to move out, and the three of them slipped into the darkness.
Con stood in the pouring rain in the alley, looking up at 738 Steele Street. He saw the cameras tracking him and didn’t make a move to avoid them. They were no threat to J. T. Chronopolous, no threat to him, unless the men watching them tried to keep him from his mission: killing Randolph Lancaster.
It was a chance he couldn’t take.
He followed the cameras through one more loop, and the next time they came to the place where he’d been, he was gone. From his calculations, there was only one possible way of getting into the building unobserved, and that was to climb it from the outside. He started with the old freight elevator, whose shadows and struts and cables hid his movements, and when the elevator ran out, he took to the wall, one finger jamb after another.
Partway up, two unexpected scents came to him off the bricks and stone-cold riveted his attention: Jane and the beast. The rancid, metallic smell of Lancaster’s newest abomination was unmistakable, and so was the warm, wild woman smell of Jane.
Dread and confusion collided in his mind. She was here, the Wild Thing, and Lancaster’s beast had her. Whatever had happened at the house on the west side, somehow the beast had gotten the better of the SDF boys.
Fuck.
Fear had been burned out of him a long time ago, but with love, he realized, it had only been lying in wait. It came back to him hard and fast now.
Doubling his speed, he scrambled higher and found the broken window on the eighth floor. When he dropped inside, he felt another punch of home, but it was the trail he was following that held him—and the trail led up.
Zach looked up from one of the comm console’s video-feed computer screens. “Looks like we had the wrong bait for the last eight weeks. Are you going, or do you want me to do the honors?”
“This one’s mine,” Dylan said, reaching for the rifle he’d set on the desk earlier. He slipped the sling over his shoulder, then checked his Springfield, making sure he had a full magazine in the .45 and four extra magazines on his belt.
Behind him, Zach was already on the radio, letting everyone know J.T. had breached the building—like every other damn person on the planet tonight—and that the boss was going after him.
The boss—Dylan started up the stairs. He didn’t feel like the boss of anything, not with Skeeter missing. His brain was frying on the edges with fear.
No one could see it, but it was taking everything he had to run this operation like a mission and not just go on the rampage, looking for his bad girl. The only thread of reason he had was knowing there wasn’t a better way to get a whole lot of people killed.
So he was cool.
Cool, cool Dylan Hart—so torn up inside, so full of fear, so wanting to take Steele Street apart at the seams, brick by fucking brick, and howl his rage.
“The smell—”
“—is disgusting.” Jane finished Skeeter’s thought and wiped the rain off her face, before going back to tugging at the knot of material at Skeet’s back. The man, if he could be called that, Jane’s “ghost,” had tied his shirt around Skeeter, and tied it so tightly, she was losing circulation in her arms.
A crackling web of chain lightning sizzled across the sky and gave her a moment’s light to work by—and made her pray she and Skeeter didn’t get fried.
Her head was pounding with pain, her muscles ached, and she was shivering with the cold rain beating down on her. She felt like she’d been in a dogfight, and lost. Every part of her hurt.
It had taken what had seemed like forever for her to work her arms out of the sheet she’d been wrapped in, and every move had cost the two women, with pieces of the stairwell dropping away underneath them like clockwork. Skeeter was hanging by a thread, almost literally, precariously perched on their diminishing island of metal trash and building guts, and the only thing holding Jane in place was Skeeter.
But they had a plan, to get them both free of their bindings and climb to the roof, which was still ninety percent intact and only five feet above them. And as long as Skeeter didn’t fall to her death and drag Jane in her wake, it just might work.