“Who?”
“His name is Reece.”
“Shifter?”
“Tiger,” I confirm. I reach forward to my desk and grab the notes I put together for her about Reece. “He’s been with the clan for awhile.”
“He was abducted?”
“And hurt.”
“Tortured?”
“I expect so.”
“Ah,” she says, tapping a word on the sheet. “Lucky.”
“You’re familiar with them?”
“More than I’d like to be,” she sighs. “I worked in a clan that had a run-in with them. Shifters kept vanishing and no one could figure out why. Then we found out there was a facility nearby that was ‘borrowing’ shifters for medical research. Science experiments. Pharmaceutical testing. All of the above.”
“Did you guys get them back?”
“Some of them,” she say
s.
“This is a similar situation. We had a few shifters go missing, but couldn’t locate them. We finally did, broke in, and pulled everyone out of the building.”
“But that wasn’t the end of things, was it?” She asks.
“Nope.”
“Tell me.” I pause for a second and she shakes her head. “Don’t hold back on me, Donny. I need to know as much information as possible if you expect for me to save this guy. You got that?”
“The entire escape was too simple. I won’t call it clean because we did lose someone. He was a father, and a husband.”
“Loss is never easy or simple,” she says quietly. “And rescue operations are rarely clean and tidy. They never quite go the way we want them to.”
“I wasn’t here for this,” I tell her. “I was...away.”
Sabrina nods knowingly, but doesn’t question me or pry. She knows how to read between the lines. She already knows about me leaving the clan, but she doesn’t know much about me coming back. I’ll fill her in later. When there’s time. When I’m ready.
“Everyone came back to the clan. It seemed like the mission had been a raging success. Everything was going to be fine.”
“But then it wasn’t fine.”
“Nope. There was an illness. Some of the shifters who came back had been infected, and the virus spread like wildfire throughout the clan.”
“That’s when you came back.”
“I came back,” I tell her.
I came back to fight for my clan.
To fight for the dragons I love.
I came back because when your people need you, you go. You don’t wait. You don’t hesitate. You don’t think twice. You just go. You’re called, and you go. That’s all there is to it.