The woman had intercepted her and Trevor in the cafeteria an hour ago and joyfully informed them they’d be training all morning. Trevor had protested, saying he had some leads related to the bombing he needed to run down. Alina noticed he hadn’t said we have leads to track down, which confirmed her assumption he planned to bail on her. Even though she knew there was a serious trust issue between her and Trevor, it still bothered her anyway. She hated not being trusted. It made her feel like the enemy. Like Wade.
The trim, athletic training officer hadn’t batted an eye but simply smiled sweetly at Trevor and informed him that he could hunt down leads to his heart’s content—after she was done with them. Something told Alina she was going to like this woman.
So they’d spent an hour at the pistol range, where Sabrina had each of them blaze through almost five hundred rounds of ammo with their issued sidearms, then come over here to the shoot house.
“You’ll be doing a scenario involving a hostage,” Sabrina explained.
Alina glanced up from loading another paintball. The black-and-silver gun had a long, slender barrel sticking out the front, a plastic tube full of bright-pink paintballs attached to the top, and a small bottle mounted below the handgrip. It looked like something out of a Star Wars movie and probably cost more than her car.
In all the time she’d been in the CIA, she’d never fired a paintball gun as part of her training. Hell, while she’d done a lot of tactical room clearance, she’d never taken part in any kind of hostage-rescue training either. That wasn’t part of her normal CIA mission, so she’d never spent any time on it.
“Jaxson and Jake will be playing the part of the opposing forces,” Sabrina continued. “You’ll need to deal with them as well as any pop-up targets in the house in order to reach the hostage. The pop-up targets will make the alarms on your vests go off if you fail to take them out in time.”
Trevor snorted, earning him a frown from the training officer.
“Something funny?” Sabrina asked.
He shrugged as he slipped a few extra tubes of paintball ammo into the cargo pocket of his uniform pants. “You realize I’m a shifter and that I can get through this scenario easily, right?”
Sabrina’s lips curved. “Maybe, maybe not. We’ll see. Besides, the objective for this training is for both you and your partner to make it through and rescue the hostage. If you get through but Alina doesn’t, you start over. Teamwork—remember?”
Trevor scowled at that but didn’t say anything.
“I’ll be watching from the overhead catwalk,” Sabrina called over her shoulder as she headed into the house. “The training event will start when the alarm rings the first time. If you haven’t completed the course before it rings a second time, you fail and have to start over.” She turned and gave them a pointed look. “By the way, keep your goggles on at all times. I wouldn’t want anyone to lose an eye in there.”
Okay, maybe she wasn’t going to like this woman, Alina decided as she slipped her goggles down from her forehead. She got the feeling Sabrina had a trick or two up her sleeve for dealing with Trevor and his shifter abilities.
At first glance, the building looked like a normal, everyday house, albeit in need of a fresh coat of paint. Then Alina realized there were no windows on the second floor and that the glass in the first-floor windows was bulletproof. The walls were probably reinforced as well. She hadn’t seen many tactical training shoot houses in the CIA. This kind of stuff was normally reserved for special operations forces. At least she and Trevor weren’t using live ammo. That would have been a little crazy. Then again, crazy seemed to be kind of the norm around here.
After Sabrina disappeared inside, Alina turned to Trevor and held up the paintball gun. “What the heck do I do with this thing? I’ve never fired one before.”
If Trevor was surprised by that admission, he didn’t let on. “The gas pressure bottle under here propels the paintballs when you pull the trigger,” he said, pointing it out with his finger. “The tube on top holds ten paintballs. Think of it like a magazine and reload accordingly. People who do this paintball stuff seriously use containers that hold fifty to a hundred at a time, but the training officers rarely let us get away with that.”
“I don’t know why,” she quipped. “I personally always like to have a lot more ammo than I think I’m going to need.”
Trevor smirked but didn’t laugh. “This is the safety. It operates just like the one on your normal sidearm. Just take the weapon off safe and pull the trigger when you’re ready to fire.”
Without another word, Trevor turned and headed for the door of the shoot house.
“Don’t you think we should talk about how we’re going to do this before we go in there?” she asked, hurrying to catch up with him. “This could get ugly if we don’t have a plan.”
He shrugged. “I’ll take the front of the room as we go in. You cover me and deal with the back side of the room. It shouldn’t be that complicated. I’ll be able to smell and hear Jake and Jaxson long before we get to them.”
Alina opened her mouth to ask what the heck he expected her to do while he was sniffing around like a bloodhound when a loud buzzer went off.
Trevor lifted his foot and kicked in the door with the heel of his boot.
Alina cursed and followed him inside. The first room had three doors leading off in different directions but was otherwise empty. Before she could even begin to wonder which room they should start with—or why the hell the place smelled like a litter box that hadn’t been cleaned in a week—loud music filled the house.
She did her best to ignore both the blaring techno beat and the god-awful stench, moving quickly to cover the blind spots to the left and right of the door they’d come in. It would have been a lot easier if she’d been working with a partner who was interested in communicating—and working as a team.
Fortunately, the first room was clear, so the fact that she had no idea which direction Trevor was going to move as he crossed the threshold didn’t come back to bite them in the ass.
Alina shook off her irritation, waiting for Trevor to figure out which direction he wanted to go. He paused, and she assumed he was sniffing for a clue. There were three doors to choose from. But then she realized he was standing there with a pissed-off look on his face.
“What’s wrong?” she shouted.
Trevor cursed. “It’s Jake. The damn guy knows exactly how shifters work—me especially. Between the loud music and cow piss he dumped all over the place, he’s taken away any advantages I have. I can’t hear or smell a damn thing.”
