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shoulder, some of the wind already leaving her sails as she met Lucan's stern look. "Jenna is free to walk about and do most anything she likes--so long as someone is with her, and so long as she doesn't try to leave the compound.
    See that she has whatever she needs. When she's ready for her walk around 27

    the compound, Brock will take her. I'm putting him in charge of her well-being. He'll make sure Jenna doesn't lose her way."
    Brock had to work to bite back the curse that rose to his tongue.
    Just frigging great , he thought, wanting like hell to reject the continued assignment that would keep him in close quarters with Jenna Darrow.
    Instead he acknowledged Lucan's order with a nod.
    28

CHAPTER
Three
    Jenna's hands were fisted as she shoved them deep into the pockets of the belted, white terry robe that covered her thin hospital gown. Her feet swam in the new, but extra-large, man-size slippers Alex had retrieved out of a cabinet drawer in the infirmary room where Jenna had awakened less than an hour ago. She shuffled beside her friend, walking along a lighted, marble-white corridor that snaked and twisted in a seemingly endless maze of similar walkways.
    Jenna felt oddly numb, not just from the shock of hearing that her brother was dead but from the fact that the nightmare she'd awakened from had not ended with her survival. The creature that had attacked her in her cabin might have been killed, as she'd been informed, but she wasn't free of its hold.
    After what she saw in the X-ray images and on the video feed from the infirmary, she knew with a bone-deep dread that part of that fanged monster still held her in its ruthless grasp. She should be screaming in terror for that knowledge alone. Deep down, fear and grief roiled. She clamped a hard lid on her bubbling hysteria, refusing to show that kind of weakness, even to her best friend.
    But there was a true calmness inside her, one that had been with her in the infirmary room--since the moment Brock had put his hands on her and promised she was safe. It was that reassurance as well as her own determination to soldier on that kept her from breaking down as she walked the labyrinth of corridors with Alex.
    "We're almost there," Alex said as she led Jenna around another corner, toward another long stretch of gleaming hallway. "I thought you'd be more comfortable getting cleaned up and dressed in Kade's and my quarters rather than the infirmary."
    Jenna managed a vague nod, although it was hard to imagine that she might be comfortable anywhere in this strange and unfamiliar place. She walked cautiously, her rusty cop instincts prickling as she passed unmarked room after unmarked room. There wasn't a single exterior window in the 29

    place, nothing to indicate where the facility was located, nor what might lie beyond its walls. No way to tell even whether it was day or night outside.
    Above her head, tracking the length of this corridor like the others, small black domes concealed what she guessed must be surveillance cameras. It was all very state-of-the-art, very private, and very secure.
    "What is this place, some kind of government building?" she asked, voicing her suspicions out loud. "Definitely not civilian. Is it some kind of military facility?"
    Alex slid her a hesitant, measuring glance. "It's more secure than any of those things. We're about thirty stories belowground, not far outside the city of Boston."
    "A bunker, then," Jenna guessed, still trying to make sense of it all. "If it's not part of the government or military, what is it?"
    Alex seemed to consider her reply for a moment longer than was needed. "The compound we're in, and the gated estate that sits above us on street level, belongs to the Order."
    "The Order," Jenna repeated, finding that Alex's explanation was raising more questions about the place than it answered. She'd never been anywhere like this before. It was alien in its high-tech design, a far cry from anything she'd ever seen in rural