“And you’re worried about him,” Ivy finished.
Kendra nodded.
“He’s a shifter, remember?” Ivy smiled. “That means he heals fast.”
Ivy was right. And if that’s all it was, she’d probably only be half as worried as she was. But it was more than that. The fearful way Declan had looked at her right before Ivy and the guys had shown up, well, it had freaked her out. But how could she explain that to her friend when she couldn’t make sense of it herself?
“Even so, I’ll breathe easier when he gets back,” was all she said.
To keep from going crazy until he did, Kendra tagged along with Ivy, Landon, and Tate to search the lab. Landon figured they only had a day or so before the Costa Rican government finally got bold enough to come see what all the shooting had been about. He wanted them to be long gone before that happened.
As she skimmed the files on one of the computers, Kendra filled Ivy, Landon, and Tate in on everything she’d learned from Harry and the other two doctors. She’d hoped the men would be able to tell the story themselves, but when Landon and Angelo found them, the doctors were already dead. All three of them had been shot in the head.
“You don’t seem surprised that the doctors who were working for Stutmeir aren’t the ones who made these hybrids,” Kendra said, glancing at Ivy and Landon.
“We’ve searched enough of their labs to know that this place doesn’t look anything like those,” Landon said.
“Which is too bad.” Ivy tossed a folder down on the desk she was searching. “I was hoping to find Klaus and Renard when we kicked in the door—preferably dead.”
Kendra silently agreed. Ivy would sleep a lot better knowing the two doctors who had tortured her were no longer a threat.
Tate looked up from the notebook he was reading. “So if Klaus and Renard didn’t make these hybrids, who did?”
Kendra explained about the research files that Harry and the other doctors had been given. “The way Harry described those documents makes me think they came from the DCO.”
Tate’s eyes widened. “The DCO? Seriously?”
Kendra nodded.
He dropped the notebook on the table with a curse. “First, someone in the DCO purposely put my team in the middle of a hybrid ambush, for reasons we haven’t figured out yet. Now, you’re telling me it’s possible that this same someone in the DCO set a group of doctors up here and gave them the research necessary to create the hybrids? Someone like John?”
Kendra didn’t answer. Even after everything that had happened, she flat-out refused to believe John was involved. Ivy, Landon, and the others hadn’t known John as long as she had. They hadn’t seen how hard he worked to keep the Committee and people like Dick from turning the organization into something that would be capable of doing exactly what it seemed to be doing now. But how was she going to convince them of that?
“Maybe,” Landon said, answering Tate’s question.
Tate’s face fell as Landon filled him in on what had been happening on the hybrid front, specifically their fear that Dick and others within the DCO were trying to replace shifters with hybrids, as well as what Landon had found while searching the DCO’s classified records repository a few months ago.
“Wait a minute.” Tate looked like someone had pulled the floor out from under him, then hit him with an axe handle. “Stutmeir was on the DCO’s payroll?Wefunded his frigging research? How is that even possible? Stutmeir and his doctors were torturing people.”
Landon traded a quick look with Ivy, but she shook her head. Kendra knew what that look meant, and Kendra couldn’t blame her. There were obviously some things that Ivy wasn’t ready to share, and the fact that she’d been one of the people Stutmeir’s doctors had tortured was one of those things.
Tate dropped into the cheap, swivel desk chair. “And now, these same people have started a whole new hybrid program?”
“Or maybe some other group within the DCO,” Ivy said. “We just don’t know for sure.”
Landon leaned back against the counter and crossed one booted foot over the other. “It can’t be a coincidence that this is the exact part of Costa Rica where the DCO decided to send you guys. If there was a single rogue group within the DCO doing all this, they wouldn’t have sent you down here.”
Kendra understood where Landon was heading at the same time Tate did.
“Shit,” he muttered. “So, the traitorous group of bastards in the DCO who employed Stutmeir got wind that a second group of traitorous bastards had a hybrid lab in this general area, then manipulated events to get us sent here.”
“You and Declan said you thought someone had us conducting a grid search for something,” Kendra pointed out. “Now we know what it was.”
Tate nodded. “This lab.”
“They were probably hoping the doctors would get nervous and abandon ship,” Ivy said.
“But instead, the second group of traitorous bastards at the DCO decided to accelerate their program, and used your team to test their hybrids,” Landon added.
