A Shadow's Embrace (9 page)

I’m so sorry, Rider. I’ll get you back, no matter the cost. Don’t give up.
 

Unable to process her emotions when seeing him brutalized, she sorted through all the files, flinging copies to the backup servers Ace had set up. Maybe having Dagan and the others here was a good thing. They didn’t know Rider. They’d be immune to the personal rage festering in her. They could ignore the cloying need for retribution that mottled her vision.
 

Sensing more than seeing Dagan within her mind, she took a few calming breaths. Waves of warming comfort enveloped her. She braced herself within the fortifying strength and moved onward, retracing the path she’d taken the other day. Get in, get the data, and get gone.
 

Since she didn’t know precisely what had gotten her on Conver’s radar, she dumped everything she’d discovered. Every bit of data she’d studied and decoded, all the feeds she’d yet to review.
 

Then she moved to the surveillance streams. They were bulkier, harder to navigate and maneuver to Ace’s system because of their sheer volume. It astounded her. The prick must’ve kept every second of every facility here to gloat and preen over his accomplishments and cruelty. Sadistic bastard.
 

She’d reviewed only a few of the streams that spanned decades. She experienced a moment of hesitation. Perhaps she shouldn’t copy all of these.
 

Most of them probably featured the people in the room with her, their upbringing and rigorous training. She’d glanced at a few minutes of some of the streams, and they’d sickened her. The things they’d survived as defenseless babies hardened her resolve to destroy Conver.
 

Exhaustion plagued her limbs, dulled her thoughts, but she continued copying and dumping anything she came across. When she filled the last sector of space available, she contemplated the remainder for a moment, only to discover another huge vat of space opened up by Ace. The man was a God. Cadence would surely worship at his altar along with her. She totally needed to hook the two of them up so they could have little god and goddess geek babies.
 

She backtracked, dumping the remainder of the files, along with several other sectors she’d considered potential dumping grounds for Conver’s associates—the senators, governors, and other assholes who’d screwed psychics of their humanity for the sake of greed and power. She’d meant to do this before but had never had the bandwidth to download it all. Now, thanks to the Ace—aka the god of all-things-metadata-storage—the opportunity was here.
 

“Devyn.” Dagan whispered a reminder he was here, watching. Protecting.
 

“Just a minute longer. I almost have it all.”
 

He remained silent, but she sensed him behind her, a strengthening presence. She settled against him to offset the growing weakness plaguing her. A few moments later, she relaxed her grip on the data stream and awakened to discover herself on a small sofa. Lodged between Dagan and Kaeden, she blinked a few times before sighing and snuggling into the warm blanket draped around her.
 

The crash afterward was always hardest. She’d gotten by with it earlier because she’d been charged fully. She’d never managed to stay in as long as she just had. Dagan had calmed her, kept her energy reserves in the safe zone somehow. Or maybe it’d been one of the other Shadows in the room. Rather than surrender to the biting cold within her veins, she focused on Ace, who was talking a hundred times too fast as he darted from one computer bay to another.
 

“Boss, you have no idea what she did.” His gaze widened as he regarded her with a reverent glow in his gaze. “You are the bomb.”
 

“Ace, dial it down, dumb it down for me.” Kaeden smirked when he looked at her. “He gets wound up easily.”
 

There were new people in the room. The realization unsettled her for a moment as she looked around. Dagan squeezed her arm and took control of the room.
 

“Before we proceed, everyone, this is Devyn. Dev, this is Kaeden, Ace, Rex, Corbin, Cash, and Trent.” Dagan motioned around the room. The twin with the longest dark blond hair was Corbin. Trent was the latest entrant into the room. She recognized the name. He was Kaeden’s second. His Rider.
 

“Thanks for your help,” she said lamely. They nodded. She looked over at Rex. “Thanks for the lift the other day, by the way. You make a hell of an elevator.” A couple of guys on the other side of the room chuckled. Twins, probably Corbin and Cash. Word on the street had them as the be-all, end-all when it came to seeing the past of an object or person. Rex sat beside them, silently regarding her without comment.
 

She leaned her head back on the sofa as the guys chuckled. “I tried to sort as I dumped, but I’m not sure how effective I was there toward the end. I got a little gleeful when I saw that huge trough of space appear. It was like Christmas.”
 

“It’s all good. I couldn’t keep up with you, but I tagged most of it. I’ve got the footage of Rider up and ready to review.” He paused, concern evident on his face. “You sure you want to see this? We can handle this part.”
 

“No. He’s my team. I’m in.”
 

“So, check this.” Ace whirled in his chair and began tapping keys. A display popped up on the largest screen. Multi-colored scraggly lines appeared. “That green line is you. I took cues from Kaeden when you started so I could train Matilda.”
 

“Matilda?” she asked.
 

“His computer,” Dagan whispered. “They’ve had a love affair going for a few years.”
 

Hah. He and Cadence would be hilarious when put in the same room. Definitely needed to hook them up. Their little geeklets would be legendary.
 

“After a few minutes Matilda used your heightened pulse rate and other physical cues to tag the sectors of footage around those incidents. I’m bringing them up first. Then we can work back to the others if needed. There are thousands upon thousands of days of footage here, and that’s if we all look at it. I’m not sure how we’re going to process it all.”
 

The fact that her body responded to the data even when she hadn’t recalled pausing to review it astounded Devyn. They’d never thought to analyze her physical reactions.
 

“I’ve gotta admit I’m crushing on your geekdom, Ace.”
 

Crimson rose in his cheeks. The guys chuckled, and one of the twins slapped him on the back. Dagan squeezed her thigh. She looked up and saw the heat in the depths of his eyes as he studied her.
 

“Just a little bit,” she whispered. “I crushed on Kaeden, too, earlier. Just a little bit.”
 

“Thinking I need to stake my claim and give you a reason not to crush so easily, little bit or not,” he whispered.
 

Kaeden cleared his throat, causing Devyn to jump. Embarrassment flooded her. Had she really admitted to crushing on him when he was right there? Within hearing range?
 

A sexy grin spread on his handsome face. Oh, yeah, she totally had. He’d admitted to being a secondary empath, but that didn’t mean he’d sensed her attraction earlier. Most empaths kept their abilities locked down, not wanting to be hampered by the residual white noise of everyone’s private thoughts and emotions. Knowing that didn’t make it any less humiliating, though. Her heart flailed for purchase in her chest as Dagan crushed her into a stronger hold against him. Experiencing techno-drop—her term for the heady, swirly, cloud-floating feeling she experienced when inside for a long period of time—was probably not a good thing when around so many hot Alpha men.
 

What were they talking about? Oh, yeah. Analyzing all the data. “Cadence and I discussed it a couple of weeks ago when I hypothetically brought up the situation of a huge glom of data to her. I didn’t want them to know what I’d stumbled into with the ARES files. We didn’t have the bandwidth or the resources we needed for me to dump them. Until I figured out how important the data was, I decided to sit on it.”
 

“Then he somehow figured out what you saw.” Dagan squeezed her thigh. “We’ll sort through it, figure out what is what.”
 

“Apparently so.” It was all she could say as her synapses began pulsating, thundering arousal through her. They were body to body. She was practically in his lap. His very hard, firm
lap. She rested her head on his shoulder and her hand on his abs, fighting the impulse to give them a squeeze, maybe cop a feel.
 

Focus.
 

Rex chuckled. “Is she always like this?”
 

“Uh, Cadence said something about techno-space or something like that. Apparently she gets a little weird if she stays in longer than ninety minutes or so,” Ace offered.
 

“Well, I’d be down with her kind of weird any day,” Rex stated.
 

“No shit,” one of the twins said.
 

Dagan grunted and shifted her deeper into his hold.
 

“Let’s focus, everyone.” Kaeden’s admonishment censured the whispers from the men as they watched her.
 

“Well, we’ll get into those files once we recover her man,” Rex said as his phone chimed. “I’ve got a really pissed-off dude named Dare calling me every twenty minutes, and I’d really like to calm his ass down.”
 

“Maybe I should talk to him.”
 

“No, we want you away from your team until we know Conver doesn’t have eyes or ears on them or us. Things have gone silent, which didn’t make sense until we got wind that they’d gotten your man Rider. That sucks, but it gives us time to assess the situation and create an offensive strategy,” Trent said.
 

“Okay, well, back to the footage.” Ace’s lips thinned, and his voice faltered for a moment as the surveillance footage began playing. “This is gonna be rough.”
 

“Just play it,” Trent stated. “She’s already seen enough when she was copying it down to know what to expect. You’re only dragging it out and making the wound deeper.”
 

She silently thanked the man for his insight as she speculated what his ability was. She knew Rex was a telekinetic, and the twins had enhanced clairvoyance and clairsentience abilities. Dagan handled the mental manipulation, and he, along with Kaeden, had secondary empathic talents. Kaeden was a legendary seer. Very few on the street knew what Trent was capable of doing. Somehow not knowing made her more nervous.
 

The crack of a whip, followed by hissed screams and grunts pierced the sensual, floaty space she’d been in. Deep, angry voices growled questions between the lashes. She cringed with each strike, as if they’d struck her rather than Rider. Listening to Rider’s torment was a horrific crash. She trembled against Dagan until his calming presence drifted into her mind, holding her firmly. Ignoring the rage roiling between the Shadows as they sat there watching, studying the torture of Rider, was tantamount to dying inside.
 

Each passing hour made her slip deeper into herself until all that was left was a hull of what she was, wrapped around Dagan as though he was a security blanket. She saw and thought but didn’t feel beyond him. The images became objects rather than pain experienced by her friend, her brother. The moment she sensed the last of her humanity escape, she analyzed the footage like a drunken robot. She slipped into the data stream, enhancing and isolating the background of Rider’s location. Cracked windows fractured strays of sunlight behind him.
 

The panes of glass offered brief glimpses to the surroundings. Shadows flickered on the other side of the panes, brief glimpses of movement that offered little detail other than the lack of isolation. She honed the feed, filtering the sounds until only the blare of car horns filled her ears.
Rider’s captors were in the city somewhere. Had they remained within Chicago? Why would they take that chance?
 

Her.
 

They’d remained nearby, confident they could break Rider and discover her location.
 

Rider wouldn’t break. He never had.
 

She slid back into reality, listening as the men conversed, discussing the intel she’d pulled from the footage. They knew the area. Ace pulled up street cameras, and the collective began sorting through potential angles until they’d identified a specific building.
 

They had a location.
 

She forced herself to breathe deeper, reach into the cavernous web of data, and breech the weak security of each network until she found the one that had streamed the footage. “Third floor.”
 

“On it.” Ace pounded the keyboard for a few minutes. “Yes. We’re live with the network now. We should be able to shadow their movements.”
 

“Good. We’ll hit tonight. That’ll give us time to work up an op. Close-quarters situations, with so many eyes, make it difficult.” Kaeden stood and crossed his arms as he studied a map Ace had pulled up of the neighborhood.
 

The men huddled around him. Devyn thought about the possibilities for a few minutes as Dagan’s hold on her emotional reactions abated.
 

“You’ll need a diversion to draw eyes and ears to something other than your entry.” Broaching the subject of her participating in the op would have to wait. Dagan and his men were probably above working with untrained lower levels like her, but she could help.
 

“I need to talk to Dare. Diaz’s crew could help. Averting attention is their forte. The street squads use it all the time. Or used to before I talked them out of scheming.”
 

“Using unknowns is risky.” Rex shook his head. “There’s another option.”