So she stayed where she was, hugging Jodi to her chest as she made a solemn promise to all of her teammates that she was going to do whatever it took to track Wade down and make him pay for what he’d done. No matter how long it took or what bridges she had to burn to make it happen, she was going to find Wade, and she was going to kill him. And no one was going to stand in her way.
Chapter 1
Quantico, Virginia, Present Day
“The director wants you in his office ASAP.”
Trevor Maxwell glanced up from the hot dog he was eating to look at the guy standing in front of his table. Short and stocky, the man was regarding him like something to be scraped off the bottom of his shoe. Trevor resisted the urge to bare his teeth in a snarl and took another bite of his hot dog. He wasn’t really hungry, but at least lunch was a pleasant break from the monotony of an otherwise miserable day. And the cafeteria served damn good hot dogs.
Unfortunately, he’d had a lot of miserable days at the Department of Covert Operations, the secret government organization where he worked. It came with being labeled a traitorous freak.
“You have a problem understanding what ASAP means?” the man asked, a butt load of attitude lacing his words.
Gaze never leaving the man, Trevor slowly finished chewing, then swallowed. “It means Dick Coleman wants me in his office as soon as possible. I’ll go just as soon as I finish eating. Because I couldn’t possibly leave before that.”
The man looked like he wanted to say something snide in reply, but when Trevor let his eyes glow coyote yellow and his upper canines slide out far enough to extend over his lower lip, the guy quickly changed his mind.
“Whatever,” the man muttered. “Your funeral.”
The comment probably would have come across as more ominous if the asshat hadn’t shuddered before walking away. But hey, the people who had been brought into the DCO lately didn’t have a lot of experience with shifters, and seeing a man sprout claws and fangs—not to mention flashing gold eyes—was a bit much for a lot of them to deal with. Most of the other people around the cafeteria were regarding him with the same mix of hatred and revulsion. It wasn’t only the muscle-headed thugs Dick—or rather Thomas Thorn, the man Dick answered to—had hired lately. The agents who’d worked alongside shifters like Trevor for years were throwing him dirty looks, too.
Trevor supposed hating shifters was sociably acceptable now that John Loughlin, the former director of the DCO and de facto champion of the organization’s shifter program, had been killed when a bomb had exploded in his office.
The day John had died, everything had changed. Now the covert intelligence organization the man had spent more than a decade building from the ground up was quickly falling apart from the inside out.
One look around the cafeteria proved that. It was lunchtime, yet you’d never know it from the handful of people scattered around the room shoving food in their faces as if they couldn’t wait to be somewhere else. The place used to be filled with agents, analysts, and other support personnel at this time of day. While there’d always been some who were antishifter in the DCO, their numbers had been more than offset by those who realized the good that people like Trevor and his kind brought to the organization.
Somehow, John had perfected the concept of pairing shifters with highly trained covert operatives. People had said it would never work, that shifters were little more than animals and couldn’t be trusted to work in a team environment, much less be given missions critical to national defense. John had proven the doubters wrong, fielding teams that had accomplished things that should have been impossible.
But John’s death had led to a complete change at the top of the organization, and the new regime was blatant in their opposition to all things shifter. These days, there were probably half as many people working for the DCO as there had been a month ago. Trevor couldn’t blame them. Why stay when Dick’s first act had been to announce that the very shifters John had trusted had conspired to murder him? There hadn’t been any proof of course, but then again, when had that bastard Dick ever let something like proof get in the way of what he wanted? Hell, he’d barely let John’s seat get cold before sitting in it.
Trevor seriously doubted that anyone with an ounce of intelligence believed any of the supposedly rogue DCO agents had been involved in John’s death. But when those twelve men and women who formed the backbone of John’s shifter program had gone on the run within hours of his murder, people either accepted they were guilty as charged or smart enough to know they’d never be able to prove their innocence before they were eliminated.
Either way, lots of good agents had read the writing on the wall and bailed. The moment they were gone, Dick had filled their positions with trigger pullers who spent most of their time chasing the rogue shifters or sitting on their asses.
It made Trevor wonder what the hell he was still doing there.
Trevor was still contemplating that—and whether to get another hot dog—when two men walked into the cafeteria and immediately headed for his table. Considering there was a twenty-foot-deep buffer zone of empty tables around Trevor, that might have put him on guard, but since they were among the few friends he had at the DCO, he turned his attention to the plate of french fries just begging to be eaten as Jake Basso and Jaxson West slid out a couple of chairs and joined him.
“Not a good idea for you guys to be seen with me,” Trevor said between bites. “Not only could it be hazardous to your career, but it might just end up getting you killed.”
Jake, a former Navy SEAL and technically still a member of Trevor’s counterintelligence/counterespionage team, reached over and snagged a fry off the pile with a laugh. Since Trevor’s team had essentially been disbanded, Jake wasn’t anything but a good friend and coworker now.
“What career?” Jake asked. He was a big guy with dark-blond hair, blue eyes, and a slightly crooked nose thanks to a fight he’d gotten into in high school. “I haven’t done anything but clean weapons at the firing range since everything went to hell around here. I think I’d appreciate someone trying to kill me just to relieve the boredom.”
Yeah, Trevor guessed Jake’s career was already shot. Thanks to him. Something else for Trevor to feel crappy about. But Jake was damn good at his job, and his SEAL background would ensure that he’d land on his feet, even if he wasn’t likely to use anyone around here as a reference on his résumé.
Jaxson West, on the other hand, was kind of screwed. As the DCO’s head of security, he’d answered directly to John when it came to securing both the training facility here on the back side of Quantico as well as the main DCO offices in downtown DC. Given that his boss had been assassinated on his watch—and that Dick hated his guts—Jaxson was in serious trouble. Dick would see that the man was blackballed in the covert community just because he could. But looking at the big, dark-haired guy sitting there so relaxed, you’d be hard-pressed to know the man was counting the days to unemployment.
“You hear anything from Lucy?” Trevor asked.
Jaxson grabbed a handful of fries. “No. But then again, I never expected to. The only reason she stayed at the DCO was because of John. With him gone, there’s nothing to keep her here.”
Even though he tried to cover it up, Trevor knew Jaxson was hurt that Lucy had walked away from the DCO without ever saying a word to him. He’d been closer to Lucy Kwan, the feline shifter that John had found in China, than anyone—except maybe John, of course. Trevor had always assumed Jaxson and Lucy would end up together.
Who knew? Maybe she’d come back someday. It wasn’t like she had to worry about anyone trying to hang the traitor label on her. No one in the organization, not even Dick, would be dumb enough to accuse the petite Asian woman of anything. While she might look like the sweetest angel ever, she was the most cold-blooded, ruthless killer the DCO had ever employed. And that was saying a lot, considering the kind of people the organization had associated with over the years.
