Aisling nodded.“I’m so sorry.”Aisling injected her in the neck.A moment later, she went limp and stopped breathing.
Aisling dropped the syringe and looked at the man.“Did you write down her name?”
He started to answer, licked his lips, then turned and boked all over the cell wall.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what he’d seen, but obviously, despite the woman looking physically like she would have survived, whatever trauma she’d endured had been unspeakable.
“I’ve got it,” a tech grimly said from the doorway, noting the information and taking out a DNA test kit.
Aisling grabbed the Prime and steered him out of the cell.At this rate, they’d run out of Primes able to function before they completed the operation.
But…
They kept moving, kept working—several of their people boking at least once before getting back to work.
The horrors blended together even as they rescued more people.
They were twenty minutes ahead of schedule when Aisling stopped at the base of the stairwell after locking the elevator down at the bottom of the shaft and setting a charge inside it.Her final charge would go at the top of the stairs, which had been lined with them by the retreating demolitions team.
They hadn’t—yet—lost a single member of their team.
Not inside the lab, anyway.
After the horrors they’d just unearthed, she wondered if they’d lose any after the fact to demons they couldn’t scourge from their minds.If nothing else, hopefully this would serve as an indelible reminder as to why any petty differences between their shifter races didn’t matter, and they needed to band together against common enemies threatening their very existence.
She’d personally made one last sweep of the lab and all the cells, checking every room, opening every door, and ensuring none of theirs were left behind.
“All right,” she said to the three people with her.“Trigger the gas cannisters.”They hit the buttons on their respective rigs, and she verified the canisters were deploying their payloads before turning and following them up the stairs.
She was the last one out—the last one who’d ever exit that unholy pit.
At the surface, she conducted a head count, just to be sure, and gave thanks for small fucking favors as she climbed into the SUV she’d ridden in and hit the master detonator switch to trigger the explosives before they hauled ass.
She felt the rumbles, even through the speeding SUV’s tires.Looking back, she saw smoke and dust billowing from the stairwell entrance next to the building that served as the elevator lobby on the surface.
Good riddance.
Peyton looked at his watch.“The drones will be coming in soon.”
“I hope there’s nothin’ left but a dusty crater when those finish doin’ their work,” she said.Glancing back, she spotted the blank look Lowri wore, but at least Aaron wasn’t trying to kill Peyton with his mind anymore.“Ye all right, then?”she asked Lowri.
Lowri slowly nodded.“I will probably need a lifetime of therapy to deal with that, but it’s nothing compared to the horrors those people endured.”She turned and kissed Aaron.“Thank you for coming with me.”
“We’re not home free yet,” Peyton said.“Because we rescued Callum and Bryn, I’ll go to Wales with the transport plane.He’s a strong Prime, even stronger than me.Jake, can you, Lowri, and Aaron stay behind here with the clean-up team and interrogate that fucker we brought out?”
“Can I kill him?”Jake growled.
“Not until we’re finished with him.He’ll need to be brought to Wales with the evacuated personnel for more interrogations.He cannot die until we get every scrap of intel out of him we can.And let’s not let him accidentally fall out of an airplane en route, okay?”
“That’s not a fast enough way for him to die,” Aaron said.
“Can we torture him?”Jake asked.
“As long as you don’t kill him or make him incapable of being interrogated,” Peyton said.“We may need him for passwords or interpreting data, so don’t blind him yet, either.Where is he, anyway?”
“He ended up in Bob’s SUV,” Jake said.
Their vehicle was the last one back over the border.In the distance, they heard two enormous explosions.
