Cassian goes to take my hand, but Luca lets out a low growl and laces his fingers with mine.
My bite. Luca doesn’t want Cassian touching the bite he left on my hand.
“Let me show him,” I tell Luca, and he finally relents, though he glares at Cassian.
I hold my hand out, wrist bent and palm up, so the rest of my men can see the silvery scars where Luca’s bite has already begun to heal.
“Fuck, man. Sorry,” Cassian says, raising his hands in surrender. “I didn’t know you bit her there.”
“I’m sorry I growled at you,” Luca grouses, but his expression is still thunderous.
“Nah, it’s cool. Your instincts are running high and will be for a few days.”
“It’s… intense,” Luca admits, pressing his palm against mine, making desire zip through me.
“Well, you have my congratulations,” Cassian says. “Both of you.”
“And mine,” Ian says, shooting me a faint, fond smile.
“Mine too, kit-kat,” Simon adds.
“Congratulations, sweet-tart. Luca.” Marcus nods to both of us, but I catch the faintest whisper of fury in his thoughts.
I don’t have time to wonder what it means.
Simon sets his laptop down in front of me and zooms in on a satellite image of New Brunswick, then clicks to highlight the clearing and the facility within it.
“Saints, it’s really it, isn’t it?” I ask, my voice hushed. “How did you finally find it?”
“Those six sigils you gleaned from Rad. They’re a cipher of sorts, and once I cracked it, I had the frequency of the mage tech they’re using to shield it. After that, tuning my AI to find the facility was child’s play.”
“They weren’t useless! Oh, thank the saints. I was starting to think Rad had tricked me with them.”
Luca studies the map on Simon’s laptop screen with a frown. “We drove that main road,” he says, tracing it with his finger. “I know we did.”
“Ah,” Ian cuts in. “We think Radcliffe Industries may have been disguising the pull off from the main road with some kind of illusion, likely one powered by mage tech. My hypothesis is that they made a narrow logging road look like it was simply part of the forest. If I’m right, you could have driven past it a hundred times and only seen trees. If all of Radcliffe Industries’ latest mage tech works on the same frequency, detecting and disabling it should be easy enough.”
“Or jamming it long enough to get a resistance strike force in,” Simon adds, flexing his fingers and setting them to the keys of his laptop.
“There are guards hidden by mage tech walking the grounds,” I say. “On regular patrols.”
“Bet they’re not as brave when their mage tech doesn’t work,” Simon mutters, tapping a few keys.
“So, that’s the plan? A strike force?”
Saints, part of me wants to go to the facility right now and burn it to the ground like I’m going to burn Rose Manor, but even with my pack behind me, I’d never make it out alive, let alone with the omega test subjects.
Cassian drums his fingers on the dining table. “I’ll get in touch with Graeme tomorrow. He let me know that Frank was killed on the Feast of Saint Jasper.”
Franklin Carmichael, the leader of our local resistance, is dead? I only ever met him at the one meeting I attended before the resistance was declared a terrorist organization, but he was kind to me when many weren’t, when many doubted that I could be of any benefit in the fight against the Soldiers of Saint Aldous.
“Saints, that’s a blow,” Ian says, shaking his head. “Frank was a good man, and the resistance will suffer without him.
“I want to do something for his widow,” I say quietly.
Cassian studies me for a moment and then nods. “We will, Junes. I promise. I’ll make sure she and the rest of her pack are taken care of.”
My mate, always so generous, willing to give everything of himself for others.
