Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
So much for Christmas lunch.
It wasn’t like Steel had expected his team, his family, to be chirpy and chatty, full of laughter and the joy of the season, they never were, not even on Christmas Day. But he hadn't expected the mood to be this somber.
They had all agreed that once they finally managed to procure the name of the person at the head of the program they had unwittingly signed up for, they would do whatever it took to get to them.
When that intel led them to a lone family member, once again, they had all agreed that they would use that family member, a much younger sister, to lure out the man who was the very definition of crazy scientist.
Ridge Gardner wanted to advance human physiology and create a new race. Stronger, faster, smarter, and better senses than the old one. He wanted to be the king of that new race, to rule over it with an iron fist.
Delusions of grandeur aside, the man had gotten his dreams off the ground. He and the five men sitting around the table with him were living, breathing proof of that.
Superior strength, superior sense of smell, hearing, and vision, superior speed, and an unnatural ability to heal.
Those were the skills he and his teammates had been given.
The experimental program they had signed up for when they were newly minted special forces operatives, drafted to form a new team spanning different branches of the military, turned out to be nothing like they had been told it would be.
What they thought were some injections that would improve their abilities in the field turned into something that altered their DNA in a way that could never be reversed.
Along with their improved skills came a deadening of their emotions, a difficulty in forming attachments outside the men they had bonded with through a rigorous training regime that could only be described as torture.
Rage lived inside every single one of them like a living, breathing being.
They had been turned into lethal killing machines, and Steel knew without having to ask any of his men that the reason they were all particularly quiet today was because of their visitor holed up downstairs.
Despite them believing the little ladybug was the bait they needed to finally get their hands on the man who had turned them into monsters, the fact that she was nothing like they had been expecting had them all on edge.
For three years, Steel and his team had been kept in a secure facility, locked in a bulletproof glass-encased room.
They were watched every second of the day, forced into submission, had tests performed on them at all hours, and were only allowed out when their king needed his specially modified soldiers for a mission.
Escaping was a pure stroke of luck, and they’d left a pile of dead bodies in their wake.
Spending a year moving from location to location, being constantly hunted, it wasn't until they learned of a former decorated billionaire SEAL who had used his resources to start the world-renowned Prey Security that they made a decision.
From everything they could gather on him, it had seemed like Eagle Oswald was a good man, one who could be trusted, and they’d all put their lives on the line to contact him, brutally aware of what would happen if the medically retired SEAL turned them in.
But Eagle hadn't turned them in.
In fact, the man had gone above and beyond to protect them. Eagle had found this old, abandoned Gothic mansion, hidden deep on a remote mountain. He gave them jobs, a purpose, he’d provided a steady presence in their lives while also giving them the autonomy to live alone as they chose.
Eagle had been nothing but good to them and had used Prey resources and every contact he had to try to find the name of the man responsible for the secret project.
Those resources had eventually paid off, and Eagle had promised to help them get to the man who seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth.
Yet they had betrayed Eagle.
Going after Ridge Gardner’s little sister hadn't been sanctioned by Eagle and Prey. They’d gone rogue, and if he found out they had an innocent woman currently being tortured in the home he’d bought for them, Eagle would be furious. They’d betrayed him, and Steel had no idea what he’d do to them.
If they wanted, between the six of them with their enhanced abilities, they could kill Eagle without blinking an eye.
And yet not a single one of them would ever raise a hand to the man who had effectively saved their lives.
Eagle was a good man, arrogant and egotistical, definitely, but he worked hard to provide every employee not just with a paycheck but with a family.
He went above and beyond. He used his power, influence, and money to save countless lives across the globe and make the world a safer place.
He took on a heavy load of responsibility, not just for his wife and two young children, not just for his five younger siblings and their families, but for every single person who worked for his company.
Including Steel and his team.
And they might have thrown that all away on a quest for revenge that hampered their ability to think straight.
“So are we just going to give up on this farce?” Blade asked, tearing Steel out of his mind to see that none of them had done anything more than load their plates up with the Christmas lunch they’d spent hours cooking and push it around those plates.
Their betrayal of their boss, who they all respected the hell out of, and their little, somewhat psycho prisoner, had them all out of sorts. Even for them, men who were never in sorts.
“Yeah.” He sighed, shoving his chair back from the table but not standing up.
“It’s just another day after all,” Lion said bitterly, but it didn't go unnoticed by him, or he suspected the rest of their team, that Lion was compulsively spinning the ring he never took off.
That ring had almost cost them their lives.
When Dr. Gardner realized the injections they’d been given were working, he had effectively abducted them, locking them up in the secure compound that would be their home for the next almost three years.
When that happened, they were stripped of everything they owned, literally.
They were given tactical gear to wear only when they were sent out, the rest of the time they lived naked side by side.
That day, when the new guy forgot to properly seal them into their glass cage and they escaped, Lion refused to leave without the ring that had been taken from him.
The delay in leaving almost got them caught.
In the intervening seven years, Steel had never once seen the other man take the ring off.
Despite being family now, the six of them hadn't known one another before they were teamed up, so none of them knew exactly why the ring was so important to their brother. But they didn't need to. They just knew it belonged to someone important who Lion couldn’t forget.
Didn't want to forget.
“Just another day,” Dragon echoed, and not a single one of them had to guess who the man was thinking about.
Cassandra Charleston. Youngest member of the Charleston Holloway family.
They’d guarded her for several months while her brothers hunted for the people responsible for setting up their parents as traitors.
During that time, Dragon and Cassandra had grown close.
Close enough that when she left because she knew they were planning something they wouldn't come back from, something she refused to be a part of, it broke something in Dragon, a man Steel thought could never be hurt by another person.
In silence, the six of them began to clear away the table, packing up the food and putting it away in the fridge where it would be lucky to last out the day. Just because none of them could pretend long enough to have a Christmas meal together didn't mean that they didn't have ravenous appetites.
They’d just eat that food alone, lost in their own thoughts.
Lost to their own demons.
As the kitchen emptied, food packed away, dishes loaded in the dishwasher, counters wiped down, and everything back in its place, Steel found himself drawn to his tablet.
A couple of taps with his fingertip was all it took to bring up the feed of the woman ensconced in the basement, currently suffering through a much worse Christmas Day than any of them were.
In her cell, Rose Gardner sat on the floor with her back against one of the walls, naked as the day she was born. Even through the camera, he could see her skin was flushed red and dotted with sweat thanks to the heat he was currently having pumped into the small room.
Steel had never intended to enjoy torturing Dr. Gardner’s little sister, she was an innocent after all, but he’d never expected to feel bad about it either.
“I’m sorry it had to come to this, little ladybug, but I need you broken if I'm going to reel your brother in,” he murmured, surprised to find that under all the rage that fueled him, he still had a heart.
December 25th
2:19 P.M.
Beads of sweat rolled down her body in a near constant stream.
If there was even a breath of air in there, then it would probably help to cool it down. Then again, the point was to make her so uncomfortably hot she would break.
Rose almost wished she were capable of cracking so they could just move on with this farce and get it over with.
Farce was exactly what this was.
Because if Mr. Bedroom Man and his friend honestly thought that her brother cared one iota about her, they were stupid as well as amateurish.
Despite the strength she felt emanating from her captor, he actually hadn't hurt her when he’d dragged her up off the floor earlier. And after issuing his threat, he’d merely dropped her back onto the floor and stalked out of the room.
Almost immediately, the heat started pumping into the room, and she’d actually laughed when she realized he thought being hot was going to bother her.