Hawk's Revenge: Lone Pine Pride, Book 3 Page 8

  This must be what a hangover felt like. She’d always been careful not to overindulge in the past—initially because she didn’t want to disappoint her parents and in recent years because losing control while the Organization was watching her was a dangerous business. But this definitely felt like hangovers she’d read about. Throbbing head. Achy muscles. A heavy reluctance to open her eyes.

  And a chain around her ankle.

  Rachel frowned, shifting again, and again heard the clink of metal and felt the weight of it dragging at her leg. That opened her eyes in a hurry.

  She sat up, flinging off the light blanket that had covered her and groping for her ankle. This time instead of the detonator that had been her constant companion for the last weeks, her fingers met cold metal. The two-inch band of silver was smooth and shiny. New, by the look of it. Loose enough not to chafe, but snug enough that she’d have to break several bones in her foot to get it out. The chain was long and slack, trailing off the bed and across the floor.

  She wore the same clothing she’d had on when they captured her at the lab—slacks and a turquoise long-sleeve button-down blouse that was now hopelessly wrinkled. Her shoes and socks were nowhere in sight and a bandage stretched over the ball of her left foot. Rachel frowned, wiggling her bare feet and felt a cut stretch and pull on the bottom of her foot, though there was little pain. Had they put a tracker in her? Taken one out?

  It wouldn’t surprise her if the Organization had tagged her from day one. Perhaps it was for the best that she hadn’t been able to escape with Noah. She may have led the Organization right to them.

  He was nowhere in sight, her hawk. He’d left her, alone in a cabin of some kind. The only light was courtesy of a weakly flickering camp lantern dangling from a hook near the door and the moonlight sneaking through holes in the threadbare curtains, but it was enough to see the rustic timbers crisscrossing on the ceiling and the rough-hewn furnishings that looked like they could have been pulled out of a Jack London novel.

  The long snake of a chain was secured to a black pot-bellied stove in one corner, giving her full play of the single ten-by-twelve room and access to a smaller-than-standard door—which she desperately hoped led to a bathroom, considering the pressure on her bladder.

  She scrambled out of the bed, pulling the chain behind her, and rushed to make use of the facilities—which were, thank heavens, of the modern variety and not a latrine to match the rest of the backwoods décor. Her body’s needs seen to, she washed up and splashed water on her face to banish the last of the drug-induced lethargy. There was no mirror, but she didn’t need one to know she probably looked like something the dog had been keeping under the porch. Her mama would be horrified by her lack of gentility, but Rachel didn’t have time for vanity.

  She quickly took stock of her surroundings—the bathroom was unextraordinary. Narrow shower, toilet and tiny pedestal sink all crammed into a space smaller than most closets. There was toilet paper and a cake of brittle soap beside the faucet, but otherwise no toiletries to speak of. Certainly nothing that could be used as a weapon or a tool to help her escape. Not that she was planning an escape—but it certainly spoke to Noah’s frame of mind that he hadn’t even left so much as a toothbrush for her to use against him.

  The main room was just as bare. There was a small kitchenette—but the cupboards were empty. Not even a box of Cheerios to reward her for her efforts. The cooler held only bottled water and, realizing how dry her throat was, she snagged one and popped the seal, drinking half of it as she studied the rest of the room. A slab of a table with two heavy-looking chairs, a bed that was more glorified futon than proper mattress, a sturdy footlocker with a massive padlock at the foot of the bed, and, of course, the pot-bellied stove, squatting beside a pile of firewood.

  She nudged one of the chairs out from the table and perched on it, once again scanning her limited range. She couldn’t quite reach the windows or the largest door, the one she suspected must lead outside. She could be two feet from another building or two hundred miles and she wouldn’t know it.

  Was this a shifter commune? Or some remote cabin where they kept their prisoners who could not be trusted on their land?

  Night had fallen, but her sense of time was all muddled. She must have lost at least nine hours, but for all she knew she’d been drugged for days. The Organization had been known to move shifters around the world while they were unconscious. She couldn’t put it past the shifters to have done the same to her. Heck, she hadn’t even been a hundred percent sure where she was before Noah captured her at the lab, so figuring out how far she’d been taken was pretty much a lost cause.

  Noah…why wasn’t he here? It seemed wrong that they would just leave her alone, unsupervised. Though the chain around her ankle was enough to keep her from going anywhere. She wasn’t a super-spy. Not like him.

  Where the hell was he? Didn’t he want to see her? He hadn’t kissed her like a man who was going to leave her to slowly starve to death in the woods.

  The shifters wouldn’t kill her. There was no point in it. She wouldn’t believe Noah could be so vengeful. And he was still Noah beneath the angry layers of the Hawk. She was convinced of it.

  This could be a test to see if she would try to escape. But he couldn’t know her so little that he thought she would run.

  Though really, how well did they know one another? They’d worked together for years, courted for a few weeks, and then she’d had him imprisoned and experimented on before helping him escape and becoming a prisoner herself. Theirs wasn’t exactly the kind of relationship that had been conducive to sharing soul secrets. Not that she ought to be thinking in terms of relationships. She bet he wasn’t.

  But what was he thinking? If she could just see him, just look in his eyes while she asked him what they had planned for her—

  The door opened as if in response to her half-thought prayer, and there he was. A tall, thin silhouette with a slightly stooped posture. If he’d cultivated the slouch to be less threatening, it failed abysmally. He still radiated that fierce intensity, yellow eyes seeming to glow in the dark shadows of his face.

  “Noah.” The name slipped out on a whisper, absent her intent. She stood, hovering uncertainly behind the table.

  He stepped over the threshold, hooked the door with his foot to flick it shut and dropped a heavy bag to the floor with a thud before turning those gleaming yellow eyes on her again. “Don’t call me that.”

  Right. Of course he wouldn’t want to be reminded that she’d helped him build his ark of shifters, escaping two by two. She was the enemy. How dare she forget? “What do you want me to call you? Master? Sir?”

  “Adrian,” he snapped, cutting her off.

  She caught her breath, shocked. “Is that your name? Your real name?”

  He smiled, and it wasn’t friendly. “No point hiding it from you now. I’m going to personally make sure you’re never in a position to tell any of your Organization buddies about me.”

  She clenched her teeth, biting back her irritation. Do not argue with your jailer. “I don’t have Organization buddies,” she said, ignoring her own counsel, one hand fisting where it rested on the table.

  “No? Then it won’t bother you to know we leveled that building and everyone who was still inside it?”

  “Of course it will bother me. Death is always a loss—”

  “Not all death.” His face, always sharp and angular, seemed even more jagged with the ferocity of his expression as he stalked closer, looming over her in a way that made her grateful for the table between them. She was tempted to sink back into the chair, but forced some starch into her spine.

  Her emotions were a mess—so grateful to be here with him, away from the Organization, and so frustrated with the injustice of the way she’d been shackled and treated like just another Organization villain. Injustice won. “Have you forgotten everything I did for the
shifters for the last four years?”

  “I haven’t forgotten anything.” He propped his fists on the wood, looming closer. She fought the urge to fall back.

  “You have to know I didn’t have a choice. When I sedated you at the hotel—”

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” he snapped, shoulders stiffening.

  “The schematics worked, didn’t they? I got you out. I got you information that could take down the Organization. I did that.”

  “So you’re the victim here, are you, Doc?”

  “I may not be a victim, but I’m not the only villain in the room, Adrian.”

  He jerked at the sound of his name and straightened, pivoting away from the table and storming to the kitchenette—though it was probably an unsatisfying distance to storm off, since the room was small enough he made the stove in two steps.

  She swallowed thickly, able to get a full breath now that he’d stopped eating up all the oxygen in the room with his proximity. She studied the lines of tension in his back. He’d grown strong again since his escape and there were muscles there again, where once he had been skin and ridges of bone. Remembering the way his body had been all but concave when she found him in the labs, her irritation retreated, leaving only a wash of guilt. She sank uneasily back into the chair, gripping the edges of the seat.

  “Where are we?” she asked tentatively.

  He didn’t turn, but she saw his fingers tracing the lines of the sink, as if remembering the shape of it would sooth him somehow. “Does it matter?”

  “As long as we’re far away from the Organization, no. It doesn’t.” She wanted to rise, to go to him, but something about his rigid posture stopped her. She didn’t know how to deal with this version of him. “Thank you for getting me out of there.”

  He did turn then, frowning. He studied her for so long she grew self-conscious, smoothing her hair and tucking the stray strands behind her ears. He’d once told her how much he loved her hair, twirling it around his long fingertips and using it to tug her close, his lips just teasing hers on the edge of a kiss.

  It had been a risk, being with him, but desire had made her reckless, the danger adding a delicious tension…or maybe that was just him. The world was always sharper and brighter in his arms.

  “I can’t make you out, Dr. Russell,” he said finally, folding his arms.

  “Ask me anything. I won’t lie.”

  And for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, the words were wholly true.

  She didn’t have to lie. She didn’t have to smile for her bosses while her stomach churned at what they were doing. She didn’t have to feel her heart beating out of her chest as she smuggled out a shifter, praying desperately that all the pieces were in place and all the codes she’d been given were still active.

  No one was going to catch her now. Noah—Adrian—wouldn’t kill her if she failed to cooperate. The shifters had an honor the Organization had never possessed. It was why they were at such a disadvantage in the silent war.

  For the first time in an age—hell, maybe ever—Rachel was free to tell the truth. To be herself. It had been so long, she wasn’t entirely sure she remembered who that was anymore, but she was finally free to find out.

  Free.

  The chain around her ankle was tangible irony, but it couldn’t diminish the feeling that rose up in her chest and filled her eyes with tears.

  Adrian’s raptor gaze immediately locked on the moisture and his frown darkened. “Crying won’t gain you anything.”

  “It’s not a ploy,” she said, her tone sharpened by his lack of trust. “I’m just relieved.”

  “Relieved,” he repeated dubiously.

  “I don’t have to lie anymore.”

  “All right.” He crossed back to the table, pulled out one of the heavy chairs and spun it on one leg like it weighed nothing more than a feather. Resettling it with the back braced against the table, he straddled it and braced his forearms across the back. His yellow eyes gleamed. “Tell me all this truth of yours then.”

  “All of it?”

  “Backing out already?”

  She wet her lips, mind racing. This was a test. She’d always been good at tests. Her emotions would go quiet, her mind calm and sharp, and she’d see the answers rising out of her memory, clear as day. But this wasn’t like other tests. She had a feeling he wouldn’t let her retake this one if she failed to give him the right answers.

  There were thousands of truths she’d been swallowing over the last four years, but only one that seemed to matter. One regret that swallowed everything else. “I would never have betrayed you if there was any other choice that would have saved your life.”

  His eyes went distant. Yellow always seemed such a bright warm color; she’d never known it could be so icy cold. “Is that so? And the way you were with me, they made you do that?”

  “No, Adrian. Everything between us was real. They came to me, when we’d been seeing one another for a few weeks, called me before the Board of Directors.” She remembered the terror of that meeting. The way her heart had beat so fast and hard she’d been grateful there were no shifters in the room to hear the blatant tell. Mr. Washington, the Chairman of the Board, had watched her with his eerily pale gray eyes, unblinking as he slid photos across the table. Photos of her with Noah. “They’d been following us. They knew who you were, but they didn’t know what we were doing. The shifters we’d helped escaped were still safe from Organization hunters. They didn’t suspect me yet. They said if I helped them acquire you, it would prove my loyalty.”

  “So you proved it.”

  “What else was I supposed to do?” She started to reach for him, but pulled her hands back when his expression darkened, knotting her fingers at the edge of the table. “They knew who you were already. They would have kept hunting until they acquired you, one way or another, and if I tipped you off they would have known instantly that I wasn’t to be trusted. Everything I’d done in the last three years would have been called into question and they might have uncovered the entire operation. At least this way, I was still in a power position in the Organization. I was able to get more shifters out and start working out an exit strategy for both of us.”

  That was what she’d told herself, over and over again, as she’d gone to meet him that night, knowing what she would have to do.

  She’d told herself he knew the dangers as well as she. Some part of her had been expecting discovery for weeks, waiting for the other shoe to drop. And then it had—like a ton of bricks on her chest, making it hard to breathe normally.

  She was good under pressure—quick on her feet. If she hadn’t been able to think with adrenaline rampaging through her system, she would never have survived as long as she had—but that day as Mr. Washington had interrogated her, her brain had short circuited and she’d known only fear. Luckily, the illusion of cooperation had been her only play for so long it was second nature. They’d thought she was just a gullible female, a pretty face with an advanced degree being taken in by a shifter con artist. How long have you been seeing this man, Dr. Russell? Have you told him anything about the Organization? When will you be seeing him again? Think of this as an opportunity for advancement, Dr. Russell. A chance to prove your loyalty. Of course, we want to believe you’re loyal. You’re the best we have at what you do. That’s why you’re still with us, my dear.

  That subtle emphasis on with us. That thinly veiled threat…

  Adrian shook his head, eyes dark and unforgiving. “You should have come to me. Told me what they were asking of you. I could have—”

  “What? Waved your magic wand and made it all better? They were monitoring me. I couldn’t risk sending a message to you. Too many lives were at stake.” She shook her head, brushing furiously at the frustrated tears that threatened her eyes. “And even then, even knowing it was the best move to turn you over to the
m, I still almost didn’t do it. That night, I tried to warn you, tried to get you to fly away, but you wouldn’t listen.”

  “So it’s my fault you stabbed me full of sedatives and let them have me?”

  “I didn’t say that.” She scrubbed at her face, not even wanting to think of how wretched and puffy she must look right now. So much for vanity. “I swore to myself that I would do everything in my power to protect you while you were in Organization custody and I kick myself every day for not being able to watch over you better.”

  He went rigid, eyes blazing. “That’s what you call it? Watching over me?”

  “I know I failed you.”

  “Failed me?” he parroted incredulously, lurching up and away from the table.

  She could hardly blame him. “Maybe I made the wrong call, maybe we should have run—but we wouldn’t have those schematics now if I had. We wouldn’t have their rosters or their financials. We wouldn’t be able to mount a successful offensive against them—like you were always talking about. And there are over seventy shifters free today who would still be in Organization custody if I’d run then. Children, Adrian. So forgive me if I took a gamble that hurt you in the name of the greater good. I shouldn’t have made the choice for you, but would you honestly have wanted me to make a different one?”

  His eyes narrowed as he stood over her, his firm jaw locked. She felt his gaze like a touch—on her shaking hands, her breasts as they rose with each gasped breath, the tears that still clung to her lashes.

  “You’re very good.” It didn’t sound like a compliment.

  Rachel huffed out a sigh and looked away from him, that sense of frustrated persecution rising again. If she even had the right to feel persecuted after everything she’d done to him. She’d tried to balance the scales with everything she’d done for him, but it may never be enough.

  Did he hate her now? She wanted to ask but was afraid to hear the answer. Afraid she already knew.