A grainy video popped up on the middle monitor. It showed a small room, only a bed inside. On the bed sat a woman, her arms wrapped around her shins, her head bent over her knees, wearing a hospital-gown-type of garment. A tray slid under the door with a plate of food and a glass of water. Apprehension rose in my stomach as we all watched her stand, crouch beside the food, and eat.
A heaviness entered my chest. From the way she glanced cautiously at the door every few seconds, it was obvious she was being held against her will and possibly abused. The urge to stop watching overwhelmed me. Deep down I knew something bad was about to happen.
Then it did. She screamed and clutched at her belly as if in pain. She rolled on the floor, kicking her legs. Her body spouted fur, her muscles taking on a different form, until a doe took the place of the woman. Only, this animal didn’t have the same vitality. It lay unmoving.
My heart pounded. I waited for the doe to get up, but she never did. After about a minute of utter stillness, two orderlies came into the room and dragged her out by the hind legs. The video froze on the image of an empty cell, the contents of the tray strewn across the floor.
Bile rose in my throat, the images sinking in. They’d labeled those Test Trials? How many others had experienced the same fate? This could have happened to Walker and Sabrina if they’d been fed a different meal?
Every part of me shook. “Do you recognize this place?” I asked Jolyn, unable to keep the rage out of my tone.
Face pale, her freckles standing out in sharp contrast, she shook her head. “I can’t tell from the one room, but if I had to guess, it was where we were last night, where we got these files. It doesn’t look like the place in Alaska.” She glanced at Alina. “What do you think?”
“Yeah, it could be that warehouse.” Alina focused on me. “As soon as we found the offices, we didn’t go any further, trying to be quick.”
If felt like someone took hold of my chest and squeezed. “What warehouse?”
“We infiltrated one of Emerson’s properties a little way outside Detroit to get these files.”
My heart jolted. Was this the place Walker had warned me about? If that was the case…I glared hard at all three of them. “That was incredibly dangerous.”
They all stared at me with varying degrees of confusion. “You know we were all in the military, right?” Alina asked with her head tipped to the side. “We’re trained soldiers. This isn’t our first rodeo.”
Right. Trained soldiers. But so was Walker, and look what happened to him. Plus, all three of them were human and didn’t have the increased speed and heightened senses of a shifter.
I stared at the empty cell on the screen, now paused and flickering. The anger I’d held for Jolyn yesterday had been completely replaced by fury for the murdered shifter. I ran a hand over my face, trying to wipe away the death of a defenseless woman. I needed to get the word out about this BDX-32 stuff.
What if there were still shifters at the warehouse? They could be dying right this very second.
“I have to talk to Walker, get him to tell Clyborne about this,” I murmured, grabbing my phone out of my back pocket.
All three women straightened like meerkats who’d heard a loud noise.
“Did you say Clyborne?” Alina asked.
“Like, as in Clyborne Inc.?” Marley added.
Finger hovering over Walker’s number, I narrowed my eyes. “What do you know about them?”
“We applied there about a year ago,” Marley replied, a frown pinching her brow. “But never heard back. They didn’t even give us an interview when we’d obviously be kick-ass additions to their crew.”
“I applied a second time and same thing,” Alina said. “Radio silence.”
“What?” Marley turned to her with a jump. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“Well, I thought if I got an interview, then I’d make sure you’d get one too.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. Walker’s whole former team was employed there, all shifters specializing in covert operations. “What do you know about the company?” How far did their knowledge of shifters go?
“They do private security mostly,” Marley said, pulling up Clyborne’s official website on one of the screens. Its blue-and-white-feathered logo took up the center portion of the top banner, the services the company provided underneath, with customer testimonials at the bottom of the page. “Anyone who was anyone in the military got a job there after serving. I’ve only ever heard positive things from the employees: full benefits, pensions, living stipend.”
Alina shivered beside her. “Talking about it gets me all tingly inside.”
I glanced over at Jolyn who’d stayed quiet through her friends’ exchange. “And you? Did you want to work there too?”
She shook her head. “I’ve never been able to look past this job, of bringing my brother down. There’s no way I could work at a place like that when he has so much control over me. And now he’s trying to silence me, so…” Her explanation tapered off.
Marley reached up to place her hand over Jolyn’s. “But once we expose what he’s doing to beasts—”
