Eye of the Storm Read online

  Bloodhaven’s own Council had a propensity to come down harshly on anything remotely resembling rogue behavior. That included crushing any attempt at spreading panic among humans that might risk riling up anti-shifter sentiments. It would only catapult them back to the past all over again, and nobody wanted to return to that type of bloodshed.

  “After that,” Grayson continued, “I arranged to release that press statement, co-signed by other CEOs and business associates.”

  “Publicly announcing that you held no support and bore full contempt for extremist groups engaging, participating, and associating in such terrorist activities.” Sara nodded, reciting Grayson’s own words. “Essentially, a big fuck-you to Chromo.”

  A surprised laugh escaped Grayson. “Well, I saw it more as giving Chromo the finger, but that works too.”

  Many of his contacts and associates had wanted to maintain good relations with him and Moran Industries, so it was no surprise that they’d instantly agreed to add their names to the press statement when he’d approached them.

  “It was a very ballsy move,” Sara commented. “You painted a huge target on your back for all those factions to aim at.”

  Grayson smiled, baring teeth. “Let them try.”

  Sara didn’t look reassured. She raised a hand to rub her forehead, the movement causing her jacket to ride over one hip, revealing a flat white fob pinned to the waist of her jeans.

  Grayson recognized the fob and stared.

  “You work for me,” he said in surprise.

  Chapter Two

  Sara followed his gaze, then lowered her arm and smoothed her jacket down.

  “In one of your R&D labs,” she confirmed quietly. “Northwood division.”

  His gaze turned piercing on her. Sara struggled to betray no outward reaction. Grayson Moran was a wolf, she told herself, and wolves pounced at the first sign of weakness.

  Her wrist still burned from the heat of his touch, and she tried not to shiver. He was even larger in person than she’d expected, having previously only glimpsed photos of him in the occasional news article. She hadn’t really paid much attention then, knowing him as her employer only in a distant sort of way. After all, it wasn’t as if the labcoats in research and development ever rubbed shoulders with the upper echelon of directors at Moran Industries, let alone its founder and CEO.

  This was the first time she’d met the man face to face, and she could now say with certainty that those photos hadn’t done him justice.

  Sitting next to him in the confines of car, Sara found Grayson’s presence overwhelming. He was good-looking in the classical sense, with dark hair and cheekbones sharp enough to cut. Wolf eyes gleamed gold as they watched her with piercing intensity, and she was quite sure they didn’t miss a thing. His mouth looked a little too grim, hard lines etched on either sides of it, but Sara could easily see how that would tempt the ladies instead of drive them away. A woman wouldn’t be able to resist wanting to gentle those lines.

  Part of Sara wanted to open the car door and back away. The other part of her knew she had to stay and do the right thing. She couldn’t trust anybody else with the information she had. She had to go straight to the top, which meant the head of Moran Industries himself, especially if he meant what he’d said about standing against the factions.

  He was close enough to touch. Sara could’ve easily raised her hand to feel the faint hint of a five o’clock shadow scrape across her fingertips. She would’ve chastised herself for the distracting thought, but she was a woman, after all, and he was an attractive man.

  He had, as her mother would say, a very fine form.

  So what if she was tempted? It wasn’t as if she’d act on it.

  Sara almost hadn’t called out to him in the first place, out there in the parking garage. Even with his back turned to her, she’d been wary as she regarded the overall size of him. Over six feet two, Grayson had loomed tall, though she was no dainty woman herself. His well-tailored suit showed off his wide shoulders and narrow waist, and when he moved, it was with confidence, stating without words that he knew his place in the world and that everyone else knew it too.

  He had it all: money, power, influence. He could do anything he wanted and screw the repercussions. Hell, he’d blatantly dared the factions to paint that target on his back.

  Sara, however, didn’t have that luxury. If anything, she needed to avoid notice.

  But Sara hadn’t let herself be intimidated in a long time. Not by her parents when she’d opted to escape the cloying, clinging confines of home, not by her colleagues when she’d entered the still-male-dominated field of science, and certainly not by her shifter labmates who continually viewed her with suspicion and regarded her human presence as a miscarriage of equal opportunity employment.

  Besides, even if Grayson Moran’s very … maleness … stirred her in a way she hadn’t felt before, that paled in importance when compared to the chilling discovery she’d made last night.

  Her attention returned to the present as Grayson spoke.

  “That explains it,” he murmured.

  Sara frowned. “What does?”

  “I was trying to figure out how you’d managed to enter the building and elude the security guards.” He nodded in direction of the fob clipped to her jeans. “I thought you were an outsider, but as an employee, naturally you’d have access to the premises.”

  He tilted his head as his gaze traveled over her curiously, from head to toe and back up again. Sara felt every inch of that look burn its way across her skin.

  Grayson brushed a thumb across his mouth in thought. “We don’t see a lot of humans working in our labs. No offense, of course.”

  “None taken. I know they usually opt to be part of sales and marketing instead.”

  That was putting it diplomatically, Sara thought. Shifters generally didn’t like the idea of humans conducting experimental trials on them. It was still something that brought back bad memories for many of the older shifters. Even now, whenever Sara passed by her coworkers, they stopped talking and waited for her to be out of earshot before resuming their conversation.

  “At any rate,” she continued, “I typically deal with the mechanical side of things. Calibrating equipment used to test pharmaceutical inhalers and such.”

  “Ah, yes.” Grayson tipped his head, a nod of acknowledgment. “Asthma’s a bitch when you’re a shifter.”

  “I bet.” Sara hesitated. She knew she should just come out and say it, instead of prevaricating like this. Making damned small talk. Grayson had been clear in his stance against Chromo and the factions. That should indicate he could be trusted, shouldn’t it?

  And if she was wrong—if he’d done it just for show without any intention of keeping his word—she’d be dead before she could even reach for the door handle.

  Hell of a time to start having doubts.

  She nervously tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear. As her hand fell back to her lap, Grayson reached over and closed his hand over hers.

  She froze, staring first at their joined hands, then up at his chiseled face and those gold-tinted eyes. He seemed to read far too much—and far too accurately—into her silence.

  “Tell me what you know,” he said quietly. “I promise no harm will come to you.”

  She swallowed. Their gazes held, neither of them able to break the strong pull. She imagined he could hear the rapid beat of her pulse.

  Then she turned up her other hand, the one that had been fisted this whole time. She opened it to reveal the flash drive that had been resting against her palm.

  She used the hand that Grayson had been holding to draw his own closer. Turning his palm upwards, she pressed the flash drive into it.

  “I found this last night,” Sara said unsteadily.

  Grayson withdrew his hand, staring down at the flash drive now in his possession.

  “I was working late in the lab,” she began to explain. “I wasn’t finished with my report yet, but I was hitching a ride home with a labmate and didn’t want to keep her waiting.”

  Henrietta, a fox-shifter, was one of the few coworkers to accept Sara into the fold. She often snorted at the way their coworkers had closed ranks against Sara: “Don’t they know lab-geeks are supposed to stick together? Who else are they gonna hang out with at the company holiday party?”

  Sara now shook her head and continued, “I decided to take some files back with me so that I could finish up at home. As you know, the lab computers are on an internal network so I couldn’t e-mail them to myself, but we have several flash drives floating around in the lab for just that purpose. As long as the files aren’t confidential, we’re authorized to do so. Most of the time we’re completing reports based on established data anyway, so it’s not like we’re compromising security or anything.”

  Grayson’s brows drew together but he nodded at her to go on.

  She ran a hand through her hair, restless, and expelled a frustrated sigh when she ended up mussing up her ponytail. She released her hair from its confines before tying it up again. His eyes followed her every move.

  “I looked for a spare drive but they weren’t in the usual drawer. That ought to mean they’re all in use, but truthfully, it usually just means one of us got too distracted and forgot to put them back after using them. It’s not uncommon to find an unused drive lying on a random shelf. Darius yells at us a lot for that.”

  “Darius?”

  “Darius Willby, our lab division’s supervisor.” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, Henrietta went to warm up her car while waiting for me. I started looking for a spare drive, then stumbled upon that.” She nodded at the slim drive in Grayson’s hand. “Literally. I bumped against one of the workbenches and heard a soft clatter. I thought I’
d knocked a test tube off the table, so I bent down to check the floor. Turned out it was that instead.”

  She frowned. “At first I thought it was a stroke of luck, considering I’d been looking for a flash drive myself. But it’s not the same brand as our other drives that R&D buys in bulk.”

  Grayson used his nail to scrape at a sticky patch on the drive. “Looks like there used to be a piece of tape here.”

  Sara nodded. “There was. I ripped it off when I picked it up—just something you do without thinking, y’ know? I thought about it later on, and I think the flash drive must’ve been taped to the underside of the workbench. It must’ve jarred loose when I bumped against it. That’s the only explanation I can think of.”

  Grayson covered his mouth and chin with his other hand, eyes narrowing in thought.

  “I was in a hurry to get out of there, so I didn’t think much of it at the time. Maybe someone didn’t want to keep sharing drives with the rest of us, who knows? So I just grabbed the thing, inserted it into the USB slot, dragged the file I needed into the drive, and headed out.”

  Grayson didn’t say a word. His stillness was almost unnerving.

  Sara wiped her palms nervously on her jeans. “It was a couple of hours later before I finally settled down on my couch to work on my report. I slipped the drive into my laptop and, naturally, the little window popped up onscreen to display its contents.”

  She hadn’t been surprised to see another folder displayed on the screen alongside her own files. Sometimes her labmates forgot to delete their files after transferring the contents to another computer.

  Still, she had raised an eyebrow on seeing the name of the folder: Delilah.

  It hadn’t been the name of any of the projects or reports her lab was working on.

  She related all this to Grayson. “Curiosity got the better of me, so I clicked on the folder to check it out. And I saw … everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “The proposal, the manifesto, all its outlines and documentation. Everything.” She met his gaze briefly. “At the time, I didn’t know Chromo had sent you that package. I didn’t even know Chromo was involved. There was no mention of its name on any of the documents.” She shook her head. “The only name that kept popping up was that of the Delilah Project. And I learned very quickly what it was about. There were … files. Research notes. Success/failure graphs.” She paused. “Experiment results.”

  Grayson looked at her sharply. “What do you mean, experiment results?”

  “I mean exactly that. Tests are being done. Have been done.” Sara wet suddenly dry lips, shuddering, recalling what she’d seen. “And worse… .”

  She felt him tense, a subtle ripple of muscles beneath his suit jacket. Something had changed in the air, and it took her a few moments to remember that Grayson was a predator underneath the civilized, well-tailored suit. He was growing furious, a wolf preparing to attack.

  Sara suppressed the instinctive urge to grab her backpack, open the car door, and flee. Predators chased things that ran.

  Stay still, she tried to tell herself. It’s not aimed at you. Not really.

  She forced the words out. “There were before-and-after photos. Videos of the test subjects. The Delilah Project isn’t just a proposed idea anymore, Mr. Moran. Chromo is working on it for real. They’re experimenting on live, captive humans, and they’re using Moran Industries to do it.”

  *

  Grayson’s mind went blank. A roaring silence in his ears blanked out all other sounds as he stared at Sara, unable to process what he was hearing.

  Chromo was using Moran Industries to carry out its sick vendetta against humans. It was using equipment, data, and resources from his own company in order to torture and experiment on innocent people.

  And the faction was doing it under his very nose.

  His wolf braced on its haunches, snarling in rage. The fucking bastards. He’d kill them—

  He saw Sara flinch just as his vision turned molten gold. He glanced down and saw that his nails had begun to lengthen into claws.

  He swore and reined in on his rage. He was frightening her.

  He drew in a deep breath and forced himself to calm down. He waited for his vision to return to normal, for the gold to fade away. His voice, when he finally spoke, scraped rough as rocks over sandpaper.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he muttered.

  “I’m not.” Her tone was level, belying the tension radiating from her. Her eyes, previously haunted when she’d told him of her discovery, were now wide and guarded. He could see her pulse beating frantically within her slender neck.

  He saw the rigid grip she held on the strap of her backpack. She’d been ready to bolt.

  He had scared her. The lapse in control had almost cost him.

  Grayson felt his skin tighten in a way he wasn’t ready to admit yet, but one thing he knew was that he didn’t want Sara Coulson to be afraid of him. Not ever.

  She lifted her chin, stubbornly meeting his gaze, almost daring him to contradict her words. Something in his chest clenched, and he would’ve smiled if the situation wasn’t so dire.

  He looked down at the flash drive in his hand. Rage stirred once more, coiling like a rattlesnake ready to strike.

  “All this time I thought it was just an empty threat,” he muttered. “I never thought Chromo would actually go through with it.”

  “It’s usually the mad ones we have to fear,” Sara said quietly.

  And she’d found it in the lab. His lab.

  Grayson clenched his fists. “I’m housing those same mad creatures under my very roof.”

  “Your company has the data, drugs, and technology necessary to carry the Delilah Project out,” Sara pointed out. “Evidently someone on the inside has decided to appropriate those things for Chromo’s use.”

  “Not just someone. Possibly two or more someones.” Grayson scowled. “If the flash drive was taped to the underside of that workbench like you say, whoever put it either meant to collect it later—in which case, why didn’t they just keep it in their pocket for safekeeping?—or was passing it to someone else to collect at a prearranged time.” He glanced at Sara. “Whose workbench was it?”

  “It’s in the general use area, I’m afraid. Anybody could’ve put it there.” Her tone held some measure of regret. She’d evidently thought along the same lines.

  Grayson didn’t miss the fact that Sara’s coworkers—people with whom she interacted on a daily basis—were all suspects. She was surely unnerved at the very least.

  He slipped the flash drive into his pocket. “Did you recognize anyone in the photos and videos?”

  By the shudder that ran through Sara, Grayson could tell she was remembering the images she’d seen.

  “No, the camera never showed who was behind the scenes conducting the experiments. Not a stray hand in the shot, not a voice that wasn’t part of the screams.” She rested her elbows on her knees, head in her hands. “It always focused on the human subjects. You’ll see for yourself when you take a look.”

  “I will,” he confirmed darkly.

  Sara closed her eyes, strain visible on her delicate face. Without thinking, Grayson reached over to touch the back of her bare neck exposed by the ponytail. She started and glanced up, but didn’t pull away.

  He gently brushed his thumb over the fragile skin beneath her eyes.

  “You didn’t get much sleep,” he observed.

  She shook her head. “How could I? I couldn’t get any of it out of my head. The screams… .” She closed her eyes, then visibly struggled before sitting up again and regaining control. “I studied everything closely. Not just the photos, but the documents too. I wanted to see if I could recognize anything. Even if it was just a writing style, a turn of phrase, something. If I could discover who’s behind this, who’s helping Chromo from within the lab, I could give you his or her name… . But I have no idea. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’m indebted to you for coming forward.” He raked a hand through his dark hair, then darted a quick look at her. “Your lab division is Northwood, you said?”

  She nodded.

  He leaned back in his seat, thinking. Music from the car’s entertainment system thumped rhythmically in the air. He wanted to shut the bloody thing off, but he couldn’t risk anyone overhearing their conversation. He’d promised to keep Sara from harm, and he’d meant it.