Page 37

Chapter twenty-eight

Felix

F elix

We didn’t speed away from the hotel; not wanting to draw attention to ourselves, Duke drove at a sedate pace. Talia lay hidden under a blanket on the back seat, her breathing shallow but steady.

How the fucking hell had Talia let herself be captured?

Just what the flying fuck were Gideon and Talia thinking?

And why the fuck hadn’t they filled me in on the plan?

This was beyond complicated now. Beyond dangerous.

We couldn’t lose Talia and her memories.

The thought of her ending up like Reynolds—vacant-eyed and hollow, staring through me like I was a stranger—made my stomach clench with something that felt dangerously close to panic.

I couldn’t let that happen. Wouldn’t let it happen.

“Duke, pull over,” Annabella ordered. “Somewhere inconspicuous.”

Duke took a turn into an empty parking lot behind a closed grocery store, killing the headlights but leaving the engine running.

“Zeke, scan for tracking signatures.”

I watched Zeke throw down the cell phone he had been typing into and pull out a handheld device that looked like a cross between a medical scanner and a bomb detector wand, and pass it over Talia’s unconscious body, and realized this was a well-polished routine.

They must have done this with all the Council members they’d taken.

“Got one,” he confirmed, hovering the device over Talia’s earring backing.

“Remove it,” Annabella ordered. “Check for more. They wouldn’t rely on just one.”

“Here.” The scanner stopped over her watch. “And… fuck. Here too.” This time, it lingered over her collarbone, the electronic whine shifting to a higher pitch.

“Subdermal implant,” Zeke announced, holding up his scanner to show the digital readout. “Probably hooked into her vital signs, too.”

“That’s new.”

“The Council is upping their game,” Duke grunted from the front of the van.

“What happens if we remove it?”

Zeke shrugged. “I doubt it will harm her. The Council is ruthless, but they are unlikely to put a kill switch in the tracker.”

“A kill switch?”

“Yes, if the tracker is tampered with, it sends an electronic signal to stop the heart.”

Annabella stared down at Talia’s face for a long moment, weighing options I couldn’t begin to guess at. Then: “Remove it.”

I leaned forward. “What? Wait! You don’t know—”

“We don’t have time to discuss this. Remove it, Zeke. Either it kills her, in which case, it’s the Council’s fault for putting that thing in her, or it doesn’t, and we can take her to the warehouse safely.”

Zeke had already pulled a small field surgery kit from his bag.

If I was going to stop this, I had to do it now.

My muscles tensed, ready to intervene. If there really was a kill switch, I’d be watching Talia die in front of me. My cover would be worth fuck all if she was dead.

But stopping Zeke meant fighting my way out of this van and taking Talia, a dead weight, with me.

It meant exposing myself. It meant losing everything—my mission, my cover.

It meant never finding this warehouse and losing any chance of helping Reynolds and the others.

I knew what Talia would tell me to do. The mission came first. Always.

Even if it meant sacrificing herself. But it fucking killed me to sit there and watch Zeke’s scalpel bite into Talia’s skin.

I watched Zeke make the first incision into her skin, just above the collarbone. Blood welled against her skin, and I found myself holding my breath, listening to the steady rhythm of her heart.

Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

His fingers were steady as he extracted a device no bigger than a grain of rice. It emerged slick with blood and something else—a clear gel that probably helped it integrate with her tissue.

Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

No change. No cardiac arrest.

“It’s out,” Zeke announced, placing the bloody tracker in a metal container.

Annabella tapped Duke on the shoulder. “Let’s go.”

Thirty minutes later, Duke turned off the main road and headed toward the university district.

Interesting. Not the industrial areas or abandoned properties I would have guessed.

After weaving through a residential area of faculty housing—historic brownstones with small, manicured lawns—he took another turn that led to the back of a massive building complex I recognized as part of the university.

The performing arts center. Clever. Fucking clever.

The east wing of the complex was surrounded by construction fencing, complete with permits and contractor information. A renovation project.

Perfect cover. Security would attribute any activity to students or faculty working late. Deliveries wouldn’t raise suspicion. Equipment could be explained away as theatrical gear. And university bureaucracy was the perfect excuse for an endless construction timeline.

No wonder our searches had come up empty. The Council had been focusing on warehouse districts, industrial zones, abandoned buildings—the typical hideouts for guerrilla operations. Not an active university campus with legitimate credentials and permits.

Duke pulled into a loading bay sheltered from street view. The concrete ramp led down to what appeared to be an underground parking area beneath the arts center’s east wing. A security gate with a keypad blocked the entrance, but Duke tapped in a code, and it slid open without a sound.

“Everyone out,” Annabella commanded as the van came to a stop in a designated spot between two support columns. “We need to secure Johnson and prep the room.”

Unlike the loft, this place was all business—concrete floors, industrial lighting, security cameras at strategic angles, though I was betting Mira had taken care of those already and they’d be showing an empty parking lot right now.

The air carried the faint scent of chemicals beneath the usual construction dust.

“Felix, help me with Johnson,” Annabella said. “Duke, perimeter. Zeke—”

“I’ll prep the containment room.”

I picked up Talia, her weight nothing in my arms. How the hell could someone so formidable be so light, so vulnerable?

Annabella led the way as I carried Talia through a series of reinforced doors deeper into the facility. What had once been rehearsal studios and set design workshops had been converted into a sophisticated operation.

“How long have you had this place?”

“Eight months,” she replied. “The university’s budget cuts were the perfect cover. They mothballed the east wing renovations, and we… repurposed it.”

The final door opened into an open space that had clearly been the performing arts center’s main rehearsal hall.

It was now a command center sprawled across the polished concrete floor—banks of monitors displaying security feeds, workstations with high-end computer equipment arranged in clusters, server racks humming against one wall.

Cables ran in organized bundles across the floor, and the high ceilings made every sound echo slightly despite the acoustic dampening.

“So… not actually a warehouse?”

“Yeah, we were going to refer to it as ‘the university performing arts center’ over comms so anyone listening would know exactly where we are. But we figured that was too long, so we just went with ‘warehouse.’”

Right.

“Point taken,” I said.

Annabella gestured toward a corridor that branched off the main space. “Living quarters are down there—we converted the old offices into sleeping areas for extended operations.”

But it was the far end of the command center that drew my attention. Two reinforced doors stood side by side, both equipped with serious security—biometric scanners, reinforced steel, the kind of barriers that meant business.

Annabella led me to the right-hand door.

“Medical facility,” she said, pressing her thumb to the scanner and opening the door.

Inside, medical equipment lined one wall, next to five hospital beds, each with reinforced restraints.

To the left was another door next to a mirrored wall, though my guess was it was one-way glass.

Beneath the beds there were intricate circular patterns etched directly into the concrete floor, filled with a substance that gave off a faint blueish glow in the fluorescent lighting.

Witch circles. The complex sigils and runes formed containment patterns more sophisticated than anything I’d seen in Council briefings.

The walls weren’t just painted that institutional shade of green—they were covered with symbols that had been worked into the paint itself, creating circuits of power that shimmered like heat mirages.

The air above them distorted slightly, as if reality was being bent around those markings.

My wolf recoiled instinctively, recognizing something fundamentally wrong about this place.

Copper bowls stood sentinel on pedestals in each corner, filled with what looked like ash but carried the acrid scent of burned herbs layered over something metallic—blood, certainly, but mixed with compounds that made my sinuses burn and my throat close up.

So, this was where Reynolds had been brought, where he’d had his last memories of who he was. He wasn’t the first; he must have known what was about to happen to him, must have been scared and angry.

Fuck! I could not let that happen to Talia.