His steps were fast, but still came off as somehow ambling, as if he had all the time in the world while Dice by his side was losing what shreds of sanity he had left. He had half a mind to peel off and just leave then and there, abandon everything, get some of his old Navy buddies together and mount his own mission to go find Meredith. But unfortunately enough, he knew that the chances of that actually playing out in his favor were slim to none.
The world was too fucking large to find one woman on his own.
Spade led him down the hall, past the clerk Dice had scared half to death before, and into a small office space with several desks and set-up workstations with people typing away. He walked to the closest one and a low growl of a command made the guy sitting at the computer spring out of his seat and practically jump ten feet away from Spade.
Must be a cheetah, Dice thought with some grim amusement.
Without sitting down, Spade leaned forward and typed a few commands into the command line, until he was prompted to give a series of passwords. Finally, a folder opened up, titled Meredith Wilder. The contents of it made Dice crumble into the seat the techie had vacated.
There were folders after folders of photographs of Meredith at various locations, some of which Dice recognized as sites he had actually scoured through over the last nine months. Times when he had thought himself to have caught a whiff of her scent here or there, or sense her presence in one way or another now came out to be true. He'd simply always been one or several steps behind her, though he got the feeling that this too was intentional on Spade's part.
But other than the places, it was the woman depicted that shocked Dice. He understood immediately why the video feeds and pictures hadn't been sent to him after a while.
She was pregnant. And then very pregnant. And then holding a baby boy in her arms in a few pictures.
His baby boy.
Dice looked up at Spade, his gray eyes wavering with barely contained emotion, both rage and confusion boiling over into one tangled sensation of confusion.
"How could you … " he started, trailing off.
Not tell me? Keep me from her? Keep my child from me? How COULD you!?
"This is bigger than both of us," Spade said dryly.
And this time, Spade didn't deny Dice the pleasure of punching him in the face. The way Spade's cheek crackled against his fist was almost too rewarding.
Nine
Meredith
"What about today? Can I see him today?" Meredith begged, the strong, sure arms of the two guards, one at either side of her, holding her by the elbows feeling like vices as she was half-dragged, half-walked down to the cells.
"We'll see," one of them said, the taller one, though after being in the complex for what must have been over two months now, she still didn't know what his name was.
Or anyone's name, really. No one was sharing a thing with her anymore. Now, she was just one of the prisoners, only vaguely recognizable by the fact that she got pulled out of her ratty room every day to be walked down to the labs and shoved in there for twelve hours until night came again.
Every day, the routine would be the same. She would wake up and beg to see her son. She'd get evasive answers, exactly like the dozen or so other women she knew to be in the rooms around her, including the three that were with her. They'd have breakfast, she'd get carted off to her work, be served lunch and something vaguely resembling dinner in the lab, and then walked back to the rooms when it was too dark outside to see anymore.
Not that she ever really saw a window. There was only one, and even that one she could only partially see sometimes when she was being walked to or from the rooms, if one of the doors along the main hallway leading to the staircase happened to be left open. It almost never was.
So far, her assumption was that she was stuck somewhere in the Middle East, because even with the air conditioning going full blast it would be hot in the building, but not humid. It was a dry, scorching heat that seemed to permeate your whole being and make every pore thirst for water, even if you were drinking at the very moment.
Meredith hated it. Then again, there were very few things lately that she did not hate. After Dean had been taken from her, finding joy had become increasingly impossible.
Dean.
Simply the thought of him made her eyes water and her throat seem to collapse on itself. She shook her head quickly, willing herself not to cry in front of the guards. There would be plenty of time for that when she got back into her room.
"Will my work be checked soon? I'm almost done, I need live test subjects now. Please, have them check my work," Meredith whispered, reciting the same plea she'd been saying for more than a week now, her body convulsing with a tremor as she looked up into the cold, uncaring faces of the two men carting her back to the rooms.
They didn't care. And the only thing they'd give her were canned answers, promising and denying nothing.
"We'll look into it," the shorter guy said, dark haired and gray-eyed, as they came to a stop in front of the door that was hiding her 'home' behind it.
Three locks were undone, two digital and one mechanical, with one of the digital locks requiring a thumb print from the guards. When the door clicked open, she was shoved forward unceremoniously and before she could regain her footing, the heavy latches were rolling shut once more.
Meredith stood in the middle of the small square room, windowless, with only a dim light bulb burning in the ceiling, covered by mesh, that would be automatically shut off in about an hour after she was escorted back. There was enough room for four thin mattresses at each corner, one for every one of the women there, and that was it. They weren't even allowed a toilet, told to 'hold it' until they were taken off to do their jobs in the mornings.
Sya and Amina were already there, waiting for her as they always were. Maria would be brought in about ten minutes later. The routine was as mind-numbing as it was certain. Nothing ever changed.
Meredith stalked over to her bed immediately, sinking down onto it with a groan that seemed to leave her lips every evening that she returned 'home.' Amina gave her a commiserating look and they nodded to one another.
"Anything new?" she asked.
"Nothing at all. I'm getting close though. I might already be there but I can't test on mice and rabbits forever, you know."
"They don't trust you with live subjects?"
"Maybe. I don't know," Meredith said, shrugging with a modicum of annoyance.
It was a surprise that she could feel that emotion. At one point, she'd been certain that the only things she could feel were dread and worry.
"Could they be doing your testing somewhere else, off-site?" Sya asked, her head resting against the hard stone wall, blue eyes seemingly devoid of any other emotion than pain.
Meredith figured she looked much the same.
"I doubt it," she said, leaving the details to herself.
They, meaning The Arctics, couldn't do the testing without her help. She'd made sure of that. The formulas for the drug she was building were close enough, but not quite right. It was missing a key ingredient that though perhaps someone could surmise it from the notes she took and the video footage that was saved of her daily work, she doubted that they could tie all the ends together to make sense of what she was doing down to that level of detail.
Dropping her forehead to her knees, pulled up to her chest as they were, Meredith took a few deep breaths. Everything had been going so well, or at least as well as one could assume, given that she was the hostage of a terrorist cell hell-bent on taking over the world, or at least making werewolves the dominant force on the globe.
After she'd left Peru, she'd been flown into Mexico City to talk about her research, though it had mostly turned into a prolonged interrogation after what had happened at both of the bases. She clung to her story throughout it, that she'd been driven from the home base to the airport, put on a plane and all she knew was that she saw a few explosions as they flew off.
To her, nothing had seemed off and the only reason she'd arrived at the airport in the morning instead of during the night was some technical trouble on the road, which had been radioed in during the evening.
Of course, no one could check her words regarding the radio transmission as both the pilot and the guards that were with her were not on communications duty that day. For lack of a better option, they'd believed her, though it was clear to see that after that incident, she'd been kept a much closer eye on. The trust was gone.