Hawk's Revenge: Lone Pine Pride, Book 3 (2 page)

Her partner. Her counterpart on the outside. The man she’d secretly hoped would be so much more.

For all his fierceness, he had only ever been gentle with her—and with the dozens of shifters they had worked together to rescue. Firm. Commanding. But never cruel.

Cruelty was more the Organization’s forte.

It showed in the wasted figure lying on the bed, drugged out of his mind. He’d never been heavy, but now he was so thin his skin seemed stretched over his bones.

She’d promised herself, when she pushed that syringe into his back at the hotel, that she would do everything in her power to make sure he wasn’t hurt in Organization custody, but her access to him had been all but nonexistent. Whatever they’d done to him had wrung him dry and left him a shell of himself.

Her hawk. She hadn’t known what kind of shifter he was—hadn’t known about his fame as
the
Hawk in shifter circles, until the Board of Directors had called her in and insisted she help capture him. Avian shifters were rare to the point of near myth, but it was easy to visualize him as a bird of prey. It fit him. Her Noah. Her hawk.

His eyes were bandaged, but his file indicated it was more to blind him than to protect his eyes. She set the syringe aside and quickly set about removing the gauze. Without the bandages his face seemed even more hollowed out, the shadows darker and more menacing. She let her fingers linger along the line of his stubbled jaw. “What have they done to you?”

Blinking back the moisture in her eyes, she reached purposefully for the IV snaking out of his arm, sliding the backpack off her shoulder and pulling out a syringe. Shifters and humans were physiologically different in thousands of ways, but the pharmaceutical mix in this syringe was as close to an adrenaline shot to the heart as she could get. In the chemical trials it had never failed to wake up a shifter. And it woke them up fighting.

Hopefully he didn’t try to kill her.

She hesitated, fidgeting with the needle.

One syringe had broken his trust. Could this one bring it back?

She couldn’t be sure how quickly she could bring him out of his drugged stupor or how soon he would be able to move, let alone run. So many variables.

So many unanswerable questions. And one louder than all the others.

What if he didn’t cooperate at all?

She’d done so much to destroy his trust he might—quite understandably—refuse to do anything she said. He may try to slice her open with his talons as soon as he was lucid enough to shift. And if he did, could she blame him?

Rachel pushed down the plunger.

Chapter Three

“Noah.”

His eyes flew open, blood surging through his system like fighter planes being launched off an aircraft carrier—though his thoughts still swam with the syrupy fog of the drugs.

The light was brutal, harsh and painfully bright, but when he squinted that vicious light wrapped lovingly around a chocolate brown curl. A curl that fell forward to rest against the sweet curve of a familiar cheek, caressing a face that made his chest ache.

His heart shuddered in his chest.
Rachel.

Adrian wasn’t a beast—his animal side had always been as distantly calculating as the man—but even the civilized hawk had to bite back a growl. If only he could have called his talons, slashed them through his bindings, raked them across that creamy cheek. The fantasy was so vivid he could almost smell the blood.

“Noah, we haven’t much time. I need you to focus for me.”

He was breathing hard, strangely energized even as the world continued to bend and warp like a Dali painting. He locked his eyes on her face, fighting for coherency. Why was he being allowed to see her face now? And why was she calling him Noah again? It had been “Hawk” for months. What was this new game? She’d told him the next time he woke up he’d be in the information extraction department—what strange torture was this?

“Can you hear me, darlin’? We don’t have much time.”

Something about the endearment helped him focus on her eyes. He fucking hated her eyes. The dewy compassion in their dark chocolate depths. The regret. The strain that pulled at their corners. The silent pleading for him to forgive her.

Never in this lifetime, sweetheart.

“Fuck off,” he said—or would have, if his throat hadn’t been stripped raw with rusty nails—the drugs always dried him out. The words were a sick croak.

Rachel ignored him, weaving in and out of his field of vision in a rush of movement that made his world blur and spin. He heard a rattle of medical instruments as she pulled a tray up next to the bed. The snap of a surgical glove. The smell of talcum powder. A scalpel gleamed in her hand.

Ah, and now we get to the torture.

She was talking, but the words seemed to warp into one another. The world did the wave again and he closed his eyes in self-defense, though the sensation of movement didn’t abate. This made the worst hangover he’d ever had feel like a walk in the park, his body a thousand raw nerves.

He felt her touch then, feather light, undoing the strap pinning his shoulders to the bed, cutting away his shirt to expose his chest to the chill, overly air-conditioned air. Her fingertips were cool and sure against the fevered warmth of his skin and his body reacted, even through all the drugs.

Fantasy. That’s what this was. Even after her betrayal, she still infiltrated his dreams with her soft voice and softer hands. She might be a soulless bitch, but she was still the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life. And she kissed like her mouth had been made for him alone. He hadn’t forgotten that.

“I’m sorry. This is going to hurt.”

Yep. Definitely a dream. Everything would be sweet and sultry and erotic until the moment she apologized and stabbed him in the back. His subconscious knew this routine. It was a well-worn path.

Adrian didn’t bother opening his eyes, waiting for the inevitable prick.

But the pain wasn’t the jab of a needle followed by a rush of oblivion.

Something sharp sliced into his upper chest, just beneath his clavicle and he hissed, jerking against his bonds, his eyes flying open only to be assaulted by the angry light and swirling world again.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her face once again floating above him. “We don’t have time to do this the gentle way. I would have done it while you were unconscious, but I didn’t think you’d trust that I’d taken it out unless you saw it yourself.”

Fingers probed into his chest, nails scraping beneath his collar bone and he would have shouted, would have screamed, but his throat was still too raw to form the sounds. Beneath the haze of pain he felt a jerk, a rip, and then her bloody hand rose between them, her expression grimly pleased. “There. Done.”

She stripped the bloody gloves, wrapping them around something that looked like a hearing aid with dangling cords dripping bits of his gore. Had she just pulled that out of his chest?

“I’ll patch you up better when we’re clear, but for now this will help.”

Clear?

Something warm and slimy smeared over the wound, stinging briefly before leaving a soothing numbness in its wake. He fought to hold on to the pain. Numb was bad. Numb was a precursor to oblivion.

He felt her fingertips, so cool against the itchy heat of his skin, tugging on the bindings at his wrists. Loosening them? No, that couldn’t be right. They never moved him unless he was drugged to hell and back. She wouldn’t be untying him.

The restraint on his left wrist came free with a jerk.

She was.

What the hell?

He heard that name again. Noah. She was speaking, he realized. Had been for some time. He tried to tune in to the words floating around his head like butterflies, but for a moment all he could make out was the pitch of her voice, low and urgent, the southern accent more pronounced than ever. He began collecting the butterfly words, putting them together like puzzle pieces.

“…only five guards…small outpost…lazy…believe what the computers tell them…your tracker here…cameras off-line…won’t even look…by the time the ‘upgrade’ program finishes screwing with all the primary surveillance systems we should be long gone. I hope. But with Madison here…”

His right wrist released and dropped limply to the mattress. Through that same distant, shifting, butterfly-puzzle awareness, he felt her move to the foot of the bed and start on his ankles. “Can you walk? You have to walk. Or shift. If you can fly—dang it!” She hissed and he caught a flash of red before she shoved her finger into her mouth, sucking on the wound in a way that reminded him more of a little girl than a genius doctor. Her hands were back on his bindings almost instantly, though he saw lines of pain on her face—her face seemed to be the only fixed point in the Dali painting of his world. He felt a drop of moisture soak into the sock on his ankle, the fabric sticking to his sensitized skin. Was she bleeding?

“Can you sit up at all? How are you feeling? Dizzy? Nauseated?”

He felt like his mind had been put in a blender and someone had hit puree, but he managed to lever his upper body a couple inches off the bed, the effort of it pathetically intense. Then he saw her hands.

The fingernail on her right forefinger was bent back at a sixty degree angle, detached from the nail bed and bleeding a steady red stream onto the crisp white sheets, but she kept working steadily at his bindings using all her other fingers.

She freed the ankle strap with a soft sound of triumph. “Can you get the last one?” She started away from the bed, but he just looked at his hands—confused to find them free—and she made a low, impatient noise and returned to yank at the last cuff.

“This is taking too much time,” she murmured. “Madison probably already suspects me. For all I know, the Board could have dispatched a team as soon as my badge was scanned at the gate.” He had the feeling she was talking for her own benefit as much as his. Nervous chatter. Some people were like that during an op.

Was this an op?

Where had that thought come from? This wasn’t an op. It was a fantasy. Just a fucking weird one where his chest hurt like hell from where she’d cut something out of it and she’d accidentally ripped one of her fingernails off trying to free him. Not his usual brand of fantasy, but the subconscious worked in mysterious ways.

“We need you off the grounds before the surveillance upgrade decoy finishes running. If they suspect anything and hit the alarm, even my badge won’t get us out of the exterior doors—they only open from the outside during lockdown and then only if your clearance is higher than mine. But if we can— There!” She straightened, his last bindings falling away. “Can you stand?”

She reached for his arms, and he flinched back, crossing his arms over his chest. A flash of hurt was quickly masked on her face. “I’m helping you,” she said, low and calm. “We’re escaping. You and me. I know you have no reason to trust me right now, but why would I lie about this?”

Why? A thousand whys instantly jumped into his head—not butterfly puzzle pieces but a hive of angry bees.

To fuck with him. To trick him into revealing something. To trick him into shifting so they could observe it. Hell, he wouldn’t put it past the Organization to actually let him go so they could follow him and use him to capture other shifters.

Rachel must have seen his doubt. Her expression hardened. “I’m not lying, Noah. Hawk. Whatever you want me to call you. I’m sorry about what happened before—more sorry than you can know—but it was for the greater good. I hoped you would understand that.” She shook her head. “We don’t have time for begging forgiveness right now. They’ve begun to suspect me. You’re my last extraction. Please just let me help you.”

She reached for him again and this time he let her touch him, let her hands close around his upper arms and guide him to the edge of the bed where he tried to put weight on legs as wobbly as a newborn fawn. His stomach pitched violently and he cursed under his breath, digging deep, dredging up all his will and every last reserve of shifter strength and it was barely enough to get him vertical.

She muttered something and dove into the backpack at her feet. She straightened with a syringe in her hand and Adrian jerked back so fast he collapsed back onto the bed.

“It’s energy!” She raised both hands like he’d told her to stick ’em up. “Artificial strength. You’ll feel like Superman for the next couple hours and then you’ll crash harder than ever, but we have to get out of here. Understand?”

“No drugs,” he growled in his raked-over-glass voice, swallowing hard to keep his stomach from sending its contents up to visit with his tonsils.

“You can’t run. You can barely stand and we don’t have time to wait for you to recover. It’s this or a lifetime in Organization custody and that life sentence might be pretty darn short since they were planning to transfer you to the torture division.”

“No drugs.” He thought he managed to say the words aloud, but it was hard to tell—even her face wasn’t steady anymore, dancing like a fucking Cheshire cat’s.

She sighed. “You can hate me later.” She moved fast—it couldn’t have been shifter fast, he knew she was only human, but it seemed shifter-fast to his muddled senses. The syringe was needle-deep in his thigh before he could blink and then warmth was slithering through his body on a strange, invigorating tide.

“I already hate you,” he tried to say. But it was working.

Strength. Fuck. She hadn’t been kidding. This stuff was
incredible
. It did almost nothing to clear the cobwebs from his mind, but damn if his body didn’t feel like it was puffing up like Captain freaking America. His stomach settled and the quaking left his legs. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see his muscles visibly swelling, but when he looked down he was still the same wrecked, shriveled bag of bones.

“Put these on.” He recognized the light-weight sweats that she tossed at him from the corner cabinet. They were standard “exercise” wear for the captives during endurance experiments.

He was tempted to throw them back at her, but he really was starting to feel like Superman. If he could overpower her, perhaps he really could escape. And if it really was September, he was going to need something warmer than a bloody half-shredded T-shirt when he did.

Adrian quickly changed, not giving a thought for modesty. Dr. Russell blushed and averted her eyes and he snorted as he pulled on the sweats. “Nothing you haven’t seen already, sweetheart.”

“Hurry up,” she said, making a point of checking her watch rather than looking at him. “We have sixteen minutes left to get clear of the building.”

“Let’s go then.” He crowded up behind her. He’d never been in the habit of using his height to intimidate, but he found he loved the way she flinched when he towered over her.

She darted toward the door, swiping her access card and tapping a number sequence into the panel until it beeped and clicked open. She silently held up a finger and he stayed back, stayed quiet. He may not trust her any farther than his atrophied muscles could throw her, but he’d ride this out and see how far it would take him. Whether she was really rescuing him or just playing at it to mind-fuck him, it didn’t do him any good to balk now. So he played along.

She poked her head out into the hallway, then opened the door all the way, nodding to him to follow her as she darted into the hall. He stayed on her six, the instincts of a lifetime in special ops making his fingers itch for a weapon even as he hurried silently in her wake.

The facility wasn’t large, he quickly realized. Two short hallways, two quick turns, and they were at a door marked
EXIT
in bold red letters.

The intercom crackled. “Dr. Russell, please report to security. Dr. Russell to security.”

Rachel stiffened, sucking in a sharp breath at the sound of the impersonal female monotone floating through the hallway and all of Adrian’s doubts coalesced into an angry knot of certainty.

Another trick. That’s all this was. Another fucking game. He didn’t know why he’d believed, even for a second, that Rachel might be helping him. That he might actually be able to get free of this place. He longed again for his missing talons, for blood dripping from them.

He wouldn’t go back to the cell. He’d make them hunt him through the short white corridors of the outpost like a rat in a maze first.

Focusing his eyes was still a challenge, but he managed to home in on her face, saw the decision form, the determination settle there. She pivoted, swiped her card over the panel next to the exterior door and let out a soft sigh of relief when the door beeped twice and popped open.

She grabbed him by the shoulder and shoved him through the opening into the shadow of the building. Disorientation shuddered through him. Sunlight. He didn’t know why he’d been so sure it was night, but the sunlight filtered through the trees and cool breeze rode the air. A fall breeze. Jesus, he really had lost months in there. The trees were pines, the slope rising behind the building steep enough to qualify as a mountain. He had to be three hundred miles from the city where he’d been taken, but for all he knew it was closer to two thousand.
Dorothy, we aren’t in Vegas anymore.