25. Chapter 25
Chapter 25
Abby
"The unit" was a literal name. We were in a storage unit. It made a good Bat Cave.
I was surprised when Gage drove miles outside of the affluent parts of Seattle he and his brother preferred and straight to a self-storage building with a questionable amount of security. Anyone else looking for secrets from Silver Bullet would be equally surprised, I imagined.
Other than a barbed wire fence and a series of security cameras, the place didn’t appear to be that secure. That was the point.
Gage rented the entire facility from his own company. With enough digging someone could uncover that but even then, it appeared to be a real estate investment. Rental income trickled in every month and taxes were paid.
Nothing to raise red flags.
Not until you walked into "the unit" that Gage called his own and saw what he and the guys were storing.
“Why does anyone need this many guns?” I was going for a casual tone, but it came out squeaky and nervous.
Gage sensed my shift in demeanor as we walked into the concrete room. He flicked on a series of lights, illuminating more metal shelves loaded with gun cases, tactical gear, and tech I had no chance of identifying.
A frisson of fear sent chills down my arms. The unit was uninsulated, and the air was frigid, adding to the cold uncertainty that had my stomach flipping.
Gage stooped over a plastic table, hefting a space heater off the bottom of a shelf, and plugging it into an outlet. He pointed the thing straight at me, hot air billowing around me and thawing some of my doubts.
“When we came home from Italy, we were erased,” he reminded me. “It took months to prove our identities, and even then, we had to start from scratch. Our bank accounts were closed. Any property we owned was sold with no evidence it was ever in our names. Everything…gone.”
That was a feeling I could relate to. “And the guns help with that how?”
Gage met my gaze, his blue eyes dark and steely. “They’re security. We’re not getting erased again.”
I offered a wobbly smile. “I’ve heard of preppers before. I thought they were just roleplaying for internet fame.”
“You don’t have to be scared,” he said carefully, stepping into my space. “I don’t plan to use these.”
Something in the deep rumble of his voice was calming. He only had to say those six words and my anxiety dissipated. You don’t have to be scared.
If he said so, I believed him.
I picked at the pink polish on my thumb. “One time in high school a boy made fun of me for having food in my teeth, and now I keep a toothbrush in my purse. Just in case.”
“So, you get it,” Gage chuckled.
“Totally.”
I relaxed after that, sliding into a folding chair beside Gage and watching as he pounded away on the keyboard of his laptop. I didn’t understand what it was like for shifters to live in a constant state of fear. I hadn’t realized just how real the threat to their freedom was.
It wasn’t uncommon to hear discussion about shifter behavior and whether it was safe for us to coexist with them on talk shows and political podcasts. For me, it was easy to tune out. I didn’t know any shifters.
Maybe I even agreed with some of the anti-shifter talking points. It was easy for someone like Gage to be made out as a monster when you only knew the worst acts he was capable of committing.
I only had to see the scars on Gage’s torso to know humans were equally capable of violence.
I wasn’t sure what I could do about it. I was just a girl trying not to drown after her divorce. Just a secretary in over her head. The gun cases on the shelves behind me gave me the heebie-jeebies, and I might still cry about Cargill pointing his gun at us.
But Gage believed I could help him, so I would.
It took an hour for Gage to decrypt the drive. Cargill was happy enough to give it to us, just not to make it easy to access. Gage was convinced this was another test. I still didn’t understand why Cargill was dead set on using the Silver Bullet team to retrieve the same weapon they lost the first time.
“Holy fuck,” Gage muttered, scrolling through what appeared to be thousands of PDFs and images.
“What is all that?”
“Answers,” he breathed. “This is every file I scanned before the explosion. A detailed list of every known member, past and present, of The Organization. Profiles on the shifter extremists that were guarding the weapon. It’s…it’s everything I’ve been looking for.”
“Cargill was telling the truth.”
“Not necessarily. We have to validate all this data before we can move forward.
“This is everything,” Gage repeated, staring unseeing at his screen. “Cargill had everything—" He rocketed from his chair, swinging around the table and pacing.
That telltale blue glow was coming from his eyes, and I could see every vein in his arms bulging. This was the reaction I’d been expecting.
“Cargill had everything, and he only gave it to us when he wanted to use us. He knew! He knew Dallas was alive!”
His head jerked to the left, and he slapped the side of his neck in the same place. The path he was spiraling down was steep, and I didn’t know if I could drag him back once he followed it down.
Swallowing my trepidation, I came around the table and blocked his way as he whirled for another round. The unit was smaller than his office and there wasn’t room for him to explode in here.
Not to mention, I was afraid of what might happen to us if he did.
“Take off your shirt.” I tucked my hands in my pockets to hide the shaking.
He looked distinctly inhuman when he locked gazes with me. His eyes blazed, face contorted, tendons bulging in his neck.
After a moment my words landed, and I watched the heat burning through him transform. The tension in his shoulders slackened, the angles of his face softening. That unnatural blue glow of his eyes was unchanging, blinding me with intensity as he leaned in, inhaling the air around me and letting it out on a groan.
“What did you say?”
I resisted the urge to take a step back. Somehow I knew that if I tried to escape now, he would pounce. “I said take off your shirt.”
The scent of him was suddenly replacing the air in my lungs. My hands weren’t just shaking now, they were malfunctioning in the tight pockets of my jeans as they tried to escape. Two minutes ago, I was clammy and cold, now my skin was on fire.
Fever scorched through me, collecting between my legs until it was an effort not to rub them together. At the same time, I felt dizzy, my heart leaping unevenly in my chest.
Ping .
“For your scars!” I blurted, trying to avert my own attention from the way his lips curled to one side. “Take off your shirt so I can document your scars.”
The fire went out. Gage’s eyes cooled, and he took two healthy steps back.
“Why?”
“So that Joseph Cargill and every member of his organization can be brought to justice.”
His laugh was humorless. “You’re forgetting the part where I’m a shifter. There’s no justice for shifters in this country or anywhere. They don’t give a shit if someone wants to lock us up like dogs.”
“You’re wrong. I promise you, Gage, you’re wrong. If people knew what they did to you, they would be as outraged as I am. And Cargill implied they’re still doing it. That women like Mackenna might be facing the same horrible treatment that you did.” I took a steadying breath, releasing my hands from my pockets to hold them out beseechingly. “Think about it. They broke international laws and misused US military resources. They built a weapon that’s dangerous enough to have multiple shadow organizations hunting it down.”
“We can’t prove any of it. We don’t even know what the weapon is!”
“Yet,” I said. “We can’t prove it yet. But if we find this research Cargill is so desperate to get his hands on…”
Gage propped his hands on the back of his head, tilting his chin to the ceiling. After a stretch of silence he exhaled and asked, “Why not just kill Cargill?”
“Because killing people is wrong!” I hissed. “And also, because that file you just opened had dozens of names and faces that are linked to this. You’ll never know if they’re really gone without knowing who they are.”
“Exposing them might be dangerous.”
“Is it there a safer alternative?”
Gage dropped his head, his gaze landing on mine again. “Are you sure?“ The words were uncharacteristically soft.
“Am I sure about what?”
“That you want to be a part of this. You could leave now. Take the money Levi owes you and go back to Minneapolis to do something normal with your life.” This was another one of those questions that felt layered. He was asking me something that he wasn’t outright saying.
I studied him, letting the cool weight of his eyes cover me. “Yes, I’m sure.”
There were sixteen known members in Manchini’s pack. Figuring them out was easy enough. Where the alpha went, the pack went. If Manchini was really after Cargill—which it appeared that he was based on documented sightings of his pack—then we expected they were already in Seattle.
The Organization was trickier. Though there were names and even some faces—Paul Burladt, father to our favorite anti-shifter politician was one of them—they weren’t necessarily members of The Organization. There were notes about suspected association, business dealings, or relations by marriage. Nothing that was going to lead us directly to the highest members that we wanted to hold responsible.
So far, we had barely finished flipping through the names and profiles. There were hundreds of files regarding weapon research, and it seemed insurmountable to read through it all.
Though his curiosity was gnawing at him, Gage decided identifying faces was top priority. If he recognized any, that would be concrete evidence. He also had me compiling photos to send to Amelia Patelle.
“None,” Gage said, his shoulders slumping. “Other than Manchini’s pack, I don’t recognize a single face.”
“And you’re sure you would?”
“I made it my life purpose during those five months to memorize every single one of them.”
“Maybe evil scientists are more reclusive. They spend a lot of time in secret labs.”
“Maybe,” he muttered. “I still don’t trust that this is complete information. Cargill is holding back a lot.”
“But this is what we have right now. Let’s make sense of it.”
“No,” Gage closed his laptop, popping cords out and packing it up. “We’re going home.”
“What?”
“The hard part is over. We can do the rest of this from the couch. C’mon.” He gestured for me to gather my things. “We can pick up dinner on the way.”
That was a suspiciously agreeable thing to do after kidnapping me and keeping me up for three nights in a row.
“You should let me sleep on the couch,” I said, following him out the door.
“Nope.”
“You can’t sleep on that couch until Thanksgiving. You’ll develop a permanently stiff neck.” Was I seriously going to stay with him until Thanksgiving?
He glanced over his shoulder, eyes gleaming. “Are you offering to share?”
My feet stumbled over each other. Gage was…flirting with me?
By the time I thought of a good response he had already moved on.
“Do you like pasta?”
“I’d never say no to…pasta.”