Blush? What do women call that shit? I don’t fucking know…but it gets slathered across the next flashlight.
“What are you doing?” Luka asks, pausing his scan of the valley to pose the question we’re all silently thinking.
Brylee glances up and waggles her brows as she grabs two flashlights, one smeared red and the other orange.
“We’re going to start a fire.” She presses a function button that makes the lights strobe on and off, creating a pattern of color as her head jerks in the direction of a smoke bomb. “Light that. Let’s see if we can smoke out whoever’s in that cabin.”
Clever. Little. Minx.
My pants are suddenly far too tight, and I have to adjust myself before I grab a smoke bomb. Each of the guys grabs a bomb and a colored flashlight. Then we fan out among the underbrush and await our omega’s command.
“Colter. Kylian. Luka. Ridge.” As she says our names, we each set off the smoke, and slowly thick gray plumes start to rise from the foliage.
The scent burns my nostrils, but I ignore it—I’ve ignored far worse—and slide my night vision goggles down over my eyes,rifle poised at my shoulder, gaze locked on the door of that trailer.
Waiting is always the hardest part. Anticipation feeds your mind all kinds of horrors. And as the sun slips behind the horizon, we have to wait for what feels like an eternity.
But finally a curtain flickers in one of the tiny square windows, revealing a splash of light from inside the building.
“Someone’s home,” I say into my comm, dark delight rocketing through me.
“We have a winner,” Kylian comments, the grin clear in his tone.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Luka cautions.
“Just watch,” Colter advises.
Another round of waiting begins, but this time, it isn’t long before the door cracks open, and two shadowy figures spill out of the house, running around to the far side.
“Fuck! Yes! We’ve smoked them out!” Kylian’s glee is too damned quick, because as we smash through the underbrush racing for our targets, the rev of a motor sounds.
A motorcycle peels out from the other side of the double-wide, tires squealing as it kicks up dust and debris, two people perched on the seat.
“Fuck!” Luka hisses. “I didn’t see any damned vehicles on the drone scan.”
Colter radios back to base for backup, though we all know that’s a lost cause. I sprint toward the double-wide anyway, because if this trailer really has been serving as a lab, maybe there’sstill data left inside. Maybe we can cobble together enough information to?—
BOOM.
My hopes blow up in my face as the trailer explodes into a mushroom cloud, flames and black smoke rolling up toward the moon. Heat blazes across my cheeks, and I have to squint as flecks of ash and debris spray out.
“Fuck!” I stop running and slam my fist into the tree trunk to my right, frustration a churning vortex in my gut.
But my mate steps into the moonlight serenely, her face brindled by the wild light of the blast. Brylee turns to us and lifts her chin, and I swear, she’s never looked more like a queen than in this moment, confident and calm with the world burning behind her.
“We’ll get them,” she declares.
And she’s absolutely right. We will. If she wants this damned scientist, we will find them, because Alpha Team X would go to hell and back for this woman, loving every single step through sulfur and brimstone as long as she’s at our side.
55
BRYLEE
The conference roomsmells like stale coffee and wildflowers, and I’m trying to focus on the ambassador from Nóthos as she details border-patrol schedules, but the room keeps tilting. Not dramatically—not like the vertigo I used to get after the attack five years ago, when my ears began to ring—but subtly, like the floor has become a boat and I’m only now noticing the waves.
I grip the edge of the mahogany table, my knuckles white against the dark wood.
“—increased surveillance along the northern ridge,” Ambassador Vex is saying, her voice a low drone that seems to come from underwater. “Your Majesty, our intelligence suggests…”
