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giving Brock something else to focus on.
    Gideon pushed back his shirtsleeve to check his watch. "I drew the last sample about seven hours ago."
    Lucan grunted as he pivoted away from the infirmary door. "Run everything again now. If the readings have changed so much as an iota from the last sample, I want to hear about it."
    Gideon's blond head bobbed. "Given what Brock has told us, I'd also like to take some strength and endurance measurements. Any information we can gather from studying Jenna could be crucial to figuring out what exactly we're dealing with here."
    "Whatever you need," Lucan said grimly. "Just get it done, and fast.
    This situation is important, but we also can't afford to lose momentum on our other missions."
    Brock inclined his head along with the other warriors, knowing as well as any of them that a human in the compound was a complication the Order didn't need when they still had an enemy on the loose--namely Dragos, a corrupt Breed elder whom the Order had been pursuing for the better part of a year.
    Dragos had been working in secret for many decades, under more than one assumed identity and within clandestine, powerful alliances. His operation had grown numerous and long-reaching tentacles, as the warriors were discovering, and every one of those grasping arms was working in concert toward a single objective: Dragos's complete and total domination over both the Breed and humankind alike.
    The Order's primary goal was his destruction and the swift, permanent 26

    dismantling of his entire operation. The Order meant to take Dragos out at the roots. But there were complications to that goal. He had all but vanished recently, and there were, as always, layers of protection in front of him--secret allies within the Breed nation, maybe outside of it, too. Dragos also had an unnumbered army of skilled assassins at his command, every one of them born and bred specifically for killing. Deadly Breed males who were direct progeny of the otherworlder who, until his escape to Alaska a few weeks ago and subsequent death, had been under Dragos's command.
    Brock glanced into the infirmary room where Jenna had begun to pace back and forth like a caged animal. To say the Order had their hands full at the moment was putting it mildly. Now that she was awake, at least his part was over. His talent had seen Jenna through the past week; where she went from here would be up to Gideon and Lucan to decide.
    Inside the room, Alex pivoted away from her friend and approached the door. She opened it and stepped out to the corridor, her brown eyes soft with concern under the dark blond bangs that fringed her forehead.
    "How's she doing?" Kade asked, moving toward his woman as though gravity pulled him there. They were a newly mated pair, having met during Kade's mission in Alaska, but looking at the warrior and his pretty bush pilot Breedmate, it seemed impossible to Brock that they had only been together for a couple of weeks. "Does Jenna need anything, babe?"
    "She's confused and upset, understandably," Alex said, moving into the shelter of Kade's body just as he had done with her. "I think she'll feel better after a long shower and some fresh clothes. She says she feels stir crazy in the room and wants to take a walk to stretch some of the tightness out of her legs. I told her I would ask if it was all right."
    Alex looked to Lucan as she said it, directing the request to the Order's oldest member, its founder and leader.
    "Jenna is not a prisoner here," he replied. "Of course she is free to wash and dress and walk around."
    "Thank you," Alex said, gratitude brightening some of the uncertainty in her eyes. "I told her she wouldn't be kept here as a prisoner, but she didn't seem to believe me. After what she's been through, I guess that's not surprising. I'll go tell her what you said, Lucan."
    As she turned to slip back into the infirmary, the Order's leader cleared his throat. Kade's mate slowed and swung a glance over her