Page 1 of Escalating Alpha

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Abducting Agent Cindy Fisher was easy.

Getting theapprovalto do it was not.

It honestly had been a fucking nightmare, and even Galvin had made it clear that if this didn’t go the way I was hoping, my ass could finally be in front of an ethics hearing. I was willing to take the risk because I was sure that I was right about her.

The main issue I had with this part of undercover training was that it always happened at theend—even in TV shows and movies. They would sink weeks or months into training someone and then have them abducted as the last “test” of their training to see how they did.

Fucking stupid.

Even when it had happened to me.

Why? You were way too panicked to really rememberdickabout your training. It was instinct. Some had it, but most didn’t.

The rare few who would survive undercover work had it.

So why waste your time andresourcesputting all that time and effort into someone to train them just to find out they didn’t have it at the end? Yeah, sure, training was never wasted, and even if they washed out of undercover work, they could use that in their career. Sure, of course.

But I was too fucking busy for that, and if I was going to take someone under my wing for real, I wanted to see she wouldn’t wash out first.

There was also the issue that my abduction had had.

Namely, I’d figured out it was a test. Yeah, ten minutes in, I’d figured it out and ruined it.

Had it still taught me a lot? Abso-fucking-lutely. I’d sent my training officer for that section a damn fruit basket when I’d been abducted for real while undercover. The skills had been invaluable in keeping me alive.

But yeah, I’d figured it out. I doubted I was the only one because after all the tests I’d been put through… I hoped the people we trusted with such big cases were smart enough.

She hadn’t been aware of her surroundings and that cost her. I would need to talk to some of the newer agents about taking that shit seriously, especially in a city like Chicago.

Hell, as a woman she shouldn’t ever have been that involved in her damn phone at night. She knew better.

But she put up a damn good fight. She landed a few shots that made us chuckle or flinch from where we were watching.

They got her back to the warehouse we were using thanks to one of Noah’s vampires. It was for his business, and he said he didn’t care if we used it for the night as long as it didn’t come back on him… And we cleaned up any blood.

Funny guy.

The stage was set well. We had others involved. A few who weren’t fans of mine but knew that it would look good on them for promotion time because just picking my buddies would be suspicious.

One was playing dead off to the side in a pool of fake blood like he’d been shot. He’d taken an actual potion that knocked him out and paralyzed his body for two hours. Terrifying, but hesaid he expected me to remember this and assumed it would get him off my shit list.

Yeah, he would. He’d deserved to be on there and we both knew it, but I’d let the shit off of it. He’d paid the penance.

Agent Eric Corbin was also being tested… Even if he didn’t know it. In other ways since he was up for being promoted. I needed to see how he reacted to putting his people into bad situations. Cindy was going to be hurt because of this—emotionally scarred.

He needed to be able to still send people into those situations as a SAiC.

He was currently restrained to a chair and roughed up. It would take a bit to heal even with the stuff I’d gotten from Nina. I was pretty sure his nose might not ever look the same from the hit one of Noah’s guys landed. The vampire definitely owed Corbin a nice meal because he’d come back to me looking guilty.

Yeah, he hadn’t controlled his strength with the human. It happened.

I would spank him later.

“You can take as many of us as you want, but we still won’t have the fucking answers,” Agent Nathan Roach snarled. “All of that comes through DC. We don’t know how to bypass the new security gates or any of it!”

Agent Roach—real last name—was a new agent who filled a slot from someone senior after someone transferred out when Murray came on. I’d asked Agent Brad Scott to help me, and he’d done a solid for his buddy and told me to ask this guy instead because apparently he had a hard-on for undercover work.

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