Her Rogue Alpha (X-Ops Book 5) (5 page)

Dreya poked her head out the door to make sure the coast was clear, then darted down the hallway to the window. Hopping onto the roof, she climbed up the thin wire she’d left dangling from the eaves, then scampered back across the way she’d come. She was walking down the side of the road toward her motorcycle when she got a strange tingling along the back of her neck. She stopped and spun around but didn’t see anyone along the dark street. But her instincts—and her nose—told her someone was back there somewhere staring at her. And the scent they were putting off was the freakiest thing she’d ever smelled before.

Pulse suddenly pounding, she hurried to her bike and climbed on, then pulled her helmet over her long, blond braid and hauled ass. She glanced over her shoulder as she zipped down Embassy Row but still didn’t see anyone. She always took the license plate off her bike before a job, so no one would be able to track her. Besides, it was too dark for anyone to get a good look at her face anyway.

She slowed down after a few miles. She needed to chill out. Now that she was on her bike, there was no way anyone could catch her—if there had even been someone back there in the first place. It had probably just been her freaky side getting nervous.

But if that were the case, why was her freaky side telling her that something bad was coming her way?

* * *

Layla sat beside Danica in the operations truck, staring at the multiple monitors set up along one wall and trying to keep her eyes open. She’d traveled through the night, getting to Glasgow, Scotland, early that morning and immediately meeting up with the rest of her team. They’d set up surveillance on the warehouse where their mysterious arms dealer, Kojot, was supposed to meet a group of people who wanted to buy some really nasty weapons for reasons that probably wouldn’t make sense to anyone but them. It was nearly lunch and so far, no luck.

Two of the monitors showed the interior of the warehouse, which was fairly dim, even at this time of the day. Two others gave a view of the main streets leading away from the building. The last monitor showed nothing but a blank brick wall at the moment, since the feed on that one was coming from the remote controlled drone currently sitting idle on a nearby rooftop waiting for the coordinates from Layla.

“So, what’s going on with you and Jayson?” Danica asked, sipping her coffee. “I hardly ever see you two together around the training complex anymore.”

Layla stifled a groan. She didn’t really feel like discussing her screwed-up relationship with anybody right now, even if Jayson and that damn hybrid serum had been the only thing on her mind since leaving DC. But if there was one person in the world she could talk to about this—outside of Ivy, of course—it was Danica. At least they were alone. If Clayne or the other two agents on the mission, Foley or Hightower, were in the van, there was no way in hell she’d talk about her relationship troubles. All three men were out checking to see if the DCO had any new intel on why the meeting hadn’t gone down yet though. At least, that’s what Layla hoped they were doing. Considering how poorly Clayne and Foley got along, it was also possible they’d gotten in a fight with each other in the middle of the street and were all in a Scottish jail somewhere with Hightower standing between the two men, trying to keep them from killing each other.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, it’s okay,” Danica added when she didn’t say anything.

Layla shook her head. “I don’t mind talking about it. In fact, getting some of this stuff off my mind would probably help. Sometimes it all seems so complicated that I’m not even sure where to begin.”

“Let’s start with something simple then. Are you in love with him?”

“Yes,” Layla answered without hesitation.

Danica glanced at her. “Is he in love with you?”

“I don’t know.” She swallowed hard. “I know he cares about me, and I used to think that was enough. But as hard as everything has been lately, I don’t know if it is anymore.”

Danica let out a sigh. “He’s pushing you away, isn’t he?”

Layla blinked. “How did you know?”

“Because I’ve seen it before.” Danica snorted. “Hell, I’ve done it before.” At Layla’s confused look, she continued. “When I fell in love with Clayne—I got put into an impossible situation where I thought that being with him was going to hurt him. He wasn’t going to let me go on his own, so I pushed him away. And when he refused to let go, I pushed even harder. I ended up saying some things that hurt him terribly to get him to let me walk away.”

Layla frowned. “But if you loved him, how could you do something like that?”

“It was because I loved him that I could do it,” Danica said. “I was wrong for him at the time and didn’t want him getting hurt because of me. I don’t know Jayson very well, and while your situation isn’t anything like ours, I’m guessing he has similar reasons for pushing you away.”

Even though Layla didn’t want to admit it, on some level, she knew Danica was right. “He feels like he’s not worthy of me because he’s disabled. I mean, I hadn’t even met him until after he was injured. I told him that’s crap and that I don’t care about it, but nothing I say gets through to him.”

It didn’t help that she was a shifter. It was hard enough for people who weren’t physically challenged to accept someone who could do the things she could. In Jayson’s eyes, she must seem superhuman. She’d always embraced her inner animal and dreamed of sharing that part of herself with someone who would love her in spite of it. She’d been so sure Jayson was that person. But instead, her shifter half was coming between them. Not because it disgusted him or freaked him out, but because it made him feel like he wasn’t good enough for her. For the first time ever, she wished she were simply a regular person.

Danica went back to watching the monitors. “He’s a man. For most of his life, his whole world was wrapped up in what he could do physically. In his eyes, that’s all gone now. If you want him to get his head right, you’re going to have to help him get to a place where he can stand on his own two feet again.”

“I’ve been trying to get him back on his feet for months, but it’s not working.” She growled in frustration. “I helped him get his own place, so he’d see that he could still be self-sufficient. Then I helped him get a job at the DCO so he could still use his tactical skills. Heck, I even tried to get him a service dog to take care of, thinking that would help him, but Jayson refused to even go look at the cute little fur ball, saying he could barely take care of himself much less a pet. Nothing I do seems to help, and he’s drifting further away every day.”

Danica offered her a small smile. “I wish I could give you some magical piece of advice, but I can’t. It’s going to take more than getting him a dog—or a job. You need to give him a purpose, a reason to keep going and get out of bed every day.”

“How the hell do I do that?” Layla demanded, especially when Dick was waiting in the wings with a syringe full of drugs that promised a shortcut back to everything Jayson used to be.

“You’re going to have to prove to him that he’s still the same man he used to be, injured or not.”

That was easier said than done.

Layla was still pondering that impossible task when the radio on top of the monitors crackled to life and Clayne’s rough voice filled the back of the ops van. “Everybody get ready. Our buyers are three minutes out and our target is probably in the area already. Layla, fire up the drone camera and find him.”

Danica swiveled her chair around. “That’s my cue. See you later.”

As Danica hopped out of the van to meet up with Clayne, Layla grabbed the controls for the drone. She guided it off the roof, letting it hover above the building, so she could see the streets below. A few minutes later, two dark blue SUVs pulled into the warehouse. A little while after that, a van came down the street.

“There’s a white van coming toward the warehouse from the East End side,” she said softly into the radio as the vehicle moved slowly through the alley and entered the building. “The van doesn’t have windows on the side or in back, so I can’t see what’s inside, but it’s low on its shocks so they’re carrying something heavy, whatever it is.”

“Can you see the driver or tell how many other people are in the vehicle with him?” Danica asked.

Danica and the rest of the team were hidden in the warehouse, ready to make their move as soon as they verified this really was a weapons deal. Clayne and Danica would focus on the man they hoped was Kojot, while Foley and Hightower apprehended the locals who were there to buy the weapons. Foley and Hightower had gotten the short end of the stick in Layla’s opinion. There were six buyers, all of them armed.

“Negative,” she said. “All of the front windows are tinted.”

“Understood,” Clayne replied in a low, gruff voice that always made it sound like he was pissed at something—which he usually was. “Let us know the second you confirm we’re dealing with weapons here and not some drug deal or a truck full of stolen computers. If that’s the case, we abort without response. It might be Kojot setting a trap to see if we’re on his trail. We don’t break cover unless we’re sure it’s him.”

Layla followed the van on the monitors as it moved into the warehouse, then pulled up next to the two SUVs and stopped. The buyers looked nervous as heck as they moved to form a semicircle around the front of the van. She supposed she couldn’t blame them. If the intel on Kojot was right, he was one hell of a scary dude.

A minute later, the driver’s side door opened and a man in jeans and a T-shirt stepped out. He wasn’t a big guy, but he was in good shape and definitely moved like a person who wasn’t concerned with all the armed men standing around him. He didn’t necessarily look like a cold-blooded killer, but Layla supposed he could be Kojot. It would have been much easier if she’d had audio as well as cameras.

One of the buyers moved over to the back door of the closest SUV and took out an iPad. He moved his fingers over the screen for a moment, then held it up so Kojot could see. Kojot must have liked what he saw because he nodded and tossed the keys for the van to one of the other buyers. The buyer and one of his buddies headed for the back of the van while their friends continued to keep a tense eye on the arms dealer.

“The deal is going down,” she reported over the radio.

“What’s in the van?” Clayne growled.

Layla glanced at the other monitor showing the inside of the warehouse. Crap, it wasn’t positioned right. When the doors of the van swung open, she couldn’t see inside.

“I don’t know,” she said. “The camera is at the wrong angle.”

“We need to know what’s in that van before we blow our cover,” Clayne said tersely. “Figure out a way to ID what’s in there.”

Layla wanted to ask him how the hell she was going to do that since he was the one who’d been so adamant about her staying in the operations truck, but pointing out the obvious would probably only piss him off. She was half a second from jumping out and hauling ass for the warehouse when she remembered the camera drone.

“I’m moving the drone in for a look,” she said, grabbing the controller.

The image on the monitor feeding from the drone immediately jumped all over the place as she put it in motion. Clearly it didn’t like the idea of diving near ground level to look through windows like a Peeping Tom.

“Hurry up before they close the doors and leave,” Danica urged.

Layla darted a glance over at the stationary camera monitor. Kojot was tapping something into the iPad, no doubt transferring funds to some account that even the DCO would have a hard time tracking. Another few minutes and they’d be out of there.

The hell with it. Turning back to the controls for the drone, she sent it diving down into the alley behind the warehouse at insane speed. A split second later, she was rewarded with a long-distance view into the back of the van through one of the warehouse windows. The dark green boxes were definitely military and the stickers on them had universal symbols for
Danger
,
Caution
, and
Explosive
.

“They’re weapons,” she announced. “The boxes are about the right size for shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles.”

She had no idea what a group of people in Glasgow wanted with surface-to-air missiles, but it wasn’t something she liked to think about.

Clayne immediately gave the order to move. A moment later, he, Danica, Foley, and Hightower dropped to the first floor of the warehouse from their hiding places upstairs and ordered everyone to freeze. No one obeyed that order, least of all Kojot. The arms dealer took off in the opposite direction. Clayne and Danica followed, the wolf shifter quickly gaining on the bad guy.

Layla went back and forth from one monitor to the next, looking for Kojot, and caught a flash of movement at the south end of the warehouse as he ran down a flight of stairs. How the hell had he gotten all the way across the warehouse in just a few seconds?

“Kojot is heading down the stairwell on the south side of the warehouse,” she called over the radio.

On the monitor, Danica immediately turned and ran in that direction. Clayne, on the other hand, was standing in the middle of the warehouse, his head tilted to the side and a pissed-off expression on his face. Then he tore across the room, growling so loud that Layla could hear him without the benefit of the radio.

“He’s a fucking shifter!” Clayne shouted as he raced down the stairs ahead of Danica. “Kojot knew we were here all along and still had the balls the go through with the deal. He’s probably been onto us for months.”

Layla’s eyes widened. No wonder they hadn’t been able to catch the mysterious arms dealer. It was hard to sneak up on a person when he could smell you coming. She couldn’t believe the DCO never even had a hint he was a shifter. Just how good was this guy?

In the warehouse, an engine roared to life. She looked over at the monitor just in time to see the white van spinning up dirt and debris as it raced for the exit on the west side. Foley and Hightower were trapped behind one of the SUVs, locked in a shoot-out with the buyers who’d stayed behind. As the van sped away, Foley switched targets, shooting at the escaping vehicle and trying to hit the tires.