Total pages in book: 104
Estimated words: 104141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
I could feel it on the side of my face and on the back of my neck.
Something didn’t add up with Kiko’s plan.
She killed everybody to stop the DNA test? No. That doesn’t make sense.
Kiko had a smarter plan, which meant there was more at play here. She was an Eye. Eyes didn’t waste people for nothing. If she killed everyone in this clinic, she did it for something she could not have gotten any other way.
My heart hammered in my chest.
What did she want?
I thought of my Tiger and tensed. “Reo, I need more men around Nyomi and—”
“She’s already been taken back to the mansion and heavily guarded. Yoichi is with her.”
“You told Yoichi to help?”
“No. He was already with her.”
I blinked.
Why?
Yoichi was not a man I had ever fully understood. He had appeared the day after my mother was buried, carrying the artifacts of her bloodline in two cloth bundles at his side. He had handed them to me and then refused to leave. Hiro threatened and even tried to kill him. Reo plotted for weeks.
Yoichi avoided both of their actions and remained around me for two full years like a shadow. Eventually, after he saved me twice, I made him my Fang.
Reo theorized that Yoichi must be one of my mother's people. Some sort of protector planted in my life by a bloodline I had never been allowed to fully meet.
Reo had even interrogated him for ten hours.
Yoichi had sat in the chair, looked at the wall, and never confirmed nor denied it. He had simply outlasted the questions, and my Roar.
If Yoichi was at my Tiger's side tonight, he had chosen to be there due to some sort of instinct to protect her.
I’ll have to talk to him later and figure out how he knew she could be in danger.
We rounded the bend into the patient wing.
The last four Scales waited at the end of the corridor. Shivering, they placed their weapons on the floor and raised their hands.
Sweat dripped down the first one’s face. “We are turning ourselves in. We did not—”
Reo shot him before he could finish.
The other three tried to run.
Reo fired three more rounds and did not break stride. They dropped one after the other—with a bullet either in their heart or forehead—collapsing to the floor.
Reo signaled to our men. “Clear the wing.”
They split into pairs and moved fast—one Scale low and one high at each doorway, weapons cutting the air in disciplined sweeps. Doors opened in rapid succession. Boots crossed thresholds. Muzzles arced left, then right. Inside each room, the soft echo of clear came back to us in clipped controlled voices, one after another.
But at the last door in the hallway on the right, a Scale yelled, “In here!”
A woman’s sobbing rose in the air.
We all raced forward.
The diamond reformed as we moved. Two Scales hit the doorway first with their weapons up, one going low and one going high. They cleared the threshold in two seconds and signaled back.
Reo flowed in behind them with his sidearm raised, sweeping right.
Two more Scales peeled inside and took the corners.
The rear pair held the corridor behind us with their rifles trained back the way we had come.
What the fuck will we find in there?
Hiro and I crossed the threshold inside the formation.
A horrid stench slammed into my nostrils. Copper. Antiseptic. Some other chemicals.
A doctor was sprawled across the bed. His mouth hung open. His chest jerked in fast, shallow heaves. His eyes had rolled back so far I could only see the whites.
A scalpel stuck out of his throat.
The handle was buried just under the right side of his jaw, angled up. The blade was lost in the meat of his neck. Blood pumped out around the steel in a rippling surge that matched the jerking of his chest.
Two nurses worked over him.
One pressed both hands against his throat on either side of the embedded scalpel. She was packing the wound with a wad of gauze that had already soaked through. Blood ran down her fingers and dripped from her wrists. Her sleeves were soaked to the elbows. The front of her uniform was streaked dark from the chest down.
The other nurse stood at the head of the bed. She leaned hard against the doctor's shoulders to hold him still as his body jerked. Her hair had come loose from its tie.
“Hold on, Dr. Goda!” Tears ran down her cheeks. “Please. Hold on!”
Her left wrist hung at a wrong angle against her stomach. Someone had grabbed it and twisted hard. Still, she was using her right hand and her forearm to brace him anyway. She sobbed through her teeth as she worked.
Neither of them looked up when we entered.
Reo took it in with one sweep of his eyes. Then, he pointed to a pair of Scales. "You two, help them. Put pressure on the wound and don't pull the blade. Keep him alive until we can move him."