“How long did you work for them before going through your change?” she asked, taking a bite of her own steak.
Going through the change was the safe phrase werewolves used to describe going through the incredibly horrible event that would kill a normal person, but in their cases, it flipped the switch on a gene and turned them into something totally different.
His mouth edged up. “If you don’t count the training, barely two months. I was with my team in Odessa on what was supposed to be a minor surveillance job. We thought there’d be a low probability of hostile contact because our intel said they were a group of wannabe terrorists, led by some Ukrainian oil magnate named Yegor Shevchenko. This guy and his brother were pissed off about something and were looking to buy weapons to stage their first attack.
“Erin, Rory, and Elliott had all been with the team for a year or two and Weatherford was the team leader. I was the new guy,” Sawyer continued. “Our job was simply to monitor the situation and determine how serious the threat might become in the future. We weren’t even there to stop the weapon exchange—just observe and report. It should have been a cakewalk.”
“I’m guessing things didn’t go as planned?” Harley asked.
Sawyer shoved a few fries into his mouth and shook his head. “Do they ever? But you’re right. It went wrong—fast. Somehow, Shevchenko figured out we were onto him and turned the tables on us. They hit us the moment we walked into the compound outside our safe house. There were eight of us, but most weren’t armed at the time. Let’s just say it was…bad.”
“You were shot?” Harley murmured softly, her stomach strangely tense at the thought of Sawyer being hurt. Which was crazy, considering she’d seen half her STAT teammates shot up already and barely noticed it. Hell, Jake had a tree branch shoved through his chest and she hadn’t batted an eye.
“Shot?” The question earned her a soft snort from him. “That’s an understatement. I was the first one hit by automatic weapon fire coming from the walkway overlooking the courtyard of the safe house. I probably should have died on the spot.”
Harley stopped even trying to go through the motions of eating, her whole body frozen solid as she pictured Sawyer lying broken and bleeding on the ground. The image made it hard to breathe.
“I was in so much pain, I could barely comprehend what was happening around me,” he said quietly. “All I knew for sure was that I was going to die and my team was going to be wiped out. I’d only been with them for two months, but they were important to me. And while I probably should have been completely freaked out about dying, I was more worried about them.”
She sat there silently, waiting for him to continue, part of her wanting to beg him not to even as the other part needed to know the rest.
“I had no idea what I was hoping to accomplish,” he said, the distant expression on his face making her think he was reliving every moment of that time. “I shoved myself off the ground and ran toward the nearest target, figuring if I could take down even one of them, it might give the other members of my team a chance to survive.”
He paused to take another bite of steak and though she didn’t have much of an appetite anymore, Harley forced herself to do the same.
“I ended up taking down Yegor and caught another round in the hip for my trouble,” Sawyer said, focusing on his plate. “I ignored the pain and headed for the next terrorist. I knew I was a goner, so I might as well go out swinging.”
More silence followed and Harley wished she’d never asked Sawyer anything like this.
“Everything is sort of a blur after that,” he added. “I remember getting the one on the walkway with the machine gun who’d shot me at the start of the ambush—it was Yegor’s brother, Illya—then kept going until I took out all of them.”
Harley held her breath, hoping the story had a good ending buried in there somewhere.
Sawyer speared another piece of steak. “Well, Yegor ended up surviving, at least long enough to get shipped off to a Turkish prison. The rest of them, including Illya, all died.”
“And you became a werewolf.”
He nodded. “I didn’t know that at the time, of course. I laid there on the ground, trying to figure out how the hell I was still alive after all that. It wasn’t until about a month or so later when I started going crazy with the change that I realized what had happened. But you know all about that part of it.”
Yeah, Harley definitely remembered that part. Remembered how her body seemed constantly out of control, claws and fangs showing up at random times, anger bubbling out of control, senses going haywire. At the time, she’d been sure she was going insane, that she was hallucinating everything. And that was without having to deal with the trauma of getting shot like Sawyer had.
“How did you keep everything secret from your team and the rest of MI6?” she asked, forcing herself to go back to eating, trying to catch up to Sawyer, who was almost finished. “I mean, aren’t spies supposed to be suspicious by nature? Didn’t anyone think it was strange you survived getting shot that many times? Not to mention running around fighting in that condition?”
He gave her a small smile. “In the bedlam of the ambush, no one noticed how badly I’d been shot. They knew I’d been hit, but they were too busy trying to stay alive themselves to look too closely.”
She was about to ask how that was even possible but stopped at the look on his face. He was lost in his memories of
