Caleb slowly set her down, giving Brielle a chance to open her coat and yank the right side of her shirt up to get her first look at the wound there. While there was a lot of blood, she was relieved to see that the neat hole the size of her little finger as well as the slightly larger one right above her waist further around her side had already stopped bleeding and were healing. Thankfully, she had gotten the supernatural’s healing ability, too.
The sight didn’t seem to assure Caleb as much as it did Brielle. He immediately reached out to press his big, clawed hand gently against the wounds with a low growl. She rested her hand on top of his.
“Shh. It’s okay,” she murmured softly. “I still have the healing abilities I borrowed from that supernatural. I’ll be completely healed in a few minutes. So relax. I’m going to be okay, all right?”
Relief shone in Caleb’s eyes, and he bent his head, resting his forehead against hers, his hand remaining on the gunshot wound. As she watched, the blue glow faded from his eyes, and his fangs retracted. She couldn’t see them at the moment, but she assumed his claws had disappeared as well.
She and Caleb stood there like that for a long time, the tension slowly draining from both their bodies as they relaxed against each other. Brielle would have happily stayed there for the rest of the night, Caleb’s warmth surrounding her, but then someone cleared their throat nearby, and she looked over to see Jake standing there with an amused look on his face.
“What?” Caleb grunted. “We’re having a moment here.”
“Obviously,” Jake said. “But unfortunately, we don’t have time for this. We need to get the hell out of here.”
That’s when Brielle heard sirens. Lots of them.
“I’ve got dozens of cars coming from multiple directions,” Hudson shouted from farther down the hallway. “This place is going to be crawling with Moscow police within minutes. We need to go. Now.”
Brielle was all for that. But one look at Misty, who was still in the server room with her hand on top of the closest server rack, told her they weren’t going to be so lucky.
“We really need to come up with a dog whistle or something that can get Misty’s attention in a situation like this,” she muttered.
Caleb chuckled at that, but before he could say anything, Misty abruptly stumbled back from the server rack, looking exhausted. She glanced around, taking in the two dead men on the floor and the bullet-riddled wall, her violet eyes filled with confusion.
“What did I miss?”
Chapter 12
“Who the hell is Xavier Harrington?” Brielle asked, looking at Caleb, then around at the rest of the team seated at the table, wondering if the name meant something to them. But with the exception of Misty, who’d revealed the name of the person she believed to be behind the stolen nuclear weapons, it seemed that everyone was as lost as she was.
Getting out of the Barclay building had been a nerve-racking experience, at least for Brielle. As the sound of police sirens had filled the air, they’d slipped down one of the back stairwells and then out through a loading dock area cluttered with bundles of compacted cardboard and half-filled dumpsters. With the aid of Caleb’s and the other werewolves’ keen senses, they’d just avoided the cops rushing into the building from the same direction, ultimately having to low crawl on their bellies across a few hundred meters of pitch-black parking lot before they could finally make a run for their vehicles several blocks away.
No one said anything until they’d gotten back to the safe house on the outskirts of Moscow, and even then, the first thing they’d all focused on was getting cleaned up and making something to eat. But while Brielle had been thrilled to get all that blood off—and watching Caleb inhale a mountain of peanut butter sandwiches had brought her more pleasure than she could properly describe—she couldn’t deny what she was really interested in were some details on what Misty had found in those Aldaran computer servers.
“Right now, I don’t have much more than his name,” Misty said, picking up the cup in front of her and sipping her tea. “All I can say for sure at this point is that he’s the head of some international corporation based out of New York called the Harrington Group. I also confirmed that the telekinetic supernatural you told me about, Uriel, is the head of Harrington’s personal security. All it takes is ten seconds on Google to find pictures of the man guarding Harrington at major appearances all around the world. It’s also obvious that Harrington has gone to extreme lengths to hide his involvement in the theft of the nukes out of Incirlik and building the facility in Siberia.”
That generated a lot of conversation around the large table in the safe house’s spacious dining room. Everyone seemed to have a theory except for Caleb. But that was because he was too busy devouring a bag of dill pickle potato chips he’d found in the kitchen along with the peanut butter. The only time he slowed down was when he glanced at Brielle sitting beside him every few minutes, like he was worried she was going to disappear on him or something.
“Maybe you should start from the beginning,” Jake said to Misty. “Explain exactly how you stumbled across this Harrington guy’s name and what convinced you that he’s involved.”
Misty reached across the table to snag a few chips from Caleb’s bag, earning her a growl. She stuck out her tongue and sat back, nibbling on one of the chips while he dumped the few left in the bag into his mouth.
“When I slipped into Aldaran’s servers, it took me only seconds to confirm they’d built the facility in Siberia,” she said. “They didn’t even try to hide the construction plans and approval paperwork. Now, figuring out who paid for the work was a little harder, but not nearly as difficult as it should have been.”
“What do you mean?” Hudson asked from the other side of Brielle. “I thought you were a wiz at digging through these computer systems. Nobody can hide anything from you, right?”
Misty grinned. “True, but normally, people who are trying to hide things at least attempt to make it difficult. They bury the information in places you wouldn’t normally look, pile a mountain of encryption on top of it, and separate key pieces so it’s hard to connect them. But in this case, it was as easy as opening the folder filed under the letter I for incriminating evidence.”
“So what’d you find?” Caleb asked around a mouthful of peanut butter he was now eating straight from the jar with a spoon. At one time, Brielle might have been shocked by something like that, but now she couldn’t help but think of him as anything but a big, adorable goofball—with fangs.
Misty ate another chip from the pile in her cupped hand. “All the evidence clearly shows that Aldaran was working for a group of hard-liners within the Russian Federal Security Service…the old KGB. Anyone finding the same thing I did would assume this splinter cell is pursuing a new technology that would give Russia a military advantage years beyond the other major superpowers.”