Page 13 of The Hunter's Heart

Although they asked, he didn’t respond, and by the time they reached the office, they’d resigned themselves to his non-answer. He parked and turned to face his friends. “You can turn away now and I won’t hold it against you. What I’m going to do tonight will burn me with the hunters. You don’t have to go down in flames with me.”

Neil leveled his gaze at Lucian. “She’s yours, right? The wolf?”

Lucian nodded. His knuckles cracked as he tightened them on the steering wheel, and he forced himself to relax. Just hearing her name made him tense.

“Then it’s worth it to save her. It doesn’t matter if you’re burned here. It matters that she’s safe. I think we all know that someday there will be someone worth walking away from all this for. It’s your time now,” Neil said.

“You tried to keep her safe by staying away, and it didn’t work. Makes me rethink everything,” Simon said.

Lucian snorted. “Neil, stay with the car and be ready to take off when we have Antonio.”

“I’ll jam the phones, comms, and cameras so no one will know what’s happening until we’re gone.”

After gearing up with supplies from a secret compartment in his trunk, the three males headed to the underground facility. It wasn’t an issue getting inside; Lucian simply entered his passcode at each point. When they reached the containment area, Lucian glanced up at the security cameras and saw the red lights blink off, and he knew Simon had done his job.

“Now,” Lucian said, stopping in the middle of the large room of cells. The guards – males that Lucian had known for years – looked at him in confusion. One of them opened his mouth to speak, but just then the lights went out and the guards shouted in alarm.

Lucian, Simon, and Isaac pulled down their night-vision goggles and moved swiftly while the guards yelled at each other in confusion. Antonio was standing by the cell door with a smug look on his face.

“I knew my ma would get me out,” he said, chuckling darkly.

“Shut the fuck up,” Isaac warned.

Lucian pressed the comm and said to Neil, “Unlock cell D.”

“Got it,” he said.

The door clicked open and Simon used a key to unlock the cuff on Antonio’s wrist. Before the raven could blink, his wrists were behind his back, locked in silver cuffs, and Lucian and the others hurried him out of the cell.

“Lock the elevator!” one of the guards shouted.

“The whole system is frozen!” another answered.

In mere minutes, Lucian was stuffing an annoyed raven into the trunk of his car and they were speeding away from the office.

Neil said, “Everything’s back online now. I wiped the security-camera footage and the codes that you entered.”

Lucian rested his head on the back of the seat. “It doesn’t matter. The guards saw my face.”

Simon said, “I hope they realize that it would’ve been easier for us to kill them.”

Isaac snorted. “Only you’d think that killing innocent guards during an entirely illegal jailbreak would be easier.”

“Tell me I’m wrong,” Simon said.

“You’re right and wrong,” Lucian said. “But like I said, it doesn’t matter. The guards recognized me and there are probably hunters on the way to my apartment.”

“What are you going to do?” Simon asked.

“See a ghost about a beast.”

CHAPTERFIVE

Mia’s body was humming. Under other circumstances she would’ve thought the feeling was nice, but right now, in this place with these strangers intent on causing her harm…well, there wasn’t anything pleasant about it. When her heat had come on her before, she was in her house with a wolf from another pack who helped her go through it. Reese was a college friend, and there wasn’t anything romantic between them. It was just a week of sex. He used condoms, and they never even really kissed. She’d fantasized that it was Lucian’s hands on her, drawing her to pleasurable peak after peak.

That fantasy was entirely shattered now, though. There wouldn’t be any rescue. She’d heard Lucian say it was impossible to get Dario’s brother out of wherever he was being held. There was so much she didn’t know about Lucian or his work. All she’d ever been told was that he hunted rogue shifters, ones who had broken with their group and gone on to commit crimes.

Most shifters were naturally interested in being part of a group of their own kind, but there were some who, for one reason or another, would drift away or be forced to leave their people. Those were known as rogues. She’d met a rogue wolf once when she was a teenager, but he’d ‘gone rogue’ because his mate was a human woman, and his pack was anti-anything-but-wolves. Mia knew that that wasn’t really the same thing as the rogues who caused harm to others.

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