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"You want to come hang out with Kade and me for a little while?"
Alex asked.
Jenna gave a mild shake of her head. "Nah, I'm okay. I think I'll stay here for a few minutes, unwind a bit. Been a long, strange day."
Alex's smile was sympathetic. "If you need anything at all, you come find me. Deal?"
Jenna nodded. "I'm fine. But thanks."
She watched her friend slowly turn and disappear up the corridor.
When there was nothing left in the room but quiet and solitude, Jenna stood up and walked over to the wall of maps and charts and sketches.
It was admirable, what the Order and their mates were trying to do. It was important work--more important than anything Jenna would ever have come in contact with in rural Alaska, or anywhere else for that matter.
If everything she'd learned the past couple of days was true, then what the Order was doing here was nothing short of saving the world.
"Jesus Christ," Jenna whispered, struck by the enormity of it all.
She wanted to help.
If she was able--even in some small way--she had to help.
Didn't she?
Jenna paced around the war room, a battle of her own waging inside her. She wasn't ready to be part of something like this. Not when she still had so much to figure out for herself. With her brother dead, she had no family left at all. Alaska had been her home her entire life, and now that was gone, as well, a part of her prior existence erased to help the Order preserve their secrets as they pursued their enemy.
As for her future, she couldn't even begin to guess. The alien matter embedded inside her was a problem she never could have imagined, and no amount of wishing was going to take it away. Not even Gideon's mental brilliance seemed capable of extricating her from that tangled complication.
And then there was Brock. Of all the things that had happened to her between the invasion of her cabin home by the Ancient and her current, unexpected--although not unbearable--embrace by everyone in the Order's headquarters, Brock was proving to be the one thing she was least prepared to deal with.
She was nowhere close to ready when it came to the feelings he aroused in her. Things she hadn't felt in years, and sure as hell didn't want to feel now.
Nothing in her life was certain anymore, and the last thing she needed was to involve herself any further in the problems facing the warriors and their mates.
Nevertheless, Jenna found herself drifting over to the computer workstation on the desk nearby. She sat down at the keyboard and brought up an Internet browser, then went to one of those free email sites and created an account.
She opened a new message and typed in the address of one of her friends with the Feds up in Anchorage. She asked a single question, an inquiry to be looked into confidentially as a personal favor.
She drew in her breath, then hit send.
Chapter Twelve
In the showers adjacent to the weapons room, Brock reached around his back and cranked the temperature setting from hot to scalding. Hands braced on the teak door of the private shower stall, head bent low to his chest, he welcomed the searing pound of water that sluiced over his shoulders and down his naked back. Hot steam roiled up all around him, thick as fog, from his head to the tiled floor at his feet.
"Christ," Kade hissed from a couple of stalls down from him. "Two solid hours of hand-to-hand sparring wasn't enough punishment for you?
Now you feel the need to boil yourself alive over there?"
Brock grunted, slicking his hand over his face as the steam continued to gather and the heat continued to batter his too-tense muscles. He'd found Kade in the weapons room with Niko and Chase after he'd dropped his gear in his new shared quarters with Hunter. It seemed reasonable to expect that a hard few rounds of blade work and hand-to-hand training would be enough to exhaust some of his restlessness and distraction. It should have been, but it wasn't.
"What's going on with you, man?"
"I don't know what you mean," Brock muttered, pushing his head and shoulders farther under the scalding spray.
Kade's scoff echoed in the cavernous shower room. "Like hell, you don't know."
"Shit." Brock exhaled the curse into the mist that wreathed his head.
