Prologue
Sixteenmonthsago
Mission: Classified
Commander Grady Carter moved through the loud and bustling marketplace. His eyes scanned for any sort of threat. Thanks to his many years spent as a Navy SEAL, the action had become second nature, something he found himself doing even when he was on leave. He wasn’t on leave today though. He was to meet his contact here where no one would notice or care if a bag was exchanged. Inside that bag would be a target package. A target he would feel no guilt in eliminating since their death would make the world a safer place. At least for a little while. Until the next threat was found.
Colorful fabrics hung on poles and flapped in the breeze. That same breeze carried mouthwatering scents from the food stalls. Grady had always been partial to spicy foods and as his stomach rumbled, he contemplated grabbing a quick bite. Checking his watch, he decided he had time. He was early.
As he maneuvered through the crowd, careful not to jostle the elderly couple ahead of him walking arm in arm, he heard a trill of high-pitched laughter. Two young boys, maybe around seven or eight years old, were chasing each other, swooping around the pedestrians and even squeezing between legs when they needed to. Grady watched their antics with a fond smile. Their happy faces lit with such innocent mischief reminded him of when he and his best friend Graham were that age. Two little hellions without a care in the world.
“Commander Carter?”
Grady turned at the sound of his name spoken in heavily accented English.What the hell?He was here under an alias – an alias his contact should have used – and he was dressed in civilian clothes, he should have been unrecognizable to anyone on this side of the world.
The man who had spoken was unremarkable, perhaps in his early thirties, of medium height and with regular features. There was nothing that would make him stand out in a crowd. Until he opened his jacket. An IED was strapped to his chest.
“Get down!”
Grady’s shouted warning came too late. The explosion blew through the crowd and blew Grady off his feet, throwing him through one of the stalls. Laying there, he tried to blink away the spots in his vision from the brilliance of the flash. Through the ringing in his ears, he could hear the muted screams and the sound of crying. He tried to rise, wanting to help the injured… Pain seared through him and he collapsed back as more black dots danced in front of his eyes. He felt weak and disoriented. Taking a minute, he tried to breathe through the pain and found it difficult to draw in a deep breath as he attempted to assess his injuries. It felt like he had some broken ribs. One of his legs felt like it was broken too. Severe burns on his chest and the underside of his arm where he’d raised it to protect his face. The skin felt tight, hot, and angry. His vision finally cleared somewhat, and he looked down at his body and gawked at what before had been nothing more than an indistinct blur his brain couldn’t quite process. A two-inch thick piece of wood protruded from his chest. Pinned under the wreckage of the stall, he’d been impaled by one of the support poles.
Sound, movement, people coming to help. They were speaking rapidly in their native language, a language Grady knew, but at the moment, couldn’t make sense of through the haze of pain. They were tossing debris away from him, working rapidly, and he wanted to tell them not to remove the pole, that it was the only thing stemming the blood, but he couldn’t seem to get his mouth to work. His vision began to falter.
His last thought was of his best friend who’d left this world so many years ago.I’m coming to see you, brother…
A raised voice roused Grady from his sleep. Unfamiliar. Male. He slit his eyes open just enough to get his bearings and assess if this stranger was a threat. The light over his head was too bright and his eyes felt gritty and dry, but he didn’t wince or move in any way that might give away the fact that he was awake.
The steady beep of machines paired with the white, sterile-looking environment told him he was in a hospital.The bomber… How many innocent people had that bastard taken with him?
Christ, he was so weak. Everything felt heavy, his mind hazy.
“Look at him!” that unfamiliar voice shouted, drawing Grady’s slitted gaze.
Two men were standing toe-to-toe on one side of the room. One, a stranger in a white doctor’s coat, the other, a man Grady had come to know quite well in the months leading up to this op. Grant Ridley, Deputy Director NCS and the man who’d recruited him to the CIA.
“Just look at him!” the doctor repeated, lashing out his arm to indicate Grady. “Do you know how long it’s going to take him to heal sufficiently for any sort of procedure? This isn’t what we agreed on.”
“He’s alive isn’t he?” Ridley returned, unwrapping a stick of gum and stuffing it in his mouth. “So I guess you got exactly what you wanted.”
The words didn’t make sense to Grady’s sluggish mind. Drugs. They must have been giving him drugs through the IV.
While he didn’t think he’d betrayed himself with any sort of movement, the doctor suddenly turned and strode over to him. Hovering over the bed, Grady vaguely made out the name on the nametag: Doctor Craig Jerome.
“He’s awake,” the doctor said, turning his head to look over his shoulder at Ridley before he looked back to Grady while tapping some buttons on the IV pump. “Time to sleep, Commander. When you wake up, you’ll be a new man.”
There was no fighting it. The drugs pulled him under.
Chapter One
Stretchingonhersunrock until all her muscles were tautly held, Lark then let her body go boneless. The six-foot by three-foot slab of smoothed stone had been a gift from the General soon after she and the others like her had been rescued from the eugenics lab they’d been raised in and was her favorite place to relax. She might technically be warm-blooded due to her human DNA, but the multitude of serpent genetics spliced into her code before birth greatly influenced her habits and desires. One of those desires was to sun herself. The act helped reduce stress, and helped her relax so that she could sleep – something she hadn’t been getting much of lately.
Too much had come to light of late, too many horrifying secrets exposed for her brain to give her the peace she needed to rest.
She, and the other genetically altered Beasts that lived on Black Bay, had always believed that the government had rescued them from that lab. That the military had learned of the illegal experiments Doctor Anne Dietrich had been performing and had swooped in to save them seventeen years ago. It turned out that wasn’t the case, and they’d learned the truth from Doctor Dietrich herself when she’d turned up out of the blue at the gates of Black Bay, demanding to be let in.
While it was difficult to trust anything that came out of that woman’s mouth, one of Lark’s gifts, thanks to her altered DNA, was the ability to mesmerize her prey. Lying when asked a direct question was an impossibility when Lark held someone’s gaze, and Doctor Dietrich had informed them that the government had always known about her experiments. They’d only stepped in once they thought they might lose valuable military assets to a foreign power.
Three times, Lark had asked the question, holding the woman’s gaze, hoping she was wrong, and three times the answer had been the same. It had rocked the foundations of Black Bay. This was the government they’d willingly and gratefully worked for as an elite black ops team for years. And the betrayal didn’t end there. While she didn’t have concrete proof, Doctor Dietrich suspected that the government’s new top-secret program of augmenting soldiers with bio-robotic upgrades was only the first phase of their plan. They intended to eventually upgrade the Beasts to create an army of unstoppable super soldiers. Physically superior as well as technologically superior, that was the government’s goal, and they wouldn’t be asking for consent first.
