“Where have you been?” she barks at me. “And where’s your uniform? We need to get to the boat.”
“Can I talk to you alone?”
She flicks a dismissive glare at me. “Later. We need to get those kids back to Three so the team can study them. The older ones might be too powerful to control, so we’re going to eliminate them on the way and use their genetic material. I want the younger ones kept alive. We need living tissue samples.”
Shit. This isn’t going to be as clean as I’d hoped. I can’t let her leave the Sub. Too many people could witness me killing her.
“Lieutenant Commander Carver, do you have the list of supplies I want when you return?” she asks.
A short man with a thick beard pats his pants pocket. “Yes, Commander.”
She’s looking at something on a long table. I ease myself closer to her.
“Okay, let’s go. You’re snapping necks; I don’t want a bloody mess on my boat.” She peers at me over the rim of her glasses. “Have you been in the jungle? You look?—”
The alarm registers in her eyes a split second before I grab the guard beside me, aromium making me superhumanly fast. I pull his gun from its holster and take out three of the other guards with a bullet to each of their heads. When I go for the fourth, the gun clicks uselessly.
“Marcus.” Ingrid pales, looking at the guard now running for the exit.
“Get back here!” she screams.
I break the neck of the guard I’m holding, then take off after the last one. He’s not very far up the ramp when I reach him, and I make his death as quick as I can by breaking his neck, too.
Ingrid can’t escape the Sub; there’s an escape tunnel, but it requires a code she can’t possibly know. I grab the dead soldier’scollar and drag his body behind me, a bolt of pain in my head temporarily blinding me.
My stomach won’t let me keep walking. I pause for a few dry heaves, pressing my body to the tunnel wall to protect myself from the gunshots I know are coming.
The heaving subsides, and I can see again. I pick up the guard, using his body as a shield for my chest.
“What’s your goal, Marcus?”
I scan the room, able to hear Ingrid but not see her. She’s hiding.
“You. Dead,” I rasp.
“I’m willing to forgive this. Join the winning side. You don’t even realize how powerful you are because of the compound inside you, but I do.”
“How did you beat me here?” I ask, trying to pinpoint where her voice is coming from.
“Don’t insult my intelligence. We intercepted the radio call from this island and I knew Tyrone was one of them. He’s the only one who could have removed your sub from our tracking system and programmed it to go elsewhere.”
I swallow back my nausea, my head swimming. “That had to burn, huh? Didn’t even know your second-in-command was working against you?”
“He regrets it now, I assure you. Tyrone will spend the rest of his life in our dungeon, dreaming of death. My men are skilled at bringing people right to the edge of it.”
A surge of power flares through me. Tyrone risked himself to help me, and now he’s being tortured for it.
My connection to my wolves and the countless organisms in the rocks buried deep in the island’s rocky foundation is wide open, their frustration at not being able to reach me making it hard to focus.
The entire Sub vibrates, my power testing its earthquake-proof construction.
“You’re extraordinary, Marcus,” Ingrid says. “You can live a life of power and luxury.”
There she is. Her voice is coming from the other side of a tall metal cabinet in the hallway.
“Yeah?” I keep my arm banded around the guard’s waist, pointing his gun in Ingrid’s direction as I walk there. “Sex slaves? Air conditioning? Control over innocent people’s lives?”
“If that’s what you want.”
