Page 23

CHAPTER 23

Costa had had better days.

Threats to Diana were the only thing that could keep him from fighting back—but it had worked. After regaining consciousness on the plane, he had submitted with teeth-grinding frustration to being chained hand and foot. Now, several hours later, he was still chained, this time in a locked room deep in a facility of some sort.

He had been blindfolded when they brought him here, so he wasn’t sure what it looked like, or where he was. He also didn’t know where Diana was, and no one had responded to his repeated demands to see her.

They left him alone in his cell, naked and handcuffed to the wall. So far they hadn’t done anything except—through the bars—stamping one of his shoulders with a mark that, when he looked down at it, seemed identical to the red lion device on the card recovered from the crash site.

“This is Halsted’s mark,” the goon who had stamped it told him, after getting hastily out of reach. “Means you’re one of his.”

“One of his what?” Costa snapped, testing his chains. He looked down at the smeary red mark again.

“One of his fighters. You’re going to be great on the shifter fighting circuit.”

“Yeah, do you remember any point when I agreed to this or signed anything giving you permission? Me neither. This is kidnapping, and I’m a federal agent.”

“You were,” the goon said ominously, and left.

That had been a while back. So far they hadn’t brought him any water or food, or even a blanket to give him relief from the cold concrete of the cell on his bare body. After the vigorous exercise in the valley, he was parched; his tongue felt like it was stuck to the roof of his mouth. He wondered if this might be part of their plan, actually—keeping him compliant by depriving him of basic necessities.

On the other hand, having a dry mouth made one thing easier. Back on the plane, he’d palmed a zipper clip off someone’s backpack and tucked it into his mouth, thinking it might come in handy later. It was the only thing he could carry in his naked state, and the only place he could think to carry it.

He waited a long while to use it, knowing he wouldn’t get another chance. But when no one returned to get him, he slipped it out into his hand. After prying at it with his fingernails and teeth until he managed to turn it into a crude lock pick of sorts, he started working on the cuffs of his chains.

He had gotten his hands uncuffed and was working on his feet when all the alarms went off.

“There has been a security breach. Please remain calm and stay in your assigned section.”

Costa grinned to himself, and a tightly wound knot of tension in his chest relaxed a little. That was Diana; he’d lay odds on it. She was alive, well, and causing problems somewhere else in the facility.

Now he just had to get himself to where she was, which was going to involve getting out of this cell.

He finished with the leg chains and let them drop, then stood up to examine the lock on the door. It was electronic, which didn’t bode well for his ability to jigger it open with the now dented and battered clip.

However, there was more than one way to get a door open.

With the chains off, he could shift freely. Costa backed up all the way to the far wall of the cell (not far to go, as it wasn’t big) and shifted. Then he charged the door.

He took the blow on his shoulder, wincing as he was reminded of the bruises from his previous altercation with the airplane. The door shuddered but held firm. Costa backed up and took another run at it, angling to land the full force of his charge on the side of the door with the lock, which he figured was probably its weakest link. The door was sturdy and the cell was probably designed to contain shifters, but how long could it hold up to several hundred pounds of angry herbivore made by nature to pound on things?

The answer turned out to be seven or eight charges. He was sore all over and starting to lose count, but he felt it start to give on the last two tries, and finally he rammed it and was rewarded with the door slamming open with a crash that must have echoed all over the facility.

Momentum carried him on out into the corridor, and that was when the door at the end of the corridor opened with a loud click.

Costa spun around, snorting, head down. For a minute, he and the man standing framed in the open doorway stared at each other.

The man in the doorway was Agent Azarias Caine. He was wearing his usual dark suit, with a tactical vest over the top and a gun in one hand. His sunglasses were shoved on top of his head. After eyeing the boar for a minute, he said, “That better be you, Chief.”

Costa shifted and straightened up, rubbing his aching shoulder. “Of course it’s me,” he snapped. “Is Diana with you?”

“No, but we have teams all over the facility.” Caine began to unbuckle his tac vest. “Here, you can wear my jacket if you don’t want to run around?—”

“I don’t care about that. All I need is a gun.” Costa stalked over and took Caine’s out of his hand. “This one will do nicely.”

Caine raised his eyebrows. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“You’re a dragon. Somehow I think you’ll figure it out.” Costa peered past him into the hall. “I need the Cliffs Notes version of what’s happening. Where are we, what are you doing here, how many people are with you?”

“Right. We’re a few miles outside Alamagordo in New Mexico with an SCB strike team. After you disappeared yesterday, it’s been an all-hands-on-deck situation. We requisitioned records from Desert Tours, and found out they’ve been making regular flights out here to a particular site that has its own airstrip. Figured that was our best shot at figuring out where you’d gone, and ...” Caine made a fluttery motion with his fingers. “Look at that, we were right.”

“Good work, although there’s been a lot more going on than just an uneventful flight across the state border. Come on, I need to figure out where Diana’s been taken.”

The halls were eerily empty, although now and then Costa saw bullet holes in the wall or heard the sounds of distant yelling. Every door was closed and locked. Caine swiped them through with a key card.

“Where’d you get that?”

“Where do you think? Its owner was very happy to donate it to the cause, especially when I explained the alternatives.” Caine glanced at Costa, who was carefully navigating barefoot through a scatter of broken glass where a window had been smashed. “Are you entirely sure you don’t want to stop and find something to wear?”

“Waste of time,” Costa said grimly. “If the sight of a naked man with a gun yelling and running full tilt at somebody isn’t enough to intimidate them, putting pants on me isn’t going to help.”

“It would help me.”

“Diana first, pants later.”

“I can see you’re clearly not into her at all.”

This brought a powerfully vivid memory of Diana’s lean, strong body writhing against his, the way she half closed her eyes and the noises she made when she came ...

“Shut it, Caine.”

Caine smirked but didn’t say anything else as he swiped open the next door.

This opened into yet another plain, unadorned hallway, but this time they could hear the muffled sound of someone banging on a door somewhere along the corridor. “Help! Let us out! Is anyone there?”

“Diana,” Costa breathed.

He pushed past Caine and hurried to the door, only to realize he couldn’t open it on his own. Caine arrived, gave him a look, pushed him out of the way and swiped the keycard.

Diana stumbled out, wearing nothing but a lab coat, her tanned legs long and beautiful. She was tousled and pale, but when she saw Costa, she fixed on him as if there was nothing and no one else in the hall.

“Quinn! You’re all right!”

She threw her arms around him, and Costa buried himself in her kiss. Even as he kissed her, he felt something was wrong. She was shaking in his arms, trembling as if she would fly apart, and she felt feverishly hot to the touch.

“What’s wrong?” He absently waved the gun butt-first at Caine, who took it, and then cupped Diana’s face in his hands. She had been fine when he last saw her. “Are you sick? Did they hurt you? What did they do?”

Caine cleared his throat. “At the risk of interrupting this touching reunion, why don’t we go inside this—lab? I guess? Rather than having an entire conversation out here in the hall, where security guards could happen upon us at any time.”

“Right. We have to go inside anyway.” Diana gripped Costa’s hand and led him in. She paused to say, “Do you want some pants?”

“Why do people keep asking me that? If you have any handy, give ‘em to me. Otherwise I’m fine.”

“You sure are,” Diana said with an appreciative look and something resembling her usual spark.

“Oh God, if I knew I was going to be subjected to naked flirting, I’d have called in sick.” Caine grabbed a lab coat off a hook and thrust it at Costa. “Wear this, for all our sakes.”

Costa absently donned it as he followed Diana around some chairs and lab tables. As he got closer, he realized there was a person lying on the floor, stretched out facedown in front of a wheeled office chair. In fact, it was?—

“Well, what do you know, it’s our old friend Farley,” Costa said grimly. “Good job, Diana. I knew you could take him.”

“No, it’s not what you think,” Diana protested. “He’s helping. Well, for now. But the point is ... they gave us both some kind of injection. He collapsed a few minutes ago, and I can’t wake him up. I’m afraid that’s going to happen to me next.”

A new surge of fury flooded Costa. “They gave you what ?”

“I don’t know. I collected everything I could find for the SCB labs to look at. It’s on that table.” She pointed to a large bundle wrapped up in another lab coat. “From what they said, I think Farley and I are research subjects for some kind of experimental chemical. They didn’t give you anything, did they?”

“No, nothing but my brand new tramp stamp here.” Costa briefly pulled down the collar of the lab coat to show the red lion. “It’s just ink, associated with someone named Halsted, I guess. Otherwise they left me alone. But what—when—” He took a deep breath, twitching the collar back into place in spite of Caine’s attempts to get a closer look at the ink. “You said they injected you with whatever it was?”

“Yes, I’d say two or three hours ago, maybe.” She pulled down the loose neck of her coat, similar to how he’d done, to display her shoulder. “They stuck me here. For a while, I couldn’t move my arm.”

There was an angry red circle showing up in a bullseye pattern around a bright, bloody pinprick. Costa touched it cautiously and felt a large welt surrounding the injection site. Diana hissed in pain and he pulled his hand away quickly.

“My head really hurts. It came on suddenly around the time Farley fainted.” She rubbed her temple with her hand. “I can’t believe the SCB’s here. How did they find us?”

“Caine can explain.” Costa put an arm around her, and she slumped on him. “Come on, let’s get you out.”

Farley made a sudden, choking sound, and his entire body jerked. Caine knelt beside him and matter-of-factly felt his pulse. “Going like a freight train.” He looked up at Costa. “We need to get both of them to medical care.”

“You’re telling me! We need to find—” Costa broke off. Feeling Diana shivering against him, overwhelmingly struck by the urgency of the situation, he turned a steady stare on Caine. “Can you take us to the SCB labs? Will you?”

“What am I now, Uber?” Caine sighed, but he rose in a single swift motion, took a few quick steps to the table with the bundled-up lab coat, and deposited the clanking bundle on the floor beside Farley. “Get her over here. It’ll need to be dark.”

Costa lowered Diana gently to sit beside Farley on the floor, then went looking for a light switch. When he found the right one, the room was plunged into near total darkness. Costa stumbled into a table and barked his bare shin. “Ow!”

“Bet you wish you’d taken me up on the offer of finding you some pants, huh?” Caine’s amused voice came out of the dark. “Get over here.”

“I’m trying,” Costa grumbled.

A sudden light speared the dark: Caine using the flashlight on his phone. “ Now can you get over here?”

Caine crossed the room through the dancing shadows and knelt beside them. He put one arm around Diana and a hand on Caine’s shoulder. Before Caine turned off his phone and darkness swallowed them again, he saw that Caine had one hand on Farley’s jerking chest.

Then there was nothing but dark. Costa felt Diana turn her face against his shoulder, and whispered into her hair, “Hold your breath.”

He felt her inhale and did the same, just before the chill dark of Caine’s particular form of transportation closed around them. The only thing that seemed real in the endless, cold emptiness was Diana, shivering as she leaned into him with a trust he wasn’t sure if even she was aware of.