I remove my hands from the guy so fast he staggers. His wife catches him. She's crying, mascara running down her face.
"Angelina-" I start when an officer runs up shouting.
"That's the one!" the government agent yells.
"Get on the ground! Get on the ground!" The cop waves his gun. I see red again-if he's not careful, he'll shoot Angelina.
"All right," I shout, stepping between her and the crazy cop, hands on my head for good measure. "Calm down, we're cooperating."
"Get on the ground," he screams again. I fall to my knees. He grabs me and I let him slam me into the pavement.
"Stop," Angelina cries. "He's cooperating-he's bleeding. Can't you see he's hurt?"
"Angelina, get away from him," her father shouts.
A boot hits my side. I grunt but stay down. The cop kneels on my neck to cuff me, grinding my cheek grinds into the gravel. I look up at my beautiful girl.
"Angelina," I breathe her name through cracked lips. "It's okay. I'm okay. Please leave."
"But you're hurt," she says. Her parents reach for her and she shakes them off. "I'm not leaving."
"Just go, baby. Go."
Face stricken, she mouths my name at me as her parents drag her away. Peering past the cop's boots, I watch her climb into a gleaming Mercedes. A howl tears from a chasm deep within me as the car squeals out of the lot, carrying my mate away.
Agent Dune
"So was this guy taking bets?" the local cop asks him dubiously. When the police showed up at the warehouse, he had no choice but to flash a badge and take claim to the scene. He sure as hell didn't want them in there fucking everything up.
He still hadn't found out who the fuck placed the 911 call they were responding to, although his money was on the redhead's dad.
And the redhead seemed to be linked to this guy.
The one he wanted to question.
He'd purposely allowed the rest of the major players to escape. Parker and the other two bookies slipped out the back when the chaos began. They were more useful to him free. He'd learn more about their kind with surveillance.
So he'd let the cops grab this guy, the one who'd been fighting in the cage. The one making a big fuss outside the building. And now he'd insisted on questioning him. In private.
Because after seeing Jared Johnson fight, he knew he was the same as Nash. Altered. Enhanced, somehow.
He gazes through the two way mirror at the bloodied, tattooed hulk cuffed to the table
"I'm not sure we can hold him on any charges that will stick," one of the cops says. "We'll probably have to let him go."
"Not before I question him."
"Alone? You sure about this, Agent?"
"Quite sure."
Dune shrugs out of his jacket, folding it and laying it over a chair. He's a big man, not as big as the fighter waiting to be questioned, but powerfully built and ripped in a way that shows an obsession with strength training, beyond the basic fitness requirements.
"It's your show," one of the cops murmurs.
"Remember that," he warns. Checking his gun, Agent Dune saunters in.
Jared watches him, alert. Wary. Not guilty, like a criminal. No, he behaves more like an agent would. Ready for trouble from any side. Suspicious. He's much more than a dumb guy with big muscles. He's a warrior.
Like Dune.
He took a seat across from Jared and fixed him with a steady gaze.
Jared stared back. He didn't get nervous the way most guys do under questioning, and Dune had questioned a lot of guys. He knew and used torture methods taught to him by the government meant to make any guy talk.
He didn't plan to use many of them today. Not in a local police station with cameras everywhere. But if the cops had to fuck with his investigation, he sure as hell was going to question this guy.
"I saw you fight," Dune says at last.
Jared doesn't answer. Doesn't look away.
"Saw you tear open a steel cage with your bare hands."
He still doesn't answer.
"What kind of… man… has that kind of strength?"
Jared purses his lips but still doesn't answer.
"Someone who's not just a man. Someone who's been enhanced. That's what I think."
Jared shakes his head. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"You know anything about two labs being blown up in southern California?"
A momentary tick before he hides it. Yes, he knows something. Dune's instincts weren't off.
"What do you know?"
Jared shakes his head. "Have no idea."
Dune slams his fist down on the table. "Bullshit."
Jared doesn't jump. He doesn't even stiffen, which tells Dune the guy isn't the slightest bit threatened by him. Because he wouldn't be if he'd been altered by Data-X, would he?
"What'd they do to you? In that lab? Did they make you into a monster?"
A slight wrinkle appears on Jared's forehead before it smooths out. Which means something in Dune's questioning is off. So the guy didn't come from those labs. He must've come from another one.
He lunges for Jared, gripping his hair and yanking his head back. "I know you have superhuman strength." He hopes to piss the guy off enough to see him change the way he'd seen Nash change.
He slams Jared's head down on the desk and yanks it back up. His nose re-breaks and blood streams out, but Jared squeezes his eyes shut so he can't tell if they changed color.
"Open your goddamn eyes," he growls.
"Fuck off."
He pushes his thumb into the other man's eye and prods a lid open. The iris seems to be yellow, but the other man draws his head back for a head butt and Dune has to dodge it, so he's not sure.