Code Name: Fox / Mind Games (Syndicate Series Book 1) Read online

  “They put you up in this big fancy hotel, provide you with nice business clothes, great food, and all the training you need to learn about the Agency.” He met her gaze. “The real Agency.”

  A chill went through her. “They spare no expense huh?”

  “They want their agents to be well taken care of. It’s a perk. A lot of time they provide housing, cars, everything you need.” He motioned to the door. “Come on Skye. It’s everything you wanted. You’ll see that the Agency isn’t evil. This is the true path to helping your kind.”

  She walked out of the house, locking it up behind her. Travis motioned to his car and she got into the passenger seat, leaning back and trying to relax. “How long is the ride?”

  “Two hours.” He reached to the radio and turned on the music. “Why don’t you start reading through the packet?”

  Just a little light reading for the drive to her demise. Of course, maybe if she listened to what the Agency had to say, she might see that they weren’t so bad. But there was no Zeek there, and the alternative was…

  She glanced at Travis and tried not to roll her eyes. She opened the booklet in her lap and started reading in full instead of glancing over it like she had the first time.

  “Your dot is moving,” Remus stated as he looked over Zeek’s shoulder.

  “Yes, I know, but it hasn’t stopped yet. It’s not the right time. We want to take out as many of their people as we can at once. Taking him out in the car isn’t going to accomplish that.” Not to mention car accidents were risky. He could kill Skye without meaning to. No, it was best that he handled it when they got to the location.

  “Dawn is coming.”

  “Yes, I know.” Zeek snapped. “I can feel it.” He’d have to wait until sundown to get to her. Hopefully, their theory on Travis had been right.

  “You’re attached to Fox.”

  He noticed the word ‘the’ missing before ‘fox’. “Seems you are too. In some way.”

  “Well, I’m not in love with her. But she knows her way around computers. We could use her in the background, especially while she’s laying low. Not to mention you could use the help.”

  A daytime hacker. “Is that the role you want to give her in the Syndicate?”

  “I think it’s fitting, no?”

  Zeek nodded. “Yes, if she survives this.” His heart still ached in his chest. He had no idea if she’d gone willingly, or if Travis had caught on.

  “Doubting now?”

  “You weren’t able to promise me her safety,” he muttered and watched as the red dot continued down the highway. “Had you been able to promise that, then I’d be a little less worried.” Or if Skye knew what she was doing.

  Remus paced the room. For a moment Zeek wondered what the demigod was thinking. No one knew much about their boss, except that he had something against the leader of the Agency. “I don’t promise any of my people safety. You know that.”

  The answer was so soft that Zeek wasn’t sure if he’d actually heard it. “Okay boss, they stopped. Let’s see where they took her.” Zeek zoomed in on the location and his heart stopped. He knew the location. He’d tried to get the territory several times from the human drug dealers that didn’t work for him. They still had a small corner of the market, with a high death rate to both humans and paranormals all the same. They didn’t care what happened to those who were seeking their next fix.

  What the hell.

  “You can’t go out there unless you got your hands on something to protect you from the sun.” Remus reminded him.

  He hadn’t managed to get his hands on a daytime suite. Not yet. He could only imagine what was going to happen to Skye while he was helpless. Travis had taken her to the worse drug territory, and the drug dealers would tear Skye apart if they thought she worked for him. He needed to see why his theory had gone wrong. Without being there to see the situation, he didn’t know if Skye would recognize the danger or not. Maybe there was no danger… “Maybe there’s an Agency base there, but if that’s the case, the drug dealers shouldn’t be humans.”

  “Unless they are employing humans now too. I wouldn’t put it past them. Sympathizers of paranormal creatures, perhaps.” He muttered. “Wait until she hits the number to call us.”

  “I don’t want to. We need to send Dugan to get her.” Though he didn’t want to depend on the werewolf, he wanted to go right in and rescue his fox.

  “If this is how you’re going to react with any mission we send her on, then her working for us won’t do any good.” Remus put a hand on Zeek’s shoulder. “You want her as part of the Syndicate, lovers or not, you can’t be overprotective of her. Trust her.”

  Zeek looked at the screen. “And if he kills her?”

  “He won’t, we both know that he’ll torture her first.”

  That wasn’t any more reassuring. “Hopefully, she can talk her way out of that happening.” He muttered.

  “Indeed. Or stall.”

  Zeek watched the dot on the screen as it didn’t move. “Come on Fox, make sure you get through this.” His fox had to get through this. They should have set this up during the night, but there was no promise that Travis would have taken her at that point.

  Of course, that would have been a better alternative than the plan going horribly wrong.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Skye looked up when Travis took them off the highway. “Where are we going?” The flat horizon showed no swanky hotel breaking the pre-dawn light.

  “You’ll see.” His voice had returned to cold and not the light voice he’d used when they’d been driving. She hadn’t learned much about the Agency, just the background tests she’d have to go through, the physical tests, the psych eval they put all employees through to determine if they were fit for the position. Nothing about what they stood for.

  He parked the car on the side of the road. “Get out.”

  “Excuse me?” She raised a brow. “We’re in the middle of a crappy part of town.”

  “My dealers own this area. Get out.”

  His dealers? She refused to move. “You said we were going to the hotel for orientation.”

  “I lied.” He pulled a gun out and raised it. “Silver ammo. Get out of the car, Skye.”

  She slipped her hand in the pocket with Zeek’s phone. The sound of the gun firing echoed in the car, making her ears ring. The bullet ripped through her shoulder and she cried out. “What the fuck.”

  “Out of the car.”

  The pain flowed through her arm, and her fingers refused to work. She used her good arm to open the car door. She could shift if she could get out, but thanks to the wound anything she’d shift into would be injured as well. Even if she managed to escape, Zeek would lose his chance to take down one of the Agency’s council members. She’d still be running from the Agency, and the Syndicate wouldn’t protect her.

  She stumbled out of the car and put a hand to her bleeding shoulder. She couldn’t stop the tears of pain from filling her eyes. More blood coated her fingers as she moved. “I’m going to bleed out.”

  “I’ll dig the bullet out of your shoulder when it’s time.” He shoved her forward towards a warehouse.

  When it was time? Holy hell, what was he planning? She stood there debating on if she should go for the phone at this moment. Would it be too soon? No. The point was to take Travis down. They had a location now. She reached across her body to grab the phone. Travis snarled and rushed her, taking her to the ground. He dropped his gun and wrapped a hand around her throat, pinning her to the asphalt. His hand snaked into her pocket and pulled out the phone.

  “I thought you said you didn’t have your phone.” He tossed it away from her. “Not that it matters now. The sun is rising, and Zeek can’t come save you.”

  “Not my phone.” She ground out. Her arm started to go numb. “Get off me.”

  He whistled and a few people came out of the warehouse. “I need a knife to dig this bullet out.”

  Her world spun at the th
ought. Yes, it needed to come out, but she wasn’t expecting him to do it with a knife. One of the men came up and handed him a pocket knife.

  “Hold her down.” Travis snapped.

  Each person took a limb and pinned her to the asphalt. The moment they dug their fingers into her skin, she realized they weren’t human. Her eyes widened as Travis holstered the gun and opened the pocket knife. “The more questions you answer, the quicker this will be. I’ll even patch you up afterward.”

  Torture. More fucking torture. Remus had set her up to be tortured again just so they could get to a council member of the Agency.

  “I’ll even give you some good drugs to take the edge off. All you have to do is answer me.” He put the edge of the knife next to the wound, and she hissed at the burning of silver.

  “I don’t know anything.”

  Travis slid the knife in, digging in the wound. “Lies. You know the location of the Syndicate members.”

  She tried to catch her breath and tears flowed from the corner of her eyes. “No. I don’t.” She gasped. “I have no idea where all the members are. They were just at the office building for a meeting.”

  “You’re fucking the vampire. I can smell him on you.” He pulled the knife out, covered in her blood and picked a fragment of the bullet off. “You know more than you’re letting on. And I will find out, and this time, there’s no other Agency member to stop me.”

  This was it. She was going to die caught in the middle of some stupid turf war.

  Zeek paced his room. Something wasn’t right. He had Skye’s blood racing in him. He could sense her. Feel her. And there was so much pain. He should have called Dugan to get her out of there, but Remus wanted to wait. He thought she could glean information from her situation. Well fuck the demigod, he was going to go after Skye the moment that sun went down.

  He looked at the computer screen; the dot had yet to move. Even a few yards. He had expected some type of movement. He cursed as another wave a pain came through him. What the hell was going on?

  “How is she?” Remus appeared behind Zeek. “Judging by the sweat on your forehead, I’d say not well.”

  “Fuck you. She’s in a lot of pain. Something’s not right. If you’d just let me send—“

  “No, not yet. Trust her Zeek.”

  He didn’t want to trust her. He wanted her back in his arms and safe. “They are torturing her.”

  “But you made sure not to give her too much information, correct? They won’t get anything out of her.”

  Zeek spun around in his chair. “If you’re not here to give me the okay to rescue her, what are you doing here?”

  Remus placed a plastic rectangle on the desk. “I came to deliver this to you. Make sure you give it to Skye when she’s back with you.”

  Zeek picked it up and looked at the picture on the card. Skye’s bright eyes were facing the camera; she wore a forced smile that didn’t even touch her real one. His heart ached. “This is her Syndicate ID card.”

  “She’ll be part of your team if she pulls through. IT specialist as a façade, of course, the only job suiting her abilities. She’ll work closely with the council to help provide us information. Safe and sound behind a computer.”

  Zeek snorted. “She won’t want to stay there for long.”

  “Are you so sure? She doesn’t strike me as a field agent. Especially after being tortured…twice.”

  As if on cue more pain shot through Zeek and he cringed. “Sundown. I’m getting her at sundown.”

  “Thank you for waiting that long.” The demigod disappeared and Zeek relaxed a touch, but it wasn’t long until more of Skye’s pain greeted him.

  Skye groaned in pain as it worked its way back into her body. Whatever drugs Travis had given her in an attempt to get her to speak were starting to wear off. Light blinded her, and she tried to move an arm to cover her eyes. It didn’t work.

  “She’s not speaking. Maybe we underestimated how much she could take. Either we broke her, or she’s well trained to take torture.”

  His first guess sounded right. But if she was broken, shouldn’t she be spilling all the secrets? “No, Romulus, sir I don’t think she’s one of their top members. I did all the background research on her myself. There was nothing there to indicate that she had a mob connection at all.”

  Romulus? Who the hell was that? The pain in her shoulder started to become apparent again, so was the weight of the shock collar around her neck. Oh, right. They’d gone through that again too. She closed her eyes and tried to drift off to the remaining bliss the drug gave her.

  “The new drug is working well, staying in her system. An optimal test subject.”

  Her eyes jerked open at the change in subject, new drug? Great, so now she was a fucking experiment.

  “Yes, it’ll be enough to kill a human in a single dose. You’ll be able to control this area and the next city over if we can infiltrate more of Zeek’s men.”

  So that was the plan. Not bad batches, but new drugs. Her finger twitched and she tried to move each one. How much had he given her to render her immobile? She sniffed the air and Travis spun around.

  “I have to go; she’s awake now.”

  She smelt death on the air. Blood and death. She’d grown accustomed to the smell of Zeek and knew he was near. She met Travis’ gaze as he leaned over her. “What do you smell, Fox?”

  She gave a crooked smile. “Your death. My death possibly. Freedom.” She threw the last word in there to throw him off, just to see the look on his face.

  His brows drew together. “You’re rambling.”

  “If that’s what you want to believe.” She muttered. “What did you give me?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Once it starts to fade, we’ll get back to work. Maybe you’ll start to answer questions for me.” He stroked her cheek. “You’re still talking and not in shock. It means I haven’t broken your mind yet. Remus must have trained you well.”

  “Remus didn’t train me.” She threw out there. “Zeek and I didn’t know each other until you sent me on that stupid mission.”

  He jerked back like she’d hit him and she giggled. “What? Didn’t think I could connect the dots?”

  “You’re not thinking straight. Yes, I sent you on that mission, but you knew Zeek before.”

  “I think you’re the confused one.” She used her good arm to sit up and glared at him as he reached for the remote for the shock collar. “Did you find that in your research that you did while we were dating?”

  He hit the button, and the jolts shot through her; she cried out, wrapping her arm around herself trying to stop from shifting.

  “Zeek recruited you from your job.”

  She lifted her head and looked at him. “Whoever fed you your information is wrong. I lost my job because of discrimination. The company fired all non-human personnel under the right to work law. Zeek had nothing to do with it.”

  He hesitated. “You’re not lying.”

  “No shit.” Zeek’s voice came from behind Travis, and Skye gave him a little wave with her good arm.

  Travis moved to draw his gun, but Skye leaped from the floor and took him down. She miscalculated the weight she could put on her still recovering body and stumbled, riding Travis down to the floor. Pain shot through her as her shoulder hit the ground.

  She rolled away from Travis. The gun fired and she froze, crouched on the ground. Her heart hammered as her gaze darted around the room looking for Zeek. The vampire was nowhere in sight, which was comforting. No one was hit by the stray shot. Skye jumped to her feet, and Travis went to raise the gun. She stomped on his wrist and then kicked the gun away from him.

  Her body stumbled as the room spun, reminding her that the drug was still in her system. Zeek caught her before she could hit the ground. He sat her back on her feet and kissed her cheek before turning to Travis. “Hello, Travis. Miss me?”

  Skye didn’t miss the fading of Zeek’s eyes into red.

  Zeek looked at the p
athetic werewolf, watching him scramble to his feet and dive for the gun. The wolf didn’t stand a chance. The room around him turned cold, and he saw Skye moving a few feet away from him. There was no fear from her, just an irregular rhythm of her heart, probably from pain. He’d take care of his fox soon. First, he needed to take care of Travis.

  Travis’ fingers were inches from the gun when Zeek rushed him, slamming the wolf into the wall. Travis snarled and started to shift. Fur started flowing between Zeek’s fingers as Travis’ muscles in his neck rolled and slid under the skin. The fantasy of bleeding Travis to death was now gone. Zeek could fight him in wolf form and still win, but it was best to stop toying with him.

  Zeek shoved his fist through the half-formed chest of the wolf’s body and grabbed the heart. Travis’ eyes grew wide, stuck in a mix of yellow and hazel, the life fading from them as Zeek ripped his heart out. The body fell to the ground with a sickening crack, and he took a moment to look down at his kill. He dropped the wolf’s heart and debated on licking the blood from his fingers. He lifted his hand…

  And erratic breathing brought his attention away from the red liquid. He turned to find Skye clutching her chest as she struggled to breathe. He ran to her and cradled her in his arms. “Skye?”

  She didn’t respond; her pupils dilated as she clawed at her shirt. Zeek’s mind raced. He needed to get her help; if he didn’t, she was going to die thanks to whatever Travis put in her system. This was not what was supposed to happen. He ran a hand over her head. “Hang in there.” If he handled this quickly, he could make it work to their advantage. He pulled out a burner phone he’d had Dugan pick up for him and dialed a doctor that was on Syndicate payroll.

  “Doctor Oswald speaking.”

  “It’s Zeek; I have an overdose victim. I need your help. She’s one of us, shifter. I can discuss details when we get there.” Skye’s breathing hitched and stopped for a moment. She took a gasping breath, and her body started shaking. “Please.”

  “Bring her in. I’ll prepare a room for her. If need be, bring her in the back way.”