Page 9 of Stolen

Chapter 5

The hotel suite had almost no private spaces, so Gunn walked down the short hallway and shut himself into the powder room to reply to the text. Moments later, a call came in from an unknown number.

“Gunn here.”

“Gunn. It’s Hawk.”

Damn. Hawk had once been on Gunn’s team, but he’d been pulled and reassigned over a year and a half ago. Gunn hadn’t heard from him since—rumor had it he was deep undercover.

Things must have gone to hell for him to be contacting Gunn now, outside the Outlaw Ridge chain of command.

“Shit, man,” Gun said. “It’s been a long time. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I need your help, though.”

“Anything.” Gunn and Hawk had been more than team members—they were friends. They owed each other their lives several times over, and no amount of silence could ever change that.

Hawk filled him in with the bare bones of what was going on with him. Where he’d been undercover, what had gone down, the fact that he was now protection detail for the cartel leader’s sister.

Although there was a lot more to it than that. Gunn could hear it in Hawk’s voice when he talked about Ariana.

There was a time when Gunn would have given him hell for getting involved with the wrong woman—letting his emotions get the better of him.

But Gunn wasn’t exactly holding the high ground there, so he kept his mouth shut.

“What can I do?” he asked instead.

Hawk said, “We’re here in town below Outlaw Ridge, waiting until Ariana’s recovered enough to stand up to the kind of interrogation that will give us what we need to take De León down. All of Thanatos’s intel says he’s hunkered down in Colombia.” Hawk took a deep breath. “But he’s not. He’s coming our way.”

“How do you know?”

Hawk gave a frustrated sigh. “We don’t. Not for sure. But he’s Ari’s alpha, and I was pledged to him, in a way, for a year and a half. Like it or not, my wolf still feels the pack bond. And he’s coming after us. We can both feel it.”

Gunn considered that. He like facts, not airy-fairy magical shit, or nebulous psychic powers. But he knew that stuff existed for other wolves—and he trusted Hawk’s instincts.

“You want me to verify?” he asked. “I can try. But Thanatos has one of the best intelligence networks in the world. If they say De León’s in Colombia…”

“I know that,” Hawk said. “But this time, they’re wrong. And you have Switch. He has more back-channel contacts than even Thanatos.”

He did. Switch wasn’t officially on their team—he wasn’t officially on anybody’s team. But he was also an old friend of Gunn’s, and he was tapped into networks most people didn’t even know existed. If De León was on the move and keeping it under wraps, Switch could find out about it.

“I’m on it,” he said. “I’ll call Switch as soon as we finish here. It may take a day or two, though. How close do you think they are?”

Hawk said, “Not right here, but getting closer.” There was a pause, and then he added, “Thanks, man. I owe you.”

“You know you don’t,” Gunn said. “I’m glad you didn’t let yourself get shot up by those cholos.”

“You and me both,” Hawk said. “It was a close thing.”

“It doesn’t matter how close it is, as long as you’re alive.”

“So they say. And Gunn? If I need backup…”

Gunn said, “I’m there, buddy.”

“Thanks.”

Gunn signed off, and then called Switch. “I have something for you,” he said. “I need some intel. A favor for Hawk.”