Chapter 10
Chapter
Ten
BONES
Pain was just a message. You could ignore it, rewrite it, push it down until it sounded like someone else’s voice echoing in your head.
The hard part was remembering why it mattered.
I rolled my shoulder once, slow and sharp, feeling the tendon pop like overstretched wire. Armor plate caught the edge of the impact from the third operator’s burst. Not enough to drop me. Enough to piss me off.
I was pinned behind an old concrete support beam in the maintenance corridor that ran parallel to the storm tunnel. Voodoo and Lunchbox were clear. That part of the op was done. Alphabet had already looped the thermal feeds—they were ghosts.
I was the distraction.
A flare of movement in my peripheral—shadow, gunmetal, movement too clean to be civilian. I pivoted hard, drove my elbow into the oncoming shape, and felt the impact crack bone. Mine or his—I didn’t care.
He hit the ground with a grunt and I put two fast strikes into his throat before he could bring the rifle up.
Three down.
Still one more.
I heard the shift before I saw it—boots on concrete, the telltale rasp of a suppressed bolt sliding into battery.
I didn’t think.
I moved.
Ducked low, rolled into the next alcove, and came up with the backup piece in my hand. The Glock barked once. Twice.
The corridor lit up as a flashbang hit the far end. Not mine.
Shit.
That wasn’t part of the plan.
I dropped flat and covered my face just as it went off. White-hot light. Pressure wave. My ears rang like church bells in a storm.
Footsteps followed.
Heavy. Purposeful. Not like the previous crew—these weren’t operators. These were cleaners.
I pulled my knees under me, pressed back against the wall, eyes still swimming.
Then I saw the silhouette.
Not armor.
A coat. Long, black. Military cut.
He didn’t move like a soldier. He moved like a man who owned the floor under him.
A voice followed.
“Captain.”
Not a question.
Not a command.
Just… acknowledgement.
I forced myself to my feet. Slow. Deliberate.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked, voice rough.
The man stepped closer. He wore gloves. No insignia. No rank. Just the coat and the weight behind his stare.
“Vega,” he said.
Bullshit.
Vega wasn’t a person. Wasn’t a name.
That’s what we’d always told ourselves. It was an operation, a protocol. A codename. Something someone could deny in court.
But this guy—he was walking like someone who didn’t need court.
“You’re late,” I said, flexing my hand. The bleeding hadn’t stopped.
He gave the faintest smile. Not warm. Not cold. Clinical.
“We’re never late. We arrive when the math says we’re needed.”
I didn’t like that phrasing. The math. That wasn’t military talk. That was something else. Something that felt—performative.
“You going to try to take me?” I asked.
The man didn’t answer. Just turned slightly—enough for me to see two more behind him.
Same coats.
Same silence.
Only one of them had blood on their gloves.
“Voodoo still breathing?” I asked.
Another pause.
“Define breathing,” the man said.
That was enough.
I moved.
Fast.
Hard.
No warning.
The Glock was up—but the one with bloodied gloves had already raised something in his hand. A square device. High-frequency pulse emitter. The second it chirped, my world flipped.
My vision crashed. My body locked.
Not pain.
Interruption.
Like my nerves weren’t mine anymore. Worse goddamn taser—ever.
I dropped. Twitched. Fought for control.
The leader crouched next to me.
“You don’t know what you’re carrying, Captain. But you’re going to lead us to it.”
My teeth ground together.
“I’d rather die.”
“Not your choice,” he said calmly.
Then something sharp pricked the side of my neck.
Cold fire raced through my veins.
Blackness surged.
But just before it swallowed me, I heard Alphabet’s voice break into my comms:
“Bones. Say something. You’ve got a tag. They just—Bones—talk to me—”
Too late.
Then—
Silence.
ALPHABET
Pain wasn’t just physical. Sometimes it came through clean audio. A sudden cut. A heartbeat that never got its echo.
“Bones—say something—”
I stared at the waveform. Static. Spike. Then nothing.
I re-routed. Dumped signal through every dirty node I had cached on local infrastructure. Old towers, microwave backhauls, shadow-bandwidth riding shotgun on a grocery store’s security net.
Still nothing.
“Goddamn it—”
The drone feed showed only black. The area where Bones had been lit up with residual infrared, but no moving shapes. No heat sig. They must have used a thermal-dampening field to extract him.
Fuck me, they were fast. Too goddamn fast.
I exhaled, leaned back in the van, and flicked through every feed we had left. Goblin leaned against my leg, his head resting on my thigh. The pressure and the presence helped me to breathe, to keep my cool. Right now, I needed to be thinking. Not reacting.
Dropping my head to Goblin’s head, I scratched him between his ears both to acknowledge him and to comfort myself. It let me take a beat, to refocus—then I saw it.
Not him.
Not Bones.
The man in the coat.
No insignia. No badge. Just presence. The camera caught a half-profile as he passed beneath a flickering exit light.
I snapped a still.
Zoomed. Cleaned. Ran it against every known-face DB I had—including ones we weren’t supposed to have.
Match: Null.
Not "unknown."
Uncatalogued.
Even the system flagged him: “Outside of available scope.”
My hands froze over the keys.
Then I did what I had to do.
Rerouted signal. End-to-end encrypted the file. Then dialed a secure number.
She answered on the second ring.
“AB?” The whisper softness of her voice was a balm. I really fucking hated what I had to do next.
“Gracie,” I said. “It’s me. You need to sit down.”
GRACE
My heart was a pulsing bruise at the tension in Alphabet’s voice. “What happened?”
Despite his warning, I didn’t sit. I hadn’t been able to be still since they’d left three hours earlier after they’d walked me through the plan and after they’d made sure I felt like a part of it, even if I wouldn’t be there.
All four of them were united on this, none of them wanted me there when they went to see O’Rourke. It didn’t matter that O’Rourke wanted a private meeting with Voodoo, it was all of them or none of them.
Voodoo voted to skip it entirely, but Bones disagreed. “We should deal with him and whatever angle he’s working. I don’t want to leave anything behind to ambush us.”
Legend and AB agreed with him, so Voodoo had shifted his gaze to me. “You promise to stay here and not fight us on this?”
Without missing a beat, I’d folded my arms and said, “You promise to brief me so I know what’s happening and when, that way I’m not sitting here paralyzed, not knowing?”
“I will, if he won’t,” AB volunteered. Funnily enough, Bones’ snort and rolled eyes entertained me almost as much as the one-upmanship that the guys engaged in for my briefing.
That amusement carried us—or me at least—through the briefing, then armed with the maps, the GPS, the locations, and their contingencies as well as their plotted schedule, I settled in to wait.
The safehouse was not associated with them directly. It was secured. There was a safe room, that was a fireproof vault if I needed it, and Bones made sure I had a taser and a gun. “Taser first. Then the gun.”
I stared at him. “You want me to tase them down then shoot them?”
“It’s easier to hit a stationary target.” Honestly, I really didn’t know what to do with that deadpan response. Was he serious? Teasing? Both?
Then he kissed me and I forgot about that debate. There was nothing joking about his kiss. It was fierce, breath-stealing, and burned like he was branding me. The intensity had me shaking, just a little before he strode out ahead of the others.
“Always knew he’d be the dramatic one,” Voodoo told me with a wink, but he left me with his own firm kiss before he followed Bones, then Legend, and finally AB.
They were all so different and yet, they fit.
The four of them together were so very much a team, it was hard to picture them without each other.
That they functioned as a unit without Doc made sense to me, because I really didn’t know Doc. Yet, at the same time, when he was there, he slotted right in. They had a bond I couldn’t truly fathom, yet that bond didn’t exclude me.
From the beginning, they’d been protective. Then they’d encircled me and wrapped me up in the shield of their team. I was still very much in the cosseted heart of the team, but I was also a part of the team.
“Bones is down,” AB said, the grim words and tone yanking me into the brutal present.
The air pressure change that made your ears pop when bad news was coming seemed to muffle everything. Those three words played on a violent loop in my head.
No breath
No sound.
Just the walls closing in.
“He’s dead?”
“No, Gracie,” AB said, his tone gentling immediately. “No, he’s—he was taken.”
“By who?” How could they have taken him? Bones was—they were all tough, but Bones was so hard. So damn fierce. The idea that anyone could hurt him seemed impossible and at the same time, I wanted to rain fire down on whoever had hurt him. “What are we doing to get him back? What can I do?”
VOODOO
I kicked a metal crate across the floor of the garage. It hit the far wall with a crash. Lunchbox didn’t flinch. Alphabet’s voice still hung in the air from the comms.
They took Bones.
That phrase hadn’t even finished settling into my bloodstream yet. My hands were clenched. I didn’t even remember balling them. Even as I blew out a breath, I forced my hands to uncurl and focused my attention on O’Rourke.
“How much?”
“Not enough to set you up,” he said, not even pretending to misunderstand my question.
“Then why the isolated meet and greet?” Lunchbox asked, his voice as cold and remote as it ever got. Of the four of us, he was probably the most human—most of the time. I played the part almost professionally. While Alphabet seemed the more relaxed of the two, his humor hid a well of pain.
Bones was the hard ass. He was the one who knew when to break jaws and when to pull the punches. He kept us centered. And he never blinked even when the mission went to hell. No matter what happened, Bones would come for us and we damn well knew it.
“To let you know there was a threat,” O’Rourke said flatly. “I knew you wouldn’t come alone. The backup was supposed to make sure none of you got dead.” His expression tightened. “To be clear, as far as I knew, they wanted you specifically, Voodoo. Not Bones.”
I shrugged. It didn’t really matter who they wanted. It mattered why. It mattered where. It mattered who the fuck they were… Those were the things that mattered.
Whatever we were chasing before—shadows, echoes, cover-ups—none of it mattered anymore. The thought scraped through me like a wipeout on asphalt. Grace mattered. That meant her sister mattered.
But they had Bones.
“How is Vega a person?” It was an operational protocol. Not an individual.
“Shifting priorities up the chain. Assignment of resources. Retasking wetwork and specialist teams. Black ops.” O’Rourke shrugged. “You know how it goes.”
A headache pulsed behind my eye.
“I told Grace,” Alphabet said as he came back on comms. “She’s holding steady, but we need to check back in with her in thirty. Where are we doing this?”
“You have eyes on him at all?” Lunchbox asked.
“Not yet.” Alphabet’s response was clipped. “I sent the activation code for his tracker. We’ll have something in an hour.”
Unless they planned for that contingency and managed to block the signal. I could practically see the same thought streaming through Lunchbox’s eyes. We could only deal with it when it came. At the moment, I was in charge.
Bones was down. That left me in command.
“Pick us up,” I told Alphabet. “Tell her to get ready. We’ll divert if necessary.”
No cutting her out. But if we got actionable intel beforehand, we were going to take it and run.
“Is he picking all of us up?” O’Rourke asked, pulling my attention back to him. His hands were still secured behind him, and his expression resolute. Still a soldier.
“You know what comes next,” I told Lunchbox and he nodded once.
“Wha—” O’Rourke didn’t get to finish asking the question. Lunchbox knocked him out with one hard punch. The man went down like a ton of bricks.
Shaking his hand once, Lunchbox grunted. “That felt good.”
“Secure him.” Because he was going. “And scan him.” We weren’t taking any other trouble back with us. We had one job right now.
We would get our brother back.