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

A backpack hit him square in the chest, the backpack he hadn’t noticed Rachel carrying. “Remember, schematics, roster, financials.”

“What?” He clutched the backpack automatically.

Frustration suffused her face. “Haven’t you been listening?”

The words, he remembered. The butterfly words. Had they been important? Then he realized she was speaking again, these words quick and angry, a hive of bees.

“Three hard drives. Schematics and locations of Organization facilities, a roster of all known shifters, and financial records of all Organization dealings. You have to get them to shifters who can use them to bring the Organization down.”

Tracking devices, probably. So the Organization could locate the largest and most organized shifter opposition.

“Repeat it back to me. Schematics, roster, financials.”

He didn’t for a second believe that was what was in the bag, but he parroted obediently. “Schematics, roster, financials.”

“One more time.”

“Schematics, roster, financials. I’ve got it.”

“Good.” She threw a glance behind her, back into the building where the intercom crackled again with another request for her to report to security. “We’re in Wyoming. Northwest corner of the state. Near Cody.”

Something in him shuddered at the thought. Shit. That had to be nine hundred miles. Nine hundred miles they’d transported him without his knowledge. Like so much luggage.

She pointed to a small black dome in the eave above the door, standard surveillance camera. The building was smaller even than he’d thought. Just a few hundred square feet when he’d always envisioned the Organization facilities as bigger than the Pentagon.

“The cameras should be offline for another six minutes. They only go a hundred feet past the tree line and the motion sensors were deactivated because they kept tripping for local fauna. Get into the forest and you should be clear.” She put a hand over the backpack. “Run, Hawk. Run like hell.”

“So you can hunt me?” He didn’t realize he’d growled the words aloud until he saw the hurt flicker briefly across her face, but she didn’t reply to the jab. All business, his Rachel.

“We’re getting out, Noah. This facility is backed up to a National Park and they won’t want to draw the attention of the rangers, so you should have the advantage. I’ll buy you as much time as I can and be right behind you. By now they’ve figured out I’m not entirely on the straight and narrow. Hopefully they’ll be too distracted by me to come after you right away. When I can get clear of them, I’ll post to the old message boards.”

“You expect me to believe you would sacrifice yourself for me? After everything you did to me?”

Irritation flashed in her warm chocolate eyes. “It was never about
you
,” she snapped. “None of it. Now go.” She slipped off her watch and grabbed his wrist, putting it on him. “Four minutes.” She placed a hand over the backpack he still held to his chest, almost as if it was a child she was praying over. “Make it count, Noah.”

She went up on her toes so quickly he didn’t have time to react before her lips were pressed, soft and sweet, to his. He jerked away, tempted to spit out the taste of her, but she was already whirling, bolting back inside, the door clanging heavily shut as she left him there, quite literally holding the bag.

Adrian cursed.

He knew it was all a trick, all a lie. The Organization bitch would never have released him into the wild. He was probably carrying enough tracking devices to be seen from space—if that even made sense. His brain felt like it was three-quarters mush. Luckily his instincts were still online, and they were urging him to run like hell. Even if he was being used as bait, he could be bait that got the hell away from here. He ran.

Chapter Four

There were certain defining moments in a person’s life, moments that gave you the opportunity to test your true nature and see if you were really the person you thought you were. In a crisis, would you save the day or be a lump of useless, shocky flesh? You never really knew until you were tested.

Rachel had often wondered if she would truly be able to sacrifice herself for others. Or if, when push came to shove, when it was the moment of truth, if she would give in to self-preservation and fight for her own survival instead.

When she’d first discovered that her “patients” at the Organization weren’t there voluntarily, she’d told herself the shifter captives wouldn’t be helped in any way by her disappearance—but she’d still called herself the worst sort of coward because she had let herself be cowed by the Organization’s thinly veiled threats.

She knew now that her bosses hadn’t been bluffing. She’d had colleagues vanish when they started asking the wrong sorts of questions. The local authorities had never investigated—the Organization selected their personnel carefully. No family attachments, unless they could be exploited as leverage. The preacher and his wife who had adopted and raised Rachel had both passed by the time she was recruited into the less-than-legal side of the Organization.

They were careful. No one would raise a ruckus if a scientist notoriously terrified of flying decided without warning to jet off to Mozambique to pursue a research grant. There was always a barely plausible story to explain the disappearance, and anyone else within the Organization who was thinking rebellious thoughts heard the warning in the faulty explanations.
You could be next.

In the Organization there were two options—toe the line and advance, or rebel and vanish. So Rachel had toed the line, and told herself it was for the best, that through her treatment she was at least better for the shifters than some other less humane doctor might be. She told herself there was nothing she could do.

Until God had seen fit to give her an opportunity to prove her true mettle again.

It had been a clerical error. A glitch.
A sign.

The shifter on her table had been very much alive, but somehow the file had been marked deceased. There were no additional transfer orders, no one who was expecting to receive this shifter for the next round of tests because as far as the system was concerned, the slim, dark-haired wolf was dead.

It had been convenient that the video surveillance systems had been knocked out in a lightning strike the day before, impulse to dress the woman in a spare pair of her scrubs, and pure luck that the guard at the gate hadn’t looked under the blanket in the backseat of Rachel’s car. That first time had been completely unplanned and her heart had been thundering out of her chest the entire time, but she’d done it. She’d saved a life. She’d proven that she wasn’t only a coward. She could be more.

So she’d begun planning and recruiting. Finding those who seemed dissatisfied within the Organization and cautiously approaching them. Computer techs, other doctors, even the occasional—rare—guard. They’d developed a system that wasn’t without risk, but it had succeeded. Five times. Ten. Rachel had been heady with the victory, but she’d still worried about what was happening to the shifters after she set them loose into the world. Some of them were so weak, so damaged. What was to say they wouldn’t be captured again?

It was one of the escapees—a young lynx with eyes too old for his face—who had given her the contact information for a shifter who could help them from the outside. Forged identities. Safe houses. Picking up where her operation left off.

Noah. Her hawk.

They’d worked together for years before they’d met, freeing over sixty shifters before that night in the woods when he’d stepped out of the shadows and straight into her heart.

Betraying him had been another of those defining moments. She could still feel the syringe in her hand. The wrongness of it. He’d had his back to her, gun in hand, ready to defend her with his life, if that was what it took, and she’d done it. Taken him down. Handed him over.

She told herself it was for the greater good. A thousand times she’d told herself that, but it still felt like a lie, even if she knew it to be the unvarnished truth.

The Organization had already known about him when they approached her to acquire him. They’d known that she was seeing him, but not that Rachel was involved in the shifter underground or even the extent of the Hawk’s involvement, as they called him. If they’d kept digging, it would have compromised the entire operation and endangered the lives of all the shifters they’d whisked to freedom, not to mention those they had yet to free.

All those lives had meant sacrificing one, so she’d done it. And hated herself every day since.

But today she got to make amends.

Madison’s voice crackled over the intercom again, demanding Rachel report to security for the third time, an edge of impatience creeping into her sedate intercom voice.

Sorry, Maddie. A little busy at the moment.

Rachel swiped her card over the access panel for the pharmacy storage, expelling a little gasp of relief when the door beeped and glided open. At least her card was still working; they hadn’t gone on full lockdown yet.

She made quick work of grabbing the vials she needed, shoving them into her pockets and filling syringes on the run as she trotted down the hall to the cells. The first cell door beeped and whooshed open, revealing a muscular Caucasian man with dark-hair just going to gray, unconscious and strapped to the bed. Rachel shot the Wake-Up Juice into his IV, jammed a chair in the doorway to keep the door propped open, and ran to the next cell. Hopefully he could get himself free of his own restraints because she didn’t have time to untie him.

Three cells later—one empty, one with a wiry African-American female and one with a slight Asian male who looked even more emaciated than Noah had—Rachel heard a distinctly feline roar from the first cell and changed direction, diving into the empty cell and pressing herself against the wall. She wasn’t wearing a lab coat—nothing to identify her as an Organization doc other than the fact that she didn’t smell like a shifter, but somehow she didn’t think the enraged cat was going to ask questions or care that she was the one who had freed him.

With a scrabble of claws against linoleum, the cat took off down the hall, a streak of tawny fur past the open doorway. As soon as the coast was clear, Rachel darted out of her hiding place and ran as fast as she could in the opposite direction—back toward the door where she’d left Noah.

How many minutes had it been? It must have been more than four, so why weren’t the alarms—?

As if on cue, the intercom squawked and a deafening siren began to wail, the agonizing screeches reverberating off the walls. A headache immediately blossomed between her temples—and she didn’t even have a shifter’s sensitive hearing.

She reached the door, swiping her card over the access panel, but the light stayed stubbornly red. She swiped again, frantically, but it was no use. Lockdown.

Rachel spun, pressing her shoulder blades back against the door. What now?

Her thoughts began to drift. Floating. Flying.
Noah is clear.
He had to be. If he’d gotten away, it would all be worth it.

The African-American girl staggered out of her cell and collapsed, fingertips twitching.

At the end of the hall, a large predatory cat snarled. The cougar.
Puma Concolor
. No, that wasn’t right, that was the species name for the feline. This was a shifter. A much more dangerous beast.

I’m going to die.
The thought hovered without a tether in her mind.

The cat lunged forward, his steps strangely awkward and clumsy.

Gas, she realized in that same tetherless, moorless way. Of course the guards would gas them. You don’t try to take a cougar in hand-to-hand combat. Or a hawk. Her knees buckled and she staggered, falling to all fours. The linoleum was chilled beneath her palms, gritty with tiny particles of dirt the janitors had missed.

The cat continued to rush toward her—probably less affected by the gas thanks to the Wake-Up Juice she’d injected him with.

Her dizzy thoughts spun, as if stirred by a lazy finger. She really should have expected this. There was a sort of justice in it. A symmetry.

She should probably be upset about this, she thought vaguely as her arms gave out and her cheek took up residence between her palms on the dirty floor. If the cougar didn’t kill her, the Organization would. She’d betrayed them and her employers did not take that sort of thing lightly.

At least Noah had gotten away. He’d taken the hard drives. The shifters had a shot now. They would know what they were up against. With the roster they could protect themselves, with the schematics they could fight back, and with the financials they could attack the head of the beast, go right to the source.

She really should be sad that she wasn’t going to be alive to see it, but as her thoughts finally fogged to match the lethargy swamping the rest of her body, she found herself…relieved.

She was done. Done with the Organization. Done with the intrigue. Done doing the wrong thing in the name of the right thing. Done pretending obedience and living in an isolation bubble where she couldn’t allow herself to confide in anyone or care about anyone because they would only become a liability. Only one thought disrupted the perfect relief, one fear as she realized these might be the last conscious moments of her life.

Had she been forgiven?

Sure, she’d explained, she apologized, but how much of what she’d said while she was untying him had he been able to process? She thought of them as still friends, still allies, she’d seen them as partners in one last grand rescue…

She still loved him.

More the fool her.

The cat was impossibly close now, teeth and claws at the ready. Moment of truth…

The cat leapt over her and threw himself against the barred door, claws scrabbling, but he had no more luck than she had. Trapped.

The alarm cut out with an aborted squawk, leaving her ears ringing with the silence. The cougar rumbled queasily and thudded to the ground, his hindquarters landing on her legs, the substantial weight pinning them down—not that she would have been able to move anyway. Her body was beyond her control. She clung to consciousness by her fingernails—and in spite of her desperate grasp it was flaking off and peeling away.

Footsteps rushed down the hall. Faces in gas masks loomed above her. Madison. She couldn’t see the features, but she knew one of them was Madison.

“Not smart, Dr. Russell,” the woman scolded, a malicious smile in her voice.

No. Perhaps she hadn’t been smart today. But she’d done right. She’d made amends. Noah was free.

Rachel’s lips curved in a smile as her vision went dark and the mortal world fell away.

Whatever happened next, Noah was free.