Since Cody didn’t look up from his coloring book, she thought he hadn’t heard her, but just as she and Trevor followed Larson to the front door, the boy jumped up and ran over with one of the pictures he’d made. When he held it out to her, she saw it was the one he’d been working on when she and Trevor had first gotten there, the one with the yellow sky and the orange clouds. She took it very carefully.
“Is this for me?” she asked.
Cody didn’t say anything. Instead, he turned and went back to his coloring book, starting another page.
“Thank you,” she said, but he was already lost in his work.
She glanced at Trevor as they headed outside to their SUV. “What was that all about?”
He pushed the button on the key fob to unlock the doors. “What was what all about?”
“That number you gave Larson. Do you always give suspects the name and number of prospective employers?”
Trevor shrugged. “I think it’s obvious that guy isn’t a suspect. He’s just someone who might have seen something. Besides, he could use a little help.”
Alina couldn’t argue with any of those things. “It was a nice thing to do.”
He only grunted in answer.
They didn’t talk much as they headed north on Highway 2 back toward Fredericksburg and the interstate. It wasn’t dark yet, but the sun was low on the horizon. It would be nightfall by the time they got back to the DCO complex.
As the last few beams of the sun’s light slipped through the trees lining the road, Alina replayed the day’s events. To say she was confused about everything she’d seen and learned was an understatement. Her new partner wasn’t anything like Dick had described. Other than the fact that he was very closed-mouth when it came to sharing information, Trevor seemed like an okay guy. Well, there were the fangs, claws, and glowing gold eyes. Those were going to take a while to get used to. Even so, she wasn’t ready to brand him the traitor the director of the DCO claimed him to be—yet.
Chapter 3
“Keep your eyes closed and just relax.”
Tanner Howland frowned even as he said the words. He wasn’t sure he was the best person to help another hybrid get a handle on their inner animal, especially since he was still trying to figure it out most of the time himself, but Sage Andrews, the woman the DCO had rescued from a lab in Tajikistan a while back, was in a really bad way. Besides, he couldn’t say no to anything Zarina Sokolov asked him to do. Meeting the beautiful Russian doctor had been the only bright spot in his dark existence since he’d been captured and turned into a beast over a year ago. If not for her, he probably wouldn’t even be alive right now.
He, Zarina, and Sage sat on the floor in the small living room of Sage’s dorm room/prison cell on the DCO complex while two armed men stood guard outside the door.
“That’s it,” he said. “Breathe in and out, nice and slowly.”
As Sage inhaled and exhaled, Tanner looked for any sign that the beast inside her might take over and she was about to lose it. Beside him, Zarina did the same. He would have preferred her to watch this exercise from farther away, like on a closed-circuit television in another room. But Zarina insisted she needed to be close in case Sage lost control.
When he’d tried to argue, Zarina had folded her arms—a sure sign he wasn’t going to change her mind no matter what he said. “Who taught you how to control your inner beast?” she asked. “Me, that’s who.”
But while that was true, Tanner didn’t like the idea of Zarina putting herself at risk. He’d been watching out for her ever since she’d saved his life in Washington State after a pair of psycho doctors had injected him with a serum that turned him into a hybrid like Sage. He wasn’t about to stop now.
Across from him, Sage’s brow knit, like she was fighting for control. Tanner tensed, but after a moment, she relaxed again. While he’d had more than his share of episodes since being turned into a hybrid, sometimes it seemed like Sage was more beast than human. If there was any doubt of that, all a person had to do was take a look at Sage’s living arrangements, and the truth was obvious.
Since she was prone to violence, staying in one of the normal dorm rooms like he did was out of the question, so John Loughlin had turned one of the outbuildings into a small efficiency apartment of sorts. Her bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living room took up the back half of the building while the front was part medical facility, part guard station. In between the front and back sections was a wall of steel bars as thick and heavy as anything you’d expect to see in a real prison.
It wasn’t the nicest way to treat a woman who’d never asked for any of this to happen to her, and Tanner hated it more than anyone, but there wasn’t anything else they could do. Sage gave in to her animal rages once every few days. The deep scratches along the walls and floors were a testament to that. A petite, slender girl with long, wavy, dark hair and expressive gray eyes, she looked like she wouldn’t hurt a fly. But when the animal inside took over, Sage turned into something extremely dangerous.
That was why Dick kept two armed guards there 24-7. Currently, both men were standing outside the steel bars of Sage’s cell watching them, disdain on their faces. They both hated and feared Sage. The only reason they treated her halfway decently at all was because the DCO might be able to use her later. That said, the thought of Sage escaping and going on a rampage through the training complex terrified the new director.
Honestly, it terrified Tanner, too. If she got out of here, it would be up to him to stop her, and he wasn’t sure if he could stop a raging hybrid without losing control of his own inner animal.
“We’re going to do the door exercise again, Sage,” he said quietly. “Just like we’ve been doing for the past few weeks, okay?”
Sage gently wrapped her graceful fingers around the silver cross on a chain around her neck, her lips moving in a silent prayer. She’d told Tanner that she had grown up in a very religious family and that her father was a pastor of a church back in her hometown. In fact, the first things she’d asked for after she’d calmed down enough to talk to anyone were a cross and a Bible.
After a few moments, Sage nodded, letting him know she was ready.
“I want you to imagine that you’re standing in front of a door in a dimly lit room. It can be any kind of door you want. It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s something you can easily remember.”
