the north and stopped precisely five feet from the back door. His embedded communicator beeped, and he activated it with a low command. “Knox here.”
“Gotcha, Captain. Disabling security.”
Conall’s reply echoed inside Knox’s head. They’d had the subcutaneous comms for almost a year, and Knox still wished they’d carved them out along with their trackers three days earlier. Conall swore he’d modified the frequencies to be unique and untraceable, but the things still creeped Knox the fuck out.
Implants to make him stronger and faster? Fine. To moderate his biochemistry to make him the perfect soldier? Okay.
Conall’s voice serving as his inner monologue?
Too far.
It took nearly a minute before Conall sounded the all clear. Knox crossed to the door, which popped open just as he reached it. Conall greeted him with a grin and an outstretched hand. “Glasses.”
Knox slipped off his glasses and relinquished them. “Pull the last thirty minutes of footage first and get it up on the wall. Everyone needs to see it.”
“So you caught up with the mark?”
“Yeah.” Knox eased past Conall and let the tech worry about resetting the security measures. The cavernous main room of the warehouse was well lit, with bright solar-powered LEDs hanging from the bare beams. Rafe and Gray sat at one end of the trestle table, the remains of a meal as well as one of Gray’s ever-present disassembled guns spread out between them.
Knox stopped at the other end and stripped off his tactical vest. “We have a problem.”
“How bad?” Rafe asked, his rice-laden spoon hovering in the air. “She got a security team or something?”
“She is a security team.” Knox shrugged out of his shoulder rig and dropped it on the table. His backup pistol followed, as well as the knife sheath strapped to his leg. “Watch the footage.”
Rafe obediently picked up his chair and turned it to face the whitewashed section of wall at the back of the building. Gray looked up without moving—or taking his full attention from the rifle components in front of him.
After another few seconds of fiddling and some muttered curses, Conall flipped his handheld projector upright, and the surveillance footage from Knox’s glasses appeared on the wall. The video from the night-vision camera was tinged with green, though Conall color-corrected it with a few keystrokes.
On-screen, Nina arrived in the alley. The video washed out the gold undertones of her skin, and the angle of the shot left her face in shadow. She surveyed the trap she’d walked into with no apparent alarm as the four men drifted into the frame.
Knox had almost intervened then. The instructions he’d received had been very specific—if he wanted his biochem hacker back, he was to deliver Nina to the designated coordinates, alive and unharmed.
He’d seen so much death in those four shadowy outlines—first Nina’s, when they overpowered her. Then Luna’s, when Knox failed to provide her ransom. Then each of his men, one by one, as their degrading enhancements slowly poisoned their bodies. Without a biochem hacker to regulate their implants, the Silver Devils might as well put bullets in their heads right now. Or go crawling back to the Protectorate.
Knox would prefer the bullet.
“Holy shit!” Conall’s shocked exclamation drew Knox’s attention back to the surveillance footage. Four bodies were already on the ground. It had happened that quickly—so quickly Knox hadn’t even had time to vault off the roof to help.
Rafe shoved his spoon into his bowl of rice and braced his elbows on the table. “Go back and play it slow.”
Conall obeyed. Even at half speed, Nina was fast. She dodged a fucking bullet before commandeering the man who’d tried to shoot her as a human shield. Then she used his gun to fire on two of his friends while the weapon was still in his hand.
Knox was good, the best the Protectorate had ever turned out. And even he wasn’t sure he could have pulled that off.
Gray sat back in his chair and rubbed his chin, his brows drawn together in a contemplative frown. “Who is she?”
“Fuck that,” Conall retorted. “What is she?”
“Trouble,” Rafe rumbled. “Hot, sexy trouble. Does this mean we go with plan B?”
Rafe always wanted to go with plan B, where he deployed his charming smile and his big, beautiful brown eyes, and everyone melted for him. Knox had relied on the man’s natural charisma on plenty of missions, but the thought of Rafe using sex to lure Nina into a trap …
“No,” he said, too curtly. “Plan A was to pick her up