Spy Snow Leopard (Protection, Inc. Book 6) Read online

  Spy Snow Leopard

  Protection, Inc., Volume 6

  Zoe Chant

  Published by Zoe Chant, 2018.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  SPY SNOW LEOPARD

  First edition. April 24, 2018.

  Copyright © 2018 Zoe Chant.

  Written by Zoe Chant.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  The Protection, Inc. series

  Prologue | Justin

  Chapter One | Fiona

  Chapter Two | Justin

  Chapter Three | Fiona

  Chapter Four | Justin

  Chapter Five | Fiona

  Chapter Six | Justin

  Chapter Seven | Fiona

  Chapter Eight | Fiona’s Story

  Chapter Nine | Justin

  Chapter Ten | Justin

  Chapter Eleven | Justin’s Story

  Chapter Twelve | Fiona

  Chapter Thirteen | Justin

  Chapter Fourteen | Fiona

  Chapter Fifteen | Fiona

  Chapter Sixteen | Justin

  Chapter Seventeen | Fiona

  Epilogue | Fiona

  A note from Zoe Chant

  More Paranormal Romance by Zoe Chant

  Zoe Chant writing as Lia Silver

  Zoe Chant writing as Lauren Esker

  Protector Panther | Protection, Inc. # 3 | Zoe Chant

  The Protection, Inc. series

  Bodyguard Bear

  Defender Dragon

  Protector Panther

  Warrior Wolf

  Leader Lion

  Spy Snow Leopard

  Top Gun Tiger (forthcoming)

  Protection, Inc. Box Set 1

  (Contains Bodyguard Bear, Defender Dragon,

  and Protector Panther)

  All the books in the series are standalone romances. Each focuses on a new couple, with no cliffhangers. They can be read in any order. But characters from previous books reappear in later ones, so reading in order is recommended for maximum enjoyment.

  The final book, Top Gun Tiger, is forthcoming. If you’d like to be emailed when it comes out, please click here to be added to my mailing list.

  Prologue

  Justin

  Justin Kovac sat in a car parked alongside a lonely country road, getting ready to track down his enemy.

  The sky looked hard as steel, and was about the same color. The leafless trees seemed to claw at it with bony fingers. Hail rattled down and piled up on the dark earth.

  When Justin’s gaze drifted to the rear-view mirror, he saw a face fit for the colorless landscape: skin pale as the hailstones, eyes and hair black as winter ponds. Cheekbones like knives. A mouth that had forgotten how to smile.

  He could barely see a trace of the man he’d once been. That man, whose buddies had called him Red, had laughed and joked his way through life. He’d loved his team and his life in the Air Force. He’d believed that he’d lay down his life to save his friends. Then he and his team had been kidnapped by the black ops agency called Apex. And he’d learned that being willing to give your life doesn’t make it happen.

  The brave men and women who’d been captured with him had died trying to save him, leaving him the sole survivor. And then there was nothing standing between him and Apex.

  Apex had made him into a shifter. Given him special powers. And taken away everything that made him who he was. He’d lost his friends. His career. His honor. His integrity. His hope. His laughter. Even the color of his eyes.

  He’d become Subject Seven, their lab rat. And their assassin.

  The only thing Apex had been unable to take from him was his longing for freedom.

  Now he had his freedom. And he had no idea what to do with it.

  I have an idea, hissed his inner snow leopard. We should hunt.

  “You’re so literal.” Justin spoke aloud. His breath clouded in the freezing air. “I meant that I don’t know what to do with my entire life.”

  But his snow leopard was right. One Apex base had been destroyed when he’d broken loose, but he knew there was at least one remaining. He didn’t know where it was, any more than he knew the current whereabouts of the surviving Apex agents from the base where he’d been imprisoned. But he meant to find out.

  “Just one left.” A streamer of mist fluttered from Justin’s lips as he spoke. “Well, just one left that I can track with my power.”

  You must find them all, hissed his snow leopard. Find them and kill them!

  “I’m working on it.” As Justin reached up to push a lock of hair out of his eyes, his arm brushed against the cold metal of the door handle.

  Instantly, he was hurled into a memory.

  The metal of the lab table was icy against his bare skin. He was strapped down, with the usual array of sensors attached to his body.

  Dr. Attanasio approached him with a syringe full of blue-green liquid.

  “What’s that?” Justin asked, doing his best to keep his voice steady.

  “A little something I designed to make you stronger,” the doctor said with pride.

  “Why the straps?”

  “You’ll see,” the doctor said, with a sadistic smile hovering at his lips. He lowered the syringe to Justin’s arm.

  The liquid burned in his veins. Justin gritted his teeth, waiting for the sensation to die down. But it didn’t. Instead, the burning spread throughout his body, getting more painful by the second, until he felt like he’d been engulfed in flame.

  Maybe the stuff increased his strength a little bit, but it didn’t make him strong enough to break the straps, which had been designed to hold down shifters.

  But even while he was screaming and struggling, unable to stop himself, he noticed when Dr. Attanasio came a little bit closer than he should have to replace a dislodged sensor. Justin’s arms were strapped down, but he managed to stealthily move one finger to brush against the tiny bit of bare skin between the doctor’s latex glove and the cuff of his white coat.

  Dr. Attanasio never noticed. But Justin felt that sense of imprint, impossible to describe but unmistakable, and knew he’d be able to find the doctor again, no matter where he hid.

  There was a strap over his chest. A strap across his waist. Cold metal against his arm. He was trapped.

  His snow leopard’s shriek of terror and rage rose to an unbearable pitch.

  Justin grabbed the straps and yanked. They tore, freeing him.

  He came to his senses kneeling in the snow beside the car, with the ruined seatbelt dangling beside him and his fists clenched so tight that his nails had bitten into his palms. Dazed, Justin looked around, trying to orient himself.

  His snow leopard was snarling, frantic and furious. Kill! Kill! Kill!

  “Calm down,” Justin said. His voice cracked; his throat was raw. Had he been yelling? “It’s all right. We’re free.”

  His snow leopard’s blind rage cooled into hatred. The doctor. Kill the doctor.

  Justin opened his mouth to agree, then forced himself to say, “I’ll find the doctor. Then we’ll see what happens.”

  Kill him, insisted his snow leopard. He hurt us.

  It was tempting. But he’d had enough of killing just because someone told him to. If there was one thing that could make the man he was now different from Subject Seven, it was making his own choices.

  “We’ll see,” Justin said firmly.

  He got back in the car, closed his eyes, and cautiously recalled touching Dr. Attanasio, keeping himself at a mental distance so he wouldn’t drown in his own memories.

  W
here are you, doctor?

  Justin felt a tug inside his mind. It wasn’t the knowledge of a location, let alone an address, just a sense that his target was that way.

  Our prey, corrected his snow leopard.

  Justin began to drive that way, following that inner pull. He hoped it wouldn’t be too far. For all he knew, he was trying to drive to China.

  But it turned out that Dr. Attanasio hadn’t gone far; he hadn’t even left the state. The sense of that way ended at an apartment in San Francisco.

  Justin staked out the building until he saw Dr. Attanasio leave. Then he deactivated his security system, slipped inside, and searched the place.

  Based on what he found on the doctor’s laptop and papers, Dr. Attanasio was no longer working for Apex, but was now busy designing extra-addictive drugs. Disgusted, Justin placed several bugs in the apartment, then replaced everything exactly the way he’d found it. He checked to make sure he hadn’t missed anything and all his bugs were perfectly concealed before he stepped into a shadowy corner to wait for the doctor to return.

  We lie in wait, hissed his inner snow leopard, sending Justin a sense of his satisfaction. Lying in wait was the big cat’s favorite thing.

  Justin sank into the calm, cool mindset of the predator within. He wasn’t bored or restless. He didn’t think. He just waited. It felt good. Almost like being invincible...

  His snow leopard stirred in alarm. He hated Justin’s power of adrenaline invincibility, which had the side effect of suppressing his inner predator.

  You don’t need invincibility, the big cat hissed. You just need to lie in wait.

  I can’t lie in wait all the time, Justin returned. Now hush.

  Hours later, the door opened. Dr. Attanasio stepped inside, flicking on the light as he shut the door behind him.

  Justin closed the distance between them in an instant, twisting the doctor’s arms behind him with one hand and putting his other hand over Dr. Attanasio’s mouth.

  Kill him, snarled his snow leopard. Rip out his throat!

  Justin mentally distanced himself from the big cat’s rage. He kept his voice calm and low as he addressed the doctor. “Scream, and I’ll kill you. When I take my hand away, you can talk, but do it quietly. Nod if you understand.”

  With his keen predator’s senses, Justin could smell the acrid scent of the doctor’s cold sweat. Trembling, Dr. Attanasio nodded.

  Justin released the doctor and stepped in front of him.

  “Subject Seven!” Dr. Attanasio gasped.

  “Surprise,” Justin remarked, deadpan.

  “How did you find me?” The doctor’s voice rose in terror. Justin dipped his hand, palm down, in a ‘lower your voice’ gesture. Dr. Attanasio continued, hushed but frantic. “I wore gloves every time I had to lay hands on you. And I never let you touch me. So someone must have sold me out! Who?”

  Justin kept his face still, making sure he didn’t reveal anything with so much as a blink. “Who do you think?”

  “One of the doctors? They were always jealous of me, because my experiments got results.” Studying Justin’s face, Dr. Attanasio said, “Or was it one of the project managers? It was, right? Which one?”

  Justin concealed his satisfaction. So Dr. Attanasio was in touch with some other survivors from Apex. In case he hadn’t mentioned everyone he knew about, Justin let one of his eyebrows raise slightly and made a small, involuntary-seeming head-shake.

  Yesss, hissed his snow leopard, with immense satisfaction. We play with our prey.

  “It wasn’t any of them?” Dr. Attanasio looked baffled, then even more scared. “Who was it, then? Who? There’s no one else who knows where I—” He broke off, obviously realizing that he’d revealed too much.

  “That’s what you think,” Justin said. With any luck, Dr. Attanasio would get on the phone to his evil co-workers and demand that they tell him who else was out there.

  Before the doctor had a chance to collect himself, Justin slowly reached out with his bare hand, letting Dr. Attanasio see it coming.

  The doctor flinched. “Don’t hurt me!”

  Justin had been trying to keep as cool on the inside as he looked on the outside, but something snapped inside him at those words. “Why the hell shouldn’t I? You hurt me until I hoped I’d die just to make it stop!”

  Dr. Attanasio flinched again, but there was no remorse in his expression, only fear. Defensively, he said, “It was necessary. We made huge scientific breakthroughs. Anyway, look what you got out of it. The Ultimate Predator process gave you powers beyond anything normal humans or even shifters can dream of. Sure, the process wasn’t pleasant, but we didn’t do you any harm.”

  “No harm?” A bitter rage burned through Justin, hot and painful as the chemical the doctor had injected into his veins while he lay strapped to the lab table. “No harm? You—”

  He forced himself to stop. He didn’t want to give the doctor the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten to him. More importantly, he didn’t want to show weakness in front of the man who would undoubtedly be reporting back to his other enemies the instant he left the room. But inside his mind, the rest of his thought echoed:

  You ruined my life. You broke me.

  His snow leopard hissed reprovingly. None of that is true.

  Rather than get into a pointless argument with his snow leopard, Justin forced his attention out of his head and to the enemy in front of him. He seized his prey by the throat. The doctor let out a shrill squeal of terror.

  “I’m touching you now,” Justin said. “And you know what that means.”

  Dr. Attanasio just stared at him, his eyes bulging with panic.

  “Say it,” Justin said. “Say it so I know you understand.”

  “I can’t speak when you’re strangling...” Dr. Attanasio’s voice trailed off as he realized that Justin had only wrapped his fingers around his throat, and wasn’t exerting any pressure. “Uh, it’s your Ultimate Predator power. I mean, it’s one of them. You can track me now. Anywhere in the world, as far as we know. You don’t need to know where I am. You just follow my—”

  Scent, hissed his snow leopard. With immense satisfaction, he added, You can run, but you can’t hide.

  “—imprint,” the doctor concluded.

  “That’s right.” Justin increased the pressure, just slightly. “Are you really making designer drugs, or is that a front for Apex?”

  “Apex is gone!” Dr. Attanasio choked out. “You and Subject Eight destroyed it yourselves. It’s just the drugs, I swear!”

  Justin considered seeing if he could squeeze more information out of him, then decided to stick with his first plan. Threatening him more might just scare him into saying whatever he imagined Justin wanted to hear.

  “It better be,” Justin said. “If I ever find out that you’re involved in kidnapping or experimenting on unwilling subjects or anything else like what you did at Apex, I’ll track you down, just like I tracked down some of your other colleagues. And I’ll do to you exactly what I did to them.”

  Dr. Attanasio’s eyes bulged even more, reminding Justin of a bullfrog. “What? Who else did you track down? Did you kill them?”

  Justin stared into the doctor’s pop-eyes, silent and expressionless. He knew the effect his gaze had on people, even when he didn’t have them by the throat. Sure enough, the doctor gulped and looked away, blood draining out of his face until it went an unpleasant pasty color.

  Without a word, Justin turned his back and walked out of the apartment, letting the door slowly close behind him.

  Where are you going? His snow leopard’s hiss rose in frustration. Kill him, kill him!

  An overwhelming weariness washed over Justin. He was so tired of arguing with his snow leopard. If the big cat wasn’t demanding someone’s death, he was all the way on the other extreme, insisting that too-good-to-be-true things like mates and packs and happiness were just around the corner.

  They are not too good to be true, hissed his snow leopard. R
emember how you insisted that your packmate had abandoned you, and I kept telling you he’d come back for you? Who was right about that?

  You were, Justin admitted. But he didn’t want to talk about Shane. He could hardly bear to think about his old best friend. Trustworthy Shane, whom Justin hadn’t trusted. Loyal Shane, whom Justin had betrayed.

  To get his snow leopard off the topic, Justin said, Stop calling him my packmate. Leopards don’t have packs.

  Shifters do, his snow leopard retorted. Go back inside, kill our prey, and then go to your pack. They will help us hunt down the rest of our enemies. We have spent far too long hunting alone.

  For what felt like the millionth time, Justin explained, We need to leave him alone for now, so he thinks it’s safe to talk to his colleagues. We’re not doing anything to any of them until we find out where the Apex base is. Then we—

  Rip out their throats, hissed his snow leopard.

  Justin shrugged. Maybe he’d kill them, or maybe he’d phone in an anonymous tip to the FBI and put them behind bars. Based on his own experience, suffering in captivity was a fate worse than death, so he leaned toward throwing them in jail. But his leopard seemed incapable of understanding that argument.

  He ran along the corridor, his soft-soled shoes making barely more sound than a cat’s paws, and opened the door to the emergency staircase. It had a sign warning that an alarm would go off if it was opened, but he had deactivated the alarm before he’d entered the doctor’s apartment.

  When he reached the roof, he lay down so no one could see his silhouette. Justin doubted that anyone was looking for him, other than possibly Dr. Attanasio, but stealth had become a habit, and he didn’t want to get killed before he’d made sure that Apex was gone for good.

  Flat on his belly atop the sun-warmed concrete, he took out his earbuds, stuck them in his ears, and listened to the sounds inside the doctor’s apartment. He heard rustling, footsteps, and then the doctor saying, “Hello?”

  Justin couldn’t hear the response; Dr. Attanasio must be talking on his cell phone, which Justin hadn’t been able to bug. But he could hear every word the doctor said, loud and clear.