“I promise.” Morgan looked at Trevor. “Alina took off a few minutes ago so one of those big, nasty hybrids would chase her.”
Trevor didn’t have to wonder which hybrid it had been. Somehow, things had worked out to put her and Wade in the same room with each other.
Double shit.
“Which way did they go?” he asked.
“Out the door and to the right, toward the back of the complex,” Milan said softly as she checked Morgan’s injuries.
“Call Zarina and tell her to be ready to come onto the complex the second the shooting stops,” Trevor said. “Morgan probably won’t be the only one who needs medical attention.”
Trevor was out of the room and heading for the exit when he heard Boo ask Milan about her mother. The door of the med lab closed behind him before he heard the answer. He shook his head. How the hell did you answer a question like that?
The moment he got outside, he stopped and sniffed the air, trying to pinpoint Alina’s location even as more gunfire came from the gym. Then he heard blaring techno music throbbing through his earpiece, and he stopped worrying about tracking his partner’s scent. He knew exactly where she was.
* * *
Alina ran toward the one place she knew would give her the best chance of surviving a lone encounter with a hybrid—the shoot house she and Trevor had trained in only a few days ago.
She was kind of shocked she’d made it all the way to the training area. She could run fast, but Wade was faster. No doubt he was toying with her, wanting her to think she could get away from him so he could enjoy it that much more when he caught her.
If he wanted to play that game, fine with her. It’d make it easier for her to turn this around on him.
She raced into the shoot house, pausing only long enough to hit every single button on the operation panel, flipping on the pop-up targets, alarms, strobe lights, and even the thumping techno beat Jake had played when he and Jaxson had trained with her and Trevor.
As she moved deeper into the building, she was relieved the place still reeked of animal urine. Wade’s sense of smell might not be as keen as a shifter’s, but it didn’t hurt to make sure her scent was masked.
It was strange moving through the building with the lights flashing and targets popping up all over the place without reacting to them. She was only about three or four rooms into the building when she heard a door slam open. Wade’s angry snarls were so loud, she could hear them over the music. Something told her he was done toying with her.
“You know how I told you it was just business when I took Thorn’s money and set you and your team up?” he yelled.
Crap, he was already in the next room over. She picked up her pace and put a few more turns between them, then took up a position she thought would allow her to get a shot at him.
“It really wasn’t just business,” he continued. “I would have done it for half the money for a chance to put an end to you and your whiny, little team of punks. Getting the chance to kill little Jodi like I did was absolutely the best night of my life. That little bitch squealed like a pig after that, begging me to let her live, telling me she’d do anything I wanted. If I would’ve had the time, I might have taken her up on that. I always thought she had a sweet ass, you know?”
Alina had to bite her tongue to keep from shouting at Wade that he was full of crap. She’d been forced to listen to the entire ordeal on the radio, and it replayed through her head almost every night before she went to sleep. Jodi had never squealed or begged. Her friend had died telling Wade to go to hell.
Knowing all that still didn’t make it any easier to hear. Wade was trying to mess with her head and get her so mad that she would do something stupid, and it was working. She was so furious right then that her knuckles creaked under the pressure she was putting on the grip of her weapon.
She turned and faced the direction Wade would be coming from, ready to put a bullet through his head the moment he walked into the room.
Alina was still looking that way when she heard a footfall behind her. Heart in her throat, she spun around just in time to see Wade lift his gun and point it at her head. Somehow, he’d gotten all the way around the room she was in and had come through the other door.
“I’m prepared to let your partner live,” Wade snarled, his red eyes boring into her. “In exchange for a suitable amount of begging, that is.”
Alina knew she was already dead, and normally, she would never beg him for a drink of water if she was roasting in Hell, but the threat against Trevor made her reconsider. She’d do anything for Trevor, even if it was likely Wade was lying.
She opened her mouth to tell Wade what he wanted to hear when a shot rang out over the heavy thumping music. Wade stumbled back a little and twisted around to see who’d shot him in the shoulder.
Trevor stood in one of the other doorways, his weapon still leveled patiently at Wade, his eyes gold in the near darkness.
Her former CIA teammate snarled and pointed his weapon at her new partner, a man who’d become much more than someone she worked with every day.
Alina pumped two rounds into Wade’s stomach without hesitation, following those up with three more to the chest. The impact slammed him against the wall behind him, but he didn’t fall.
“Those were for Jodi,” she said as she lifted her weapon and aimed it at Wade’s forehead. “And this one is for Rodney and Fred.”
Alina pulled the trigger, killing the man she’d hunted for three years. She watched him tumble to the floor, waiting for some sense of closure—or satisfaction—to hit her. She’d dreamed of this moment every day since the night her teammates had been killed. She should feel something, right?
