Silence descended on the group, worry reflected in everyone’s eyes.
Triana’s stomach clenched. She’d lost her father to these damn hunters. She refused to even think about losing anyone else she cared about. Maybe it was because of the bond she shared with Remy, but she already cared deeply about everyone here.
Having someone who could pick up on her emotions was a good thing in this case, since Remy leaned over and wrapped a big, strong arm around her, lending her some of that strength to help her feel safe.
“Are you regretting moving here and putting yourself in the middle of all this?” he asked softly in her ear.
“No, of course not! I love you. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be than with you.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “And don’t even consider pulling any of that I-love-you-too-much-to put-you-in-danger crap. Because I’m telling you right now, I’m not putting up with it.”
Remy pulled her close again, giving her a kiss that warmed her all the way down to her toes. “You won’t have to. If there’s any danger, I want you right beside me where I can keep an eye on you. I love you more than anything in the world, and I refuse to let anything come between us.”
“Do you think the hunters will come here?” she asked. “Do you think they’ll really try to take on the Pack?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. But if they do, we’re going to be ready for them. And they’re going to learn that this pack isn’t like anything they’ve ever dealt with before. We’re used to facing bad guys, killers, and psychopaths on a daily basis, and because of that, we’re a pack bound together in ways these people could never imagine. If the hunters come here, we’ll deal with them together—as a pack.”
Around them, everyone voiced their agreement. Max, who was still over by the grill, tipped his bottle of beer in Remy’s direction. “Damn straight we will. As a pack.”
As everyone began eating and laughing again, Gage walked over with the new betas, introducing everyone.
Triana leaned in and kissed Remy, smiling up at him. “As a pack,” she whispered.
For more Paige Tyler
check out the X-Ops series
Her Dark Half
On sale September 2017
Keep reading for a sneak peek at the next book
in Paige Tyler’s action-packed X-Ops series
Her Dark Half
Adana, Turkey, 2013
“Crap on a stick! Why the heck did the weather have to pick tonight to unload on us?”
Alina Bosch glanced at her watch again before turning her attention back to the industrial buildings across the street from the small fourth-floor apartment they’d turned into a tactical operations center for the mission. She and her team were in the Yüregir district, one of the low-income sections of Adana, where streetlamps were few and far between. That, combined with the cold rain that was coming down in buckets, made it nearly impossible to see what the hell was going on over there.
But she didn’t need to see much in the way of details to know it was time to move on their target. Two vehicles, one an expensive four-door sedan and the other a midsize moving van, had pulled up in front of the buildings ten minutes ago. The van had pulled straight through a roll-up door into a maintenance garage area while two men in dark clothes had left the sedan and run straight for the main door of the building. People making a delivery in the rain wouldn’t be unusual, but it was two o’clock in the morning, which made it damn suspicious.
Alina and the other four agents of her CIA team were in Adana to stop members of al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction of the growing Syrian rebel movement, from obtaining the necessary chemicals to make sarin nerve gas. Analysts within both the CIA and NSA had good intel suggesting the group was close to a deal with a local supplier in Turkey for the two most critical ingredients to produce sarin—methylphosphonyl difluoride and isopropylamine.
The really scary part was that the rebel group didn’t intend to use the sarin against the Syrian government but instead planned to gas a few thousand innocent civilians—people they were supposedly trying to protect—hoping it would provoke the United States and other western powers into launching a full-scale war against the current Syrian regime.
Alina supposed that if you couldn’t take your enemy out by yourself, then you needed to get someone bigger to do it for you—even if it meant your own people had to pay the price.
As she watched the garage door roll down behind the moving van, Alina got a twitchy feeling in her stomach. The deal was going down right now; she was sure of it. If she and her team didn’t go in soon, they were going to miss their chance completely. If that happened, there was a good chance that a lot of people were going to die.
Unfortunately, moving on their target at exactly that moment was a problem, because her team was presently one person short.
“Jodi,” she whispered softly over her shoulder to the petite, dark-haired woman leaning back against the kitchen counter, cell phone in hand. “Anything on Wade yet? He was supposed to be here thirty minutes ago.”
Jodi Patterson, the youngest and newest member of the team shook her head, her curls bouncing. “I’ve been alternating between calling and texting him for the past twenty minutes. No luck. He’s probably shacked up with some local girl, if he’s not sleeping it off in a ditch somewhere. Then again, it’s always possible he lost his cell phone in a damn poker game.”
