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“Hopefully, we can find Sister Margaret and she can help us figure that out,” Dylan said.
“Do we have any way to contact her?” Renata asked.
Dylan’s excitement dimmed a bit. “Unfortunately, we can’t even be sure she’s still alive. My mom’s friend said she would be in her eighties by now. The only good news for us is that the sister’s convent was based in Boston, so there’s a chance she could be local. All we have to go on right now is her social security number.”
“Give it to Gideon,” Sava
“My thought exactly,” Dylan replied with a grin.
Je
And she was better off not letting herself get entangled in any of this, she reminded herself sternly, as Dylan picked up the phone next to her computer workstation and called the tech lab.
A few moments later, both Gideon and Rio arrived in the war room. The two warriors received a quick summary of what Dylan had uncovered. Before she’d even finished explaining, Gideon seated himself at the computer and got busy.
Je
“Sister Margaret Mary Howland, alive and well, according to the Social Security Administration,” he a
Dylan gri
“I aim to please.” He sprang out of the chair and grabbed Sava
“I’m dazzled,” she replied drolly, laughing even as she slapped playfully at his shoulder.
He gri
“Hah! You wish,” Sava
“Too bad we’re not having this same luck getting a bead on TerraGlobal,” Rio said, his arm wrapping around Dylan’s shoulders in what seemed to be an instinctively intimate move.
Renata frowned. “Still no luck there, eh?”
“Not much,” Gideon interjected. He must have seen Je
Alex jumped in next. “You remember that mining company that opened shop outside Harmony a few months back—Coldstream Mining?” At Je
“We were able to trace the mining company back to TerraGlobal,” Rio added. “But that’s about as far as we’ve been able to get. We know TerraGlobal has lots of layers. It’s just taking too damn long for us to peel them away. Meanwhile, Dragos digs himself in deeper, every minute farther out of our reach.”
“You’ll get him,” Je
“Yeah,” Rio replied, his scarred face drawn tight with determination as he nodded in agreement and glanced down into Dylan’s eyes. “One day, we are going to get that son of a bitch. He’s going to pay for everything he’s done.”
Under his strong arm, Dylan smiled sadly. She burrowed into his embrace, trying unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn.
“Come on,” he said, brushing some of her loose red waves out of her eyes. “You’ve been putting in a lot of hours on all of this. Now I’m taking you to bed.”
“Not a bad idea,” Renata said. “Nightfall is going to come early, and I’ll bet Niko is still testing out new rounds in the weapons room. Time to go collect my man.”
As she said her good-byes and headed out, Dylan and Rio, then Sava
“You want to come hang out with Kade and me for a little while?” Alex asked.
Je
Alex’s smile was sympathetic. “If you need anything at all, you come find me. Deal?”
Je
She watched her friend slowly turn and disappear up the corridor. When there was nothing left in the room but quiet and solitude, Je
It was admirable, what the Order and their mates were trying to do. It was important work—more important than anything Je
If everything she’d learned the past couple of days was true, then what the Order was doing here was nothing short of saving the world.
“Jesus Christ,” Je
She wanted to help.
If she was able—even in some small way—she had to help.
Didn’t she?
Je
As for her future, she couldn’t even begin to guess. The alien matter embedded inside her was a problem she never could have imagined, and no amount of wishing was going to take it away. Not even Gideon’s mental brilliance seemed capable of extricating her from that tangled complication.
And then there was Brock. Of all the things that had happened to her between the invasion of her cabin home by the Ancient and her current, unexpected—although not unbearable—embrace by everyone in the Order’s headquarters, Brock was proving to be the one thing she was least prepared to deal with.
She was nowhere close to ready when it came to the feelings he aroused in her. Things she hadn’t felt in years, and sure as hell didn’t want to feel now.
Nothing in her life was certain anymore, and the last thing she needed was to involve herself any further in the problems facing the warriors and their mates.
Nevertheless, Je
She opened a new message and typed in the address of one of her friends with the Feds up in Anchorage. She asked a single question, an inquiry to be looked into confidentially as a personal favor.
She drew in her breath, then hit send.
CHAPTER
Twelve
In the showers adjacent to the weapons room, Brock reached around his back and cranked the temperature setting from hot to scalding. Hands braced on the teak door of the private shower stall, head bent low to his chest, he welcomed the searing pound of water that sluiced over his shoulders and down his naked back. Hot steam roiled up all around him, thick as fog, from his head to the tiled floor at his feet.