Scott Ross Cameron was a Synergy volunteer who was given a nanocloud treatment for late-stage leukaemia. It eliminated the cancer in short order, just as my own nanocloud had fixed my own, and like everyone else, it had de-aged him to the physical peak of fitness, a man in his early-to-mid twenties.

It was a bizarre coincidence that this man, a volunteer for Synergy's nanocloud experiments, was now out in Massachusetts, infiltrating breeding facilities and slaver compounds. I was beyond curious what his story would be.

"This must be Cam," Philippe stood to greet the man.

"Otherwise known as Scott Ross Cameron," I interjected, getting a sharp glare from the man, who was now immediately wary of me. "A fellow Synergy volunteer from the old world, and someone who received successful treatment for a late-stage form of blood cancer."

Scott's glare continued for a moment, before he spoke. "Looks like you have me at a disadvantage," he said in a low tone, his broad New England accent a stark contrast to the slight Parisian of the other four around me. "Who are you?"

"Ricardo Reyes," I told him. "Also a Synergy volunteer. I was in England during my trial, and only woke from cryo a few months ago."

"England?" The glare gave way to surprise. "You're a long way from home."

"That place is no longer home for me," I told him. "How long have you been awake in this world?"

"Nearly half a century?" Scott replied uncertainly. "You need to tell me your intentions. Now."

"My only intentions are to help infiltrate the breeding facility, free the cubs that are there, then get back to my mission-"

"Which is what, precisely?"

I debated with myself whether to trust the man or not. My initial intention when seeking out these people was to warn them about the Harvesters and their operations, then hope they could go to ground and hide. The fact that this man had lived so near a breeding facility, and was allegedly feeding information to the Cuisset foundation was a complication that left me wondering what his true intentions were.

"I've been finding the volunteers from the Synergy project, warning them about people who have been pursuing me."

"Do you know who they are?" Scott asked me, surprising me with the question.

"What's with the interrogation, Cam?" Amélie asked Scott, relieving me of the need to hedge, given I wasn't sure to trust the man or not.

Scott looked sidelong at me, as he turned his head to Amélie. "Seriously, some guy comes along, claiming he woke up from the old world, and you just-"

"Shut up," Eveline hissed at Scott, causing him to flinch. "You may not like him, but don't try to poison us against him again."

The silence in the room was tense. "With all due respect, miss..."

My eyes bugged out of my head. How did this guy not know who this was, if he was feeding information to the Cuisset people here in the country? Then again, I realised, Eveline had never left Europe until coming here with me.

"Eveline Cuisset, adoptive daughter of the people you are meant to be directly working with," she barked, standing next to me in support. "Rick is here to help us on this mission," she paused, glaring at Scott in the same way she glared at me the first day we met. "And I trust him."

"That's your funeral, lady," Scott barked back at her. "But when it comes to my safety and the safety of the cubs we're going to be trying to rescue from the breeding facility on the ground, I'd rather make my own judgments, if it's all the same to you."

Amélie stepped forward. "Enough of this," she barked, a familiar hint of steel on her canine face. "Eveline is no fool, and she doesn't trust easily," she told the man. "You don't have to trust Rick if you don't want to, but she does, and she wouldn't allow herself to do so without a very good foundation to work from, so be as cautious as you wish, but you won't be interrogating him any further."

"That's not what I signed up-" Scott started to protest, but Amélie cut him off.

"Your reasons for joining our organisation are your own," she started, her tone harsh. "But this is a waste of time, and those cubs are running out of time for us to act. Now get to the point, so we can plan our next moves! What did you mean when you said it would no longer be possible to regroup after infiltrating the site?"

Scott glared at her, then at Eveline, then at me, before finally capitulating, though he did not do so with any great enthusiasm. "They've established an underground lab facility near the old Fire Department building. Right now, there are twenty guards at the site to keep the lab researchers and the cub breeders under watch, but they're bringing in more, so that means we need to move quickly on this. Not only that, but they've started a new policy of locking in anyone who potentially wishes to purchase cubs until such time as they've completed the imprinting process and have paid up in full."

Eveline's stab of apprehension hit me like a blast wave through our nascent bond, and I hadn't expected it. I jolted slightly. "Wait a minute," I barked. "They're forcing potential buyers to stay on site while they evaluate their decision? What if someone decided not to go through with it?"

"What, you think there's a Better Business Bureau they can go and complain to?" Scott scoffed at me. "These people deal in person trafficking, genius. They're not going to let anyone go until they eliminate even the smallest chance they're an infiltrator for some outside interventionist group, and they've decided that the next best thing is to force their potential buyers not only to pay up for at least one of their breeding experiments-"

Eveline hissed at him. "Don't call them that!"

Scott glared at her, then let out a sigh. "You're right. I wasn't thinking."

"I'm one of their experiments," Eveline snapped. "So's Amélie, and so's Philippe. Every single fucking hybrid alive today is one of their 'breeding experiments'. You weren't thinking?!"

"I said I was sorry, alright?" Scott snapped back, exasperated.

"No, actually," I stepped forward. "You didn't. You just said you weren't thinking." Scott glared at me as I took a breath before continuing. "Look, I get it. I've said some unbelievably stupid shit in the past as well, but when people have a reason to be angry, you don't tell them 'I said I was sorry okay?' like a fucking child... Especially when you never apologised to begin with."

"Alright," Scott turned his exasperation on me, next. "I'm sorry already!"

"Yeah," I sneered. "Real sorry. Say it like you fucking mean it!"

"We don't have time for this!" Scott growled, glaring at me.

"What we don't have time for," I retorted. "Is someone who isn't really there for the cubs who are suffering in these places, who only sees what he can get from it!"

"What the fuck leads you to that conclusion?" Scott approached me, getting in my face. Eveline pushed him back, forcefully, but not enough to cause him to topple over, though I'd no doubt she could.

"The fact that you refer to the cubs holed up in the facility as 'breeding experiments'?"

"We don't have time for this!" Amélie barked. "We need to get in there and get them out, and shut this place down!"

"How are we going to do that," Eveline hissed. "When we have a guy who literally walked in here, questioned Rick's trustworthiness, and then called us breeding experiments?!"

"Fuck this," Scott retorted in a low tone, before turning his fury on Eveline. "The fuck is your problem?!"

"ENOUGH!"

I was startled not only by the volume of that shout, but by the fact that it was Philippe who uttered it. I'd never heard the man shout in all the time I'd known him, and I glanced in his direction, waiting to see what he did or said next.

"Scott, you said something unbelievably stupid and thoughtless," he told the man. "Something that causes distress among many hybrids like us, but especially Eveline, because of how much worse she had it."

I could feel through our bond, that Eveline was astonished, saddened and embarrassed that she was being made a focal point for what Scott had said, and she'd rather not be used as an example. I understood, not least of which was because I had the intuitive sense that she was mainly upset at the idea that others were going through what she suffered right under our noses while we were all arguing in a room.

"Eveline, while he said something stupid, that doesn't automatically mean he's not to be trusted," Philippe told her, his expression hard, uncompromising, and I felt the embarrassment that Eveline felt when she was reminded of her unwarranted assumption about my character the first day we met. I could also feel she needed to get away from here to get some breathing room, and I felt impatient for them to get to the point so that she would have the chance to get the space she needed. "Both of you need to stop the bullshit and get back to the point."

Eveline hissed, then took off for the exit. Scott threw his arms up in the air.

"That's it, just storm on out of here-"

"Leave her alone," I growled at him.

"Fuck that-" Scott started, but Amélie cut him off, while Philippe looked at the door where Eveline had stormed out, concerned.

"You have no idea what she went through," Amélie told him sharply, gripping Philippe's arm gently. "If she needs space to deal with the painful reminder of her time in the facility and the dismissive attitudes of humans around her that she has been reminded of due to your careless use of language," she paused to allow the point to sink in. "She has every right."

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

"And while she's getting her rights," Scott sneered, and I immediately wanted to punch him. "We still have a mission to plan and several cubs to rescue. Doesn't she care about that?!"

"We can discuss the specifics of the mission without her present," I growled at him. "And don't dare to gainsay what she should feel in my presence again."

"Both of you, stop it," Amélie barked. "She'll come back when she's good and ready, and Scott, you don't need to like her in order to plan and execute our mission." She then turned to me. "Rick, I know you two have bonded, and I know that would only be possible if you two felt deeply for one another, but you know better than anyone that she can take care of herself. Now stop this already! Both of you!"

Fuck.

I knew Amélie was right. I knew that we needed to stop fucking around with all of the tangential bullshit that Scott's words had caused, but a big part of me felt that Scott was being unfair to Eveline, and what she had suffered through. He might not have meant any harm, and I recognised that fact, but that didn't make Eveline's feelings any less valid.

I could feel her appreciation through our bond, muted as it was by her distress. I also suspected that she was busy working it off in the local wilderness by some rather intense physical exercise, though how exactly I knew that was beyond me. I'd hoped that she would feel better soon, and that she knew I'd need to deal with the mission itself, but a part of me felt like it would be a betrayal to her in some fashion.

I felt a brief jolt of confusion, then amusement through our bond at that same moment. Both were soon drowned out by a primal sense of aggression as she seemingly returned to her task, the emotions fading into the background of our bond as she turned to concentrating on her task.

It had still only been a few seconds for that brief empathic exchange to take place, then Amélie continued, looking at me with a knowing glance. "Let's decide how we're getting in, and then how we're going to get the information we need out."

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Planning the infiltration had been time-consuming and draining, but we eventually hashed out a workable plan to get into the facility based on what little information we had. While I had reservations about Scott's part in all of this, I also had to accept that he was integral to our plan to get in, and that without his presence, the people at the facility would be too suspicious to let us in, much less show us any of the facility or the cubs currently trapped within.

Eveline had returned about an hour after she had left, looking flushed from her exercise, and gave a stony glare in Scott's direction, who did his best to ignore it. I did my best to ignore it as well, knowing that she was definitely not in the mood for any teasing, but also because while we were bonded now, and she and I were often of one mind in many of our decisions, she was still reluctant to show her true self in front of people she didn't trust. Scott was one such person, and given the two of us had only met the guy today, I could hardly say I was surprised she wasn't willing to trust him much, if at all.

So when she came back and continued to give Scott a very frosty shoulder, I instead concentrated on the specifics of our mission into the facility we had discovered here.

What we did learn from Scott, was that the people behind the breeding facility had commandeered the fire station and a nearby underground shelter built for use during weather storms. Over the course of the last three months or so, reports had come in from roaming merchants of excavations going on at the site, which was why Scott had been sent there to investigate in the first place. The result was a guard tower right next to the building, a series of pre-fab outbuildings that appeared to have been made from material converted from the soil and clay that had been extracted from the ground - I had some pressing questions about that possibility but waited on those for now - and an unknown facility below ground that no-one knew the layout of.

It was clear we would have our work cut out for us. I had an idea.

"Did you guys bring any short-range radiotransmitter equipment with you?" I asked as we were planning the infiltration phase.

"Yeah," Philippe replied, hoisting a box that Thierry had delivered while we were talking. "Digitally encoded radios with a range of about three hundred metres. Maybe a hundred if it has to go through concrete, and I don't know how low it would have to go if you were underground."

"You think they'll let us waltz in their front door with radios on our belts?" Scott sneered.

I was so thoroughly sick of his fucking shit. "No," I deadpanned.

"Then what was your point?"

I turned to Eveline. "You wanna tell them, or shall I?"

She gave an indifferent shrug. "You do it," she sighed. "I'm already sick of listening to this arsehole. Excuse me," she finished with a glare in Scott's direction, before walking out of the tower.

"I don't know what the fuck her problem is-" Scott started, but I cut him off.

"Then I can't help you," I told him flatly. "Point is, if you'll shut the fuck up and listen, that we can transmit over short distances from our nanocloud to any radiofrequency transceiver that's within range. It wouldn't take much to use such a radio to piggyback off of, and send out a radio signal. As long as we could get a radio in poisition near the entrance to the facility, out of sight, then we could send out a signal from inside."

Scott glared at me, and I was as abruptly tired of his shit as Eveline was. "I don't much like you-"

"And I'm not here for a fucking popularity contest, so how about we stick to the mission so we can all go our separate ways afterward?" I grated. "Or would that make too much fucking sense to you?"

"You know what?" Scott gritted his teeth, looking like he was about to wind himself up for a tirade.

"Get a grip!" Amélie barked, looking sternly at both of us. "I don't know what your problem is with each other, but I grow tired of listening to you two carry on like you're having a dick measuring contest! Rick, I expect better of you than this! And Scott, you've been on his and Eveline's backs since you arrived-" Scott went to interrupt, but Amélie barked at him, her expression turning fierce. "I don't want to hear it! Rick has proven himself to me in the past, and Eveline is like a sister to me, so your attitude toward them has already made me wary of you. Now enough already! We have a mission to execute, and cubs to rescue, so I don't want any more dog shit. You get me?" And this time, she immediately turned to me with a glare.

I raised both hands in surrender, accepting Amélie's rebuke. She was right. My concern for Eveline after what Scott had said to her earlier had clouded my objectivity, and I knew better. I did Eveline no favours by continuing to confront Scott, even though I wished he'd leave her the fuck alone.

"Rick?" Amélie barked again.

"I hear you," I told her quietly, holding her gaze with a nod. "And I should know better."

Satisfied, she turned her fierce glare to Scott. "Well?"

"Fine," Scott hissed, glaring at me. "Just don't fuckin' stab me in the back!"

"Scott!" Caitlynne barked. "Weren't you listening?!"

"Fuck off!" Scott roared. "You expect me to trust this mother fucker on your say so? If I wanna warn him not to stab me the fuck in the back, that's my right-"

"Enough," Amélie's voice was deathly quiet. "Thank you for your service. I'll make sure Mister Cuisset contacts you with your payment as soon as possible," she then turned her back on him. "You may leave, now."

The silence was deathly, and Scott didn't move. "After months of spying for you, this is the thanks I get? All because I don't just kiss this boy's feet?"

Philippe stood beside Amélie. "No, you've been asked to leave not because you withhold trust, as anyone rightly would," he sighed. "But because you insist on remaining confrontational and adversarial with him and his bond mate." His pause didn't last long, and his face was one of tired resignation. "And we can't have that on an infiltration and rescue mission."

"Seriously?!" Scott scoffed, though he looked like he was desperately trying to get a lid on his temper. "This isn't right. All the effort I've put into this. They know me. They know nothing about any of you. If you want this mission to succeed, you need that."

"We don't need the liability of someone who won't have our backs," Caitlynne told him in a flat tone.

"What the fuck is your problem?!" Scott rounded on her. "What makes you think I'd stab you in the back? Because I'm angry with you guys?"

"This isn't-" Amélie seemed to wind herself up for a hostile confrontation, but Eveline's voice issued from the entrance.

"ENOUGH!" She roared, her expression fierce, her tail swaying in anger. I knew never to argue with her when she was like this, so I held my tongue, though I held her gaze for a moment as she looked in my direction. "Like it or not, we need a way in to this place, and Scott is our most likely way in. We can't afford to throw that away."

"Since when were you the voice of reason?" Caitlynne looked at her in annoyance.

"We don't have time for this," Eveline told her flatly. "Philippe can explain it to you when we're not looking at trying to break out a bunch of cubs from a breeding facility." She then turned her attention back to Scott. "You need to understand something about me. I've been where these cubs are, right now." Her expression was grim, and I could tell through our bond that she was making a gargantuan effort to keep a lid on her emotions in order to make her point. "I know they're not taking a holiday in there, and you need to know that there are real youngsters in those places going through experiences that only three other people in my life know about from me, so when I tell you that describing them as breeding experiments is not only painful for me personally, but objectifying for every hybrid to ever exist, then I want you to understand, I'm not just saying this to be difficult."

Scott's expression seemed caught between trying to understand and his own defensive anger. I could understand that conflict, so I kept my thoughts to myself and waited to see which way he'd go.

Eventually, he turned away, scowling at the floor, running fingers through his hair.

I looked back at Eveline, and though her glare was stony, I could feel the maelstrom of emotions through our bond, a confusing mix of anger, pain and a small measure of gratitude that she might have finally helped him to understand. She looked at me, and through our bond, I felt a muted affection swirling with a desire to take off and be alone.

And by alone, I somehow knew she meant alone with me.

"Guys," I said quietly. "I think we should get some air and come back to this later."

Eveline stepped to my side as soon as I made my suggestion, her expression almost unchanged, but I could almost feel the appreciation radiating off of her.

"We don't have time for this-" Caitlynne began in protest, but Philippe cut her off.

"It's alright," he said, gently. "I think we could use a few minutes at least." His gaze fell to Eveline and myself, and I nodded gratefully to him.

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The few minutes we took out for each other was all we needed in that moment. Once we found a quiet place for ourselves, Eveline wrapped me in a gentle hug, sighing tiredly, saying nothing. I remained silent as well, holding her close, combing my fingers slowly through her mane. Finally, after those few minutes, she looked up at me, her face a picture of contentment.

"Thank you," she whispered. "Ever since we bonded, I've been feeling more... Resilient. I know Philippe and Amélie will be able to explain what's going on than I understand right now, but I'm grateful that I feel in better control of myself."

"Me too," I breathed, kissing her forehead before taking her hand. "Game faces on?"

Eveline snorted. "That's another one I learned from your sister," she laughed. "And no, not this time. Now, I want everyone to know what you mean to me. I'm walking in there with you by my side."

Part of me marvelled at this openness. Part of me was concerned she might be forcing herself to be that way when she might not be ready, but I wasn't about to question her about it.

"Hey," Eveline surprised me the same instant. "You helped me find the strength to face life on my own terms," she kissed me. "I wouldn't have been able to do this, once."

"Are you sure you're alright, Ev?" I asked, expressing my concern. "You were pretty pissed at Scott earlier."

She gave a casual shrug. "That's because he's an unthinking arsehole and a defensive prick," she sighed. "But his words only stung for a moment. I'm surrounded by people who won't let me down. Amélie, Philippe..." She paused significantly. "You."

The touch of her lips on my own was magical, and after a moment, she pulled back.

"I love you," I told her softly.

"I know," she breathed in a voice that was almost a full octave lower than she would normally use, a twinkle in her eyes, and I was astonished.

I frowned. "You did not just..."

She let loose a throaty chuckle. "You just got Solo'd!"

"You little-" I exclaimed as Eveline took off in a fast run, laughing as she did. "Get back here!"

The quick game of chase the cat we enjoyed was exhilerating, even if we couldn't do much more than run and try to catch each other given how we were not alone, and we had a mission to accomplish.