They obliged, stepping out and lifting their Russian-made automatic weapons. She put the first man down before he got off a shot. But the second one was ballsy, standing his ground and taking time to get a bead on her. He fired first, the round of his AK-47 tearing through her jacket, skipping along the left side of her torso, ripping open the side pocket, and spilling her confiscated radio to the street.
The pain of the wound—and that of Fred’s and Rodney’s deaths—sharpening her focus, she put a 9mm ball round right through the center of the man’s chest. He bounced back off the wall behind him, then tumbled to the wet ground.
Only after she was sure they were dead did Alina finally lower her gun. She put it away, clutching a hand to her side as she bent forward to collect the radio. She’d intended to pick up the radio and toss it in the bushes along with her weapon, but then she heard a thump and clang of a heavy metal door on the back side of the apartment building. Alina breathed a sigh of relief knowing her friend was going to get away, but then she heard another sound that was impossible to mistake for anything other than the pop of a silenced weapon going off.
Alina sprinted for the front door of the apartment building, slamming open the door and racing down the hall as fast as she could. She still had a hundred feet to go when she heard Jodi’s soft voice over the radio.
“Screw you, Wade.”
There were several more pops, then silence.
Alina ran as fast as she could, but it took her a few minutes to find the door that Jodi had shoved open. It was tough, because the building was large and had at least two exits on each side of it. When she finally found her friend, Jodi was curled up in a ball beside a big trash can. Wade was nowhere in sight.
It almost looked like Jodi was sleeping, but the hand she had clenched to her stomach was all the proof Alina needed to know she wasn’t.
Alina gently rolled her friend away from the trash can to find she was already dead. Two shots to the stomach and three to the chest. Since Jodi had cursed Wade before she’d died, the son of a bitch must have shot her in the stomach first just because it would hurt, then followed up with the kill shots to the chest. After he’d let her suffer a bit. He’d always been such an asshole.
Sitting on the wet ground, Alina wrapped Jodi in her arms, squeezing her tightly as she finally let the tears come. A part of her knew she should get out of there before the police showed, but she couldn’t make herself move. She needed time to cry for her friends before she let them go.
Slowly, anger replaced the horrible, soul-crushing sorrow. While she was furious with Wade, she was mad at herself, too. She should have seen this betrayal coming. She’d always had some reservations about him, but instead of trusting the instincts that had been screaming at her from day one that Wade was a piece of crap, she’d gone along with the flow, assuming the Agency wouldn’t have hired him if he was dirty. That assumption and lack of faith in her instincts had gotten the three most important people in her life killed.
Sirens echoed in the distance, but Alina ignored them. The police would congregate around the industrial building first, securing the perimeter, searching for survivors, trying to make sense of the scene, and talking to witnesses from the apartment building. They wouldn’t get around to searching back here for a while.
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 buttload 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 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.
