Me: Emergency meet. Five minutes. Main table. Full force.
My phone lights up with a series of acknowledgments. They’re all coming to the war room now.
I return inside our suite to find Katie still sitting on the floor, the puppy curled up on her stomach. I kneel and kiss the top of her head. She smells like the strawberry kids shampoo Christina used on her last night. It’s the scent I’ve come to associate with my daughter.
“Grandma’s coming to hang out with you,” I tell her. “I need to go help your mama out for a little bit. We might both be gone overnight. I’ll bet you could talk her into having a pajama party tonight.”
Her eyes light up. “A pajama party?”
Queenie appears in the doorway. “Oh, you want a pajama party. We can do that. It’ll be all kinds of fun.”
Katie scrambles to her feet and carries her puppy over to Queenie. My ma’s eyes glance from Katie to me. I know she can feel the tension rolling off me in waves. She steps inside and rests a hand on Katie’s shoulder.
“Is everything okay?” she asks quietly.
“It will be, once I get there. You’ll take Katie, right?”
“Of course,” she responds firmly. “Always.”
I follow them out of the suite and then take a hard right. By the time my boots hit the stairs, the shift has already happened inside me. The mindset of a soldier rises to the surface, though truth be told I don’t think it ever left. I turn once more into the man who battles danger with skill and cunning and will stop at nothing when someone he cares about is under attack.
I don’t know exactly what Christina is up to, but I’m worried that she’s bitten off more than she can chew with that damned place. I wish she’d never been ballsy enough to walk into that building.
She’s either hiding or has been caught prowling where she shouldn’t have been. If someone dares to put their hands on her, they’re going to learn how stupid that decision was.
I reach the small room in the back of the clubhouse where we hold church, my father and brothers are already waiting around the main table. They look almost as worried as I feel.
Jasper speaks first. “What’s going on, brother?”
I drop my phone onto the table. “Christina went to Hydro Relief’s Greer County building. She hasn’t come out. Rivera is on-site and we don’t know whether she’s hiding out waiting to snoop around or if she’s been caught. We’re gonna need to go out there and extract her either way.”
Jinx is our sergeant-at-arms and the only non-blood relative in the room. He is the first to speak up. He pushes off the wall. “Then we gear up and roll out, like Onyx said. We hit them full force, with no warning.” His hand curls into a fist. “If we come tofind out they grabbed your woman inside a damn office building, I say we make a hole right through the front door.”
Onyx nods once. “Hit them from both sides. We take the lobby, choke the interior halls, and breach and just keep turning every room upside down until we find her. We make it quick and clean.” He looks at me. “You take point.”
Mica taps his fingers on the table in a restless rhythm. “We can be on the road in five. Bring the van and two bikes per entrance. Rivera can get a piece of the action once we’re in place.”
I want to do exactly what they suggest. Christina is inside a multinational corporation that hires trained killers. I want her out now. And I’ll want to rip apart anyone who touched her.
Rock leans back in his chair with a hard look in his eyes. “We need to move hard and fast. That’s what we do best.” His voice is steely.
Before I can respond, Jasper lifts a hand. “You need to hear something before we mount up.”
The room quiets. Jasper’s eyes meet mine. He’s my older brother and has always had my back. I want to hear what he has to say.
“Striker sent me a file ten minutes ago. New intel from Christina’s flash drive.” Jasper pauses long enough to catch his breath. “REACH wasn’t just moving supplies for the military. They were running side deals with insurgent groups. They were moving weapons, giving up intel on our coordinates and even selling them supplies they were supposed to be moving for alliedforces. They were feeding hostile fighters intel while cash from Russian intermediaries funded the whole operation.”
The stunned silence only lasts a few seconds before the cursing starts. My father’s face darkens. Mica’s knuckles whiten on the table. Onyx mutters something low and violent. Jinx looks like he needs to hit something to release his anger. Jasper is the only one not losing it and he looks grim as hell.
I feel a slow, sickening churn in my stomach, thinking of the men we lost, the ambushes we ran into, and the snipers that picked off so many of my brothers in arms. Too many lives were lost and even civilians were caught in crossfire. Whole operations went bad because some assholes leaked details they never should have had access to in the first place. Hearing that REACH had a hand in that chaos changes everything.
“They cost us lives,” Onyx says softly, his voice bitter. “American lives. Afghan lives too.”
Mica’s jaw flexes. “And they buried it under a bunch of corporate bullshit.”
I grit out, “The American government was paying them to deliver supplies, not to fuckin’ betray us to the enemy.”
Jasper responds as he types out a message on his cell phone. “This is a company with layers of protection and political insulation. If we hit them alone, they’ll spin it as bikers causin’ trouble at a civilian site. But if law enforcement we can trust is standin’ next to us when we find the evidence, it becomes bigger than us. This is how we burn down the money machine they created for themselves.”
