“It’s over Yegor,” Sawyer said as Harley and the others spread out, each taking a different angle on the Ukrainian, lining up shots at his head and chest. “You’re surrounded and all your men are dead or dying. I know you did all this to get revenge for your family, but it stops now. You can’t win.”
Everyone tensed as Yegor held up his phone, thumb moving over something on the screen Sawyer couldn’t see even as the smile on his face grew wider. “I’ve already won. You’re just too stupid to realize it.”
Turning to Adriana, Yegor lifted the pistol a little, lining up for a shot at her head. Sawyer didn’t hesitate, squeezing the trigger on his own gun at the same time that four other weapons went off all around him. Yegor slowly crumpled to the floor of the control room without ever getting a shot off at Adriana. Sawyer couldn’t help but shake his head now that it was all over. The psychopath had committed suicide simply because he wanted to kill one more person.
Additional sirens suddenly went off and from the corner of his eye, he saw the few remaining dials and LEDs on the panel that were still working beep, click, and flash.
Cursing, Jake ran over and pulled the cell phone out of Yegor’s hand, staring at the screen before looking at Sawyer. “Did you take care of the magnets in the reactor room?”
All Sawyer could do was shake his head as Jake turned the phone to show them the screen and some kind of app covered in words and symbols he didn’t recognize. Not that it mattered. The wailing alarms told him more than he needed to know about what was happening.
“I think the app turned on the magnets to pull the control rods,” Jake said. “With the automated safety systems destroyed, there’s nothing to stop the reactor from going into meltdown. We need to shut down the magnets.”
Sawyer cursed. This was on him. He should have ignored his inner wolf and headed to the reactor room. Now, thousands of innocent people were going to pay for that mistake.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
* * *
“We’ll go with you,” Erin announced, holstering her weapon and already stepping forward like she was ready to run straight to the reactor room.
“The hell you will!” Dr. Jones shouted over their earpieces. “If those rods have all been fully retracted, the radiation level in the reactor will already be at dangerous levels before you can reach it. It’s a suicide mission for whoever goes in there.”
“Which is why I’m going alone,” Sawyer said firmly. “We all know the only person who has a chance of surviving going in that room is a werewolf, and since it was my job to begin with, it might as well be me.”
He turned and headed for the door, fully aware he’d just outed himself to everyone on the radio, including his branch chief and a nuclear physicist who almost certainly hadn’t been aware of the supernatural world. In fact he could hear both men stumbling over their words as they tried to get clarification, but Sawyer didn’t bother to answer them. It was too late to worry about crap like that.
“I’m going with you,” Harley said, hurrying after him.
The spike of panic that ripped through Sawyer nearly took his breath away. He stopped in his tracks, spinning around to glare at her.
“No, you’re not. It makes absolutely no sense to risk both our lives.”
“If it’s safe enough for one werewolf to be in there, it’s safe enough for two,” she insisted. “The longer we stand here and argue, the worse the radiation is going to get and the closer we’ll be to meltdown. So I’m going. If you’re coming with me, you’d better keep up.”
Sawyer snarled in frustration, but Harley was already out the door and running down the hall.
Sawyer growled and ran faster, catching up with Harley as she turned down the corridor that would take them into the heavy-duty concrete bunker that housed reactor five. The sirens were even louder in this direction than they’d been in the control room, but the moment Harley looked over her shoulder at him, all of the background noise seemed to fade away. The strobing red-and-blue lights reflected off her skin, revealing a beauty that made breathing seem like a waste of time.
It was as if the soul bond chose that very second to click firmly into place for him. It was also the moment Sawyer knew there was no way in hell he could let Harley go into that reactor room with him. He’d just found her; he couldn’t let her get hurt. No matter how much she would hate him for pushing her away.
His mind was moving at a hundred miles an hour as they approached the heavy steel door designed to seal off the concrete bunker. If Adriana hadn’t destroyed the safety systems, the computers would have already slammed and locked down the door. He supposed the fact that the door was still open could be viewed as some kind of silver lining—if it hadn’t meant Harley could walk through as easily as he could.
“We need to close the door behind us,” he said, catching her arm and tugging her to a halt outside it. “If we can’t stop the meltdown, it might give everyone else a few extra minutes to get away from here.”
Sawyer could hear the way fear made Harley’s heart pound faster. Far more than the running ever had. But she nodded, reaching out to grab the edge of the door. The thing had to be at least four inches thick and would look right at home in any bank vault.
“Crap,” she said with a grunt as the door barely moved. “This thing is heavy.”
“You push from the outside and I’ll pull from the inside,” he said. “Once we get it moving, slip through.”
Harley didn’t hesitate to follow his instructions, which only made Sawyer feel worse when he gave a savage yank and the door closed far quicker than she probably thought it would. She barely had time to realize what was happening before it clanked shut with a solid thud, the metal rasping as he ripped the bolt on the inside way past the point of no return.
“What are you doing?” she screamed, her voice muted by the thick metal of the door and the concrete surrounding it. There was a small glass port near the top of the door, the clear material as thick as the steel itself, and Sawyer’s heart clenched in his chest at the sight of her starting to panic as she yanked on the handle outside, fighting to get the thing open again. “Sawyer, open the damn door!”
Maybe his imagination was messing with him, but being this close to the reactor, it seemed like the sirens were wailing even faster, as if they knew the radiation was getting out of control. Even if he was wrong about that, he couldn’t stand there the rest of the night and stare at the woman he loved. He had to move.
“I love you!” he shouted, making sure to enunciate clearly so she could read his lips as he said the most important words he’d ever uttered. “Now, run!”
Turning, he raced toward the reactor. He heard Harley pounding on the door behind him and he prayed she’d do as he told her and get the hell out of there.