Page 54 of Dual Nature

"Grounds live, outside doors and living room sensors down. Target is asleep in his room upstairs, alone. Make sure to wait at the stairs for my go."

This was the trickiest part of the whole thing. I couldn't practice how long it would take me to get past the lock then to the stairs. On average, I could get a standard lock open in under a minute, but you stayed alive longer if you planned for the worst. I had three minutes to get in and over to the stairs before the motion sensor would catch me. The trick was making sure the stairs’ sensor would turn off right away since they overlapped. Holding my breath, I worked on the lock, and just as I feared, it was created to deter being picked—at least by the average person. I'd mastered how to get around it with a modified tool; it just took the right movements. If I fucked this up, it would seal the whole door handle, then there would be nothing I could do but use another access point, and I didn't have the luxury of that as an option.

When the tell-tale snick of the lock sounded, I let out a breath and bolted for the stairs, dodging around the furniture that was hidden in the darkness. I didn’t know that I could have pulled this job off as smoothly if I wasn't a super. Having sharp night-vision and faster reflexes to help deal with the tight time table was making all the difference.

"Well done, now count to five and head up the stairs. His room is the fourth door on the left hand side. He has a canopy bed, and the curtains are closed by the looks of it," Vicky informed me.

Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath, extending my senses to take in all the sounds and smells around me. There was something odd in the air, almost a metallic tang, and I couldn't place what it was coming from. Something about it seemed so familiar, but with my heightened sense of smell, it wasn't connecting to my memory the right way. This deeper access to the nuances of the scent were helpful, but at the same time, they made the familiar into something unfamiliar. Swiftly, I moved up the steps, thankful that I had five minutes to get into his room. His door was locked; however, this one was easy to pick. He likely thought his downstairs security would keep people from reaching him.

The moment I opened the door, I was hit with the musky scent of sex and what I could now tell was blood. With the curtains closed, I couldn't figure out if he'd just taken matters into his own hand and cut himself shaving or something. Otherwise, it could mean that someone had beaten me to the punch and lured him to bed, fucked him, and killed him, but Vicky had sworn he was alone. This was why working with a team needed a whole other level of trust because if I opened that curtain and he wasn't alone, this night was going down very differently than we’d imagined.

Silent as a ghost, I crept closer to the bed, peeking into the pitch black darkness while sniffing the air in an effort to get more information. I couldn't hear another heartbeat, but that wasn’t a guarantee of anything in a world where supers were involved. What I was able to determine was that my target was alive and sleeping on the left side of the bed. The blood was coming from him, but the pace of his pulse, strong and even, told me that he was alive. Slinking to the head of the bed, I pulled back the curtain, and the soft light of the digital clock on the bedside gave me just enough light to make out the naked woman sprawled on top of him, blood smeared over them both.

Fuck! Dealing with a vampire was not something I was prepared for, but I would just have to make do. I could use a vial of the paralytic on both of them. It would only last for seconds with the woman, maybe a minute or so. Would that be enough time for me to cut off her head? It would have to be. I was far stronger than I'd been the last time I’d dealt with a vampire. In this moment, she was the greater threat, so she was getting dealt with first, then I would manage the pudgy billionaire.

I unclasped the knife on my hip, making it easier for me to grab it post-injection. Then I grabbed one of the syringes and readied it. Before I could doubt myself, I jammed the needle into her neck, causing her blood red eyes to snap open. They locked on mine, holding my gaze as I pushed the plunger down to shove the drug into her system. A sharp gasp left her lips, but I leaped onto the bed, grabbing her long, thick red hair to pull her away from my target and give me a better angle. My knife sliced across her throat, hitting her spine, but it didn't cut through it. Unable to think of anything else to do, I gripped her head with both hands and twisted, snapping her neck and ripping it off the rest of the way before I chucked it out of the bed.

"What the bloody hell is going on here!" My target spluttered as he woke up.

He hit a switch and screamed at the sight of the woman he'd fucked, now headless and bleeding out into his bed. My face was covered in a mask, adding to the fear permeating the air as he tried to scramble away, but I jammed the second dose into his leg, stopping his efforts. With a garbled cry, he flopped out of the bed, landing on the floor with a thud, his naked body wearing nothing but blood.

"Finley, did I just see you toss a head out of the bed?" Vicky asked once I pushed back the curtains and turned on all the lights. "Oh my god! You ripped that woman's head off!"

I looked up at the camera in the room and nodded, not having the time or interest to explain. Gripping my prey under his armpits, I dragged him over to the wooden rolling chair he had near a small writing desk. It wasn’t ideal, but it would have to do. Once situated, I pulled out the zip-ties from my pack. These made it so simple to bind him to the chair by his wrists, ankles, and neck, giving me plenty of room to work with. His eyes were wide as he watched me manhandle him, unable to fight back or do anything about it. He broke out in a cold sweat, his body shaking when he tried to move and found he couldn’t.

Peeling off the mask, I tucked it away, leveling him with a look of disgust. "Was she one of the supers you kidnapped, or was she just after your money?" He stared at me, unable to do so much as twitch.

Fuck me, duh. Sighing, I pulled out another needle and gave him a small amount of the antidote to free up his muscles enough that he could speak.

"Do you have any idea who I am?!" he demanded.

"Tell me where the supers are being kept for the Dark Ring, and I'll make sure you die quickly," I offered, ignoring his outburst.

He gaped at me, shocked. "You know I’m with the Dark Ring, yet you still attack me in my own home?"

"You get one more chance to tell me before things start to get worse for you, Mr. Sutton. Where are the supers you have hidden away for tomorrow’s auction?"

Like all men who had money and power, he did the stupid thing and spat at me. I snarled at him in response, letting my wolf shine through my eyes even though she wanted nothing to do with what was going on. She'd much prefer to be cowering in the corner, but something else was combating her fear, allowing me to hold the reins.

I stabbed my knife into his thigh and got right up in his face, reveling in his screams. "I just ripped the head off of a vampire, and you think it's a good idea to piss me off?"

"You—you're a super?" he stuttered, trying to put on a brave face.

"Hmm, seems money can't buy intelligence," I mused as I twisted the knife in his thigh. "Might be why you can't seem to remember where the stolen supers are being kept."

"They won't let this stand, and even if you free them, you can't stop the Dark Ring. We are far larger than anyone realizes, and we have friends in high places," Sutton spat through clenched teeth.

"See, the thing is, you’re the second member I've gotten my hands on. Granted, the other one got lucky and escaped, but I don't make the same mistake twice," I shared, ripping the knife out of his leg. "Let's see how many fingers it's going to take before you crack…"

I had to hand it to the man, he managed to hold out for four fingers. In the meantime, I got some useful information—through the choked back tears, of course. Especially helpful was the information about disabling the house’s security system.

"They’re here on my property in a secure room I had made under the pool, but you'll never get in," he sneered, his laughter borderline deranged. "The security down there is far superior to what I have in the rest of the house."

Wiping my knife on my leg, I slid it back into its sheath and headed for the control panel that ran the house’s security system. Disarming it from the inside was easy, and now I was able to move freely about the house since Vicky had the access to cover our tracks. Jogging back to the main floor, I looked for the hidden entrance to the underground lair he’d made. In his office, there was a gigantic framed painting on one wall that just screamed for me to look behind it. I found hidden hinges on one side, and the catch was a magnetic lock. Following the worst security protocol ever, he kept a key for the lock in his desk. Idiot. Behind the painting was a thick steel door with a hand and retinal scanner followed by a keyed-in passcode. Seemed it wouldn't be all that hard to get into his secret area.

Back in the master bedroom, I promptly chopped off his right hand—I’d left all those fingers intact just in case—and then used my knife to pluck out his eye. "I'll be back if I need anything else." His screams would have echoed through the house, but I'd made sure to gag him. Better safe than sorry, especially after Delilah.

The hand and eye worked, which left only the passcode to figure out. For this, I counted on the fact that no one liked to memorize more than one set of long numbers at a time. I grinned when the same code for the home security worked for this as well. Lights flickered on as I headed down the concrete steps, leading me lower and lower just as Vicky had described. There was another door, but this one was just a handprint scanner with a wheel I needed to turn to undo the seal. Pulling the heavy door would have been impossible for me as a human since it took everything I had to manage it as a werewolf. Once the door was open and I entered the vault, I was frozen in shock by the sight of hundreds of cages made out of some kind of thick clear material. All those in my sight were occupied. Some were in their shifted forms, but the majority were human, cowering in the corner of their small square space.