Eight

 

KYLE

 

“Jared is coming,” I told the rest of the Ghosts watching a variety of looks and emotions cross the faces of my team mates.

Jared was my number three in the military, an independent contractor like us, but also a lone wolf. At one point, I had trusted him with my life, but then something changed and I found myself watching him closely and no longer giving him the trust that he once had. There was nothing specific that I could put my finger on, but my gut didn’t normally steer me wrong. Judging by the look on their faces, the rest of the team felt the same.

I had two reasons for inviting him today, actually, no, make that three. Firstly, I wanted to see if the feeling I was getting was constant and if I felt the crawling sensation while we were on home ground working together. Secondly, he was bringing my new TAC-50 rifle that a friend in the Canadian Special Forces had gotten for me. I was going to use it when we went in for Piper. Thirdly, I had spoken this morning with Cookie, one of Wolf’s men. His wife had been a victim of human trafficking so he kept himself up to date with what was going on and gave me intel and helped when I needed it. We discussed my worry about Jared and he’d told me to keep my friends close, but my enemies closer.

I knew inside me, without a doubt, that Jared was up to something. Maybe he was stealing from the military, maybe he was cutting back and putting us on the front line instead of himself…maybe anything really. There were a billion things that could be going on, so I needed to try and resolve that because I knew that I’d be called back to the pits soon.

I needed to make sure that the eyes on my back weren’t the ones that stuck a knife into it.

 

JAGGER

 

I sat still watching as Preacher struggled to absorb what I’d just told him. I felt like shit breaking Kyle’s trust and telling him all of it, but he needed to know and he really fucking needed to talk to her.

“She…” his voice broke and he swallowed audibly. “My baby…”

He suddenly stood up and roared. I just stood up and jumped out of the way in time as he flipped his desk in anger. It was an old one made of solid wood  and normally took two guys to move, so him flipping it solo was freaky as shit.

Stalking over to the wall, he punched it repeatedly leaving holes and cracks in it.

“Preach,” I tried to say it as loudly as I could without yelling. “Stop!” He was breathing hard, almost like he was about to pass out.

“I failed her, Jagger,” I could only just hear what he said.

“No, you didn’t. How could you know what she was doing to her?” Kyle’s mom was a well-known manipulative bitch. She’d been trying to start a war between us and another MC an hour away from us. Thankfully, Preacher had found out and had put an end to it. The day that she killed herself, he’d laid it all out for her in his office and she’d threatened to kill Kyle. Preacher had told her that she was to get her shit and disappear or he’d make sure she did. He’d known that she was a psychotic bitch, but how would he have known what she was doing to Kyle?

“What do I do?” His voice sounded absolutely tortured as he moved away from me toward a table with a variety of bottles on it. Picking up a bottle of whisky, he pulled the top off it and took a pull before putting it back down again.

“Tell her the truth, Preacher. She needs to know.”

Nodding his head, he looked at the floor. “I’m going to lose her.”

I had the same worry, but I was going to fight for her and he needed to, as well. Before I could say anything though, Duke came through the door without knocking and with one word let us know that the shit was on.

“Church!”

 

 

We were all sitting in Church discussing this guy Demingo when Duke came back in and threw some papers on the table.

“We found some shit,” he said in a hard voice.  Picking up the papers, we passed them around after we read them.

Kyle had been quiet as she read, but I could feel her stiffening beside me. She leaned over and grabbed a couple of papers that Data placed on the table. He just kept finding more.

“Son of a fucking bitch,” Kai gasped. “He did it.”

“It appears that old Demingo was the head of the Diavoli cartel” Duke ground out. “He worked his way to the top, starting a year before he joined the FBI. Once he had his position within the FBI, he used it to become ‘el jefe’. With the combined power and authority, he basically had control of one of the major routes from Argentine to the USA.”  That kind of power was insane. Normally, traffickers and cartels worked separately and away from each other. There were instances where they did work together, but the power was distributed amongst a lot of them. The most powerful ones had a bigger amount of territory and control, but it was centered around one cartel. Demingo had been working from the American government so the power and authority he had would have been huge. How the fuck did no one pick up on this?

“What does that have to do with us?” Hunter’s guy Noah asked. “We didn’t shop him to the higher ups, we never got the chance. Just as we were about to fuck him up, the bastard burst into flames. So, why the fuck is he doing this now?” He had been focused on our insider, Bo, since we found out she was in there and there was a controlled fire burning inside him that was getting hotter with every second that passed. Hunter looked like he had the same.

“It’s not just now,” Hunter rasped.

“Well, nothing like this has happened before now, so obviously, it is,” another of Hunter’s guys, Elijah, snapped.

I saw the look that Hunter shot Kai, before his head dropped into his hands and his shuddering breaths filled the room.

“He planned the bomb,” Noah growled in disbelief as he looked at the piece of paper in front of him. “He paid that fucking bitch to put her babies in the car and hit the button,” he roared, jumping up and throwing the chair that he’d been sitting in against the wall. On their final tour, Hunter and his team had been out in their vehicles when a lady had detonated a bomb in her car with her little kids in there too. Lives had been lost and lives had been changed forever as a result.

Dragon stood watching with his arms crossed. He was the most astute President that I’d ever come across and his expression didn’t change as all of this happened in the most sacred room of his MC. He knew that none of us would react like this if it wasn’t warranted, and with what Noah had just revealed, we were lucky it was just a plastic and metal chair.

“He also planned that RPG attack on us a couple of months before that,” Kai added. I saw the weasel, Jared, lift his head and look at her. I would have expected disbelief, but instead his eyes narrowed slightly and if I wasn’t mistaken he looked like he was trying not to smile. Neither myself or Preacher trusted this fuck and I was gonna get to the bottom of it and find out why.

“You can’t be fucking serious,” one of Valiant, Blake, said disbelievingly. “He had his freedom, he wasn’t bound to the government anymore. He can fucking move in any way that he wants now and isn’t under the microscope. What the fuck does he want with us?”

“Revenge,” Kai said in the most monotone voice that I’d ever heard. “He lost the power that working for the government gave him, too. Now he’s answering to other people and having to work with other cartels. He wants to prove his strength and get that power back.”

“What does he have planned?” Mace, the guy whose girlfriend and sister had been kidnapped asked. The guy was in a fucking state and I fucking felt for the guy. If it was Kyle in her shoes and I’d gotten that photo…I’d be a psycho. “What is he going to do?”

I watched as Duke rubbed his chin and thought through it all. Mace was visibly trying to control his anger as Duke did this; he wanted answers now, and if anyone in his shoes said they’d react differently they’d be fucking lying.

“I don’t think that they intend to do anything to Ava and Gia,” he said, talking about Mace’s sister and woman. “We know that he has another woman from the area, Scarlett, and that she had been working when she was taken. Ava and Gia, however, had been in your home together,” he paused and tried to figure out how best to explain it. Duke was one of the best at analyzing and planning, so I hoped that these guys fucking listened. He’s helped us out numerous times over the years that I’d been a part of Preacher’s chapter. “In criminal psychology, that would be viewed as a possible multi-motive move. Ava and Gia were undoubtedly aimed at you, but Scarlett wasn’t involved with them and is of no huge relevance to you apart from being a passing friend to you and close friend to Ava,” he trailed off and it all clicked.

“Scarlett is aimed at someone else,” Hunter whispered before I could. “Someone who holds her as valuable to them, that Demingo is trying to make a point to.”

There were a couple of questions about people that I didn’t know thrown about and I noticed that the table almost split off into little groups to discuss this revelation as it affected us all in different ways.

“Or,” Duke interrupted, “someone requested that she be taken to make a point to this person. We can’t discredit the possibility of this being a job for someone, too.”

“That actually makes more sense,” one of the guys with Mace, Coleman, nodded before explaining about the issues going on in their home town and how someone was after two of the families there. It sounded like a fucking shit storm.  “Maybe Scarlett means something to them?” He asked, talking about the person responsible for the injuries.

“Fuck me, this just gets worse,” Hunter groaned and I nodded. Sitting back, watching and listening, was my MO. It’s amazing the amount of information and insight you can get doing that. This group was so diverse that listening was the only way to understand the problem as a whole instead of as fractured little pieces.

“So, how do we find them?” Mace asked. “And why are they including me in this shit?” I’d been asking myself the same question. He didn’t seem involved in the same way as the rest of us.

“You were part of the raid in 2014,” Kai explained and it suddenly made sense. He was a former Marine.

Mace lost his shit and started punching the hole that Noah had made with the chair in the wall. The guy who was with him, Coleman, grabbed him and held his arms to his body so that he couldn’t throw any more punches while the rest of us sat still. We all understood the emotions riding him and the feeling of anger from being helpless to fix the shit that was going on, but I agreed with the guy stopping him. He wouldn’t be any good to his sister and woman with a fucked-up hand.

“We’re gonna find them,” he growled at Mace and then turned to Hunter. “We’re going to find all of them. But you need to calm the fuck down, Mace.” Mace’s head was hanging as he panted. “What good are you gonna fucking be if you’re out of your damn mind or have a broken hand because you’ve been an asshole? No fucking good is what. Now get yourself together.”

The sound of Kyle’s phone ringing broke the silence that followed Mace’s meltdown. “It’s Bo,” she said, the tone of her voice giving away a little bit of the anxiety she was feeling.

The room went completely silent as Kyle spoke to her putting a plan in place. We split into two groups; one for Mace to retrieve Ava, Gia and Scarlett, and the other going after Piper.

 

KYLE

 

I watched through the sight on my new rifle as Bo dragged Piper out of the building. In seconds, Demingo’s assholes had been shooting at them and trying to get them back. I’d provided cover, taking down as many as I could, but I hadn’t been able to get Bo out safely and she’d been shot. We got Piper out, but Bo was gone when we got there and Piper was in such a bad way, that we had to get her to the ER immediately.

Noah wasn’t holding up well, which was to be expected, but he knew that we’d go back and get her; no man got left behind.

Sitting in the waiting room while they worked on Piper to save her life was hard. There was a huge group of us and you could have heard a pin drop; we were that quiet. We were pros at this kind of shit and had cleaned the camouflage paint off our faces before entering the hospital grounds after Hunter had taken Piper in. There would be enough questions about what happened and any attention that we brought to our involvement in it, increased the risk of the traffickers finding out our names.

We’d gotten word that Mace had Gia, Ava and Scarlett safe and sound. A friend of theirs tracked them down and they’d been at their location within hours of us going after Piper. One of the guys guarding them had been wearing an explosive vest, but Mace was almost as good as I was, with his sniper skills so he’d been given the task of taking him out. If he placed a shot while he was near the girls and the vest had been triggered, it would have taken them out too, so he had to wait for the guy to head to the woods to take a piss to do it.

In the days that followed, we waited for news that Piper was out of the ICU. She’d been hurt by a glass days before she was taken and it had become infected. The conditions she was kept in meant that it turned to septicemia so she had been really ill, but she was turning a corner.

Duke and I discussed a plan of action with our team and the Knights; Jagger and Preacher weren’t happy about it, but it was a case of tough shit.

We had gotten some information on a property where some of Demingo’s men were stationed. We’d gone in and eleven of his men had been neutralized, two of which were key players in his operation. We sent a photo from one of their phones to the asshole in question, knowing full well it would hit the mark. The photo showed their bodies scattered around the room with the bricks of cocaine and laundered money burning in the corner. The men from the Knights had picked up the weapons and an anonymous drop off to the authorities had followed the mission.

This morning there had been a brief mention of it on the news, basically saying that there were bodies found that were identified from a letter that had ‘apparently’ blown away from the property and had gotten stuck in a bush far away enough from the fire for it to have not caught fire. In the letter, it outlined that they were a gay cult headed by a Jose Demingo who had shamed their families and the good Lord above by engaging in drug fueled orgies. Because of this, and to repent for their sins, they’d committed suicide while Demingo was away picking up things for them.

We may or may not have been responsible for the story and the fact that it was sent to various news channels and publications throughout Central and South America. I knew full well that Demingo took his dick seriously and that he thought he was the man.

We’d recovered some photos of him from security cameras in different locations and had been able to study him in more detail and at all angles. It looked like someone wasn’t looking as pretty as he used to, a bit sort of like something out of a horror movie. His face looked like it had been melted down one side. On top of that, with the news travelling fast that a man with his name was running homosexual orgy cults…it fucking sucked to be him. But if we pissed him off enough, maybe he’d come out to play?