Chapter 006 Ballistic
Stallion didn’t yell. Yelling was for men who needed volume to command respect. Stallion just vibrated.
He circled the leather chair behind his desk like a caged rottweiler, the air in the office thick enough to chew. It smelled of stale coffee, gun oil, and the sharp, ozone tang of Alpha rage. A heatmap about to go white hot.
I stood at parade rest in the center of the Persian rug. Feet shoulder-width apart. Hands clasped behind the small of my back. Eyes fixed on a knot in the pine paneling behind his head. The military drilled the flinch out of you in basic, but the wolf in my chest didn't give a shit about drill sergeants. It paced under my ribs, snarling, wanting to tear out the throat of anything that threatened our new objective.
*Protection. Mate. Kill.*
I locked my jaw. *Stand down,* I told the beast. *This is family.*
Breach stood next to me, posture looser, but his eyes were tight. He knew we’d crossed a line. We’d gone dark. We’d run an op in Houston without clearing it through the table, and now we were paying the tax.
Stallion stopped pacing. He planted his palms on the mahogany desk, leaning forward until his shoulders hunched up around his ears. A vein in his temple throbbed, a steady, dangerous beat.
“At what point,” Stallion said, voice low and scraping like gravel over glass, “did y’all decide that the chain of command in this club was, what, a fuckin’ suggestion?”
Silence. The grandfather clock in the corner ticked loud enough to sound like gunfire.
“We had actionable intel,” Breach said. Attempting to de-escalate. Brave. Stupid.
Stallion’s head snapped toward him. “I don’t give a shit if you had the nuclear launch codes tattooed on a stripper’s ass, Breach. You went off the grid. You took a patch into hostile territory without backup. Without a sitrep.” He straightened, the leather of his cut creaking. “If the cartel had been watching? If the Rogues had been tracking your exhaust?”
“We ran counter-surveillance,” I said. My voice was flat. Tactical. “Route was clean.”
“That’s not the point, Ballistic!” Stallion slammed a hand against a stack of files. Dust motes danced in the morning light streaming through the blinds. “You are Iron Valor. You don’t move alone. You don’t bleed alone. And you sure as shit don’t start wars I don’t know about.”
He was right. Tactically, strategically, he was right. My wolf didn’t care. My wolf was still back in that VIP room, smelling the fear on Sloane’s skin, tasting the copper of her blood and the salt of her tears. The memory hit me like a physical blow—the way she’d flinched, the scars on her knee, the hollow, haunted look in eyes that should have been bright.
My hands tightened behind my back until the knuckles popped.
Stallion saw the shift. His eyes narrowed, amber flashing in the irises. “You’ve been off since you got back. Jumpy. Distracted. Now, I want to know what the hell happened in Houston that was worth risking my VP and my best shooter.”
He waited. The air pressure in the room dropped.
I could carry the secret. I could lie, fabricate a recon report, claim we were chasing a lead on the supply chain. But Stallion was Pack Alpha. He’d smell the deception on me like cheap cologne. And I needed the club. I needed the resources. I couldn't extract Sloane and Macy with a glock and a prayer. I needed an army.
I broke stance. Just enough to look him in the eye.
“Sloane,” I said.
Stallion frowned. “The dancer? The lead?”
“She’s not a lead anymore.” I took a breath, letting the scent of the clubhouse—sawdust, leather, brotherhood—ground me against the feral panic rising in my gut. “Sloane is my fated mate.”
The words hung in the air. Heavy. Absolute.
Breach shifted his weight, looking at the floor, waiting for the explosion.
It didn't come.
The silence that followed wasn't the silence of violence. It was the vacuum of sudden, total shock. Stallion stared at me. He blinked, once, twice. The rage drained out of his posture so fast it was like someone cut his strings. He sank into his chair, the leather groaning under his weight, and scrubbed a hand down his face.
“Fuck me,” he whispered.
“Roger that,” Breach muttered under his breath.
Stallion looked up at the ceiling, as if asking a higher power why his life had to be this complicated. “Why?” he asked the plaster. “Why the hell can’t a female wolf in the state of Texas ever meet her mate like a normal goddamn person, huh? Grocery store. Library. Tinder. Why’s it always got to be a rescue mission involving cartels and psychopaths?”
“Fate has a sense of humor,” I said. My voice was tight. “She’s trapped, boss. Krueger owns her. Debt contract. He’s... he’s hurt her.”
The temperature in the room plunged again, but this time, the heat wasn't directed at me. Stallion’s gaze snapped back to mine, and the leader was back. The father. The Alpha.
“How bad?”
“Bad.” I didn’t elaborate. I couldn’t. If I let myself describe the scars on her knee or the way she smelled like pain, I’d lose the tactical detach I needed to function. “She’s bonded to me. We triggered it. The pull is... active.”
Stallion nodded slowly. He knew the lore. He knew what happened when a male found his mate and couldn't claim her. It was a slow form of insanity. A biological imperative that would eventually override every ounce of discipline I had.
“Okay.” Stallion leaned forward, elbows on the desk, hands clasped. “Okay. This changes the ROE.”
“I need an extraction team,” I said. “I need intel on Krueger’s operation. We need to find her sister, Macy. That’s the leverage he’s using to keep her compliant.”
Stallion held up a hand. “You’re going to run this op, Ballistic. You know the ground. You know the target.”
Relief hit me so hard my knees almost buckled. “Thank you, boss.”
“But,” he cut in, voice hard as iron, “you’re going to do it my way. That means no more cowboy shit. You check in every two hours. You use the team. You don’t make a move without my go-ahead until we have a solid extraction plan. If you go rogue again, I will bench you. Mate or no mate. Am I clear?”
“Crystal.”
Stallion stood up and walked around the desk. He stopped in front of me, a wall of muscle and denim. He reached out and gripped my shoulder, a heavy, grounding weight.
“She’s family now,” he said quietly. “We protect our own. Go get with Sawyer. Find me something I can use to burn Krueger’s world down.”
***
The sun was blinding when we stepped out of the main building. Just regular, Saturday morning Texas sun, baking the asphalt of the compound, indifferent to the fact that my world had tilted on its axis.
I needed it to be raining. Or night. Something that matched the static noise in my head.
“You looked like you were gonna stroke out in there,” Breach said, tossing his keys in his hand. He headed toward his truck. “I thought I was gonna have to shoot him to save you.”
“Stallion wouldn’t have shot me.”
“Maybe. He looked like he wanted to bite someone.” Breach unlocked the door of his lifted Silverado. “Tech room at my place. Sawyer’s been diving into the data you pulled from the club’s WiFi while you were busy making eyes at the girl.”
I climbed into the passenger seat. “I wasn’t making eyes. I was assessing the asset.”
Breach snorted, starting the engine. “Right. Assessing. With your tongue. I saw the way you looked when you came out of that room in Houston, brother. You looked like you’d seen God and God was wearing stripper heels.”
I ignored him. I stared out the window as the landscape blurred by—scrub brush, barbed wire, dust. My wolf was scratching at the door of my mind, demanding we turn the truck around, go back to the city, go to the high-rise. Kill the threat. Take her.
*Patience,* I told it. *Intel first. Then violence.*
Breach’s place was a few miles from the main compound—a sprawling ranch-style house that looked normal from the front but housed a server farm in the back that could rival the NSA.
We walked in through the garage. The air was cool, conditioned to a precise sixty-eight degrees for the machines. It smelled of ozone, hot electronics, and bacon.
“Incoming!” a voice yelled from the other room.
A blur of black and tan fur hit me at waist level. Rocket. Sawyer’s Malinois. The dog had a tail like a jet turbine and a tongue like a wet sandpaper belt.
“Hey, buddy.” I scratched him behind the ears. He whined, leaning his entire weight against my leg, sniffing frantically at my jeans. He smelled her on me. Dogs always knew.
“Traitor,” Sawyer called out. She was sitting in a swivel chair surrounded by six monitors, her feet propped up on the desk, a half-eaten bagel in one hand. She wore an oversized band t-shirt and glasses thick enough to stop a bullet. “I feed him, I walk him, I pick up his poop. You show up once a week and suddenly I’m invisible.”
“Somebody missed his boyfriend,” Breach said, grabbing a chair and spinning it around to straddle it. “Breach is late with his breakfast again.”
“Don’t talk about yourself in the third person. It’s creepy.” Sawyer spun her chair to face us. Her expression sobered when she saw my face. “Okay. Playtime’s over. You guys look like you just came from a funeral.”
“Stallion know’s,” I said, walking over to the bank of screens. “We’re clear to operate.”
Sawyer let out a low whistle. “Bold strategy, Cotton. Did he kill you?”
“Only a little,” Breach said.
“What do you have?” I asked, leaning over her shoulder.
Sawyer adjusted her glasses and tapped a key. The screens flared to life, maps and spreadsheets cascading across the digital real estate. “Okay, so you know that data packet you sniffed out of the Eyrie’s network? It was encrypted, but the encryption was... bored. Like they didn't think anyone would actually look.”
She pointed to a spiderweb of lines connecting various logos.
“Krueger has a holding company. ‘Savage Garden Enterprises.’ Sounds like a bad goth band, I know. That company owns the club, the land it sits on, and a few shell LLCS in the Caymans.”
“Standard money laundering,” I noted. “Clean the cash from the dancers, funnel it back.”
“That’s what I thought at first. Standard dirt. Tax evasion. But then...” She highlighted a red line that snaked away from the main cluster. “I found a recurring payment to something called ‘Horizon’s Reach LLC.’ It’s a logistics firm based out of the Port of Houston.”
My gut tightened. “Logistics?”
“Shipping,” Sawyer corrected. “International freight. Mostly to Southeast Asia. Korea, Thailand, the Philippines. Now, why would a strip club in Texas be paying five figures a month to a shipping company that moves industrial machinery?”
“They aren’t shipping machinery,” I said. The realization was a cold stone in my stomach.
“Bingo.” Sawyer tapped the screen again. A manifesto popped up. Grainy scans of shipping documents. “On paper, they’re moving heavy equipment parts. Generators. Turbines. Stuff that doesn't get opened often because it’s a pain in the ass to inspect. But look at the container specs.”
She zoomed in.
“Double-walled,” Breach muttered. “Insulated.”
“And vented,” Sawyer added quietly. “With power hookups for ‘climate control.’ They’re modified reefer units. But the manifests don’t list perishables.”
I stared at the screen. The numbers blurred. *20 units. Monthly recursions.*
“They’re moving people,” I said. My voice sounded distant, like it was coming from someone else. “He’s not just buying debt slaves. He’s exporting them.”
“Twenty to thirty a month,” Sawyer said. Her playfulness was gone. Her face was pale in the monitor glow. “And it gets worse. Horizon’s Reach isn’t just some shady startup. I dug into their board of directors. Most of them are ghosts—fake names, dead social security numbers. But I found a signature on a lease agreement for a warehouse in the port.”
She brought up an image. A scrawl of a signature that looked jagged, angry.
“I ran it through the database. Cross-referenced with occult symbols because, well, we live in Dairyville.” She looked at me, eyes wide behind the lenses. “It’s a sigil. A proxy mark for a Greater Demon.”
“Vorgath,” I said. The name tasted like ash.
Sawyer nodded. “Vorgath. The Shadow King. Whatever you want to call him. He’s the silent partner in Horizon’s Reach. Krueger is feeding him.”
“Feeding him souls? Or feeding him product?” Breach asked, his voice hard.
“Both,” I said. I pushed off the desk and paced the small room. Rocket trotted after me, sensing the spike in adrenaline.
It wasn't just a pimp running a hustle. It was a pipeline. A consecrated supply chain feeding the worst kinds of darkness this side of the veil. And Sloane was right in the middle of it. If Krueger decided she was more valuable as export than as an earner... if he decided to ship her out...
I’d never find her. Once she was in a container, on a Maersk freighter in the middle of the Pacific, she was gone.
“We need to hit them,” Breach said. “Torch the warehouse. Sink the ships.”
“No,” I said instantly. “We hit the warehouse, Krueger goes to ground. He moves the girls. He kills the evidence. We lose them.”
I stopped pacing and looked at the map again. The red pins glowed like infected wounds on the city grid.
“We need the schedule,” I said. My mind shifted into mission mode. The fear receded, replaced by the cold, clear logic of the hunt. “We need to know when the next shipment is. Who is on it. And we need to know where Macy is.”
“I’m working on Macy,” Sawyer said, typing furiously again. “If she’s in the system, I’ll find her. But Krueger keeps his personal assets offline. She might be at a private residence.”
“Keep digging.” I stared at the location of the Eyrie. “Dig into the property records for Krueger’s personal estates. Anything off the books. Hunting leases. Safe houses.”
“On it.”
I walked over to the window. The Texas sky was vast and empty.
Breach came up beside me. “We’ll get her, Jade. We’ve got the scent now. Vorgath’s empire has more layers than a good lasagna, but we’re going to eat through it.”
“I don’t want to eat through it,” I murmured. “I want to burn it.”
My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from a number I didn’t have saved, but I knew the area code. It was the realtor I’d contacted three months ago, back when I thought I was just looking for a place to store my gear, maybe a workshop.
*Lot on County Road 404 is still available. Owner dropped the price.*
I tapped the attachment. A photo of a patch of dirt. Just weeds, a few scrub oaks, and a rusted fence line. It was nothing. Just dirt.
But I closed my eyes, and for a second, I didn't see the dirt. I saw a porch. A wrap-around porch with a swing. I saw bluebonnets in the spring. I saw a woman with dark hair and legs that went on forever, sitting there with a cup of coffee, not looking over her shoulder. Not flinching.
A white picket fence. The cliché of it almost made me laugh, but the ache in my chest was too real.
For five years, I’d been a weapon. A tool for the MC. I lived in the barracks, I slept on a cot, I ate MREs or diner food. I hadn't wanted a home because a home was something you could lose.
But looking at that picture... for the first time in five years, I believed in it. I could build it. I could fortify it. I could make it safe enough for her.
I texted back. *I’ll take it. Cash.*
I slipped the phone back into my pocket.
“What was that?” Breach asked.
“Just... future ops,” I said.
“Right. Future ops.” Breach slapped my back. “Let’s get some chow. You can’t kill demons on an empty stomach, and Sawyer’s got bagel crumbs all over the intel.”
“Hey!” Sawyer protested.
I looked at the map one last time. Vorgath. Krueger. The double-walled containers.
*I’m coming,* I pushed the thought out, hoping the bond could carry it across the miles to the city. *Hold on, Sloane. I’m coming.*
My wolf settled, just a fraction. He had a target. He had a pack. And now, he had a plan.
The hunt was on.