Page 3 of Omega Hunted

I yanked.

The mask peeled down.

For one frozen heartbeat, I saw him.

Dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. Golden eyes, wide with surprise rather than anger. A scar cut through one eyebrow. He looked younger than I’d expected, and nothing in his expression matched the cold satisfaction I’d always seen on the SED wolves from Center 14.

Then his free hand shot up, dragging the mask back into place.

“Stop,” he said again, breath coming hard as he fought to restrain me without hurting me. “I’m not here for you!” His frantic gaze swept past me, searching the room, and then he saw Yannick. He went utterly still. Whatever he’d been about to say died on his lips, and the despair that broke across his face was so raw I almost looked away. Then a sound tore from somewhere deep inside him, too broken, too animal to be human, his wolf howling through him at the sight of Yannick on that table. It lasted no more than a heartbeat before he dragged it back under control, but I’d heard it. I’d heard what seeing Yannick dead had done to him.

He knew Yannick?

“Fuck!” he yelled, then yanked me back, staring at me, calculating. “Can you run?” I couldn’t answer. “Can. You. Run?” he repeated, louder this time.

“Yannick…” My voice broke around the name.

His gaze drifted back to the operating table for the briefest moment. “He’s gone.”

I clutched the stuffed wolf to my chest. “The others,” I whispered. “Please… help the others. They’re still locked upstairs.”

His shoulders sagged. “I can’t.” His gaze remained fixed beyond me, on people I couldn’t see. “But if I can get at least one of you out…”

Another volley of gunfire exploded down the corridor, and this time he didn’t wait for me to answer.

“Move.”

He grabbed my arm and yanked me through the door, pressing me into the shadow of an alcove, one arm locked around my shoulders, gun raised and sweeping the corridor over my head. Panic clawed my throat as I stumbled onward, one hand on the wall, my back aching at every stride, searching for an exit while my mind tried to understand what I’d seen. Shouts broke out behind me. “Someone’s in the wing, find them”—and boots hit the floor ahead.

He yanked me sideways, and I twisted and clawed⁠—

“Stop.” His voice was low and rough, right against my ear, as he locked his arm around my shoulders, and my leopard lurched between submission and escape so violently it made my knees weak.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

My daughter pressed hard under my hand. The pain in my back stayed deep and constant. Voices were getting closer. He dragged me into the dark, and I went, stumbling, his gun raised as we moved, and I didn’t know who he was or where he was taking me, only that behind us, people were dead, and I had to keep going.

A shadow emerged from the laundry alcove ahead with a weapon. A gunshot exploded beside me, deafening me, wiping out every other sound as the man dropped. My ears were screaming with a high, piercing whine; we were already through the service door before his body finished falling.

The stairwell beyond was narrow, and I stumbled on the first steps, grabbing at the man to stop myself tumbling. “I can’t leave the others!” The words came out ragged and wrong.

“Get the fuck down the stairs,” he snarled, his animal in his eyes.

“My baby⁠—”

“This is your only chance.”

I stumbled and half fell two flights, then three, my breath tearing, while the stranger stayed close and kept me upright. My stomach cramped, tight enough to make me gasp, my back flaring with a deep, dragging knife that made my knees threaten to give. I had to stop, gripping the banister.

He caught my face in both hands, and his expression didn’t suggest we could rest. “Move,” he snapped.

“O-okay.”

Somehow, we reached the bottom. “When we go through the next door, you run,” he said, his voice muffled and distant beneath the relentless ringing in my ears as he pressed a cold metal key into my palm. I stared down at it.

“Fuck,” he snarled. “Do you know how to drive?”

“A little, around the … before I was… before⁠—”