“I could do this all day,” Agent Smith sneered. “Or you could just tell me how many of your pack are still roaming around free. And the location of your safehouse. We can always use a few more volunteers.”
“How many volunteers do you need?” Jace asked, but his voice was weary. “You must really suck at science. Otherwise, you wouldn’t need so many test subjects, would you?”
Agent Smith plowed his fist into Jace’s stomach, and Jace huffed over with the impact. The blow screeched the chair across the floor a few inches, and Jace’s hands sprouted claws briefly, then they retracted.
Piper lurched up from the cold concrete floor where she had been lying and grasped hold of the steel bars of the door of her cage. Her stomach was a writhing pit of snakes. She tried to summon her wolf, but the beast was nowhere to be found, somehow hidden in the depths of her mind. Either Agent Smith had injected them with some kind of suppression drug earlier, or the pink mist that had knocked them all out had some kind of anti-shifter medication. Either way, her wolf was silent inside her—which was just wrong. Unnatural feeling. It gave Piper a shudder that ran from the tips of her toes up to lift the hairs on the back of her neck.
Jace must not have gotten the same shot… or maybe his wolf was so powerful, it could resist whatever drug or genetic technology Agent Smith had cooked up.
Piper quickly cased the situation around her. She was locked in a cage by herself, but dozens of cages were stacked around the enormous hangar. She strained to look for Noah, but she couldn’t find him. On her left was an empty cage and on the right was a cage holding a man she didn’t know. He seemed about the same age as Jace, a few years older than her, and he was standing tensely at the door of his cage, gripping the bars and watching Jace get pummeled.
Jaxson and Jared and the rest of Jace’s pack had to be here somewhere, but the alignment of the cages made it difficult to see more than a few cages down the row. The man next to her glanced at her, but only briefly—he was drawn back by another smack to Jace’s face, this one whipping his head to the side so hard, Piper could hear bones crack. She gasped and almost cried out—but she knew that would do no good. It might even bring more harm to Jace. She knew shifters were tough, but they weren’t impossible to kill. And Agent Smith looked like a man who didn’t really care if Jace lived or died, experiments or no.
On the opposite side of the hangar, far enough away that she couldn’t see it clearly, were several medical suites. Each bed was filled with a shifter strapped to a gurney—some were writhing around, others were lying still. Piper couldn’t tell if they were conscious or not. But then her attention snapped to a tall, powerful figure strolling across the open center of the hangar.
Her father.
She knew he had to be involved somehow, but the shock of seeing him here still felt like ice running through her veins. Noah was in one of these cages, and now so was she. How could the man even begin to justify that to himself? Maybe he didn’t give a fuck about her, but Noah was his own flesh and blood.
The Colonel strolled up to Agent Smith and waved him off from delivering another pounding to Jace’s face.
The pause in the beating made Jace looked up. “It’s like an asshole parade around here.”
The lift in Jace’s voice made Piper’s heart soar. He must not be too badly injured if he was giving shit to the Colonel. Agent Smith put his hand on his holstered pistol like he wanted to pull his weapon and kill Jace and have it done with.
Piper gripped the bars of her cage so hard, her skin squeaked against the metal.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” the Colonel said to Agent Smith, who just growled in response and kept his hand on his weapon. “You’re not going to get any more information out of Mr. River, and I’d like to see how he performs under the drug trial. He’s a very interesting case.”
Agent Smith snarled again, but he pulled a knife from the back of his desert fatigues and advanced towards Jace. Piper was afraid he might just slit Jace’s throat, but Smith only cut the zip ties holding Jace’s feet to the chair legs, freeing him to stand. Two guards grabbed hold of Jace’s arms, one on either side, while Smith cut the ties at his wrists. Then the guards hauled Jace toward the cage next to Piper. Agent Smith turned on his heel, snorting in disgust, and strode toward the medical suites.
The Colonel followed the guards and Jace, watching him struggle to keep his legs underneath him while the paramilitary thugs tossed him in his cell. Piper vaguely noticed the man in the cell next to her—he shuffled away to the far edge, no doubt wanting to keep his distance from this freak show. Once Jace’s cell door was locked, the Colonel turned to face her.