“Christ,” Kade hissed from a couple of stalls down from him. “Two solid hours of hand-to-hand sparring wasn’t enough punishment for you? Now you feel the need to boil yourself alive over there?”

Brock grunted, slicking his hand over his face as the steam continued to gather and the heat continued to batter his too-tense muscles. He’d found Kade in the weapons room with Niko and Chase after he’d dropped his gear in his new shared quarters with Hunter. It seemed reasonable to expect that a hard few rounds of blade work and hand-to-hand training would be enough to exhaust some of his restlessness and distraction. It should have been, but it wasn’t.

“What’s going on with you, man?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Brock muttered, pushing his head and shoulders farther under the scalding spray.

Kade’s scoff echoed in the cavernous shower room. “Like hell, you don’t know.”

“Shit.” Brock exhaled the curse into the mist that wreathed his head. “Why do I get the feeling you’re gonna enlighten me?”

There was a hard squeak of a spigot handle, followed by the bang of Kade’s shower door as he stepped out and walked into the connected dressing area. A few minutes later, Kade’s voice sounded from the other room. “You ever going to tell me what happened last night down in Southie at that meat-packing plant?”

Brock closed his eyes and blew out something that sounded like a growl, even to his own ears. “Nothing to tell. There were loose ends. I cleaned them up.”

“Yeah,” Kade said. “That’s what I guessed had happened.”

When Brock lifted his head, he found the warrior standing across the way from him. Kade was fully dressed in a black shirt and jeans, leaning back against the opposite wall. His steely silver gaze narrowed, knowing.

Brock had too much respect for his friend to try to deceive him. “Those humans were scum who thought nothing of harming an innocent woman. You expect that kind of brutality to be condoned?”

“No.” Kade stared, then gave a sober nod. “If I found myself face-to-face with anyone who’d laid a finger on Alex, I’d have to kill the bastard. That’s what you did, isn’t it? You killed those men.”

“They were hardly men,” Brock ground out. “They were rabid dogs, and what they did to Jenna—what they thought they could get away with—probably wasn’t the first time they’d hurt a woman. I doubt Jenna would have been the last. So, yeah, I put them down.”

For a long time, Kade said nothing. He just watched him, even after Brock stuck his head back under the furious pound of the spray, feeling no need to explain any further. Not even to his closest friend in the Order, the warrior who was like kin to him.

“Damn,” Kade murmured after a lengthy silence. “You care about her, don’t you?”

Brock shook his head, as much in denial as it was to slick the water off his face. “Lucan gave me the responsibility of looking after her, of keeping her safe. I’m only doing what’s expected of me. She’s another mission, no different than any other.”

“Oh, yeah. No doubt about that.” Kade smirked. “I had a mission like that up in Alaska not too long ago. Maybe I mentioned it to you once or twice?”

“This is different,” Brock grumbled. “What you and Alex have is … not the same at all. Alex is a Breedmate, for one thing. There’s no threat of getting serious with Jenna. I’m not the long-term type, and she’s human, besides.”

Kade’s dark brows knit into an intense frown. “I don’t think any of us can be sure exactly what she is now.”

Brock absorbed the truth of that statement with a renewed sense of concern, not only for Jenna, but for the Order and the rest of the Breed nation, as well. Whatever was happening to her, as of today, it appeared to be accelerating. He couldn’t deny that the news of her blood work changes troubled him. To say nothing of the fact that the damned bit of alien matter was actively delving deeper into her body, infiltrating on a level not even Gideon seemed prepared to combat.

Brock blew out a low curse under the punishing deluge of the shower. “If you’re trying to make me feel better about all of this, feel free to stop anytime.”

Kade chuckled, clearly enjoying himself. “I don’t expect you’ll be having any heart-to-heart talks with your new roomie, so this is me, showing you I care.”

“I’m touched,” Brock muttered. “Now, get the fuck out of here and let me scald myself in peace.”

“Gladly. All this talk of missions and women reminds me that I have important duties of my own that I’ve been neglecting back in my quarters.”

Brock grunted. “Give Alex my best.”

Kade merely grinned as he saluted him, then strolled toward the exit.

After he was gone, Brock lingered under the water only a few minutes longer. It was late in the day, but he was too wired for sleep. And Kade’s reminder about Jenna and her changing biology had his mind churning.

He toweled off, then got dressed in a gray T-shirt and dark jeans. He stomped into his black leather boots, feeling the sudden urge to head back into the weapons room and blow off more steam until nightfall, when he could finally escape the compound again. But working up a sweat hadn’t done him much good the first time; he doubted it would do anything for him now.

Uncertain what would take off his edge, Brock found himself stalking down the central corridor of the compound, toward the tech lab. The halls were quiet, deserted. Not surprising for the time of day, when the mated warriors would be in bed with their females and the rest of the headquarters’ occupants would be getting some rest before patrols rolled out at sundown.

Brock probably should have been thinking about that, too, but he was more interested in knowing if Gideon had turned up anything more about Jenna’s blood work results. As he entered the stretch of corridor that would take him to the lab, he heard movement in another of the compound’s meeting rooms.

Following the sound of shuffling papers, he drew to a pause outside the open door of the Breedmates’ mission command center.

Jenna was alone inside the room.

Seated at the conference table, several manila file folders fanned out before her and a couple more stacked neatly at her elbow, she was bent over a pad of paper, pen in hand and thoroughly engrossed in whatever she was writing. At first, he didn’t think she knew he was there. But then her hand paused halfway down the page, her head lifting. The soft brown layers of her hair shifted like silk as she pivoted to see who was standing in the doorway.

That had been his cue to duck away fast, before she saw him. He was Breed; he could have been there and gone before her mortal eyes could register his presence. Instead, for some idiotic reason he had no interest in examining, he took a step inside and cleared his throat.

Jenna’s hazel gaze went wider when she saw him.

“Hey,” he said.

She gave him a brief smile, looking more than a little caught off-guard by him. And why shouldn’t she be, after the way he’d left things with her the last time he saw her? She pulled one of the file folders over and set it on top of her notepad. “I thought everyone had gone to bed.”

“They have.” He walked farther into the room and made a quick visual scan of the information spread out on the table. “Looks like Dylan and the others have managed to recruit you already.”

She shrugged, a weak denial. “I was just … looking at a few things. Comparing notes on some of the files, jotting down a couple of my thoughts.”

Brock took a seat in the chair next to her. “They’ll appreciate that,” he said, impressed that she was lending a hand. He reached for the notes she’d been writing. “Can I have a look?”

“It’s nothing much, really,” she said. “Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh pair of eyes.”

He glanced at her crisp, precise handwriting that filled most of the page. Her mind seemed to operate in the same organized manner, based on the logical flow of her notes and the list of suggestions she’d made for investigating the missing persons cases that Dylan and the other Breedmates had been pursuing for the past few months.