Page 45 of Covert Affections (Shadow Agents/PSI-Ops #5)

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Efren

Rainwater seeped through the abandoned farmhouse’s roof at a steady rate, dripping into rusted pans and buckets—anything Efren could find to collect the water. He’d emptied the containers three times tonight already, and the storms showed no signs of letting up.

Headlights splashed over the window as a familiar hatchback pulled into the driveway of the property next to this one. The sight of them helped to cool Efren’s anger.

Little Sweet Thing was home.

He stared out of the window, the glass long since yellowed and cracked, watching for signs of the others.

When he’d tasked them with handling Samuel’s daughter, he thought it would be fast. They should have been back hours ago.

Yet, there was no sign of them. His gaze slid to the handheld radio he had on an old kitchen table.

The radio was set to the local law enforcement channel.

He’d been able to monitor the fact that the authorities had found the dumping ground his companions had been using to dispose of their kills.

Efren had warned the other coyote shifters that they needed to find their own dump site. That they couldn’t use his. That they needed to go deeper into the woods or even the mountains. They’d not listened.

Now they’d fucked up everything he’d worked so hard on.

Efren wouldn’t be able to visit the site and see the fruits of his labor. To see the beauties who had filled in until he made his move to collect the grand prize.

Little Sweet Thing.

He was so close. Soon, she would finally be his. It had been a long time coming. For nearly thirty years he’d waited for her. Waited to be able to claim what should have rightfully been his from the start.

The scientist in charge of the testing facility Efren had been stationed at had sworn he’d make sure one of the lab experiments was a match for him. That he’d make Efren a mate. A woman to stop the constant gnawing from within by his coyote side.

The man had been convincing in his lies.

He had even taken Efren to the labs and shown him the test subject created for him.

Efren had waited patiently for her to grow, checking in regularly to be sure all was going according to plan.

And it had been right until Samuel Eyres had fucked everything up.

He and his buddies had broken protocol and stolen the children from the testing facility, taking Efren’s chance at a future with them.

They’d gotten help from an unlikely source—Jesse Culbertson.

The man had always been an outsider among his own kind, at least as far back as Efren could recall.

The man and Samuel had butted heads more often than not, seeming to hate one another.

When Culbertson had taken part in the escape, it had shocked and enraged Efren.

When the opportunity to head the man’s interrogation was presented to him, Efren and his best friend, Peters, had jumped at the chance.

A smile slid over Efren’s face as he thought back to the smell of Culbertson’s blood as it dripped freely from him.

The way the man had shook, trying desperately to keep from showing weakness or crying out in pain had been glorious.

Oh, the things they had done to him. It had been brutal and sadistic.

Everything the traitor deserved for what he’d done. For letting Little Sweet Thing go.

It didn’t matter that later Efren had learned the truth—that the scientist had lied. He’d not made Little Sweet Thing for Efren. No. The fucking prick had made her for Culbertson.

No! She will be mine!

Lightning flashed, illuminating the yellowed pane of glass, giving Efren a glimpse at his reflection. Gone was the man he used to be. The handsome man women fawned over. Culbertson had left him with a wicked scar running down the right side of his face and without vision in his right eye.

Bastard!

Instead of commending Efren and Peters for a job well done with their interrogation of Culbertson, The Corporation had deemed the mission a failure and said that Efren and his friend were liabilities.

That they were weak. That allowing a man who had been in as bad of shape at the time as Culbertson to get the jump on them meant they weren’t operative material.

They weren’t worthy of The Corporation rankings they’d held.

And if they weren’t operatives that meant they were free for testing.

They carted them off to cells of their own and from there sent them to another site. One that was buried deep in a mountain. One that very few people ever lived to tell the tale of.

They’d been there for years. Subjected to nearly a decade’s worth of testing, torture, and psychological warfare.

Efren and the others like him had been used and abused.

They’d been used as lab rats for their hybrid super soldier program.

There had been no regard for their safety or well-being.

No one cared if the experimental treatments killed them.

Even dead, their bodies would have still proven useful to The Corporation.

Efren had made friends there—bonded with the others being held prisoner. He’d seen more than one friend perish in the name of scientific advancement. Too many good men dead before their time because of that place. Because of The Corporation’s sick and twisted need to play God.

Efren had thought he and Peters would meet their end there as well.

That they’d become another statistic. Then Director Murlick had arrived, offering them the deal of a lifetime.

Samuel’s betrayal had left a black mark on the director’s name too.

While he’d not been punished to the extreme as Efren and Peters, he had been demoted.

His plans to climb the ladder with The Corporation had come to a grinding halt.

Efren laughed softly, thinking of what a twisted fuck the man was.

He was the reason Peters and Efren had been able to walk out of the testing facility, long before their fellow cellmates, but not before the damage had been done.

They weren’t the same as they’d once been.

Now they were what was termed a hybrid. Instead of making them better and stronger.

The Corporation had made them unstable. Their systems were living in a constant state of breaking down.

The Corporation had ways to stave off the decay—the rot—but it meant getting regular injections of a specialized serum only they possessed. Access to that was restricted and carefully monitored. If you did not obey, you did not get the antidote. It assured loyalty and compliance.

Efren and Peters had scored a decent supply of the serum years ago from Murlick and had tried to pull away and go it alone.

For nearly six years after their release they’d lived free from the hold of The Corporation.

With that time, they’d looked for answers on how to fix what had been done to them, all while they also searched for the missing test subjects.

Efren wanted to find Little Sweet Thing, and Peters had it in his head that they could somehow win the trust and respect of their former employer again.

That if they managed to locate the missing test subjects, The Corporation would welcome them with open arms and fix whatever the fuck it was they’d broken in them to start with.

That they’d be able to live free from the serum and whatever was happening to them.

It had seemed hopeless to start, but then Efren’s connections, which ran deep, paid off.

Medical records were obtained from off-the-books clinics run by former Corporation personnel.

Children from the escape began to arrive at the facilities, brought in by their caregivers at the time, lured by way of the supernatural underground.

By the possibility of fixing whatever had been done to the children during testing.

But there was no correcting it because there was no problem.

They were as they’d been created to be.

Blends of many things. From everything Efren had learned over the years, the introduction of supernatural DNA into their genetic makeup had been relatively smooth because of their age.

Some had the splicing occur when they were in utero, some when they were minutes old, and others within their first few years.

He was fast starting to think that was the secret to success.

That age was the deciding factor in how much, if any, issues arose down the road.

Murlick believed that was part of it but that their family history played a part.

He was quick to point out the lengths The Corporation went to when seeking viable candidates for their baby farms. Everyone had some type of a genetic marker in them.

Some tell that they had supernatural DNA to start with, even if just a little.

Whatever the secret ingredient was, they weren’t as broken as Efren and the hybrids.

They didn’t suffer the same rotting side effects as the adults who had been subjected to similar genetic manipulation.

Their systems weren’t breaking down. They were flourishing, adapting, accepting.

Efren had poured through the information and had been shocked to see that far more than just the test subjects he knew about were being brought into the clinics.

Evidently, PSI had been busy liberating other testing facilities around the world and children from those experiments, all classified under the umbrella of the Asia Project, seeing as how the testing on the children originally started on that continent.

Efren hadn’t thought he’d ever find the one he was looking for.

He thought Little Sweet Thing was lost forever to him.

Then he’d seen a picture of one of the children who had come into a remote clinic, owned and operated in secret by The Corporation.

It was her.

Her eyes were unmistakable.