Chapter 41
brYLEE
All our scouts reported the building was clear, but as we tromp through underbrush and peer through the trees at the blocky building, I feel a strong sense of foreboding.
Maybe it's because this building looks an awful lot like one I was taken to the first time the Noths captured me. Tall, made of granite blocks with inset windows tinted pitch black, the lab seems to shimmer with malice.
The team feeds out a long wire and hurries back to us, and I'm reminded of rats scurrying for cover.
Colter's massive hand sinks down onto my shoulder, gently pushing me into a crouch as the other soldiers around us get low.
We cover our ears seconds before the doorway is blasted into a jagged opening, sending dark smoke rolling up into the morning sky and making the birds in nearby trees flee for their lives.
Still, we wait, crouched, hearts pounding, eyes staring with unblinking, laser precision on that door. Waiting to see if someone comes out.
My left hand clenches repeatedly. Each swallow feels laced with lemon, sour and stinging, and the explosive remnants float through the air.
My foot has started to prickle by the time Ridge calls out over our headsets, "Team Blue. Go."
A team of five races forward and plunges into the dark abyss of that building. Part of me wishes I were with them because the agony of waiting feels unbearable. But another part of me is glad I'm not.
After three impatient minutes that make me think my head might explode like a firework from all the anxious pressure, Ridge gives the rest of the group the go-ahead.
"Stay with me, Your Highness," the grumpy alpha barks in my direction.
If I were capable of sarcasm or flirting right now, I'd give him a breathy, "Yes, sir," but I'm not. I'm absolutely not. The back of my neck is coated in sweat by the time we make it through the doorway into the shadows.
The lab’s a single cavernous space, gutted by violence and time. It smells of ozone, decay, and the acrid tang of chemicals.
A jagged hole, the size of a small car, has been ripped through the corrugated iron ceiling, and through it pours a merciless shaft of gray daylight, illuminating a swirling universe of dust motes and casting long, distorted shadows that make the wreckage seem to writhe.
The floor’s a treacherous landscape of shattered safety glass and buckled linoleum. In the center of the room, the main workbenches form a kind of metallic island, their stainless-steel surfaces scarred and pocked by shrapnel.
A complex web of thick, insulated cables, some as thick as a man's arm, snake across the floor from a bank of humming servers that have somehow survived this war.
They pulse with a faint, intermittent green light, a mechanical heartbeat in a place of stillness.
One server rack has been peeled open like a tin can, its circuit boards exposed and glittering cruelly in the shaft of light.
Along the far wall, a line of fume hoods stands like sentinels in a forgotten war. Most are shattered, but one remains intact, its reinforced glass marred with a thousand tiny cracks but somehow holding together.
Inside, a single beaker stands upright, filled not with liquid, but with a layer of fine, iridescent black dust that seems to drink the light. A handwritten label, curled and yellowed, is still barely legible: Specimen - DO NOT OPEN.
It’s there the virologist—Doctor Tamara—goes, her lips pursed in contemplation.
I wonder if it’s important.
I wonder if any of this is important.
Just what were the Noths working on here?
Terrifying sounds start to flit through my head, and I'm only ninety percent certain they are traumatic memories, not reality. But my eyes dart as though the noises are real.
I take in dusty workbenches, empty gloveboxes with cracked glass, a clean room that looks anything but since it’s strung with cobwebs and a layer of dirt coats the floor.
My memory flickers like a strobe light when I spot a chair that looks like it belongs in a dental office.
It’s on the opposite side of the room from the fume hoods, with crumbling plaster and loose cement blocks half obscuring it from view.
I almost wonder if it was in an entirely separate room before the building began to deteriorate.
In quick succession, I see white lab coats. Blue gloves. A bright light overhead.
What the fuck?
My pulse thunders, and my chest feels like a herd of wild horses have trampled through it. But my mind is sparking with that morbid curiosity that always seems to accompany fear.
What am I seeing and why? What happened to me?
Head tilted, I glide closer and realize that there are straps dangling from the arms of the dusty seat. Foreboding accompanies my steps, but I can't seem to stop walking.
This time, instead of an image, I'm bombarded with sounds. My own high-pitched shriek. Someone yells, Keep her still!
"You okay?" Luka asks, and as his face comes into focus, I realize that my hand is on my chest, my breathing frantic.
Panicked.
I swallow and try to shake away the visceral sensations coursing through me and make sense of the adrenaline crashing through my veins and the piecemeal flashes I’ve experienced.
I tell Luka, "My therapist said that it's normal to repress some memories after a traumatic experience."
Luka's brows rise, and he glances at the chair. His gun lowers a little as he strides over to it, bends, and then lifts something up from the chairback with two fingers.
It's a leather strap, right at neck height, with a bunch of holes punched into the end. People were tied down to that chair.
My palm flies to my neck, and I can practically feel that strap cinching tighter around my windpipe.
Luka's at my side in under a second, leaning close, his breath ghosting over me as he asks, "Do you need to go outside?"
His arm moves to wrap around my shoulders, but I step back, aware that other men are in the room with us.
Teddie can’t have a panic attack.
I’d never be able to explain that away.
Vehemently, I shake my head, my furious sense of violation overcoming the quaking that's set in at my knees.
Clenching my jaw, I circle the chair and then glance around the empty lab room to see if anything else triggers me.
It doesn't.
But my earlier suspicion that this place held a sense of darkness is now justified.
When Luka and I reach a second door and start into the hall behind the others, he asks, "Mind telling me what happened?"
Exhaling, ensuring that none of my other alphas are within hearing distance, because I don't think any of them could react with composure or logic to my revelation, I intone, "I think the Noths did something to me the first time they took me. But I'm not sure what."
A lingering sense of anxiety sticks to my ribs as we clear the remainder of the building. No people are found anywhere on the premises. But also…no medicine for my brother, according to Doctor Tamara. This place has been empty for too long.
We're trudging toward the front door when one of the members of Team Blue rushes toward us. Mole Man's face is frantic, eyes wide, and his energy immediately puts all of us on high alert, the room filling with the potent scent of alpha pheromones.
"We found a hidden stairwell. This way!" He jerks his head and spins on his boot, not waiting for anyone, certain we'll follow.
Head lights flick on, and Ridge orders, "Night vision active, guys. Who has the flash bangs?"
An alpha I don't know replies, and Ridge signals for him to proceed ahead.
When we reach the location of the stairwell, I realize that it leads underground. An entire bit of countertop has been lifted, the cabinet beneath the counter sliding to one side to reveal a secret passage. Horrified foreboding sloshes through my veins like tiny chips of ice.
Soldiers start descending, guns drawn. Alpha Team X and I wait at the top for the all-clear because they won't let the "prince" proceed without it. Doctor Tamara remains with us. She may be an alpha, but she isn’t trained in combat.
My breath becomes the loudest sound in the room, so I hold it.
Stale air wafts up from the staircase and brings another unbidden memory…this time a massive syringe filled with a neon-blue liquid. The needle glints as a drop of that blue poison bubbles up onto the tip—
Gunfire erupts from the black abyss of the stairwell.
Colter shoves me into the closest wall, his massive bulk used to block me in so that all I can see is his back.
"I have a bulletproof vest," I protest, but the masked man pretends he can't hear.
"What is it?" Ridge calls out via our headsets.
But there's a yell from below instead of a response. The sounds of scrabbling and thumps of bodies smashing into walls join the gunfire.
"Booby trap," Kylian comments, his tone airy. "Only slightly less fun than boobies."
"Shut up," Luka retorts.
"Blue Team, check in!" Ridge commands into his mic.
There's a crackle in our headsets before a breathy male voice comes on. "There’s an entire group of alphas down here. More massive than any I’ve ever seen. And feral. Completely fucking—”
The transmission cuts out before the soldier can complete his thought.
Doctor Tamara whimpers, fear leaching her face of all color, and then she turns on her heels and runs toward the entrance.
A scream startles a shiver out of me, and my shoulders creep up toward my ears.
Colter mutters, "I'm taking her outside," to Ridge.
I don't hear Ridge's reply, but a second later I'm scooped into my huge alpha’s arms.
"Let me go play, Ridgey," Kylian wheedles.
Immediately, I writhe in Colter's grip, wriggling free and leaning around him to glare at my other alpha. "Don't you dare."
Kylian gives me a confident wink. "It'll be all right, my obsession. In fact, it'll be fun."
Fun! Fun! He hasn't even bothered to shove on his night-vision glasses like everyone else.
I open my mouth to retort, but a soldier explodes out of the secret passage and immediately rounds to shove the cabinet back over the opening.
"Quick! Help!"
"There are men down there," Ridge protests.
The soldier glances up at Ridge, and I spot the man's mole on his pale-as-plaster face.
He shakes his head. "Not anymore."
Fuck.
Fuck!
We lost everyone?
Kylian and Luka hurry over and help the soldier shove the cabinet back into place, slamming the steel countertop back down just as a wild screech erupts from the stairwell. A strangely pitched screech that sounds more like it belongs in the wild, not to a human.
Bullets start to pimple the surface of the table, shot from below.
Holy hell.
What’s down there?
"Let's get out of here," Ridge commands.
But we don't need his instructions.
We're already running.