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Gideon kept talking, advising Renata of Je
“Cut the power,” Brock said. “You have to cut the power to the fence.”
Gideon swiveled a dubious look on him. “And let her waltz right off the property? No can do, my man.”
Brock knew the warrior was right. He knew the smartest, best thing to do for the Order was to ensure that the human woman stayed contained within the compound. But the thought of Je
He glanced at the security camera feed and saw Je
“Gideon,” he growled, as Je
Brock didn’t wait for the other warrior to comply. He stalked over and slammed his hand down on the control panel. Lights blinked on, and a persistent beeping kicked up in warning of the disabled power grid.
A long silence filled the room.
“I see her.” Renata’s voice came over the speaker in the lab. “I’m right behind her.”
They watched on-screen as Nikolai’s mate sped on foot in the direction of Je
Finally, Renata spoke, but the curse she hissed into her mouthpiece wasn’t what anyone in the room had hoped to hear. “Goddamn it. No …”
Brock’s veins went cold with dread. “What’s happened?”
“Talk to me,” Gideon said. “What’s going on, Renata?”
“Too late,” she replied, her voice oddly wooden. “I was too late—she got away. She’s gone.”
Gideon leaned in, cocking his head toward Brock. “She climbed the bloody fence, didn’t she?”
“Climbed it?” Renata’s answering laugh was more of a sharp exhalation. “No, she didn’t climb it. She … ah, shit. Believe it or not, I just watched her jump over it.”
CHAPTER
Four
The road hummed beneath Je
How she’d managed to get off the compound’s property was a blur. Her head was still swimming with the disturbing revelations of the past few hours, and her senses had been on overdrive from the moment she made the decision to attempt escape. Even now, sights and sounds and motion—every bit of sensory input—seemed to be flying at her in a chaotic blur.
Up in front of the van, the driver and his passenger chattered animatedly in a thick, Slavic-sounding foreign language. They had known enough English to agree to take her into the city when she’d flagged them down on the street outside the estate grounds, and at the moment that had been good enough for her. Except now that they had gone a few miles, she couldn’t help but notice they had stopped smiling at her and trying to talk to her in broken English.
Now the driver cast furtive glances at her in the rearview mirror, and she didn’t like the sound of the low-voiced, chuckling exchanges the two men shared as she bounced around in back of the darkened van.
“How far to downtown?” she asked, holding on to a crate of hard salami as the van took a left through a caution light. Her stomach pitched with the motion, her ears ringing, head pounding. She squinted through the windshield at the front of the vehicle as it headed toward the late-afternoon glow of the city in the distance. “The bus station, yes? That’s where you said you’d take me. How far is it?”
For a second, she wondered if either of them could hear her over the loud rumble of the van’s engine as the driver gave it more gas. The sound seemed deafening to her. But then the passenger pivoted around and said something to her in his own language.
Something that seemed to amuse his lead-footed friend behind the wheel.
A knot of dread formed in Je
She spoke with the no-bullshit edge that came to her like second nature, even all these years since she’d been in uniform. But if the pair of jokers up front picked up on her tone or what she was telling them, they didn’t seem moved to believe her.
“Police?” The driver chuckled as he looked over at his companion. “Nassi, nuk duken si ajo e policisë për ju?”
“No,” the one apparently named Nassi replied, shaking his head, thin lips pulling back from crooked teeth. His thick-browed gaze traveled in a slow crawl over Je
She looks like a tasty piece of ass to me.
Je
“I don’t know about you, Gresa, my friend, but I could do with a bit of prime American tail,” Nassi added, so confident that his foreign speech would slip right past her, he had the balls to look Je
“Sounds good to me.” Gresa laughed and dropped his foot down on the gas pedal, sending the delivery van speeding under a highway overpass and into the throng of busy traffic.
Oh, God.
Je
The sudden jolt of acceleration threw her back on her ass. She scrambled to hold on to the crates around her, knowing her chances of escaping the fast-moving vehicle were nil. If the fall out of the van didn’t kill her, the roaring cars and trucks flying by on both lanes beside them certainly would.
Making everything worse, her head was begi
Was she losing her mind?
After all that she’d been through recently, after all she’d seen and heard, she shouldn’t be surprised if she was cracking up.
And as she sat back, miserable against the crates and cartons, listening to the two men discuss their ideas for her in eager, violent detail, she got the feeling that her sanity wasn’t the only thing at risk right now. Nassi and his friend Gresa had some rather nasty plans for her back at their office. Plans that included knives and chains and soundproof walls so no one would hear her screams, if Je
They were arguing over which of them would get to enjoy her first, as they wheeled the van off the main road and into a ratty section of the city. The pavement narrowed, streetlights growing more sparse the deeper they traveled into what looked to be an industrial area. Warehouses and long, red-brick buildings crowded the street and alleyways.