Chapter One
“Target spotted,” Uranium’s voice came across the bud in Thallium’s ear. “Repeat, target spotted. Back bedroom. Launching crawler now.”
Adamantium cracked his knuckles then began typing on the keyboard. A moment later, the monitor labeled “Nightcrawler I” lit up and displayed an infrared video feed from the robot. After a few keystrokes, a popping sound came from the roof of the van over their heads as a drone lifted off. A second later, the image split in two and a second video feed, this one labeled “Nightwing I,” appeared on the screen.
“Nightwing and Nightcrawler are active and rolling, sir,” Ant said.
“About time,” Steele muttered and rotated his seat on the driver’s side of the van in their direction. His big body filled the seat and still had room to spare and looked mighty comfortable, compared to the bench seat Thallium and his fellow teammates were squished on. “What took him so damn long? My team would have been in and out already.”
“You are more than welcome to get in the other vehicle and take your scrawny ass back to the base,” Tin rumbled in his gravely bass and flashed a tight smile. “Sir,” he added at the last minute in deference to Steele’s rank.
Although they were no longer in the Marines, protocol was still used in the Elite teams, and they adhered to many of the old rules. For one, to do so alleviated much of the chaos in their lives, and two, it kept them alive. At least from others. It wouldn’t surprise Thallium one bit if he found one of his team members had taken out another just for being so damn annoying. They were like family, after all.
And Steele had perfected the put-out-older-brother eye roll years ago. “Right. Back to the task at hand, please. Uranium, how many do we have on site?”
From his perch somewhere in the darkness, Uranium came back. “Besides the target, there are two souls. That is two U.S. marshals, Sergeant Fuckhead.”
Thallium and Tin each sucked in their snorts of laughter. Steele should have known better than to talk smack to Titanium’s men. As far as Thallium was concerned, Steele was getting off light.
“Are we done, boys?” Steele’s lips were pinched so tightly together that with his goatee, the lower half of his face appeared to be one flat slate of beard. “Need I remind you there is a woman out there who is seconds away from death and has the misfortune of having us be her only protection? Ant, can you confirm heat signatures?”
“Affirmative. Three people total. Man,” he said with a shake of his shaggy-haired head. “I can’t believe WITSEC only has two marshals on this witness. That is the shittiest witness protection program ever.”
The occupants in the van fell silent as they all looked at Ant in disbelief.
He glanced to his left, then right, then shrugged. “What?”
“Are you serious?” the commander asked incredulously. “At least she has protection, and a whole lotta other things too. All Uncle Sam gave us was the equivalent of a bag full of cash, a slap on the ass, and the advice to not get killed.”
“And…the freedom to do whatever we wanted,” Ant reasoned. “I’d rather be out on my own than stuck in a safe house with two Feds in the middle of suburbia.”
The man did have a point.
Ant toggled a joystick attached to his keyboard and the image on the screen for Nightwing I displayed the target location. “No civilians spotted in the area, sir. We’re clear to go.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way,” Steele said with a sigh then slapped his hands on his thighs and stood the best he could in the cramped van. “All right, boys and girls, you know the drill. Obtain the target. Incapacitate the marshals, but do not terminate, and yes, Tin, I am looking at you. Obviously, they will try to kill you, so make sure your armor is secured.”
As Steele barked his commands, Thallium triple-checked his body armor, face mask, and gloves. The temperature of the clear Texas night still hovered at a balmy seventy-three degrees and with the additional weight of his gear and the heavy breathing of those inside the van, sweat had long ago soaked through his clothing. Most people would have started bitching, but he loved the heat. Craved it to the point that he rarely went out without a couple layers of clothes on, even in the summer sun.
“Ant, pull up the picture of who we’re looking for again,” Steele said.
A photo appeared on the screen and Thallium squinted at the image of the woman who took down an empire, and felt the blood in his veins quicken.
Sure, a woman dressed in leather chaps was a surefire way to nab his attention, and if she had been holding a riding crop in her hand, forget about it. But it was more than her apparel that made his heart pound. She was beautiful, in a 1950s pin-up girl kind of way. Black eyeliner rimmed her dark eyes, and her pouty lips were slicked with the deepest shade of red lipstick. The huge belt around her waist highlighted her hourglass figure and her black halter top made her cleavage look a mile deep. Judging by the near-perfect streak of gray that framed her heart-shaped face, he’d guess her dark hair color came from a bottle, but that didn’t matter to him none.
No, what really had him going was her expression. More specifically, what he saw in her expression. There wasn’t a single word that could be used to describe what he saw in the depths of her brown eyes or the line of her lips, but he identified with what must have been going on in her mind when the photographer captured the picture.
It was a look he’d seen many times in the service. That grit of determination to get the job done, even when you knew you were walking into a shit storm with little hope of making it out the other side. It was the look of the resolve you felt when you were doing the right thing, even at the cost of your own life. She had been living on borrowed time and knew it. The signs were there on her face, in the jut of her hip and the tilt of her chin, but her stance said she didn’t give a shit and nothing would keep her from succeeding.
That show of strength in a female got to Thallium like nothing else in the world. The woman in the picture was a goddess, and in another time, another place, Thallium would have gladly fallen to his knees and worshipped her.
But not now. Now he had a job to do, and he had to get his mind off his hardening dick and to the task at hand.
“Athena Argyris,” Steele said. “According to Agent Rodriguez, their code names were Georgia Peach and Avenging Goddess. One guess as to which was which. Nickel, I’m counting on you to bring her in safe and sound.”
“Got it,” she replied with a sharp nod. Her entire focus was on the image on the screen, staring but unseeing as her eyes appeared like dark empty pools in the dim lighting.
Tin watched her from the corner of his eye, and amusement tickled the corner of Thallium’s mouth. Tin thought he hid his feelings well, and for the most part he was successful, except Thallium was a master of observation. He knew what lay below the surface of everyone in his unit.
He knew Tin was a hair’s breadth away from falling for Nickel. Nickel was so deep in her head, they may have all not even existed. Titanium’s nurse, Raine, had a major thing going for her patient, and Thallium’s buddy, Zinc, was more at peace now than at any other time in his life.
His skill at reading people came from being ignored since he began to talk.
So he had a stutter. He wasn’t stupid. But when your father was a prominent doctor, or at least had been, the slight imperfection was deemed a major defect.
The Marines hadn’t treated him much better. After boot camp, the instructors lost the amusement that came from teasing him mercilessly when they failed to rile him. His ability to keep calm in any situation was what made him not only a damn fine Marine, but an excellent mercenary as well.
“We rendezvous back here in twenty minutes,” Steele said. “A minute longer and I will make your lives hell for the next month.”
Yeah, yeah. Steele loved to talk like he was a badass, which he was, but he was too reasonable to be considered hardcore. Chrome, on the other hand, was a crazy motherfucker and one you didn’t poke unless you had a death wish.
With a chorus of oorahs, Thallium, Tin, and Nickel spilled out of the van and disappeared into the darkness while Adamantium and Steele stayed behind to man the getaway vehicles.
On a normal snatch and grab, it would have been Nickel manning the control booth, but since their intended target was female, the thought was a feminine presence on the takedown team would be an asset. The target didn’t know it yet, but the Ghost team was there to save her, not do her harm.
Target. Every time he heard that term on this mission, his right eye twitched. This particular target was a woman, and from what he heard, a badass woman at that.
Athena Argyris was the ex-wife of Nicolai Argyris, former president of El Vengadores motorcycle club. Former being the operative word, since nearly the entire club was arrested and currently on trial for one crime or another.
The Vengadores were mean sons of bitches who were known to have had their fingers in everything. Drugs, extortion, arms dealing—if a buck could be made, the Vengadores were on it.
About a year prior, over two hundred badges from federal, state, and municipal jurisdictions launched the largest takedown of a criminal organization in United States history. Almost every club member was now awaiting trial, if not already convicted, and the ripple effect of the club’s loss upset the entire underground crime syndicate. While the club had fewer than a hundred members, they were well connected members, and the outreach of their influence was still being determined. It could take decades before the investigation was completely over.
And it was all because of one woman.
No one on his team knew why, or at least Poppy wasn’t saying, but for two years, Mrs. Argyris had worked with the ATF, DEA, FBI, and Homeland Security. It was the evidence she provided that shut the club down for good. Now there was a bounty on her head to keep her from testifying in the cases against the top brass, and the major arms dealer, known as Red Wolf, was offering the biggest reward. The Vengadores was key to keeping the route from Dallas to Mexico clear, and they ran weapons on occasion.
Actually, Thallium was surprised a hit hadn’t been called on all of the club’s members in an attempt to keep their traps shut. It spoke to the level of interest Red Wolf had in the club that he was willing to go to such lengths to protect them.
It was that possibility that made the lead agent on the case suspicious. Agent Melinda Rodriguez was a college friend of Steele’s sister, Sarah, and contacted her on the down-low to see if Sarah could hook a girl up with some secret security. She had a suspicion that someone on her team could be bought off, if they hadn’t been already. So now the Ghost team was skulking in the darkness, preparing to kidnap the key witness to one of the biggest cases in the history of organized crime.
Yeah, probably not the smartest mission Titanium assigned them to, which was saying a lot, and Thallium had a hunch that was why Steele was as cranky as a teenage girl with PMS, but they were given their orders, and like always, Thallium would carry them out, no matter the cost.
Too many times he had sold his soul for the mission, and the receipt was written across his body in scars that went beyond skin-deep. Some might find the marks disturbing. To him, they were badges of honor and sacrifice.
A black balaclava protected his face from the slap of tree limbs as he raced from cluster to cluster of ash trees toward the safe house the U.S. marshals had set up just outside Marshall, Texas. Yeah, he got the joke.
The area was flat and consisted of wide-open grassland, sections of forest, and the occasional barbed wire fence just waiting to jump up at you from out of nowhere and grab you by the nuts.
This section of real estate still contained a good chunk of land per parcel, and hadn’t succumbed to the latest trend of being divided into tiny plots where an eighteen-hundred square foot house sat on a piece of land of about the same size. There was plenty of room to spread out, which was what he and his team did as Uranium stationed himself to the north of the house and Tin approached from the west. Steele was due to arrive in the getaway car in fifteen minutes from the east, which left Thallium and Nickel heading for the back door on the south.
A light glowed through the curtains from the upstairs bedroom and another, brighter set illuminated the kitchen windows. He and Nickel crouched behind a set of bushes about thirty yards from the back door and waited for Ant’s signal to move out.
In his ear, there was a soft crackle before Tin’s bass rumbled over the line. “I’m in place.”
Nickel pressed the button on her radio. “Extraction team ready.”
“Stand by, team,” Steele replied. “Ant, cut the power on my signal.”
Just then the house went black, and with the cloud cover obscuring the night sky, they were plunged into a darkness so deep, Thallium couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.
“Did I miss the signal?” Nickel whispered by his side.
“What the fuck?” Steele growled over the line. “I didn’t give the signal.”
“I didn’t cut the power,” Ant shot back. “No one move. Nightwing is picking up something.”
Thallium paused with his hand on his night vision goggles and adjusted the setting with the tip of his finger. In one of the trees behind Nickel, a tree branch shifted, separating into the shape of a two-legged animal.
All of the members of the Elite Metal squads wore uniforms made of fabric that concealed the temperatures of their bodies from thermal detection devices. The only way to tell his team members apart in the complete dark was by the markings on the palms of their gloves.
Whoever was lurking in the shadows was not one of them.
“Seven bogies, I repeat, seven bogies,” Ant said, but Thallium was already on the move.
In the amount of time it took Thallium to shoulder his weapon, the shape revealed a weapon in their hands and had taken aim at the kitchen window. Both of their rifles cracked with gunfire at the same time. The unknown figure dropped from Thallium’s bullet as a smoke canister from the unknown smashed through the window.
More gunfire erupted from the front of the house as Steele’s voice roared in his ear. “More goddamn assassins. Fuck stealth. Get the target. Be out front in two minutes.”
Adrenaline shot through Thallium’s veins and sharpened his senses as he raced toward the back door. A shape popped up out of the shadows to his right and quickly fell as Nickel covered his six.
He paused for all of three seconds as he took an experimental kick at the back door. The thing didn’t give the slightest, just as he expected. If the U.S. marshals had done their job correctly, all of the entrances would be heavily fortified to prevent an easy break-in.
From his pocket, he withdrew a small charger and pressed the activation button before adhering the backside to the lock. He and Nickel took cover on either side of the door as the charge detonated and blew the oak paneled steel to pieces.
“I’ll cover the b-back,” he said and began to bust out more of the back windows in an effort to help ventilate the smoke.
Nickel nodded and disappeared into the gray cloud. A few seconds later, another mini explosion came from the living room. Whether it was one of their own bursting in or another unfriendly was impossible to tell.
“Shit,” he heard Nickel mutter from somewhere in the cloud. “I’m pinned in. Thall!”
“On it.” He switched out his rifle for a pistol and stepped carefully into the house, weapon drawn.
The bright kitchen lights wreaked momentary havoc with his eyes and even though he held his breath, his lungs burned from the smoke. He switched off the night vision option on his goggles and hightailed it up the back stairs, pausing as a shadow fell across the top step before quickly disappearing.
“Ma’am?” he called out. Normally the “m” sound gave him trouble, but he long ago had learned to address a female officer without tripping over his lips. “I’m here to p-protect you.”
The silence that came back was the equivalent of a “Yeah, right,” but he figured it wouldn’t hurt to try to establish contact.
He peered around the corner to find the hallway empty. On the opposite end was the landing to the stairs leading down to the living area. An occasional burst of light preceded the pop of gunfire, but the stairway remained clear.
All of the doors were closed, but he guessed Mrs. Argyris was in the bedroom on the right. The windows of the room on the left had a straight drop to ground level, while the room to the right opened up to the roof of the garage.
Sure enough, as he eased the door open, the window was wide open and the curtains fluttered in the light breeze. Since this wasn’t his first rodeo, he crept into the room with one ear trained to the fight downstairs and the other straining to hear the faintest sound.
A creak from the floorboard was his only warning as a large object flew in his direction, crashing into the wall behind him. He ducked, a leg of the nightstand catching his arm. A flurry of flying fists followed, aimed right at his head. As he moved his arms to block, the attacker kneed him right in his protective cup. The extra lining in his boxers provided some protection against any serious damage to his junk, but the pressure still smarted like a stubbed toe, and the breath whooshed from his lungs. Little white lights danced in his vision and framed the very determined face of Athena Argyris as if she were an ornament on a lit-up Christmas tree.
Fighting the urge to curl into a ball on the floor, he stumbled after Mrs. Argyris as she ran past him without a moment’s pause to see if the coast was clear.
“Careful,” he shouted, and reached out, trying to snag her by the arm, but she dodged his grasp and sprinted for the stairs to the living room.
As Thallium scrambled to his feet, a tall figure dressed in black appeared at the top of the stairs. The unfriendly lifted his weapon, preparing to aim at the woman, but the woman didn’t slow for a second. She lowered her head and ran straight at him. Thallium hit the floor again as Mrs. Argyris plowed into the man before he could get off a shot, riding him down the stairs as if he were a boogie board.
The next few moments played before Thallium’s eyes as if it were a slow motion scene in an action movie—his run to the staircase, Mrs. Argyris scrambling to get off the would-be shooter as he caught her around the hips and rolled, pinning her beneath him. From his holster, the man pulled out a knife and slashed upward, the blade slicing through the flesh of her arm in a burst of blood.
Thallium lifted his weapon and fired just as the attacker raised his arm to strike the deathblow. The man jerked as the bullet pierced his back and he crumpled, trapping Mrs. Argyris under his carcass.
Not bothering with the stairs, Thallium instead jumped to the ground floor and kicked the dead motherfucker to the side to free Mrs. Argyris, who continued to try to crawl away. Damn, the amount of fight the woman had in her was amazing. A trait he found to be hotter than hell.
“Georgia Peach sent us,” he yelled over the sound of gunfire coming from outside. “We’re here to save you.”
That stopped her frantic scrambling. She looked over her shoulder at him with eyes still cloudy with suspicion. “What did you say?”
“Georgia P-Peach sent us. She said you’d need help.”
“Son of a bitch,” she spat and her shoulders slumped. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
“Didn’t give me a chance.” He crouched by her side. “Lay low. We’ll get you out. Steele? Where the fuck are you?”
“Pulling up now,” his commander said over the earpiece. “There’s a bogie on my tail. Ant.”
“On it,” Ant replied.
The roar of a vehicle coming in hot brought Thallium’s attention to the busted-out window. Two sets of headlights about a city block apart bounced wildly as the tires hit the uneven terrain.
“Nickel,” he shouted. “Ride’s here.”
“The rear is clear,” Nickel said as she ran from the kitchen to join him. “Both marshals are down. One dead, the other unconscious in the dining room. Tin is with him now.”
Thallium helped Mrs. Argyris to her feet, making sure to use a gentle touch under her bleeding arm. The sight of the flayed skin made him want to shoot the fucker who hurt her in the head for good measure, but he clenched his teeth and palmed his gun. “Are you ready, ma’am?”
“Sure.” The corner of her lip ticked up, and he felt his lips stretch into an answering smile. She sure was something special.
As they readied themselves by the door, the two SUVs came barreling in their direction. A figure holding what looked like a rocket launcher leaned out of the window of the second car and took aim at the house. Thallium’s muscles tensed as he prepared to throw himself over Mrs. Argyris, but the blur of Ant’s drone flew between Steele’s vehicle and the enemy. A second later, Ant pulled the trigger and launched a rocket attached to the undercarriage of the drone, igniting a fireball that illuminated the night sky as if it were sunrise.
Steele screeched the SUV to a halt before them and shouted, “Move it.”
Tucking Mrs. Argyris under his arm, Thallium ushered her across the small distance and to the back seat of the SUV. The door hadn’t even closed all of the way before Steele slammed on the gas and hurtled them down the drive.
“Stay d-down,” Thallium ordered and pushed her head toward his lap.
“Ant,” Steele shouted over the sound of the roaring engine and stuttered gunfire. “Status.”
“Uranium is engaging with two more bogies west of your location. Tin is with the downed marshal. I’m en route to their location now to provide backup. You’re all clear.”
“Copy. Rendezvous at the clinic on Jones, outside of Deep Ellum. Don’t leave a body behind.”
“Copy,” Ant replied.
Steele looked over his shoulder. “Hang on, boys and girls. Next stop is the clinic.”
A squeeze on his knee drew his attention to the woman sprawled across his lap. Blood continued to gush from her arm and created a wet smear on his pants, but she didn’t make a sound of discomfort as they bounced over the rough terrain. Although they received the all-clear, his finger tightened on his firearm and he plunged his gloved fingers into the thickness of her hair to begin a light massage of her scalp. He needed that connection with her. To confirm she was safe and to relay the message that he was there to protect her.
Within seconds, her grip on his knees relaxed, and she settled across his thighs with a long sigh he felt in his bones. That little sign of trust was both a boost of energy and set off a stirring of desire that brought his senses alive. She was under his care now, and nothing would stop him from keeping her safe.
Nothing.