He groaned as he sat forward, his spine having worked out some kind of intimate relationship with the back of the chair that it apparently did not want to end. Everything else on his body cracked and popped as he got to his feet, but he forgot about the aches and pains as he looked to the closed door of the bedroom.

Ingridge was in there. On the bed. Wrapped in clean white batting.

It was twenty or so degrees Fahrenheit in that part of the cabin, only the main room, bathroom, and kitchen winterized and currently heated. She would hold.

At first, he had been frustrated by how long it had taken to get transport for the remains to be taken out of the farmhouse. But then Rhage had let him borrow a cell phone, and it was then that he had done his research on the lab that Ingridge had named in her partially written letter—said Internet search performed under the guise that he was reading the New York Times online as the Brother snoozed in a corner.

Murhder had been careful to delete his website history when he returned the phone. And then the high-pitched whine of snowmobiles had cut through the meadow’s silence as surely as they ruined the mostly undisturbed snow cover.

The body had been put on a sled, and the Brothers had done Murhder the honor of allowing him to drive her the twenty miles through the woods to where a blacked-out van awaited at the side of a rural road. By the time they had gotten things settled here at the cabin, it had been too close to dawn for him to head out to the location he’d confirmed on that phone. He’d had no choice but to spend the night. Meanwhile, Xhex had not returned from wherever she had gone, and Rhage had insisted on playing surrogate host by turning on the heat in this section of the cabin and getting the water running. And making sure there was food. Drink. A burner phone with the Brother’s number in it in case Murhder needed anything.

The kindness had been unexpected and yet not a total surprise. Rhage had always been the Brother with the most voracious appetites, but he’d also had a good fellow side to him. As well as a chatty nature. As he had gotten things all set, he’d filled Murhder in with regard to all kinds of things that had happened in the last twenty years.

The fact that the male had gotten mated had been a shock, given his history with the ladies, and yet he’d seemed happy. At peace.

He even had a daughter he loved.

And that wasn’t all. The King had a queen. Z had even settled down. Vishous, too.

That Tohr’s Wellsie had been killed made Murhder’s eyes sting. That the Brother had found another mate was a miracle, a gift from the Scribe Virgin.

Who, as it turned out, had abandoned the race.

There were too many other things to count. Times had changed. The Brothers had changed.

And yet Murhder himself had stayed the same, stuck in the past, in his madness.

Shaking himself into focus, he went into the bathroom, used the facilities, and decided not to waste time on the shower. Before he headed out to the lab, he had to go down to the Rathboone house to get weapons from his stash there. Ammo, too. And this time, he was wearing a goddamned Kevlar vest when he infiltrated.

Except he didn’t want to leave this cabin. Sure as if Ingridge were alive and cognizant of being in a strange place, all alone, he felt the need to stay with her.

Reaching into the front of his shirt, he took out the shard of sacred seeing glass. As he stared into its reflective surface, he waited for the image to appear. And there it was. Ingridge as she had been before age and illness took her life, her face youthful, her hair pulled back, her eyes looking right at him in that widened surprise.

Compared to how she had been at the end, there was almost no likeness, and that struck him as tragic.

The sound of the back door creaking brought his head up.

Before he could find a makeshift weapon, Xhex stepped in out of the cold. She was in the same parka and her cheeks were bright from the frigid wind. She looked intense.

“Hey,” she said. “Sorry I bailed on you last night. And before you deny it, I know you’re going after the son, and that you know where to find him. I also need you to meet someone.”

She stepped aside.

The male that came in behind her was enormous. Clearly a Brother, although Murhder didn’t recognize the face—and that was when the unfamiliar ended. The blue stare that nailed him like a sucker punch froze him where he stood, and not just because they were hostile. There was something about the way they narrowed, the flash of aggression, the energy emanating out of them.

“I know you,” Murhder said softly.

All at once, the male started to shake, and that big body listed forward as his arms and legs jerked and his eyes rolled back as if he’d been electrocuted.

“John!” Xhex yelled as she caught her mate.

Sarah fiddled around in the office part of her division, sitting in her cubicle, ostensibly checking order forms for new slides and for the upgraded microscope they’d gotten cleared to buy the week before. What she was really doing was trying to assess in her head whether Kraiten’s presence on-site meant she should pull out. In the end, she decided she could not reasonably make any statistical assessment of the probability of her success under current conditions, as her data was insufficient.

Or in layman’s terms, she was in the dark about so much, and so patently out of her depth, that “utterly clueless” would be an improvement.

At ten minutes to ten p.m., she casually went over to her backpack and took out her meal card, making sure that it showed on the security cameras. What she kept hidden was the credential badge from Gerry’s safety deposit box.

That she slipped into the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt.

One-strapping her backpack, she left her lab, striding quickly down the corridor. Gerry’s division had two levels of clearance, the only lab at the firm that did. When it had come time for his level to be increased, she could remember him commenting on how he’d had to go down to Personnel and sign a bunch of documents. He’d also been fingerprinted, drug tested, and, as he’d said, all but microchipped like a dog at the vet’s.

The cafeteria was halfway between Sarah’s lab and the Infectious Disease division, and she steamed right by it. Security changed shifts at ten, something she’d learned from previous late nights, and she wanted to do her figural breaking and entering during the handoff.

When she came up to the IDD lab, her palms were sweating and she was breathing heavily. Taking the credentials out, she felt time slow to a crawl, and a part of her was all No! Don’t do this!

Because there was going to be no going back. Her face, her infiltration, was going to be recorded, and if she were wrong, if what she’d seen on Gerry’s USB drive was incorrect or if the program had been discontinued in the past two years, she was going to be fired and prosecuted for trespassing. And she was never going to work in her chosen field again because no research program in the country wanted to volunteer for a whistle-blower who’d cried wolf.

Plus she was going to be busy pulling an Orange Is the New Black for a while.

But then she thought of those scans. Those reports. All that cancer being pumped into a human being—

Her hand moved with a decisive swipe, and the nanosecond that followed took forever.

The light turned green. The air lock hissed.

She wasted no time going through the office part of the space and the layout was exactly the same as it was for her division, which was helpful. In the rear, over on the left, was another sealed door, and she swiped again, figuring it had to be for the lab.