Her Lone Wolf Read Free Page A

waited for the person on the other end to pick up. When she’d walked away from the DCO, it hadn’t been on her terms, and it had been ugly. Getting involved with them again was going to open a lot of old wounds. But stopping a serial killer was more important than hurt feelings and a broken heart.
    * * *
    This wasn’t going to end well.
    Clayne squatted behind the sandbag barricade as live rounds of ammunition buzzed over his head. It wasn’t the live-fire training exercise out at the DCO training complex in Quantico that worried him—he’d taken part in hundreds of these stupid things. Other than someone screwing up and drilling a round through your forehead while you moved from one covered position to the next, there wasn’t much to get jazzed about. Occasionally, you might have to return fire against various pop-up targets. If the training officer running the op was really feeling his oats, you might get to engage in a little hand-to-hand combat at specific designated no-fire zones. Again, no big deal.
    But today was different. Because today, he’d been paired up with Tanner, the Hybrid from Hell. Maybe it wasn’t the nicest way to describe a guy who was trying to get his life together, but Clayne couldn’t think of anything better to label the man-made shifter. The drugs that had been used to turn him into a shifter had come with some nasty side effects. While Clayne might have anger management issues, Tanner went stark-raving mad at the drop of a hat. And when he did, the ragged claws, long fangs, and strength beyond that of any shifter made him the most dangerous and uncontrollable creature the DCO had ever dealt with. That’s why everyone in the DCO called Tanner and those like him a hybrid instead of a shifter.
    Some things just didn’t make sense from the get-go. Like ordering a Diet Coke with a monster burger. Or giving a guy who had more issues with anger management and impulse control than Clayne did a loaded weapon and putting him in a combat scenario.
    Oh yeah. This really wasn’t going to end well.
    Clayne swore under his breath as he moved out from behind his covered position and hauled ass for a pile of logs fifteen feet away. The gunfire over his head sounded a whole hell of a lot closer than before. If the machine gunner on top of the hill was doing his job right, the bullets would be ten feet above his head. But it was hard not to duck anyway.
    As he dove behind the barricade, Clayne caught sight of Tanner out of the corner of his eye. The hybrid was right there beside him.
    Thirty minutes earlier, Clayne had been getting ready to run the exercise with Trevor Maxwell, one of the other shifters he’d worked with a few times. He wasn’t exactly friends with Trevor—though that could be said about almost anyone at the DCO—but he respected him. The coyote shifter and his industrial-espionage-slash-counter-intelligence team—humans, or norms, though they may be—were damn good at their job.
    Then Dick Coleman had shown up with Tanner Howland in tow. That should have clued Clayne in that something screwy was up. Dick rarely came out to the live-fire training area. Probably because he was afraid one of the dozens of people he pissed off on a recurring basis would “accidentally” shoot him. And if that hadn’t been enough to let Clayne know something was up, the fact that the Russian doctor, Zarina Sokolov, was hurrying after them with a concerned look on her pretty face sure as hell should have.
    “Howland is taking Maxwell’s place,” he’d told Todd Newman, the training officer for the exercise.
    When Todd had attempted to point out it wasn’t a good idea to introduce Tanner to DCO training in the middle of a live-fire exercise, Dick waved away his concerns.
    “He was an Army Ranger. This stuff is child’s play for him.”
    So Todd had given Tanner a loaded M4 carbine and told him to follow Clayne’s lead.
    Clayne had to admit that so far Tanner was doing damn good. He covered