Marie Harte: Julian's Jeopardy

Somewhere in the Amazon

Julian Hawkins clenched his jaw tight as he strained at the cuffs chaining him to the stone wall. A thin trickle of water fell down the wall across from him, lit by the lone ray of sunlight that shone through a small opening in the ceiling, some twenty feet up. Sweat rolled down his naked body; the nearby water teased, making his dry throat even drier. He would have thought a cave would be cool, but here, in this godforsaken jungle, it felt like a sauna. Just one more piece fitting into the puzzle of where the hell he'd been taken.

He yanked his right wrist again but couldn't break free. The chafe of metal irritated his raw and bleeding wrists and ankles. The fuckers who held him knew what they were doing. He could have broken his way out of simple iron cuffs, but they must have reinforced the metal holding him, because it withstood Circ strength.

Julian swayed—from lack of food, pain, or the drugs they gave him, he couldn't be sure. Hell, he didn't even know how long he'd been in this hellhole, away from his team. But it would have been long enough to turn Tersch into a raving berserker, and Fallon, Olivia, Hayashi, and Morgan crazy trying to find him.

He wondered if Alicia Sharpe, their illustrious leader and a woman he didn't trust one damn bit, cared where he'd gone. His vision blurred, and his hearing suddenly centered on the pulsing of his own heart. Flashes of his time as a SEAL

mixed with past missions as a Circ, muddied with the present. Shit, more hallucinations . He tried to shake them off. Then his mother was there and seemed to be calling out for him, warning him to wash the mud off the dog before his father returned. Man, Dad would be so pissed. Before he could answer her, though, he suddenly found himself standing over his parents' caskets in a stale funeral home, baffled at their sudden deaths.

Grief, rage, and confusion tugged at him. And then the sticky-sweet smell of tropical flowers and the sweltering humidity of the jungle pulled him back to the present. Swearing under his breath, Jules wondered how the hell he was going to escape when he had trouble making sense of what was real and unreal.

The echo of footsteps beyond his cell sounded overly loud as his superior hearing gradually returned. As a Circ, a man enhanced by the genetic experiments of an overzealous government, Jules had enhanced senses, increased speed, the capacity to regenerate tissue, and an intuitive sense of survival. Which didn't explain how or why he'd been chained up in this cave like a fucking pincushion for the dickheads in white lab coats, dickheads who didn't speak English. He shook his head, hoping this bout of lucidity would last. A sudden thought hit him.

Mrs. Sharpe was right. We assumed we’d found that drug lab, but we didn’t find the real place manufacturing the drugs… Drugs? What drugs ? A sharp pain interrupted the flow of thought, and then something inside him seemed to push through the drugs again, clarifying his memories. The drugs that had been aimed at disabling Admiral London’s new psychic warfare program. I’d bet everything I own that I’m in their shitty lab as we speak.

The footsteps grew closer, and Jules forced himself to relax. He wouldn't give these fuckers a thing. Not rage, not one damn emotion that would tell them what he was feeling. He'd been stonewalling them since he'd woken up in this hellhole. Not until they answered some of his own questions would he respond with anything more than silence or insults. If I can stay conscious enough to ask them.

A lock turned, and the thick, wooden door of his cell grated as it opened. He'd mentally broken through that weak door a dozen times over. He only needed to be released from the chains imprisoning him to the wall.

The open door allowed a warm breeze of air to flow through. The uplifting sweet, floral smell was so at odds with the treatment he currently suffered. That scent and the lack of coolness typically associated with a cavern told him that, though he might be in a cave, he was aboveground, not under.

Four men entered. Each held a gun equipped with specially tipped tranquilizers—not bullets, as he'd learned when he'd first arrived however long ago.

That they seemed to have no intention of killing him bothered him more than if they'd come at him with machetes. They wanted something. Jules had a bad feeling he knew just what that something was.

His body trembled, and he forced himself to hold on. A subtle shifting beneath his skin, a sentient presence not quite his own, reinforced his will. He wouldn't let the drug take him under again, not until he'd faced the enemy and tried to get some answers.

Behind the armed guards, an older man he'd had the misfortune of already meeting, Dr. Manoel Eduardo Melo Silva, approached with a stranger. Jules squinted. No, not a stranger. The asshole stepped closer, and Jules blinked past the haze in his vision.

Colonel Ricardo Montaña, in the fucking flesh.

A tall, muscular man who looked to be in his late forties, Montaña had short black hair, a dark complexion, and a thick mustache that curved over thin, bloodless lips. He wore a military uniform of camouflaged khaki. His eyes were dark, mean; a sadistic gleam showed through as he stared at Jules. But it was the scar that identified him. It ran down the left side of his face, from his eyebrow to his jaw.

Montaña—the murderous asshole they'd been looking for the past year.

The swarthy male muttered to the soldiers, who quickly surrounded Jules.

Jules remained silent, understanding he was in a hell of a lot more trouble than he'd assumed. He and his team had been after Montaña for months, ever since the psychotic colonel had joined forces with Jules's ex-commander. Now dead ex-commander, Jules thought with grim satisfaction.

Thanks to Jules and his partners, that dick had died four months ago at the hands of a mutant Circ, a monster no more human than the natural predators that thrived in the Amazon. Unfortunately, Montaña had escaped before Jules could nail him too. They'd thought Montaña worked for the Circs' ex-commander, but now Jules had to wonder. Perhaps Montaña played a larger part in the enemy's organization than they'd assumed. Jules meant to find out.

One positive in this fucking nightmare, at least.

“Ah, Julian Hawkins. I've so looked forward to meeting you.” Montaña's deep, husky voice aggravated the beast that lived just beneath Jules's skin. He forced back his animalistic impulse to bare his lengthening fangs and remained quiet while Montaña continued to talk.

“I watched you destroy William Delancey—your old captain, no? Impressive.

Using his own mutant to kill him was genius. The thing fucked him to death before the yacht blew. Did you know that?”

Jules hadn't known. He'd hauled ass off the boat after making sure the explosives his teammate had set were in place. But knowing Delancey had suffered righted the scales of justice in a small way. Jules still blamed the shithead for dragging him and his team into this life beyond being human, a life that demanded so much more than he'd ever wanted to spend on living.

“So quiet.” Montaña nodded at Dr. Silva. “ O doutor tells me you're not being very cooperative, Lieutenant Hawkins. Or do you no longer go by naval rank, now that you're not officially a SEAL? That ended four years ago, eh? When you first entered the Circ project?”

Montaña stepped closer and nodded for Silva to approach.

As usual, Silva stank of fear when near Jules, and Jules's beast thrived on the stench. He didn't take his eyes from Silva when the doctor stabbed the needle into his arm, a needle made especially to penetrate thick Circ skin. Normal instruments didn't work on him, even when he was in his human form.