“I can wait in the car,” she offered feebly.
Xander slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine. “Nah. We’re gonna need all the hands we can get. Con will give us twenty minutes – thirty, tops – to clean out the place.”
Hudson’s breathing grew shallow as she got into the passenger side. The entire drive down to the warehouse, she prayed that she didn’t know anyone inside the place. That the guards Connor might have captured were blindfolded. That Xander would change his mind and decide she should wait outside.
But he didn’t. He parked the Jeep and signaled for her to follow him.
Hudson drew a breath and paused at the edge of the gate, staring at the scuffed white trail zigzagging toward the entrance: chalk, crushed between Rylan’s fingers and smeared onto the pavement with his boots, indicating the safe route inside.
Her heart thudded as she and Xander stepped into the fluorescent-lit entryway of the warehouse, which looked like all the other storage facilities she’d visited in the past. Usually with Dominik, or sometimes their father, when he’d felt like leaving his office to make the rounds through the colony.
Aisles and aisles of metal racks took up the cavernous space, shelves neatly stocked with an array of supplies. Several corridors branched off from the main room. Doors labeled HAZARDOUS MATERIALS and MEDICAL spanned the halls, and Xander briskly ushered her toward the latter, thrusting two duffel bags into her hands.
“Grab as much as you can,” he ordered. “Antibiotics and painkillers are the priority, but take it all if there’s time.”
She was left in a twelve-by-twelve-foot room full of metal cabinets and freestanding refrigerators containing so many vials and pill bottles that she knew the allotted twenty minutes of scavenging would barely make a dent in the inventory. She hurriedly got to work filling the canvas bags, all the while praying she’d be able to stay out of sight during the raid.
When she’d stowed as many supplies in the bags as she was able to carry, she reluctantly left the room and made her way back to the entrance, where Xander was manning the door.
“Take those out to Kade,” he told her. “He’s loading the Jeep.”
Hudson eagerly hurried outside, hoping that her part in all this might be over, but when she reached the Jeep, Kade simply handed her two more empty duffels, grinned, and sent her back inside.
This time she tackled the facility’s pantry, pulling canned food and boxes of freeze-dried packets off the shelves and shoving them into the duffels. From the corner of her eye she saw Rylan march by with a drum of oil in his hands, which she realized was probably a critical acquisition for the men.
There weren’t many operational refineries left on the globe; the few that existed were in East Colony, but West Colony did have its own pipeline, along with a solitary oil rig up north, in an area her father had told her was once called Alberta. Petroleum products were hard to come by outside the city, so she understood the relief on Rylan’s face as he trudged past her.
She dropped off her second load of supplies with Kade, then made a third trek inside. She was halfway to the pantry when a sharp voice called out to her.
“Hudson.”
Gulping, she turned to find Connor in the corridor.
“Come here a minute.” Without awaiting a response, he stalked toward the double doors at the end of the hall. They were marked COMMAND ROOM.
Crap.
Her knees wobbled as she followed him. She was terrified that she was about to come face-to-face with the second Enforcer, that he might be someone she knew from the compound, someone who would take one look at her and —
Two dead bodies were sprawled on the cement floor when she entered the room.
The relief was instantaneous, trailed rapidly by a jolt of guilt for being relieved that the men were dead. She didn’t recognize either one of them, but the neat bullet holes in the center of their foreheads made her heart ache.
She turned to Connor. “Why did you kill them?” She couldn’t control the note of wary accusation in her tone.
On the other side of the room, Pike raised his head from the papers he’d been shuffling through. “Because we’re not stupid,” he answered for Connor. “We don’t leave loose ends, especially the kind that pose a threat to us.”
“You could’ve tied them up, or knocked them out, or…” She drifted off unhappily. “They didn’t have to be a threat.”
“Everyone is a threat,” Pike corrected, then dismissed her with a hard look and continued to rummage through the desk.