When they’d taken the left, Lucan grabbed the other male’s arm. “You better go your separate way now.”
“Fuck that. There might be a reward. Besides, if I turn you in, I don’t look like I’m with you. It’s self-preservation—and a good decoy for you in case things get complicated with your little secret.”
“Excellent point.”
They continued on, making fast work of the ins and outs of the basement. It had taken Lucan about three weeks on-site before he knew the way around the multi-layered underground. So many wide lanes and smaller offshoots, with all kinds of rooms and larger spaces. The architect who’d designed the building had clearly known that there were things that had to be hidden, truths that compassionate healers did not want their vulnerable patients to know.
Like the fact that three morgues had been required to handle the number of dead who’d apparently needed processing.
Down at the very far end of the basement, he and Mayhem got to a fire door that was brand-new, and punching through, they went up two flights of stairs. Without saying a word, they both passed in front of another fire barrier.
There were three subterranean levels, and this middle one was where the prisoners bunked. Above that? Party time.
On Lucan’s nod, they ascended another two flights, and stopped again.
“You ready?” Lucan said.
“Born ready, wolven.”
On the far side of another fresh-as-a-daisy fire door, Lucan smelled the cocaine in the air, dry and tingling, like it was radioactive fallout in the nose and down the back of the throat.
This was the business level, where the processing happened behind doors that were locked with copper and guarded with guns. At the moment, however, there was nothing getting cut, weighed, and parceled out into packets in the workrooms, the prisoners still in their sleep cubicles, all checked in. After nightfall, they’d be woken up, fed, and forced to come up here to work the job they were being kept alive to do.
Sadly, this building really was perfect for what they needed. The Command, now dead, had had it all planned out, but had been killed just as the move from the old location was happening.
Which was how the Executioner had declared himself ruler of the prison camp.
On that note, Lucan started walking past the product rooms, toward a wall of fresh Sheetrock about twenty feet across and ten feet tall. The expanse was both new—and stained: All along its flat plane, there were pegs set at intervals, with greasy straps that hung loose and ready for further service. Behind the beating posts, that Sheetrock had soaked in the blood that had flowed—and you could smell it, too. The whole area was air-stained with both the plasma bouquet of torture and the new-built-house perfume of chalk and sweet pine.
As they closed in on the Executioner’s private quarters, the pair of guards on either side of the inset door palmed up their guns.
Unlike during the Command’s era, they were members of a private guard, hired to maintain order—as opposed to culled from the prison population.
“I’ll let him know you found him,” the one on the left said.
The steel door set into the Sheetrock opened and closed.
“You can go,” Lucan muttered to Mayhem. “I’ll make sure you get your reward—”
He caught the scent first, and it was the kind of thing that made the nape of his neck prickle.
Letting his head fall back, he breathed in deep. And then a howl started to curl in his gut and rise up out of his throat.
The sound of his people was cut off as the recessed steel door opened once again.
The black-clothed figure that emerged had a bald head and narrow, calculating eyes. And the male was carrying something in his arms, something that was large and furred—and limp as a rug rolled up in itself.
The head and forepaws dangled off to one side, the back paws and tail to the other.
The Executioner threw the dead wolf at Lucan’s feet.
“I believe this is one of yours,” he announced.
When the door to the makeshift clinic area opened, Rio sat up. “Luke—”
The man who stepped inside was not him. And the way that harsh face snapped in her direction . . . made her wish that she had pretended to be asleep. She didn’t need to know him for it to be clear that being alone with someone like this should come with a Surgeon General’s warning.
As his eyes narrowed, he took a step toward her and his upper lip peeled off his front teeth.
Which exposed tremendous teeth, teeth that surely had been cosmetically—
Rio scrambled to remember where Luke had told her that gun was. Under the bed. It was under the bed.