Over the open line, Angelo could hear the sounds of automatic weapons fire. Double shit.
"Landon," he called. "Powell and Moore are trying to get to Watson's team, but they're pinned down. You want Derek, Ivy, and me to break off and give you a hand?"
"No," Landon answered. "Get those doctors to a secure location first, then come help. We'll hold on until then."
"Roger that." Angelo jogged over to where Ivy and Derek were standing, looking at the hybrid lying on the floor of the first cell. "We need to move."
"They smell like Minka," she said. "Like me."
Angelo ground his jaw. Dammit.
Derek frowned. "What do you mean?"
Ivy ignored his question, instead focusing on Angelo. Her green eyes glowed so bright they practically lit up her face. "You never asked how I knew Minka had been created from my DNA the moment I saw her, but it was the scent. Like any person's scent, it's unique, but there are parts that are like mine. That's how I knew. I'm not sure if the other shifters have noticed, but I did." She glanced at the hybrids. "They have that trace of my scent, too. They were made with my DNA."
Derek's eyes went wide. "All of them?"
She nodded, and Angelo could see the horrible pain in her eyes. "All of them. We can't leave them here like this. We have to help them."
Angelo winced as he remembered yelling at Ivy about not wanting to help Minka, how he had essentially called her selfish because he thought she was more worried about keeping her marriage to Landon a secret than helping Minka. But now he finally understood it had never been about the secrets. It had been about not wanting to be responsible for other humans being tortured and experimented on-about not wanting to look at Minka and know the pain she'd gone through was Ivy's fault.
There wasn't anything Angelo could do to take that pain away, but there was one thing he could do-make sure it never happened again.
"We'll come back and get the hybrids out. I don't know how, but we'll do it, Ivy. I promise," he said. "We need to end this. We can't let Klaus and Renard get away to ever do this again. Can you find them?"
Ivy opened her mouth to argue, but Derek spoke first.
"You and Angelo go find those doctors. I'll stay here and figure out a way to get these people free. If nothing else, at least I'll keep them safe, okay?"
Ivy regarded Derek for a long moment, then she nodded. "I'm trusting you to do that."
Giving the hybrids one more long look, she turned and sniffed the air. "Klaus and Renard are here."
"In this building?" Angelo asked.
She nodded.
"Then let's go find them." He keyed the mic on his radio as he jogged after her. "Landon, I know you're in deep shit right now, but you need to get somebody over to the research building as soon as you can. Derek is trying to save some injured hybrids, and he's going to need help."
On the other end of the line, Landon didn't even hesitate. "Copy that. I'll break off here as soon as possible. Keep it together until I can."
Up ahead, Ivy had picked up her pace to a run. Angelo hurried to keep up, trying to cover every branch in the hallway and every open doorway they passed. Several of the rooms reminded him of small treatment rooms in a hospital, complete with beds and carts of equipment. Other rooms had computers and workstations that seemed more suited to a financial company than a hybrid research facility.
He was just wondering if Ivy was wrong about the doctors being there when she suddenly turned and kicked in the double doors of a random room on the left. She charged inside with a menacing growl that made the hair on his neck stand up. He sprinted the rest of the way, practically skidding into the room to cover her in case someone in there had a weapon.
But the place was empty.
Dim lights on the high ceiling barely illuminated the circular room, but Angelo had no problem figuring out what it was used for. The metal table in the center of the room was highlighted by banks of adjustable lights overhead and surrounded by trays and carts of surgical instruments that could only mean this was an operating room. This was where Klaus and Renard had tortured and experimented on Minka. And if the row of dark, reflective glass on the opposite wall was any indication, people had watched it happen.
For the first time, Angelo wished he were a shifter, so he could growl.
Ivy spun around to stare at the windows. A moment later, she let out a hiss and darted toward the glass. Lights flickered on behind the windows, revealing two men. Angelo had only seen them in the photographs put up during the mission briefing, but he easily recognized them-Johan Klaus and Jean Renard. The doctors should have looked terrified, but they didn't. If anything, they looked damn pleased.
Angelo's gut clenched.
He ran forward to pull Ivy back, but she was already ahead of him, spinning around to shove him back toward the door.
"It's a trap," she shouted.
They'd barely made it into the hallway when she jerked to a halt. Angelo stopped too, swinging his M4 around just as the doors on the other end burst open. Half a dozen hybrids charged into the building and headed their way.
Angelo squeezed the trigger as he backpedaled into the operating room. Beside him, Ivy did the same. He glanced around for something to take cover behind as the hybrids returned fire, but there was nothing in the room that a bullet wouldn't be able to punch a hole through-him and Ivy included.
"Kill the man!" one of the doctors shouted from inside the observation room. "But take the female shifter alive."
Ivy snarled. "The hell you will!"
Damn straight, Angelo thought as he dropped his empty magazine and slapped in a fresh one. There was no way in hell he was going to let his best friend's wife get captured by these assholes again.
* * *
Minka felt the beast clawing to get out as she sprinted toward the building Angelo, Ivy, and Derek had gone into. She tried to remember what Tanner had taught her about holding on to herself while letting the beast out enough to use its abilities, but that had been much easier to do when she'd been sitting on the couch in Layla's office. Now that she knew her friends were in danger, she couldn't think of anything but getting to them. The risk of losing control was worth the speed she gained when she ceded a little more of herself to the beast though, so she opened the door in her mind almost all the way.
She ran faster than she ever had in her life, faster even than any animal she'd ever seen. The feeling was exhilarating, and maybe she would have enjoyed it if she hadn't been terrified of Angelo, Ivy, and Derek getting killed by those hybrids.
Minka didn't have any idea what she was going to do when she got inside, but she would do whatever was necessary. Angelo had risked everything to save her. If that meant she had to let the beast completely free, she'd do it without hesitation.
When she reached the building, she charged through the door she'd seen the hybrids disappear through less than a minute earlier, her heart pounding in her chest. She thought she was ready, that she had enough control to do this, but the scene that met her gaze froze her muscles solid and she slid to a stumbling stop.
A dead hybrid was lying in the center of the room, blood pouring from an unbelievable number of gunshot wounds. Angelo was standing over by another set of double doors on the far side of the room, facing down two hybrids. But instead of shooting them, he'd turned his gun backward like a club and was smashing it into the hybrids over and over. His uniform was shredded across the chest and stomach, and blood dripped from his lacerated arms. She briefly wondered why Angelo didn't simply shoot the hybrids, but then she realized the weapon must be out of bullets.
On the other side of the room, two more hybrids had Ivy pinned to the floor while the really big one had her arms pulled away from her body at a vicious angle. Renard advanced on Ivy with a syringe as thick as Minka's wrist as Klaus stood off to the side, smiling.
Ivy snarled and clawed at the two creatures on top of her, tearing great, long gashes into every part of them she could reach. But the hybrids seemed impervious to the damage, or at least to the pain.
While seeing Angelo and Ivy in such danger was traumatic, it was those doctors and being in the room where they'd experimented on her that almost made her turn and run out screaming. They had strapped her down to that metal table in the center of the room, shined those bright, overhead lights into her eyes, and injected her with the serum that had destroyed her life and turned her into a monster. This was the place where her months of pain and suffering had begun.