Page 51 of Conquered Betrayal
It felt like someone had stabbed me in the chest with a knife. “Let’s get out of here. I have to make some calls.” Everyone I knew in Goldenlach Ridge was in danger. Walker needed to tell Clyborne Inc. They had connections with the FBI. But first, I had to stop the delivery to the high school.
Jolyn gave me a determined look. “We’ll stop it.”
I nodded once. “I know we will.” I headed toward the door.
“I need ten seconds to finish this download.” Marley tapped her fingers on the top of the desk.
“And what about all these files?” Alina asked. “We should take them with us so they stay safe.”
“We’ll let Clyborne figure that out.” I strode into the hallway. “Let’s worry about the immediate stuff first.”
“Hold up, Lover Boy,” Alina called out, hurrying ahead of me. “Let the professionals lead the way.”
Swiping the USB out of the computer, Marley joined her a moment later, while Jolyn walked beside me. All three women resumed their tense postures as we hurried through the dark building, our footsteps echoing off the concrete walls.
“Do you know how many shifters live in Goldenlach Ridge?” Jolyn asked, keeping her gaze forward.
I sent her a quick glance. “You don’t?”
She shook her head, scanning down the next hallway we passed. “My brother never told me. It was another way he exerted his control. He only said they were everywhere and I should never let my guard down.”
What would be the point of concealing this from her after everything? She already knew about us. “About half the population are shifters.”
Her footsteps faltered. “Half?” We stopped altogether, and Jolyn peered around the foyer of the building, like she might see a shifter lurking in the corners. Ironic, when there was one standing right in front of her. “Is half the population everywhere shifters?”
Ahead of us, Alina and Marley exited the building. We followed the pair, urgency in our steps. Crisp air surrounded us as the door closed with athunk. “Half is pretty high for a human town as far as I’ve heard.” Marley and Alina were already cresting the hill, and we followed, gravel crunching. “There are some purely shifter communities, but they usually like to stay hidden, isolated. Otherwise, it’s shifters on their own, in small family groups. So no, not a lot of the population are shifters.”
“How do you know so much about them?” she asked, Alina and Marley disappearing into the tree line.
I paused and turned toward her. If it weren’t for the truckload of death heading toward Goldenlach Ridge at this very moment, this would have been the perfect opportunity to tell her what I was, to be honest with her. Even over the course of the day, her attitude toward my kind had softened. She and her friends wanted to help; they didn’t want to expose us.
Continuing across the parking lot, I shrugged. “It pays to have friends with connections.”
She was going to ask something else when gunshots resounded ahead of us.
Jolyn paused, her face a mask of dread. She spoke into her comm. “Marley. Where are you?”
There was no response, no crackle that the comm was on, or heavy breathing to indicate they heard us. The sick sensation in my stomach twisted and churned. What was happening?
I moved in the direction of the noise, but Jolyn put a hand on my arm, stopping me. “We don’t know what’s ahead and I don’t want you running into bullets.”
She was right. Of course she was right. I really did need to leave this clandestine shit to the professionals. I followed her as she skirted the parking lot, leaving my night vision goggles on my helmet. I saw better without them and couldn’t waste time pretending.
The sound of an engine gunning it made us whip around. A van barreled down the drive toward the building, a truck following it.
“Titty fucker,” Jolyn spat.
We were out in the open, sitting ducks.
The vehicles skidded to a stop near the door, two men in each, jumping out with a general sense of scrambling. They spotted us.
I had no time to think about what I was doing. I turned, snagged Jolyn around the waist, and used my shifter speed to hurry us into the cover of bushes near the fence-line of the property.
Setting her down, I crouched. Jolyn did the same. If she had felt anything different in me or my movements, she didn’t speak of it, her focus entirely on the men fanning out to find us in the dark. Their shouts and more voices on their radios bounced off the walls of the building. These didn’t look like the same kind of guys who’d fired at us on the freeway. These men wore jeans and T-shirts instead of tactical gear or suits—but they still had guns. Their scents came toward me on the breeze. All human.
“Alina,” Jolyn pleaded. “Talk to me.”
No response.
