Closeted away in her tiny flat in east London, Melissa sat at her desk, her laptop in front of her, typing furiously.
The experiments into creating a device that could force a shifter to change forms had yet to yield any real results, though Evans continued to come up with more and more complex ways of running the tests, ordering close to ten thousand pounds worth of new equipment for the lab, having the walls insulated, the metal surgery table exchanged for a plastic one, even going so far as to implant electrodes within the shifter’s body. But at no point had she reconsidered Melissa’s suggestions as to the electrical dynamics of the shift, while Melissa became more and more convinced that she was right, as each new set of test results came in.
The wolf was clearly suffering from the ongoing tests, losing weight, his fur becoming bedraggled, his eyes puffy from lack of sleep and his skin had taken on a grey tinge. As pleased as Melissa was to see him suffering, there was a more pragmatic issue at hand – if they didn’t take care of him well enough, they ran the risk that their only test subject would die before they completed their experiments, and she knew from first hand experience how difficult it could be to catch another one. But her suggestions to Evans that they pay more attention to the shifter’s health had been met with incredulity, followed by outright laughter. She was going soft, Evans had told her with a sardonic grin. The shifters were tough, some of them having survived not weeks, but years in captivity, undergoing far more unpleasant things than this team was doing to their current prisoner.
But with their present limitations, it could take years for them to crack the mystery of the mechanics of the shift, and despite Evans’ reassurances, Melissa was far from convinced that their captive was going to last that long.
Unless she did something to speed up their progress.
So here she was, at midnight, after putting in a full day in the lab, now sitting at home still working on her life’s purpose, but in an entirely different way.
After long minutes typing, she paused, and took the time to re-read the letter she had composed. It was addressed directly to Headquarters, to Professor Ivor Banks, the most senior scientist in the whole of the Noturatii, and it detailed all of her ideas concerning the shifter experiments, each and every avenue that Evans had either blocked or ignored. And then it went a step further.
During the raid on our former laboratory facility, it read, I encountered a small group of shifters attempting to flee the lab. Knowing that to allow them to escape was a great threat not just to our organisation but to humanity as a whole, I attempted to shoot one of them. Unfortunately, my firearms skills are not what they could be, and I missed, receiving a serious injury from the shifters in the process.
Traditionally the Noturatii has focused its combat training on its security staff – as well it should – but in the process, we have perhaps overlooked what has become a significant hole in our strategic planning. I propose that each and every staff member, whether administrator, scientist, diplomat or even a cleaner, should be given comprehensive weapons training. Had I been more competent with a gun, I would have been able to kill the shifters attempting to flee, and it could be supposed that several more of them might be dead, and many of our staff still alive, had they been appropriately trained and armed.
While I realise that it would take significant time and money to achieve this level of training across all of our offices, I would like to propose that this strategy should be considered, as I believe it would go a long way towards strengthening our team as a whole, and preventing future setbacks of this nature.
Melissa finished re-reading her work, and nodded to herself. Satisfied that it came across as both polite and urgent, detailed but not boring, she took a few moments to set up a secure link to Headquarters, and hit send.
Jacob would be furious if he found out. Evans would be livid. The other scientists would be ropable about her having gone behind their backs.
But the opinions of those at Headquarters were the only ones that mattered. And if Melissa’s ideas led to the strengthening of their cause, the opportunity to put more of her ideas into practice and win this war all the quicker, then it would all be worth it.
16 Years Ago
Andre watched Caroline in consternation. They were in the middle of another of their counselling sessions, and Andre was currently being forced to admit to himself that he’d reached a dead end.
It was five weeks since Caroline had arrived in Italy, and long discussions had occurred during that time, conversations about Caroline’s home life, her relationship with her mother, her feelings when the woman had left, and her feelings about her Den.
None of it was simple, every event or relationship wrapped up in both bitterness and joy. She’d loved her mother, and yet also hated her for leaving. She was immensely grateful for her new life in the Den, and yet felt that she wasn’t worthy of it, having done nothing to earn her place there, and having made no particular contribution to the community since her recruitment. Her childhood had been hellish, and yet she still managed to find bright moments, a birthday party when she was a young girl, or the day she’d got her ears pierced. Her joy when she’d got her first job, for all that it had been a miserable place to be.
The only thing she really felt clear about was her father. She hated him with every ounce of her being, with no hint of happiness or pleasure to temper her anger.
And now she’d just told him what her father had done just before she’d left her home for the last time, the total destruction he had wrought in her bedroom, and the fury she had felt, more tempted than at any other time in her life to give in to the rage and simply kill him.
And then, years later, when she’d thought there was nothing left that he could do to her, nothing left that he could take from her, he’d killed her mother. Or at least, she believed he had. Andre was keeping in mind the pertinent fact that the police had found no clear evidence of his involvement in the murder, and so the true events of that night remained uncertain.
But Andre’s job in all this was to convince Caroline that killing her father was neither a necessary or nor a viable option, that clinging to family bonds was inappropriate, and he was to somehow come out the end of it all with firm assurances that Caroline would never again feel tempted to betray her pack and put her species at risk, whether for familial ties or for personal revenge.
How the hell was he supposed to do that, when he could empathise far too strongly with her, the rage, the helplessness, the overwhelming sense of injustice about it all.
Eleanor had done well, he had to admit, with no shortage of irony. He and Caroline had far more in common than he had realised, both of them losing parents to a force of evil, and both of them bent on revenge, and he could see no clear path out of their current conundrum. Evil had been done. Justice was required. How did one just walk away from that?
He was tempted to call an end to the session for today, needing time and space to get his own thoughts in order before he continued trying to muddle through hers. But just as he was about to speak, Caroline beat him to it.
“It’s not like I would have gone with her anyway,” she murmured, almost to herself.
“What do you mean?” Andre asked, feeling exhausted and wrung out from the dark memories the conversation was bringing up.
Caroline looked up at him, a bleak despair in her eyes. “I was waiting… I was hoping she’d come back one day. I always thought… When she left, I thought she must have decided I was as worthless as my father. I couldn’t think of any other reason why she wouldn’t have taken me with her. There are plenty of reasons, I suppose, but I couldn’t see them at the time. So for all these years, I’ve been hoping she’d come back, and tell me she was sorry, that she wanted me to leave that hell hole and go and live with her. And when I went to my father’s house… I thought that was why she’d been there. She’d come back for me. And he’d taken that away from me, the last, final chance to know that she’d thought I was worth something.
“But what would I have said, even if I’d had the chance to speak to her face-to-face? I have – had – the Den,” she went on, correcting herself as she recalled that she might have lost even that part of her life, now that she’d betrayed them in such a reckless manner. “I’ve spent two years being trained for a covert war. I have new friends. I’ve cut all ties to any life I had before. So what the fuck did I think I was going to say? ‘Hey, mum, great to see you again after all this time, but you’re a couple of years too late, so how about you just fuck off again?’ Jesus…”
It seemed she was feeling as wrung out as Andre was, and he searched for something intelligent to say. “Just because you couldn’t go with her doesn’t mean you didn’t love her. Or that you didn’t want that final validation of yourself. Regardless of the circumstances, your emotions about the whole thing are still important.”
“True,” Caroline agreed. “And I’m still furious. I feel hurt, and betrayed, and unbelievably angry. Not just at my father, but at my mother as well. But I also… It’s like what you said yesterday. Even before Kendrick found me, I’d already moved on. I’d left that house, mentally, if not physically. I’d got a job and was looking for a place to live and I had plans…” She peered up at him, looking tired, and world-weary, and yet there was an odd spark of something else. Joy, maybe? Peace? Or a kind of freedom that Andre couldn’t quite understand. “I can grieve for everything I’ve lost, and everything I never had in the first place. But it’s also time I let it go. I don’t want to let him keep controlling me for the rest of my life. I’ve moved on. I just… It would have been nice to know, in the end.”
“To know what?”
“Whether she really loved me.”
That was something Andre understood. For all her bravado and fiery attitude, he’d known for some time that there was still a small, childlike part of Caroline that just wanted someone to tell her she was deserving of praise. “Do you think your Den loves you?” he asked simply.
“I don’t know. I haven’t exactly made life easy for them.”
“Then let me tell you this: The usual protocol for someone who had done what you did would have been to put them down. But after you ran away from him, Kendrick spent no less than three hours on the phone, trying to convince the Council to give you a second chance. Why would he do that if he didn’t care about you?”
Caroline tried to smile. The expression came out wobbly as sudden, hot tears slid down her cheeks. “He really did that?”
“He really did.”
“Wow.” She wiped her eyes, sitting quietly as she gazed off into the garden, lost in thought.
Andre tried not to stare at her, while her attention was elsewhere, and completely and utterly failed. In the last few days, along with his own growing disquiet about his parents’ deaths, he’d also been having to deal with the slow realisation that he was finding it harder and harder to maintain a professional distance in his feelings towards her. When they had first met, Andre had thought she was the total opposite of himself in every way, impulsive where he was thoughtful, brash were he was painstakingly polite, derisive where he aimed for empathy. But he had slowly come to realise that Eleanor’s prediction was true – they were far more alike than he could ever have expected.
And as he watched her, he finally managed to admit to himself the thing that was causing him the most discomfort.
She was… beautiful. Wild black hair that emphasised her eyes. High cheek bones that gave her a look of unexpected elegance. Lips that were thin, but expressive, always ready to tighten in displeasure, or quirk upwards in a smile that she was trying to hide.
She was, in a word, captivating.
And she was completely and absolutely off limits.
“Can we call it a day?” she asked suddenly, jerking Andre out of his illicit thoughts. “I’m exhausted.”
Andre felt just as tired as Caroline seemed to be, and he was more than happy to end the session. “Get some rest,” he said, closing his notebook and standing up. “I’ll see you again tomorrow.”
“How is the young lady doing?” Eleanor asked Andre later, after dinner was finished and the villa was quiet.
“Very well,” he replied, feeling more together now, after an hour of meditation and a stern review of his own emotions. “She’s still got a way to go to understand everything she’s been through, but we’re slowly working towards the point where she can let go of the past and move forward.” Andre didn’t fool himself into believing that today’s session was the end of it. Caroline would come back with doubts, with questions, with a justifiable anger. But today she’d seen life from a different perspective, which was a huge step forward in his efforts to help her deal with her past.
“Good news indeed.” Eleanor looked at him speculatively. “And what have you learned about yourself in the process?”
Andre closed his eyes and sighed, immediately seeing where she was going with this. “You knew exactly what you were doing when you put me with Caroline.”
“That I did,” Eleanor admitted easily. “You didn’t think it had escaped our attention that you chose to become an assassin immediately after your parents were killed? So let me ask you this: How many Noturatii members do you need to kill in order to avenge your parents?”
“A few weeks ago, I would have said all of them,” he admitted quietly, feeling the swell of emotion he’d felt that afternoon come rushing back.
“An impossible quest,” Eleanor observed, knowing that Andre had already realised that. “And one that would slowly eat away at you, as each kill served as a reminder of how far away from your goal you were. So what would your answer be now?”
Andre stared at the floor, not quite able to meet her eyes. “None.”
Eleanor reached out, laying a gentle hand on his shoulder. “So now you understand,” she said softly, “why Caroline was assigned to you.”