He quickly washed up and threw on some fresh clothes, then trotted down the stairs. Even that jostling didn’t hurt him. He was feeling better with each step.
A war room had been set up in the dining room just outside the kitchen. Jaxson, Jace, Piper, and even Olivia, along with Owen and a couple of the other pack members, were crowded around the table. Maps and printouts and tablets scrolling information crowded the surface.
“Sleeping beauty has arisen,” Jace said with a smirk.
That must mean Jared was off the medical watch list.
“Whatever you guys are doing, I’m ready to do my part.” Jared gestured to the table. “What do you have?”
“We’re just working out a plan of action,” Jaxson said. “So your timing for getting back in the game is pretty good. How do you feel?”
Jared frowned. He was standing, wasn’t he? “I’m good. Did you find Grace?”
“Well, sort of.” Jace picked up an image of an office building and held it up for Jared. “We think she’s in here.”
Piper tapped the image. “You’re never going to guess what this is.”
“Agent Smith’s day job as a middle manager?” Jared was surprised he had any sense of humor at all in him. He shut that down pretty quick and chalked it up to the heady recovery.
“Supposedly it’s the headquarters for an import-export logistics company,” Piper said with a smirk. “It’s an open secret in intelligence circles, however, that it’s the local NSA office.”
National Security Agency—the feds. “Shit.” Jared humor faded quickly. “Why is Grace there?”
Jaxson gathered up several more images. “We’ve been tracing Agent Smith’s pings on your facial recognition software. This morning, about the time you were at the Senator’s estate, we found several hits tracking him through cameras on street surveillance and local banks. Then he went off grid. The last image has him pulling into the parking lot of the NSA’s secret HQ. We didn’t know what it was until Piper clued us in.”
“So you know Agent Smith is there, but not Grace?” Jared frowned again. “Did you check her office?”
Jaxson nodded. “The party line at the campaign headquarters is that she’s home with the flu.”
Jared ground his teeth. “So the Senator’s got a cover story already. One that will keep her out for a while.” This was getting worse and worse.
Piper nodded and gave him a knowing look. “We know Grace was in the car with Agent Smith as he pulled into the parking lot. We’ve got seven red light camera images just before he arrived—all with a man fitting Agent Smith’s description, and a woman with long brown hair like Grace. Although she looked like she was sleeping.”
Jared momentarily squeezed his eyes shut. Smith had her. Jared had waited too long.
“And he’s still in there,” Jaxson added. “We’ve had surveillance on him from the moment we knew he was inside.”
Piper gave Jared a concerned look, like she was reading his thoughts. “We can’t just storm in there,” she chastised him, then glanced at Jaxson and Jace. “We’ve been debating the options, and we figure the best is falsified ID. I can get you clearance through my office. I was going to go in myself, but I can hook you up. Unless you’re not feeling up to it…”
“No. I’m doing this.” It came out harsher than he meant.
Piper just nodded, like she expected that answer. Jared narrowed his eyes at his brothers, daring them to stop him.
Jace just held up his hands. “Hey, I was voting for waiting until you woke up. No way I wanted to answer to you for having sent my mate after yours.”
His mate. Jared’s throat closed up. Because inside, deep where his wolf lived, he already knew she was. If she would have him.
He cleared throat, and the sound carried in the silence that had suddenly dropped across the room. “Right. I’m going after my mate.”
When Grace awoke, slowly swimming out of the haze the tranquilizer, she was inside a cage.
It was the kind of cage you would put a dog in—a very large dog, but still nowhere near large enough for a human. She was lying down, but when she sat up, her head almost grazed the top of the fine steel mesh. She rubbed at the blurriness in her eyes, not quite believing she was caged like an animal. As she blinked and focused beyond the thin metal bars, she jerked with surprise.
Agent Smith sat outside her cage in a swivel chair. It was an ordinary office chair—black, cushioned—and he was slowly rotating it, back and forth.
“Nice to see you awake, Ms. Krepky.” His eyes glittered, a small smile tugging at his lips.