It was hard to figure out which one of those concerns would be the most contentious this morning—that Sawyer was a werewolf, that Adriana’s boyfriend was actually one of the traffickers, or that Rory had been the one feeding Yegor information since the morning after what happened in Paris.
Harley hoped it was the latter. She and everyone else had been stunned when they’d found Rory fifteen minutes after the fight was over, holding a young girl who’d been…tortured…for lack of a better word. The girl was Rory’s younger sister, Tilly. His supernatural younger sister. Rory hadn’t been too forthcoming, but from what he’d been willing to tell them last night, they’d learned Yegor had been holding the girl and using threats of violence against her to force Rory to keep him informed on STAT/MI6’s plans.
Maybe the most shocking part of that particular confession was when Sawyer, Erin, and Elliott had decided to keep the information from Weatherford. At least for now. Maybe that meant everything else would work out okay, too.
That hope was dashed when Harley stepped into the immense white kitchen with its stucco walls and blue accents and picked up on the tangible tension in the room. She noticed she was the last one down. Well, except for Adriana, who was nowhere in sight. Then again, Adriana was almost certainly still with Kristoff. He was being held on the far side of the city at an abandoned clinic the support team had set up to serve as a makeshift hospital/jail. Not only had they needed a place to keep all the supernaturals until they could get them home, but they also needed somewhere to hold the bad guys they’d arrested. Harley had no idea how she and her teammates would have managed without the combined support teams’ help.
When Jake called McKay to give him a report, they’d fully expected to have to deal with everyone themselves until the support teams could get there from Morocco, which was nearly a full day away by plane. Luckily, McKay knew better than to listen to them, because he and Weatherford had already moved both backup teams to the airport in Albania, where they’d been waiting on a plane that was fueled up and ready to fly. Two hours later, the support teams showed up to handle transportation and accommodations for everyone on the mountain, including one very happy mermaid in a seriously heavy water-filled tank.
And since they now knew where the information leak had come from, living without backup was no longer a requirement.
Harley glanced around as she moved over to the granite island that separated the kitchen from the adjoining living/dining area. As she filled a plate with scrambled eggs, a custard-filled pastry, cheese, yogurt, toast slathered in orange marmalade, and fresh fruits, she noticed her STAT teammates had chosen to grab seats on the far side of the living room while the MI6 agents were at the dining room table on the other side of the room, with Rory sitting at the far end away from the others. Yeah, that particular dynamic was going to take a while to work out. Almost as long as it’d take for them to reconcile with the fact that Sawyer was a werewolf.
She looked over at Sawyer, noting that he’d moved a chair closer to the coffee table, sitting halfway between the two teams while he ate. He met her gaze, his blue eyes full of hurt, but also resolve. Like he already knew his teammates had rejected him. From the way they were acting, maybe he was right.
Erin looked so angry she seemed like she might burst into flames—or shoot someone. Elliott kept his eyes on his plate the whole time, even though it was empty, refusing to acknowledge anyone. Rory appeared to be lost in thought for the most part, ignoring his plate of food. No doubt, he was thinking about his sister. Or maybe how the hell he was going to salvage what was left of his career. Assuming MI6 didn’t simply fire him on the spot when they found out.
Harley’s STAT teammates weren’t quite as tense. As they sipped their coffee, Jes and Forrest darted curious glances back and forth between Sawyer and his friends like they were wondering when someone would light the first match and blow this whole thing to pieces. Jake ate in silence, maybe willing to simply let the MI6 team tear themselves apart if that’s what they wanted to do. Caleb was too busy making roll-ups from cold cuts and cheese and eating them like Twizzlers to pay attention to what anyone else was doing. And Misty looked too exhausted to care about any of this crap. Harley didn’t blame her. Misty had only come out of her coma an hour before sunrise—the coma Yegor had put her in when he’d found her buried in one of his iPads and forcibly ripped her out. To say that yanking Misty out of a network connection was brutal on her consciousness was putting it mildly. Harley and everyone else in STAT worried that one of these days, they’d lose Misty forever.
Plate in one hand and mug of coffee in the other, Harley moved a kitchen chair over to sit
