Hawk's Revenge: Lone Pine Pride, Book 3 Read Online Free PDF Page B

doctor might be. She told herself there was nothing she could do.
    Until God had seen fit to give her an opportunity to prove her true mettle again.
    It had been a clerical error. A glitch. A sign.
    The shifter on her table had been very much alive, but somehow the file had been marked deceased. There were no additional transfer orders, no one who was expecting to receive this shifter for the next round of tests because as far as the system was concerned, the slim, dark-haired wolf was dead.
    It had been convenient that the video surveillance systems had been knocked out in a lightning strike the day before, impulse to dress the woman in a spare pair of her scrubs, and pure luck that the guard at the gate hadn’t looked under the blanket in the backseat of Rachel’s car. That first time had been completely unplanned and her heart had been thundering out of her chest the entire time, but she’d done it. She’d saved a life. She’d proven that she wasn’t only a coward. She could be more.
    So she’d begun planning and recruiting. Finding those who seemed dissatisfied within the Organization and cautiously approaching them. Computer techs, other doctors, even the occasional—rare—guard. They’d developed a system that wasn’t without risk, but it had succeeded. Five times. Ten. Rachel had been heady with the victory, but she’d still worried about what was happening to the shifters after she set them loose into the world. Some of them were so weak, so damaged. What was to say they wouldn’t be captured again?
    It was one of the escapees—a young lynx with eyes too old for his face—who had given her the contact information for a shifter who could help them from the outside. Forged identities. Safe houses. Picking up where her operation left off.
    Noah. Her hawk.
    They’d worked together for years before they’d met, freeing over sixty shifters before that night in the woods when he’d stepped out of the shadows and straight into her heart.
    Betraying him had been another of those defining moments. She could still feel the syringe in her hand. The wrongness of it. He’d had his back to her, gun in hand, ready to defend her with his life, if that was what it took, and she’d done it. Taken him down. Handed him over.
    She told herself it was for the greater good. A thousand times she’d told herself that, but it still felt like a lie, even if she knew it to be the unvarnished truth.
    The Organization had already known about him when they approached her to acquire him. They’d known that she was seeing him, but not that Rachel was involved in the shifter underground or even the extent of the Hawk’s involvement, as they called him. If they’d kept digging, it would have compromised the entire operation and endangered the lives of all the shifters they’d whisked to freedom, not to mention those they had yet to free.
    All those lives had meant sacrificing one, so she’d done it. And hated herself every day since.
    But today she got to make amends.
    Madison’s voice crackled over the intercom again, demanding Rachel report to security for the third time, an edge of impatience creeping into her sedate intercom voice.
    Sorry, Maddie. A little busy at the moment.
    Rachel swiped her card over the access panel for the pharmacy storage, expelling a little gasp of relief when the door beeped and glided open. At least her card was still working; they hadn’t gone on full lockdown yet.
    She made quick work of grabbing the vials she needed, shoving them into her pockets and filling syringes on the run as she trotted down the hall to the cells. The first cell door beeped and whooshed open, revealing a muscular Caucasian man with dark-hair just going to gray, unconscious and strapped to the bed. Rachel shot the Wake-Up Juice into his IV, jammed a chair in the doorway to keep the door propped open, and ran to the next cell. Hopefully he could get himself free of his own restraints because she didn’t have time to untie