“Aren’t you finished yet?”
Just when Annie was finally adjusting to Nerezza…
“I’ve seen retarded orangutans work faster than this.”
…along came Delaney.
“I—”
She cut herself off. He was pacing back and forth behind her, and even the sound was enough to throw off her concentration.
She’d never finish her line of code at this rate.
“You know,” he said, taking the high back of the leather chair and tilting it backward ever so slightly, “my patience is ’really’ starting to wear thin.”
There was that choking feeling in her throat, the one she’d been having more and more lately—the one that made her wonder if she would ever breathe again.
“Please—please let go.”
Her voice was low and shaky. She knew he knew how afraid she was.
He leaned down next to her ear.
“Is that what you want?”
She gripped the armrests. Maybe it would keep her hands from quivering.
She strained with all her might to keep her eyes on her computer screen. Look at that markup language. Her best and only friend.
“I thought as much.”
He released the chair, and she rolled forward, smack into her desk.
“Death is a liability. I can’t have that sort of liability on my hands. And, if you should happen to meet anyone, I can’t have you blabbing.”
She nodded, never taking her eyes from the screen.
“Annie, I know you were always Nerezza’s favorite.”
Annie had never been very good at distinguishing sarcasm, but she was beginning to read into Delaney’s. She knew that what he meant was that she was Nerezza’s favorite to torture.
He leaned on the back of the chair.
Then he yanked out the chair again and spun it around.
If Annie’s breath hadn’t been so cut off, she would have screamed. But she was learning to tamp these things down anyway. So she bit her bottom lip and held on for dear life.
Three times around, four, five—
“Had enough, Annie darling?”
Her eyes were closed. She nodded.
“All right.” Roll. Slam. “Now go finish that code yesterday.”
She was slumped against her desk.
Annie waited to hear the door shut behind her and the footsteps fade before letting out a sigh. The sigh sounded like she was about to burst into tears.
She hadn’t done much crying previously. She didn’t have a lot of experience with intense emotion.
But this was wearing her out.
Much more sinister instead. Much more psychological.
What had he said the first time he was in here?
Annie doubted he felt that way now. With all the delight he took in tormenting her, she must have already paid for herself.
She tightened her ponytail, scrolled up and down to ensure she hadn’t mistakenly hit anything and screwed up the code in the course of all the rolling around, and got back to work.
Once she was through with this, once it was in functional shape, she would use it to try to infiltrate Lazarus.
Maybe she was the wrong person to choose as a main accessory to this revolution. But here she was.
She just hoped she’d actually get to talk to someone today.
And, even if she didn’t, there would now be someone to do it for her.
Shannon was sprinting to the conference room, exasperated and late for the Council meeting, having stayed too long in the cafeteria.
Her friend, Isabella, had mind-linked to ask if they could have lunch together.
It was a rarity that they got to see one another these days, so on those rare occasions, they had to mind-link to plan for a lunch together.
But today Isabella hadn’t shown up. Shannon had waited as long as she could before running to the conference room.
As she rounded the corner, Shannon saw a familiar face.
“Louis! Hi!”
Louis, a wolf shifter, was Isabella’s mate.
They had made it official a few months ago, just after Isabella announced she was carrying his child.
“I tried mind-linking with Isabella. We were supposed to have lunch,” Shannon explained.
“But it’s getting pretty late,” she continued. “Maybe we can reschedule…would you mind letting her know I had to run?”
“Sure,” Louis said with a smile. “She probably got carried away at the pool.”
It was feasible. Isabella sometimes swam for hours in the gym pool. It always relaxed her, but she had a habit of losing track of time.
“When she gets in the zone, you know how she is,” Louis said with a smile. “Can’t be distracted by mind-links.”
With a friendly nod, Shannon continued on to the conference room.
Killian had never been in a more distracted frame of mind at the start of a Council meeting. “Killian.”
“Hey, Killian?”
Holy shit, he was going to be a father.
Probably. They still didn’t know for certain.
“Hey.”
Walker snapped his fingers in front of Killian’s face. Killian resurfaced at the head of the table in the conference room.
Right where Milo used to sit.
“Thanks, man.” Killian threw Walker a brief but meaningful glance.
There was no denying that this guy, sitting directly to his left, had effected a remarkable transformation.
He didn’t talk much about Carrie these days, and so no one else brought her up to him.
But he was participating and being social and making every effort to heal.
Killian was proud of him.
And also, for his own and Tristan’s sakes, relieved as hell.
He cleared his throat.
“All right, well, here we are.”
The faces of Walker, Marcum, and Hannibal were fixed on him expectantly. All with relative trust, except maybe Hannibal. He still had to come around.
“I guess I’d make some kind of opening remark, but I don’t want to do that until—”
Even before he had a chance to say it, the human representative came barreling through the door.
“Sorry,” she said breathlessly, pulling up a chair to the foot of the table, opposite Killian.
“Baby trouble?” Marcum said under his breath. Shannon only glared.
“No problem, Shannon,” Killian said. “That settles that. I’m going to level with you. After witnessing everything that’s gone down here, it’s weird to be Alpha.”
“Rigged,” muttered Hannibal, crossing his arms over his chest. And if he hadn’t been first on Killian’s right, he might have gone unheard.
He let his eyes circle around them.
“We’re in way over our heads here. We’ve got no idea what we’re doing. Trouble could strike at any point, and we need to keep our wits about us.”
He was fighting to speak as vaguely as possible because he knew who was watching.
“As we all know from our last—session—”
The Council members squirmed in their seats.
“—we are receiving the new reinforcements tomorrow.”
Everyone looked away.
“And there’s no way to know, really, what we’re in for with them, so we’ll just have to cooperate.”
“Is there really no way to know, though?” asked Marcum, opening his hands on the tabletop in that infuriatingly deferential manner of his. “Has anyone tried talking to Derek?”
“Derek isn’t talking,” said Killian. “We’re going to have to play it by ear.”
Killian was right. Derek was keeping his lips sealed.
No one needed to know who these guards were. And no one needed to know that there were now almost double what they’d been expecting.
Two hundred, to be distributed around the compound and within the building. Almost one guard for every Lazarus resident.
They had been herded into a tent a few miles away from the compound, a meager temporary lodging for the night. He paced in front of the door flap.
As the afternoon wore on, he watched them prepare. They would go to sleep soon to be ready for entry in the early hours of the morning.
They hadn’t needed much instruction—highly trained military specialists, every last one of them—just a basic outline of the entrance strategy.
Which Derek had given them, and which he’d review one more time immediately prior to its execution.
“All right, people, let’s start piping down in there,” he said through the flap, but then it flipped open so fast he jerked backward.
A woman, probably about thirty, with high cheekbones and dark chocolate skin, peered out. Her eyes were incisive, as sharp as her jawline.
“Sir?”
“Come out,” he gestured, holding back the flap. She stepped out and stood rigid, as if at attention.
“Major Clarice Hoxton, sir.”
He held out a hand. “Call me Derek.”
She took it reluctantly, and they shook.
“With all due respect, sir—”
“Derek.”
“Derek—we’ve been told nothing about our precise positioning within the compound. I’m a little ill at ease with the uncertainty.”
“Hoxton, what you need to understand—what might be difficult to understand—is the improvisatory nature of this operation.”
Her arms were folded, and she was looking at him skeptically.
“Lazarus is a volatile institution. We don’t know exactly how many people we’ll need where. An incident could break out anywhere, at any time.”
He didn’t mention how certain people needed special protection.
He didn’t mention how these guards existed as much to buffer the community from the tyranny of the “volatile institution” as to protect the institution from the violence of the people.
“So you’re saying everyone just needs to constantly be on call for everything?”
“Exactly.” He could work with this one. “So when we go in, don’t act until you receive direct word from me, and then go straightaway. Don’t hesitate.”
“Oh, I’m not used to hesitating.”
He saw something in her eyes that he wasn’t used to seeing in anyone’s, much less the people he was supervising.
A noble secrecy.
Perhaps she would prove to be trustworthy. When the time was right, at least.
“Good. Then you got me?”
She turned back toward the tent, throwing the faintest glimmer of a smile. “I got you.”
“Oh, Hoxton?”
She stopped at the door.
“I don’t remember you telling me where you were from?”
“It’s a special operations outfit, sir,” she said without turning around. “Confidential, if you don’t mind.”
Annie had been feeling pretty on edge before getting a note from Rowan.
Well, it came through Rowan, who passed it to Derek, but the message itself was from Killian.
Asking her to help find his brother. The doctor. Seth.
She blinked to bring some water back to her eyes and glanced at her screen.
Judging by what she’d read, Killian didn’t have the first idea where to look.
Well, that was understandable. He was under a lot of pressure.
But if he was too busy to have an idea, then it was lucky Annie already did.
