Aidan filled Cage in on the rebuilding status, and Mirren had to admit he was glad to have the man back in Penton—as long as he kept his psychoanalysis bullshit to himself. They needed every experienced fighter they could get, and Cage had a cool head under pressure. They might not be at war since they’d defeated Matthias and forced the Tribunal bullies to back down by bringing in the Rangers, but he wouldn’t exactly call it peacetime, either.
“Aw, fuck.” Mirren spotted the construction site at the top of the hill and sped up. The work site was illuminated by three floodlights, and a heap of brick-filled rubble was visible even from a distance. “Looks like the whole east wall came down. They’d almost finished bricking that one.”
He slammed the truck to a halt, slinging white nuggets of loose gravel across the parking lot. Aidan, Krys, and Cage jumped out before he had the key out of the ignition.
Mirren popped the hatch to retrieve Krys’s medical kit, stopping to study the site and the woods behind it. Max stood upright and looked uninjured, judging by the way he waved his arms around as he talked to Aidan. Fucking drama queen. Mark sat off to one side with his head propped on his bent knees.
Pausing beside the Bronco, Mirren scanned the wooded area behind the job site, looking for anything out of place. It had become habit to suspect Matthias of being behind anything bad that happened here, but Penton had other enemies on the Tribunal—not the least of whom was Director Frank Greisser. He wanted both Aidan and Mirren dead. They’d challenged his ability to lead and had “fomented rebellion” by advocating a partnership with bonded humans as a way to survive the pandemic crisis. After Aidan’s power play of bringing human military personnel into vampire affairs, Greisser had been forced to throw Matthias to the wolves and pretend an alliance with the Penton scathe. But things weren’t over. Mirren could feel it.
He sensed no unbonded vampires lurking around, however, so he walked up to the site where Aidan, Krys, and Cage knelt next to the pile of collapsed brick.
Aw, fuck.
From the parking lot, the heap of bricks had camouflaged the body lying underneath. Rob Thomas looked like he’d been at ground zero when the wall collapsed, and Mirren could tell by one look at the guy that he was dead or dying. That much weight didn’t land on your head without breaking something unfixable.
He skirted around where Krys knelt next to Rob, trying to talk to him, and approached Max and Mark. “Mark, you okay?”
“Just had the wind knocked out of me. Give me a minute and I’m good.” His blond hair was caked with blood around his right temple, but it had already dried. “Rob’s in bad shape, though.”
“Yeah, he is. Start talking, Max.”
Max looked back to where Cage and Aidan were trying to talk to Rob while Krys ripped away clothing to assess the wounds. If Mirren knew he was dying, Krys knew it, too. He guessed that as a doctor she had to at least go through the motions.
Max and Rob had been best buddies since college and throughout their Army tours, so he would cut the guy some slack—as long as he didn’t revert to smartassery. “What happened?”
“Hell, I don’t know.” Max stuck shaky hands in his pockets. “Mark was having trouble with one of the last bricks, so I went over to get a new one off the stack that came in yesterday. When I turned around, the whole wall was coming down on them.” He looked down, but not before Mirren saw tears.
Aw, fuck me. He was not the Mother Teresa of vampirehood, by a long shot. He didn’t know what to say to a guy watching his best friend die. “Focus,” he said. “The anchors holding the wall to the frame must have come loose.”
As soon as he said the words, Mirren realized how ridiculous that scenario was. One anchor could come loose. Two? Not outside the realm of possibility, although unlikely. But not all of them. “You sure all the anchors on the construction plans got put in? No shortcuts?”
“No way.” Max took a deep breath and turned back to Mirren. “We even checked them before we left the site last night, Rob and me both, ’cause we knew we’d be adding that last section today. They were solid. No way fifteen anchors came loose.” He looked around again. Aidan and Cage were talking to Krys, who held her hands to her face. Max’s voice softened to a whisper. “No fucking way.”
Which meant sabotage—and Mirren didn’t have a clue who the saboteur might be, although his first thought went to Fen Patrick. Everyone else, even Britta and Shawn, had gone through one of Will’s background checks. They’d all turned up clean. He should’ve locked Fen up himself. Although he couldn’t imagine Cage would have left the newcomer unguarded long enough to be able to come to the job site and screw with the anchors. How could Fen even have known about the construction project when Cage didn’t know himself?