His chance came as one of the guards poked his head out of the rear door. As bullets whizzed by, Apex surged forward in a crouch, running down the lineup of vehicles, pings and sparks following him from a shooter who was up in a third-story window.
Just as the guard lingered in his fish-or-cut-bait stage of exit, neither in nor out, Apex pile-drove him back into a staircase that funneled into the private quarters.
Curling up a fist, he beat the face of the male until there were no features to recognize, and then he looked up the steps to the interior locked door—
Sure as if he’d rung a bell, the last barrier swung open.
The head of the guards stood there in uniform, a bulletproof vest strapped on her chest. She was as she had always been, cold and calculating, a little smile on her face.
“I knew one of you would come for him. If I just remained patient, it was going to be so much more efficient than trying to hunt you all around that mountain.”
“Let the wolf go,” Apex said. “You can have me. Just let him go.”
“I don’t think so. He’s proven to be quite a pet.”
As she opened the door wider, what was on the far side was the last thing he wanted to see: Callum was alive, it was true. But that was only his body.
The male had been strapped naked to a bedding platform, and it was clear he had been used, his throat raw from bite marks, his sex lying across his thigh, bruised and deflated. But the worst of it was the way he stared up at the ceiling, his eyes unfocused and blinking slowly.
Like his soul was gone.
“You bitch!”
Apex attacked before he knew what he was doing, his lunge so violent that he nearly lost hold of his gun.
He didn’t make it.
The head of the guards shot him in the thigh so that when his weight landed, his leg crumpled out from under him.
His head caught his fall.
Right on the last step.
The crack was like a lightning bolt. Just like the pain.
And then everything went black.
Kane didn’t go back to the garage. He knew that was where Nadya would go. Instead, he dematerialized to the clearing up on the mountain, to the hut. But there was no old female. No wolven, either.
Maybe that was for the best.
He sat down on one of the logs around the cold fire pit and stared at where the flames should have been. Behind him, the sounds of nature at night were a tiptoe into his ear, as if the whole world recognized he needed to be handled carefully.
He should have explained himself better to Nadya, but his head was fucked, and the anger that had entered him along with that resuscitation he’d been through, or whatever it was, made him volatile to the point where he didn’t know if he could trust himself. He had once been so even-keeled.
Then again, back in the Old Country, the world had been his oyster. It was easy to keep a level head when there was no pressure.
As he thought about Cordelhia once again, he was shocked, and also not surprised. In his gut, he had known something was wrong about all of his good fortune in the New World.
Or maybe that was just hindsight talking.
As for Nadya, he wanted to be angry with her for doubting him, but how could he be. With the way her past had gone, he could see the why of it all for her, and though he wanted to talk her out of the way she felt, wasn’t he just like her father?
Telling her what to do because of his own ambitions.
Which had been a future with her.
What the hell did it matter—