“Erin, Rory, and Elliott had all been with the team for a year or two and Weatherford was the team leader. I was the new guy,” Sawyer continued. “Our job was simply to monitor the situation and determine how serious the threat might become in the future. We weren’t even there to stop the weapon exchange—just observe and report. It should have been a cakewalk.”
“I’m guessing things didn’t go as planned?” Harley asked.
Sawyer shoved a few fries into his mouth and shook his head. “Do they ever? But you’re right. It went wrong—fast. Somehow, Shevchenko figured out we were onto him and turned the tables on us. They hit us the moment we walked into the compound outside our safe house. There were eight of us, but most weren’t armed at the time. Let’s just say it was…bad.”
“You were shot?” Harley murmured softly, her stomach strangely tense at the thought of Sawyer being hurt. Which was crazy, considering she’d seen half her STAT teammates shot up already and barely noticed it. Hell, Jake had a tree branch shoved through his chest and she hadn’t batted an eye.
“Shot?” The question earned her a soft snort from him. “That’s an understatement. I was the first one hit by automatic weapon fire coming from the walkway overlooking the courtyard of the safe house. I probably should have died on the spot.”
Harley stopped even trying to go through the motions of eating, her whole body frozen solid as she pictured Sawyer lying broken and bleeding on the ground. The image made it hard to breathe.
“I was in so much pain, I could barely comprehend what was happening around me,” he said quietly. “All I knew for sure was that I was going to die and my team was going to be wiped out. I’d only been with them for two months, but they were important to me. And while I probably should have been completely freaked out about dying, I was more worried about them.”
She sat there silently, waiting for him to continue, part of her wanting to beg him not to even as the other part needed to know the rest.
“I had no idea what I was hoping to accomplish,” he said, the distant expression on his face making her think he was reliving every moment of that time. “I shoved myself off the ground and ran toward the nearest target, figuring if I could take down even one of them, it might give the other members of my team a chance to survive.”
He paused to take another bite of steak and though she didn’t have much of an appetite anymore, Harley forced herself to do the same.
“I ended up taking down Yegor and caught another round in the hip for my trouble,” Sawyer said, focusing on his plate. “I ignored the pain and headed for the next terrorist. I knew I was a goner, so I might as well go out swinging.”
More silence followed and Harley wished she’d never asked Sawyer anything like this.
“Everything is sort of a blur after that,” he added. “I remember getting the one on the walkway with the machine gun who’d shot me at the start of the ambush—it was Yegor’s brother, Illya—then kept going until I took out all of them.”
Harley held her breath, hoping the story had a good ending buried in there somewhere.
Sawyer speared another piece of steak. “Well, Yegor ended up surviving, at least long enough to get shipped off to a Turkish prison. The rest of them, including Illya, all died.”
“And you became a werewolf.”
He nodded. “I didn’t know that at the time, of course. I laid there on the ground, trying to figure out how the hell I was still alive after all that. It wasn’t until about a month or so later when I started going crazy with the change that I realized what had happened. But you know all about that part of it.”
Yeah, Harley definitely remembered that part. Remembered how her body seemed constantly out of control, claws and fangs showing up at random times, anger bubbling out of control, senses going haywire. At the time, she’d been sure she was going insane, that she was hallucinating everything. And that was without having to deal with the trauma of getting shot like Sawyer had.
“How did you keep everything secret from your team and the rest of MI6?” she asked, forcing herself to go back to eating, trying to catch up to Sawyer, who was almost finished. “I mean, aren’t spies supposed to be suspicious by nature? Didn’t anyone think it was strange you survived getting shot that many times? Not to mention running around fighting in that condition?”
He gave her a small smile. “In the bedlam of the ambush, no one noticed how badly I’d been shot. They knew I’d been hit, but they were too busy trying to stay alive themselves to look too closely.”
She was about to ask how that was even possible but stopped at the look on his face. He was lost in his memories of those moments once again.
“Silas Thompson was the one who picked me up and got me to the nearest hospital,” he said slowly, his tone anguished. “He didn’t want to leave me there on my own, but he didn’t have a choice. It’s MI6 protocol in a situation like that. Less chance of the team being compromised if they scatter. I stayed there while Weatherford got the rest of the team out of the country, so none of them were there to see all the damage when the doctors got around to stripping my clothes off.”
Harley couldn’t imagine what that must have been like for him. To go through something like that alone was beyond awful.
“I still can’t believe they left you,” she said.
If something like that happened to her or anyone else in STAT, there was no way she or her teammates would ever bail on each other. But maybe that was because they were more than a team. They were a pack. And that included the humans.
“It’s not that they wanted to,” he said. “But if they’d stayed, there’s a good chance local law enforcement—or worse, some foreign covert organization—would have picked them up. It was safer for me to be a John Doe than to have my teammates hanging around.”
Harley wasn’t sure she believed that. She’d want to be with her teammate if one of them was badly hurt. “Didn’t the doctors realize there was something strange going on once they saw how badly you’d been wounded? The extent of the injuries and the amount of blood you lost must have made it into your medical records.”
He shrugged. “I suppose so. When the extraction team came a few days later to get me, they snagged my medical records too, and by then, my injuries didn’t look nearly as bad. I was still beat up when I got back to London, but it wasn’t bad enough to suggest how close I’d come to dying. And it wasn’t like I was going to bring it up. MI6 put me on six weeks of medical leave to heal up, so there wasn’t anyone around to see me going through the worst of the change. By the time I went back to work, I was in control of my abilities. I almost died ten times over and got turned into a werewolf because I have the gene and no one even noticed.”