Page 34 of Checkmate

“What the fuck!” she screams.

“Miss, you can’t be in here, we're conducting tests.”

“On what? It looks to me like you’re trying to kill a member of my team. Unbuckle him now,” she demands and I smirk.

“I can’t do that,” he says with a quiver in his voice.

“Okay then, we do this the hard way. Make sure to tell Mr. Z that you hurt his daughter.”

The guy's eyes go wide with recognition as he realises who she is. He stalks towards her muttering obscenities, and I can see that she braces, ready for a fight.What the hell is she doing?I will my mouth to work, to tell her to run and that they won’t actually kill me, but when his big meaty arms try to grab her, she spins away from him. His arms close around her torso and a glint catches my eye as she stabs him in the leg with a syringe. He lets go of her immediately and takes a step back, ripping the needle from his leg before he falls to the floor like a lump of shit.

After making sure that he is down and out, she races to my side and starts to unbuckle my arms and legs.

Once I’m free I try to stand up, but my legs give out and I fall to the floor. Rolling onto my stomach, I push myself up and use the chair to regain myself.

“Mr. Z is going to be pissed.” I manage to push out through gritted teeth.

“That’s the funny thing. He told me if I could save you then you’re mine.” I smile at the way she looks at me when she says mine. “He didn’t make it very hard, though Chester may be pissed when he realises I stole one of his tranquilisers.”

I laugh, those tranquilisers are for us, that poor guy will be asleep for a week. I'll have to message Chester and make him check that he doesn’t die.

My muscles start to loosen up and I follow Jolie out through a back entrance. The creepy pedo van we used for our assignment screeches to a stop beside us. Jolie opens the door and helps me in.

“Hold on tight fuckers.”

“Why is Colt here?” I mumble to Jolie.

“He's the getaway driver, but we have a few more additions on their way out.”

I turn and look at the door when I hear it open and the rest of Colt’s team files out with Chester, Kai, Brennan and Trace. Kai smiles at me and runs to the van.

Everyone piles in and with how many bodies are in here, there is no free room. Jolie crawls into the front with Colt and Blayne sits on one of her guys' laps. I want to say his name is Van but I have never given a fuck enough to bother asking names. There are very few teams that would even interact with us; they know who we are and what we are capable of.

What Jolie doesn’t realise is that she has shown them our weakness, one they could very well use against us one day if Mr. Z decides to pit them against us. We're not here to make friends, we can be friendly towards other teams but everyone knows the score. It’s your team above all else and we are sworn to that. If any of these people had to choose between a team member or Jolie they wouldn’t hesitate to take her out. They’re not stupid enough to try unless they’re ordered to because our wrath wouldn’t be worth it.

Colt floors it and we all tumble into each other, our energy is depleted after a gruelling twenty hours locked inside those walls. Our cuts and bruises are already starting to heal. In the extra few hours that we would've been locked in there, they would have been gone. It’s only broken bones that take a few days to heal; cuts and minor injuries take no longer than a day.

Brennan sits and hangs his head. I know days like these take it out of him; they make him memorise so much and then test him. His brain needs to rest, cataloguing that much information sends him into an overload. Trace is similar, facial recognition requires him to look over files upon files of faces. If he spots someone he has seen before he'll know the exact time and place. Kai, this is a game to him. He likes to pull the piss and tell the security he can see their cocks through his x-ray vision, and Chester, that bastard gets off on causing pain and lashes out at whoever tries to run him through punishment. He refuses to use his gift; he thinks auras and telepathy are for pansies, but him having a good read on people really helps us even though he can’t see it. His ability to be able to get into someone's head is a gift he should be wanting to access, but Chester is a hard man to convince.

Colt flicks on the stereo and changes the station until “Eagle Rock” by Daddy Cool catches his attention. Him and Jolie start belting out the lyrics and laughing as we pull out of Olympia and onto the main road. He makes a pit stop to drop his team off to their cars, then we continue home. They sing along to a bunch of old Aussie songs until we pull into my driveway.

We all groan as we pile out and head inside. “Um…so that problem in the morgue, you might want to attend to it straight away.”

I raise a brow at Jolie. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” she shrugs. “I just watered it and it smelt so bad. Colt helped me though, to stop that problem.”

I look over at Colt, damn it now he knows. “Ease up dude, no judgement here. I would have done the same thing. Actually that’s a lie, I would have killed him there and had a huge mess to clean up.”

I turn my back on them and stalk down to the morgue swinging the door open. The smell of vanilla burns my nose and at least a hundred car air fresheners are scattered around the room. The lamb chop song is on repeat through the sound system. Jolie squeezes past me and turns it off.

“He pissed his pants,” she mutters, twisting her nose up in disgust. “I saw a drain on the floor so I hosed him down and found something to kill the smell. The guy at the servo must have thought I was weird asking to buy an entire box. Oh! Colt gave the guy a catheter so he stopped pissing himself. I could hear the scream from upstairs.”

I snort as I move into the room and closer to the table. Martin is still firmly strapped down so I remove the blindfold and the gag from his mouth. His eyes blink open in sheer horror.

“Make it stop,” he begs.

“Don’t worry, you'll be meeting your maker as soon as I have a shower.”

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