if they’d gotten the information she’d sent.
She nearly growled with anger, thinking about the unbelievable jerk who had accused her of phoning in fake alien abductions. As if she would ever.
If an alien had abducted her, she would’ve have far too many questions for it to bother with wanting to turn it in. She was simply too science-minded not to.
As it stood she still wasn’t sure if any help was coming.
Though, apparently they’d come running if she was up for an anal probing. She wanted to hit something, preferably the jerk-off who had answered the phone. Didn’t he understand the danger she was in—the danger they were all in?
What have I gotten myself into?
Yes, she’d been an unwitting accomplice, but an accomplice all the same. She couldn’t forgive herself. She was in too deep to simply say no and leave. No one walked away from the Corporation and lived to tell the tale later.
No.
She had to be smart. She had to take them down. Had to make their empire crumble. It was the only way she could ensure the safety of the Corporation’s secret prisoners, not to mention her own safety.
Mercy continued, walking with a purpose so as to not alert the guards to the fact she had no actual business to attend to in the area. She was in a heightened state of awareness, fearful she’d be caught. Every precaution she could take to head off being discovered, she’d done. Was it was enough? It wasn’t as if being a spy came easy to her. And espionage wasn’t part of her skill set. At least it hadn’t been.
“Concentrate,” she whispered, scolding herself.
She’d designed the majority of the biometric scanners and sensors used for security within the facility. She knew her way around them. She also knew that most of the guard station doors were rigged to explode if tampered with too much. The Corporation wouldn’t hesitate to bring the building down on everyone’s heads rather than allow their enemies inside and access to their research.
But she’d been smart. When she’d first created the systems, she’d made a backdoor into them. It didn’t matter what it was she’d created for the Corporation, she’d installed a kill switch and a back entry point. Her conscience had demanded she do so because her gut had sensed there was something off about the company almost from the beginning.
The security measures she’d built into the systems meant that, if need be, only she could access and control the technology. Back then, it had felt like too much power to hand over to people she’d really only just met. She was glad she’d had that tiny bit of forethought.
Gaining entrance via the backdoor path she’d created was a last resort. Even she would have to use care around their safeguards to avoid tripping anything dangerous. For now, she would simply walk through all the checkpoints. She kept her gaze ahead, already knowing cameras were mounted everywhere, showing her every move to the men hired to watch everything and everyone who had anything to do with the Corporation. She had high clearance but
not level one. As a Level Two she was afforded nearly free roam of the facility—but kept under constant surveillance. She was required to show her identification upon entering the building and then at each guard station between here and the lowest level.
Armed guards were stationed on each floor. She’d already made her way past several checkpoints, doing her best to maintain an even façade. She’d come too far to get caught now.
The lower you went, the more heavily the guards were armed. Currently, she was eleven levels underground. Anything below lobby level wasn’t shown on records available to the public. The low areas simply did not exist. At least not to anyone who wasn’t in the know.
And she was in the know.
She was a trusted member of the staff. In reality she hated everything the Corporation stood for—the lies they perpetuated to the public when in truth they were sick sons-of-bitches.
She’d spent the greater part of her year working for them, collecting evidence against them. Problem was, Mercy had no clue where to go with the information. Certain politicians were in the pocket of the Corporation. They were so powerful, some governments backed them fully, knowing what they did. She’d been at a loss until she’d met Test Subject 87. He’d given her a channel to reach out through for help and she’d taken it.
She shuddered, fear racing its way up her spine at the thought of being caught.
“Steady,” she whispered to herself. “You can do this.”
Pressing a smile to her face, she approached the guard at the desk at the end of the corridor. Gaspard was by far the nicest guard employed at the facility. He would often smile and make small talk with her. She’d have thought him an ally but she’d witnessed him torturing test subjects with his other guard buddies. He was also cruel to the test animals kept on the premises. Ones Mercy hoped to free as well as the human test subjects.
While this guard, in particular, had not been the ringleader, he’d been a participant. She always remembered what he was capable of, despite his warm smile. She showed her badge.
Act of Mercy Page 3