Whatever he intended to use her for, she sure as hell wasn’t going to cooperate.
The sound of Jace’s feet dragging across the floor of his cell drew her attention. “I would have helped you out with telling him off,” he said with a small smile, “but you were doing such a magnificent job all on your own.”
She hurried to him and reached through the bars to touch his face. He was bruised and cut and battered, but she could already see it starting to heal. “You were doing a pretty fine job yourself with Agent Smith.” She dropped her gaze to his hands as they reached through the bars to hold her waist and pull her closer. She pressed her face between the bars and lightly kissed him. Then she whispered, “I saw what you did out there. Your claws came out.”
He pulled back, releasing her. “I could barely keep my wolf contained.”
Her eyes went wide. “Why did you even try? I wanted to give them both a slash to the face.”
He frowned. “One raging wolf isn’t going to get us free. Especially one I can’t control. We need a real plan to have any hope of escape, much less managing to get everyone out. A lot of these wolves are sick.”
A voice spoke from behind her. “A lot of them are dying.”
Piper turned to look—it was the man in the cage next to hers.
Jace peered around her. “Owen?” His voice had hiked up, astonished. “What… how… holy shit, man, you’re alive!”
His shock made Piper examine the man—Owen—more closely. He was definitely around Jace’s age, late twenties, but his cheeks were hollowed out and dark circles haunted his eyes.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Owen Harding, Private First Class,” he said wearily, leaning against the bars. “Last seen serving with Army Specialist Jace River in Afghanistan before our Jeep blew up and the world went to hell.”
Piper’s mouth dropped open.
“How is this even possible?” Jace’s mind was a whirlwind of confusion. His fellow grunt, Owen, was standing in the cage across from Piper’s when he was supposed to be dead.
Although he did look halfway to the grave. “The last thing I ever wanted was to see you show up here, Jace,” Owen said with a tight expression. “They told us you were dead, but I’d always hoped you’d made it out somehow. Only I sure wouldn’t wish this place on anyone.” His Texas drawl was there, just like it had been in Afghanistan when they served together.
“Have you been here all this time?” Jace asked, horrified. “It’s been, what, over a year?” He wracked his brain, trying to figure out how this had happened. Owen was supposed to have been blown up by the same IED that threw Jace out of their patrol Jeep—the singular event that hurtled him down this dark path where he couldn’t control his wolf and destroyed a village of innocent people.
Owen gripped the steel bars of his cage. “Yeah, I’ve been in the program for over a year. There aren’t many who’ve been here longer—at least, not many who are still alive.”
Jace leaned his head against the bars of his own cage, wishing he could bridge the gap and grip Owen in a manly hug—the members of his patrol were like brothers to him. Owen had been suffering all this time, and Jace had no idea. It reminded him far too much of Jaxson’s dark, closely-held secret, and Jace’s failure to even know about it, much less help him.
“What have they been doing to you?” Jace asked with a grimace.
Piper stood by, silent, watching them both with wide eyes.
“It’s one experiment after another.” Owen sighed. “They take my blood and do something to it—I’ve heard the staff talk about genetic stuff. Then they inject their serums into some hapless civilian. Sometimes it takes, and they turn into… well… some kind of creature. Nothing I’d call a wolf. Sometimes the injection kills them outright. Some of them probably wished they’d died. They get their wish soon enough. It’s like the fucking island of Doctor Moreau in here.”
Piper had her hand over her mouth, hiding the horror that Jace felt rippling through his entire body.
“What are they after?” Jace asked. “Why don’t they just recruit shifters into the Army? It’s not like there aren’t a bunch of us already willing to serve our country.”
“It’s much bigger than that,” Owen said, a grim look drawing down his already deathly pale face. “This isn’t just about the Army, although they definitely want to create some kind of super soldier. They’re working on a universal serum, I think—something that can take all the shifter abilities and amp them up, like dialing it up to eleven or some damn thing. I don’t really know. All I know is that I’ve been trapped here for over a year, praying to God that I die before I inadvertently give them whatever it is they want.”