Boarlander Silverback (Boarlander Bears #3)(53)

The bedroom door swung open so hard it banged against the wall. Alison startled hard.

Finn looked around the room with hollow-looking eyes, blinked slowly, and dragged his fiery gaze to her. His veins were sticking out on his neck and forehead, and his face was red. He was dressed in all black, and his bullet proof vest covered his chest.

“Finn, why are you dressed in your gear?” she asked loud enough for Kirk to hear her over the phone.

Finn’s hand brushed the gun at his hip, and he gave her an empty smile that failed to reach his eyes. Slowly, he pulled her holster off the peg by the door and tossed it into the room behind him. “So you don’t get trigger happy on me, Holman.”

Frantic, Alison scanned the immediate area for a weapon, but came up empty. Finn approached her slowly, step-by-step. He was big, and the all-black attire and fitted vest made his shoulders look wider, his waist narrower. She’d never given much thought to Finn’s strength before because she’d never felt the need to size him up as an opponent. But as he pulled a capped syringe from his pocket, those days were long behind her. Finn, her own damned partner, was the biggest threat she’d ever faced.

Alison ripped the lamp off the nightstand, the cord flying forward as it pulled from the outlet, and chucked it at his head. Finn ducked, but not fast enough, and took the brunt of the shattering glass on his elbow. Alison bolted, dropped down and slid across the wood floor between his splayed legs. Glass cut her hands, but she didn’t care about that. Cuts would heal, but everything in her body screamed that whatever Finn had in that syringe would be the death of her.

Help from Kirk was out. He was too far away, so it was on her to keep breathing. To keep moving. To keep fighting whatever treacherous plan Finn had hatched.

Eyes trained on her discarded holster, she lurched forward and pushed off the floor. Finn’s grasp wrenched her backward by the hair, and she screamed at the unexpected pain. The arc of the syringe flashed out of the corner of her vision, and on reflex, she jammed her hand upward and hit his wrist. Alison used the second she’d bought herself to twist in his grasp. Eyes watering from the pain at the back of her head, she jammed her knee upward and racked him, and as Finn hunched over with a grunt, she slammed her forehead against his nose. A sickening crack sounded, but she wasn’t done. Alison went down with him, straddled his stomach, and pummeled that broken nose with her fists. Finn curled into himself, blocking her with his forearms, and the syringe rolled across the uneven floorboards, coming to a stop in the shallow crevice between two planks.

Finn stopped defending his face long enough to grab the side of her neck and slam her against the floor beside him. In an army crawl, he scrambled toward the syringe, but Alison was faster, and gripped the body of it. It was empty, or at least it looked like it. What the hell? She scrambled away from Finn’s desperate grabbing and shoved the plunger down. A tiny capsule slid from the thick needle.

“Fucking bitch!” Finn screamed. “Now you’ve made it worse for yourself. That was your shot to go quickly!”

Go quickly? Alison’s head was ringing as she shoved off Finn. He meant die quickly. Horrified, she bolted for the capsule and stomped her shoe on top of it. A crunch sounded, and she stood back. In horror, she gasped. The wood under the green splattered liquid was disintegrating. In a rush, she scrambled to unlace her hiking boot, but her foot was on fire. She screamed as her nerves sparked with agony. She threw the shoe and it landed against the wall, the sole dissolving completely.

And now she knew who Finn was. No, not who, but what.

She turned slowly to where Finn was lurching upward, hand over his gushing nose.

“That’s an IESA kill switch. You aren’t a cop. You’re IESA.”

Finn stood up straighter and lifted his chin, looked down at her like she was nothing. “Clever girl.” He stalked her, backed her into the corner.

Alison’s head felt like it had been crushed, her muscles shook from the adrenaline dump and fight, and her foot hurt so bad she couldn’t even bring herself to look at it as she limped backward. But all the pain cleared in the moment Finn pulled his Glock from his hip.

“Tell me why,” she rasped out, her shoulder blades hitting the wall. “You owe me that much. Why are you doing this?”

“Because we can’t touch the f*cking dragon with no proof he takes human life!”

“I don’t understand.”

Finn lowered his hand from his gory face and smiled. “You aren’t here to keep peace, Holman. You’re here to incite a war on these mountains. Everyone in the country will back us when they hear what Damon did to you.”

“Damon hasn’t done anything to me!”

The low rumble of a plane motor rattled the cabin, and the roar of a tidal wave sounded against the roof. Outside, it was near dark, but she could make out the rush of water hitting the yard, dropped from above. A pungent, chemical smell burned her nose. That wasn’t water. It was some sort of lighter fluid, and everything became clear in an instant.

She was going to burn, and Damon would be blamed for her death. This is why they’d cleaned the bad marks off her file. She was the perfect target. An upstanding human citizen who had devoted her life to cleaning up the streets, burned alive by an evil dragon shifter. Her picture would be splashed across the news, deeming her the face of the war.

She retched and shook her head hard to clear it because now there was the scent of something much more familiar in the air. Finn must’ve turned up the gas on the kitchen stove.