Authors: A. C. Arthur
“Listen, I have to get to this meeting,” Nivea told her as she picked up a bottle of perfume and spritzed.
Amina stood then, dropping her magazine to the floor as she came to stand behind Nivea. She looked at her sister through the mirror. “What?” Nivea asked.
Amina touched a hand to Nivea’s ponytail, letting the long, fat curls fall from her elegant fingers. She smiled as she continued to survey her and Nivea shifted uncomfortably.
“What are you looking at?”
“You, little sister,” was Amina’s soft response. “Perfume, glossed lips, slightly shadowed eyes. You’re a pretty little guard, huh?”
“Cut it out,” Nivea said, swatting at Amina’s hand and moving from the mirror.
“Got your eye on someone, sis? Another guard maybe?”
“No!” Nivea replied, loudly. Too loudly. “Dinner before you go back to New York?” she asked, changing the subject as they both headed for the door.
Amina continued to smile. “Sure thing. But not here. You have to get dressed in real clothes and we’ll go to a nice restaurant. I’ll send the car back to get you around seven.”
Nivea nodded. “Okay, I’ll be ready.”
She gave her sister a quick hug then ran down the opposite hallway, knowing she wouldn’t be as early as she’d planned, but still hoping to get there before Eli. It was silly, she knew, and well on the side of playing feminine games, which she’d prided herself on never having to do. But as she’d attempted to tell her sister, things were different now. The position of the shifters was more than precarious, and as she would probably learn more about at this meeting, at a very critical state. If she didn’t go for what she wanted now, would she get another chance? Would the shifters? She didn’t have those answers and she wasn’t about to take the risk.
* * *
“Captain Lawrence Crowe is the man behind the Genesis Project.” Roman Reynolds, Stateside Assembly Leader, spoke to the three hundred and fifty guards that made up the primary defense unit of local Shadow Shifters.
Up and down the East Coast there were thousands more that were prepared to fight for the shifters’ secret to be kept. But these were the men and women closest to the Assembly Leader, some that he’d trained himself—namely the Sanchez brothers—and others that had been trained by Xavier Santos Markland and Nicholas Delgado, Lead Enforcers, and Eli and Ezra Preston, Lead Guards in the Eastern Zone. Basically, these were the best of the best.
Nivea’s heart hammered in her chest as she realized this. How long had she worked to get to this point? And how foolish did her parents think she was for doing so? Who was she kidding? Richard and Michele Cannon were thinking about everything else in their socially elite and financially secure world, but not about their youngest child. No, that wasn’t quite true, Richard would never forget her, just as she couldn’t possibly forget him. Her chest ached at that thought, fists clenching in her lap.
In an effort to relax, to forget, Nivea moved uncomfortably in her seat, settling her gaze on the Assembly Leader and what he was now saying.
“We believe the goal of the Genesis Project is to successfully develop hybrid soldiers using shifter DNA to enhance their abilities. So far Crowe has only come close to achieving this goal. His latest attempt was disposed of in Arizona, where the project may or may not be continuing. Crowe has not been detained.”
Rome looked up from the podium then, letting his gaze fall on as many of the guards as he possibly could. There’d always been a very personal feel to everything that happened here at Havenway. Even though the Stateside Assembly was now larger than most corporations, Rome had managed to keep this headquarters as relaxed and family-oriented as he possibly could. The Leader knew most, if not all, of the guards by name, as he often came down to the training center to watch them when time allowed. That had grown less frequent in the past couple of weeks, but everyone knew that was not to be helped.
The kidnapping of Shya Delgado, Nick and Ary’s daughter, to try and obtain her DNA to aid in the Genesis Project, had put everyone on edge. Now, sitting here listening to even more information about this project that could force the exposure of the Shadow Shifters was more than a little alarming. And yet there was one person that didn’t look distressed at all.
Rayna Corpeta sat in one of the seats along the side wall of the auditorium, closer to the stage than Nivea had been offered. The
Lormenia
shifter wore her uniform pants two sizes tighter than any other female guard, her shirt always unbuttoned to expose her cleavage, leaving nothing to the imagination about her voluptuous breasts. She looked exotic, talked with an accent, and fought almost as well as a portion of the new recruits.
And Nivea didn’t trust her as far as she could toss the annoying bitch.
Rayna had one long leg crossed over the other, one hand with fingers running along the line of her throat while the other toyed with her long bronze-tinted hair. She looked around the room almost as if she were bored and Nivea barely resisted the urge to run up and kick the chair from beneath her. Just barely.
“Our number one goal from this point on is finding Crowe and whoever is helping him in this project. Although we are not sure of the others involved, we do know that somehow Crowe managed to obtain shifter DNA. If he has done it once, there is a likelihood that he will do it again, meaning other shifters are at risk. We are confident, however, that once we bring Crowe down this project and all he may be working with will crumble. To that end, I want him found and brought in,” Rome said, looking among them once more, his voice ominous as the microphone immediately amplified and silenced it. “Dead or alive,” were his final words, spoken with determination and clarity, albeit softer than his previous comments.
With perfectly synched movements, Nick and X fell into step right beside Rome as he walked down from the platform. Kalina, the First Female, stood from her seat in the first row to walk beside her mate as her personal guard, Jax, fell in with the others. As they neared the door Ezra and Eli joined in the ranks, slipping into the line behind Nick and X.
Nivea stood with all the other guards as they always did the moment the Assembly Leader was on the floor. Their hands remained tucked behind their backs, chins up, eyes focused on the Leader as they silently declared their loyalty and service. Only this time her gaze shifted back a bit, until it rested on him.
His glasses were too dark to see his eyes, not even an outline of them, his chin held high, steps coordinated, strength oozing from every movement of his legs, his arms, his shoulders. She swallowed hard and had to be tapped on the shoulder when her row was ready to file out of the auditorium. She was just about to head to the gym to work off some of this energy she felt running wildly through her body when a touch to her elbow had her jumping.
Fists raised automatically to fight back, she turned, only to have those sunglasses glaring down at her, lips of medium thickness held in a stern line.
“Let’s go,” Eli told her. “We’re running late.”
Nivea didn’t even bother to speak, wasn’t 100 percent sure her voice would cooperate if she wanted to. There were times—like earlier this morning—when she’d been able to hold tight to her attraction to him. And then, there were times like now when just the sight of him made her feel like coming, right then, right there, just letting the abundance of his sexuality take over.
She hated that part. Damn, did she hate it.
“So Captain Lawrence Crowe is now Public Enemy Number One for the Shadow Shifters,” Nivea said, climbing into the passenger side of Eli’s Assembly-issued Jeep Wrangler.
The vehicle was silver with windows tinted so dark nothing on the inside could be seen. Each vehicle was specially designed to assist guards in doing their jobs with skill and ease. They had been retrofitted with bulletproof steel. Weapons and ammunition were stored in side-door compartments that were specially lined to go undetected should the vehicles ever be searched. They even had a self-destruct mechanism that, once activated, would cause a chemical explosion that would destroy all evidence of the additions made to the vehicle as well as any other items that may have been inside.
They were pretty slick to look at too.
Nivea hadn’t been issued one of her own yet. If Eli recommended her for this promotion, she would. If he didn’t she would continue to drive the older-model Jeep with minimal security features that might at some point get her killed. Pulling out of the parking spot, Eli tried not to think along those lines. His job was to train her, to observe as she completed the assignment of investigating Agent Dorian Wilson. It was not to take care of her, protect her, or any of the other bullshit that had been roaming around in his mind where she was concerned lately.
“He’s not working alone, we’re positive of that fact. Still, the sooner we find Crowe, the sooner we can kill this supersoldier project before it goes any further,” Eli told her as he turned right onto the trail that led out of the forest to the main highway.
She’d finished adjusting herself, pulling the lever at the bottom of the seat so that it was a little closer to the dashboard, snapping her seat belt into place, and pushing down the headrest. He had to admit it was too high up for anyone who wasn’t at least six feet tall. Eli watched all her movements out of the corner of his eye, unable to keep his attention 100 percent focused on something as menial as driving the damn Jeep when she was around.
“I still can’t believe he cloned a shifter. Who would ever think to do something like that, without considering the repercussions?”
The last had been spoken quietly but Eli ignored that. Denying the ability to pinpoint changes in her voice, her demeanor, her hairstyle, was all about self-preservation. It was about coming out of this assignment in one piece, without change. It was how he needed to proceed.
“Believe it,” Eli said tightly, taking the Jeep into the busy midmorning traffic on Route 193. “It took Ezra, Bas, and Jacques, three pretty damned powerful shifters, to stop that bastard from killing every shifter in the police department out West.”
In his front pocket his cell phone vibrated. Retrieving it, Eli read the message from one of his staff at the barbershop he owned and frowned. He’d been receiving similar ones for days now and chose to ignore them all. Gritting his teeth, his fingers gripped the steering wheel as he refocused his thoughts on the scenario his twin brother had described with the first hybrid.
Ezra had been there to save the woman that was now glued to his hip, the human named Dawn that Ezra had claimed as his mate. That was part of the reason why Ezra’s new relationship status irritated the hell out of Eli. For one, Eli didn’t believe in the mating concept of the shifters. The notion that there was one perfect female for every male was to Eli a lie, plain and simple. His past was living proof of that fact.
The other reason he wasn’t jumping with glee at Ezra and Dawn’s union was that his brother was the second highest-ranking shifter to not only reveal himself to a human, but to fall for one and bring her into the shifter fold. Sure, there’d been two younger couples—two of the three Sanchez brothers that made up one of Rome’s newest elite groups of guards—that had mated with humans. The Assembly Leader thought the relationships might go sour and cause big problems for the shifters, but Bas and Ezra were the first two to openly defy the laws of the
Ètica
. Rome hadn’t tried to cover up either of those relationships, instead he’d made Bas’s mate, Priya, the official spokesperson for the shifters and had welcomed Dawn, the one with all the secrets, into the fold as well. Simply put, more situations that put the shifters at risk and pissed Eli the hell off.
“I heard about that,” Nivea said with more enthusiasm than he wanted to hear. “They said Ezra almost ripped his head right off. I guess I can imagine how he felt knowing this ‘thing’ was going after his mate.”
Eli spared her a glance before turning his attention back to the road. “Don’t sound so excited about someone getting their head ripped off. You’re a female, remember.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
He sighed, wanting this conversation to be over, wanting this stupid assignment to be over, once and for all. “It means that you might want to start acting more like a female than a G.I. Jane. From the time you wake up in the morning until you close yourself off in your room after dinner, you’re either in the field looking for a fight, or in the cafeteria picking a fight, or just always looking for some way to be physical. That’s not what females do.”
And saying what he’d just said to a female such as Nivea was the dumbest thing he could have ever done. She was a great guard and he respected that. On the other hand, she was a female, one who could be hurt or even killed being a guard. His thoughts were so conflicted when it came to Nivea Cannon and Eli didn’t know why. Or rather, he didn’t want to entertain the thought of why. All he knew for certain was that there was a war going on inside him where this particular shifter was concerned. A feeling he’d never felt with any other female in his life—the ones he’d allowed to get close or the ones he’d kept away. Nivea was unlike any of them, a fact that was more than a little disconcerting for Eli.
“First of all,” she said, slapping a palm on the dashboard as she turned sideways in the seat. “I can do whatever the hell I want to do. And second, I’m as good a fighter, maybe even better, than half the guards back at Havenway. And if you don’t like how I spend my days then stop paying so much attention to what I’m doing with them.”
Eli wished like hell it could be that simple. If he could just tell himself to stop thinking about her, stop watching her whenever they were in the same room together, and even going so far as to follow her a time or two, he would have done it months ago. Unfortunately, like Nivea, he tended to do whatever it was he wanted.
“Calm down. Nobody’s saying you’re not a good guard. I’m just saying you could do other things with yourself instead of focusing so much on the job.”