Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

January 29 th

8:42 P.M.

Something was buzzing.

Annoyingly close to her head.

The sound roared through her ears like a horde of angry wasps flying about.

Wasps?

The panicked thought was enough to have Cassidy Caddel snapping open her eyes, already lifting a hand to swat away the dangerous bugs.

Okay, so her parents would have a fit if they heard her referring to an insect as a bug. She was a genius, and she was supposed to act like it at all times. They'd paid a lot of money to have her and spent hours going through hundreds of dossiers on potential sperm and egg donors so they could create their own baby genius. They didn't want that time and money to go to waste.

How many times had she heard that growing up?

No, you can't take a ballet class, Cassidy, you're too smart for that.

No, you can't join Little League, Cassidy, you're too smart for that.

No, you can't go to school and have friends, Cassidy, you're too smart for that.

"Too smart, too stupid, more like it for going along with their rules," she muttered as she looked around to find no insects only darkness.

Not normal darkness like she'd woken from a dream tucked up in her bed in her cute little apartment.

This darkness was different.

It was deeper somehow.

All-consuming.

Almost alive, although intellectually, she knew that was just her imagination talking.

Too bad she wasn't allowed to utilize that skill as a child. She'd always had a great imagination, and she'd loved making up stories, sometimes illustrating them as she went. Although art hadn't been one of the skills her parents had been looking for when they'd decided to handpick a baby it was a skill she had, nonetheless.

And it was her favorite.

She loved nothing more in the world than sitting alone in her apartment, tapping away on her keyboard, and writing a story. It was her dream, albeit a secret one, to write a novel and publish it. Already, she'd started doing market analysis to see what was popular in her favorite genres, studied the ranks of the books from her favorite authors, and was fairly confident she could come up with a successful marketing plan.

Only none of that was relevant right now, and she had no idea why she was even thinking about it.

Writing books wasn't a productive use of her time, and she'd been so conditioned to focus only on what was productive and not the things that brought her joy or pleasure.

Right now, what should be productive was finding out why it was so dark and why she could still hear bugs swarming around her head even though she knew there were none there because she'd waved her hand about at least six dozen times already.

She also had to figure out why her brain felt … weird.

It was not the right word, only for some reason, she couldn't seem to think of what the right word was.

What was wrong with her?

Why wasn't her brain working?

It was the only thing she had to offer. She was socially awkward unless she was with her Prey family. She had no friends outside of them, and she'd never even dated because who was going to date her when she was tutored at home, graduated at nine, and started college before she was even in double digits?

No one.

Because the only thing she had to offer anyone—including a man—was her brain, and now it was ruined.

What was she supposed to do without it?

She'd lose her job, and without it she'd have nothing. Her relationship with her parents had never meant much of anything. They were her carers, not her mom and dad, not in any meaningful way. If she lost her job at Prey Security because her brain was no longer of any use to them then her parents would pretty much disown her.

She'd have no value.

She'd be nothing.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to breathe, and it took Cassie far longer than it should have to figure out why that was.

Hyperventilating.

Panic had her lungs trying to drag in air far too quickly. Instead of taking long, slow, deep breathes, all she could manage were short and sharp ones, more gasps than anything else.

It was weird.

Instead of feeling like she was inside her body, she almost felt like she was hovering above it, looking down at herself.

Definitely weird.

Was she dying?

Is that why she felt so off-kilter?

It would help tremendously if she could just figure out why it was dark.

Usually she loved puzzles, next to making up stories and drawing pictures it was her favorite thing to do. It was the one pastime that she enjoyed that her parents had actually approved of because in their minds, it was kind of like school work, just in a more enjoyable format.

Puzzles …

Why did that seem familiar?

Maybe … she'd been doing a puzzle before she started feeling … odd?

But that didn't make sense.

Did it?

Even though she tried to talk herself out of it, Cassie couldn't shake the feeling that puzzles were exactly why she was in the dark right now.

Her breathing wasn't improving, in fact, she could now see white dots dancing about in front of her eyes.

They bounced with precision like everything else in her life.

Then, they began to … form letters.

Okay, so she had definitely lost all practical use of her mind. It had just vanished, turned into a puff of smoke, and … disappeared.

Poof.

Gone.

The white dots formed the word poof, and she giggled.

Great.

Now as well as hyperventilating, she was having some sort of breakdown.

What was wrong with her?

Why couldn't she pull it together?

She always pulled it together. Always. She'd held it together when Scarlett had been accused of treason and been kidnapped not once but twice. And she'd held it together when Lucy had been in a plane crash and then captured. She'd held it together through the lonely and wasted years of her childhood and through the years at college, studying for multiple degrees as a little girl who everyone else either ignored or resented.

Why couldn't she find that same calm now?

Where was it?

Why had it abandoned her when she needed it the most?

What was wrong with her?

Tears of frustration burned her eyes, and since she was alone and didn't have to worry about anyone seeing them, she didn't fight it when they began to fall.

If the others were here now, they'd know what to do. Scarlett Madden, Lucy Elrod, and Ella Whitlock. Those three women weren't just her colleagues and the other members of Prey Security's Athena Team, they were her best friends and more of a family to her than her parents had ever been.

There wasn't anything she wouldn't do for them.

Including doing whatever she could to identify the mole at Prey that seemed intent on going after her team and getting their hands on the Reactivator. The Reactivator was a drug that had initially been her idea, a way to give the people she cared about—and all men and women serving in the armed forces—a better chance at surviving injuries in the field. It worked simultaneously to dull pain receptors, encourage faster healing, give an extra burst of much-needed adrenalin, and slow bleeding.

It could be a game changer, and she would not allow it to fall into the hands of someone who would use it against her country.

That was why as soon as she heard the plane that had been tampered with and crashed in the Mexican jungle, almost killing Lucy and Zander Madden—who was Scarlett's twin brother and now also Lucy's boyfriend—had been found and brought to Prey's lab, she'd come right down here.

Wait.

What did she just think?

The plane.

The lab.

The puzzle she'd been working on.

That's where she was. In the lab at Prey. She'd been working on going through the plane debris as carefully as she could to find any hints of tampering that she might be able to examine and gather clues on the mole's identity.

Like she always was when she was working on a puzzle, she had been completely engrossed in what she was doing, oblivious to whatever was going on around her. When she got like that, she forgot about everything else, including eating, drinking, and sleeping. There had been plenty of times when the only reason she'd gone home at night was because one of her friends forced her to.

She didn't like to lose her train of thought, that was when mistakes happened.

Tonight, something had interrupted her train of thought.

Hazy images of a dark figure behind her floated through her mind, but when she tried to latch onto them and make them clearer, they shimmered out of reach.

After noticing the shadowy figure, she remembered a deafening bang and then a scream, which she was sure had been her own. After that, things fell from the sky, raining down around her.

No, not falling from the sky.

They were the sky.

Well, the roof of the building.

Because the figure had set off a bomb.

The reason her brain wasn't working right was that she'd likely received a head injury when the lab had been blown up, leaving her buried alive.

January 29 th

8:42 P.M.

Luis Aguilar was leaning against the side of his truck beside one of the hangars at Prey's private airfield when the ground suddenly rocked, and an explosion lit up the night sky.

He was moving before he even realized it.

Although he was a Navy SEAL, he was on US soil, and this was no official mission. It was just a favor for a friend that had been approved by their commander because former SEAL and billionaire Eagle Oswald, founder and CEO of Prey Security, was a legend in special ops circles, and when he asked for a favor, chances were, he was going to get it.

So, he'd been watching over one of the members of Prey's Athena Team tonight. She'd come down to this specially designed lab at the airfield because it was the only place big enough to fit a plane. Well, the debris of one anyway.

It was the small private plane that had been tampered with and crashed in the Mexican jungle just over a week ago. The two people on board had been Lucy Elrod, another Athena Team member, and Zander Madden, a supposedly dead Delta Force operator who had survived an ordeal that killed the rest of his team and then been offered an undercover mission.

One he'd taken.

One that had wound up crossing paths with Prey and an internationally wanted weapons dealer named Raul Castillo. The man had bought a drug called the Reactivator from a mole at Prey and seemed determined to do whatever it took to get his hands on it.

Which was why he was here instead of hanging around a bar looking for a woman to pick up and take home and spend a few hours having fun in his bed before sending her on her way after feeding her breakfast in the morning. Perhaps not the most meaningful of ways to spend his time, but he was comfortable with it. He loved women, loved sex, and was a young, healthy, virile man in his early thirties who spent the rest of his time training hard and putting his life on the line for the country he loved.

But his teammate, Tate Laurier, was dating one of the Athena Team members, and it had been their SEAL team who went in after that woman when she'd been accused of selling the Reactivator. It turned out that Scarlett was innocent, and he was happy that she and Tate had hooked up since the pair seemed happy.

Tonight, though, it wasn't Scarlett he was supposed to be watching over, it was the youngest team member, Cassidy Caddel. Only twenty-three years old, the woman was a verifiable genius with one of the highest IQs ever recorded, and almost a dozen degrees in everything from physics, to chemistry, to advanced mathematics.

Since his team had been the ones to rescue Scarlett, and then had hung around because of Tate's connection to Scarlett, he'd spent a little time around the other three Athena Team women, and he had to say that Cassie was his least favorite of them. Lucy, with her no-nonsense attitude and practical personality, had been his favorite, but she'd hooked up with Zander before he had a chance to ask her into his bed. Ella had that whole sweet vibe thing going, and he was pretty sure he had zero chance of getting her into bed.

Cassie, on the other hand, had the whole spoiled princess thing down to a T.

He didn't do princesses, they were too much work, and always after more than he was willing to give.

But tonight, she'd been his charge, and he hadn't been watching over her closely enough if the fiery building ahead of him was anything to go by.

Yanking his cell phone from his pocket, he speed dialed Eagle himself.

"What happened? Why am I getting alerts about an issue at the lab?" Eagle asked without offering any sort of greeting. It was one of the reasons the man was such a legend. He was calm under pressure, confident in himself and his abilities, and took his responsibilities as the head of Prey seriously.

"Lab went up in flames, looks like an explosion," he explained, wondering how someone had got in and set explosives when he'd been there. They knew the mole was someone at Prey, but information was being locked down and not shared with many people. Yet somehow, the mole always seemed to know what was going on, a nightmare given that Prey was involved in everything from private security work to black ops for the government. If the mole decided to move on from selling the Reactivator to something else, then it spelled disaster for the government and Prey.

"Was Cassie in there?"

Luis had to swallow down his fear for the woman. "Yeah. She went in and never came back out. I didn't see anyone else enter the building."

"Doesn't mean they didn't. If it was the mole, they know their way around our systems and would know how to gain entrance without you being aware of their presence."

Eagle's words didn't do anything to ease the knot of guilt sitting heavily in his stomach.

This was his fault. He was supposed to be watching over Cassie, keeping her safe, and he'd failed.

Simple as that.

"I'm going in. The building is damaged but not completely down. There's a chance she survived the initial blast." If she had, he wasn't leaving her in there to be buried alive if more of the building went down or caught by the flames licking about.

"Negative," Eagle said like it was already a foregone conclusion. "I don't want you doing anything that could make things worse. I already have firefighters en route."

"And I have a team closer. I have two other guys on my team watching the other roads into the airfield." With or without Eagle's permission, he was going inside that building. Cassie was his charge tonight, and he'd already failed her once.

It wasn't going to happen again.

"Don't take risks. I don't want any other casualties."

"And you won't," he assured Eagle.

As soon as he ended the call, Luis sent texts to the two other guys he had with him tonight, but he was sure they were already on their way. The explosion was enough that anyone in the vicinity would have seen, heard, and felt it.

Not wanting to wait the few minutes it would take for them to get there, Luis headed for the building. While there was a lab at Prey's main West Coast building in the city, this facility was well equipped and a rabbit warren of rooms with a huge open area in the center.

Before Cassie had gotten there, he'd done a thorough walkthrough of the place, wanting to have the layout fixed in his mind in case there were any issues. The debris from the plane crash had been set up in the large center room, and while he knew that was where Cassie would be working, he'd checked out every other room to ensure the place was empty.

And it had been.

Or at least he'd thought it was.

But obviously, someone had been hiding in there somewhere because nobody had gotten past him and his team, he was sure of it.

Parts of the building were completely destroyed, but he could see other parts still standing. Whoever had set the bomb hadn't packed as much charge into it as they should have if they wanted to bring this place to the ground. Then again, they couldn't if they were still inside at the time and wanted to escape with their life intact.

The front door to the building was still in one piece, but as soon as he got inside he could see piles of rubble. The deeper he went into the building, the more it had been destroyed. Flames licked about, casting the whole space in an eerie red glow that made him feel like he was walking through the hallways of Hell itself.

Hope began to drain out of him.

There was no way Cassie could have survived.

It looked like the worst damage was focused on the precise area where Cassie and the plane had been.

Cleaning house.

The mole was trying to cover their tracks and make sure any evidence they may have left behind was destroyed.

Which would have been one thing.

But Cassie had likely been destroyed along with it.

A ripple went through the building, and it shuddered. Luis could actually see the walls swaying around him before another one dropped with a deafening crash.

This was a suicide mission. There was no way Cassie could have survived the blast, and if he didn't get out of there, chances were the building was going to take him out as well.

Leaving felt wrong, but the ceiling was caving in, and things were only looking worse not better.

He had to face facts.

Tonight, he had failed Cassidy Caddel.

It wouldn't be the first time in his life he'd failed and it likely wouldn't be the last.

Still, it ate at him to know he hadn't protected the young woman.

Another shudder, and he only just managed to roll to the side to avoid being hit as another part of the ceiling rained down around him.

He had to get out.

A team of firefighters would put out the blaze, and then professionals would come through, making sure to be careful as they searched for the remains of the explosion's victim.

Just as he turned to head back the way he'd come, praying he could still get out that way, Luis heard it.

The merest hint of a sound.

A voice calling out for help.