Chapter 24
CALLEN’S WORLD NARROWED TO those three words. They took her. Everything else—the grit in the air, the metallic sting of blood, even the senator’s sharp inhale—faded into static behind the roaring in his ears.
The other two looked like shit, Elvis bleeding from the temple, Gage looking like someone beat the shit out of him. He knew they gave their all. It just wasn’t enough.
Behind the others, two more SUVs pulled up, and Sage and Abbie stepped out into the humid night. He heard the senator leave his vehicle, but didn’t have time to worry about him.
He closed the distance between Elvis and Gage in three strides, grabbing Elvis by the arm before he could stumble further. “Who took her? When? How did it happen?”
“Two vehicles ambushed us,” Elvis rasped, clearly in pain. “Boxed us in. Black Suburban and some panel van. Alabama plates. They were well-coordinated, Callen. Ran us down like we were nothing.”
Gage coughed behind him, a sharp wince on his face. “We fought. I swear to God, Callen. We fought until we dropped, but there were too many, and they out-gunned us.”
Callen’s fists clenched as panic coursed through every fiber of his being. “And Meaghan?”
“Held her own,” Gage’s jaw ticked. “Kicked like hell, screamed like hell. But they still got her. There were just too many of the bastards.”
The senator shoved his way between them, spinning on Callen. “This is what your protection looks like? I told you to bring her to D.C. for this very reason. They took my daughter because of you!”
Narrowing his eyes, Callen took a step toward the man, his voice a low, rumbling growl.
“You want to point fingers? Maybe start with the man who shook hands with the devils who took her and thought the house of cards you built wouldn’t collapse around you.
This is your mess, Harrington. You just didn’t expect it to touch your family.
People like you never think of anyone but themselves, and now Meaghan’s paying the price for it. ”
The senator flushed, hand tightening into a fist. “You’ve always been a screwup. This is just another instance to prove I’ve always been right about you. You’re not a soldier. You’re a bloody mercenary.”
“No, what I am is someone who has to come in and clean up after fuck-ups like you.”
“Enough!” Elvis barked, his voice like gravel ground through a blender. “This isn’t helping, and we’re wasting time. You want to throw punches, then do it later. But right now, Meaghan’s out there, probably scared out of her mind, and we’re still standing here twiddling our thumbs.”
Callen exhaled through his nose, long and hard, reining it in. Elvis was right. He could kick the senator’s ass later. Right now, he needed to find Meaghan and get her back to safety. “What do we know?”
Elvis nodded once. “That’s better. And Dane’s already got the gears in motion. He’s sending Hawk and Grim to meet us, and we’ve got Sage and Abbie.”
Just then the two redheads stepped up, Sage’s hands in her pockets. “We picked up your SUV in Live Oak and were heading home when we got the call.”
“Don’t worry, Callen,” Abbie said. “We’ll get your girl back.”
Elvis crossed his arms across his chest. “And Blaze is tracking the highway cams, traffic feeds, anything around where they hit us.”
Callen’s eyes flicked back toward the SUV, heart pounding like war drums as he shoved his hands on his hips. “What about the necklace?” He turned his gaze to Elvis. “I gave her a necklace at the motel. Was she still wearing it?”
The senator scoffed. “You’re worried about some gift you gave my daughter right now?”
He ignored the older man. “Tell me she was still wearing it.”
Gage made a slow bob of his head. “Yeah, she was still wearing it as far as I know.”
Elvis stared at him. “Just why are you worried about a necklace at a time like this?”
A flicker of desperate hope sparked in his chest. “Because I didn’t just give her a necklace. I gave her a tether.”
Elvis’s eyes went wide as a slow chuckle rumbled out of him. “You put a tracker in it.”
Callen nodded. “One of our micros.” He reached into his pocket for his phone. “It’s built into the clasp. Undetectable unless you knew it was there.”
Gage whistled. “She’s going to be pissed after she thanks you for it.”
“At least she’ll be alive.” He hit Blaze’s contact, pacing hard, his boots echoing off the treeline. “Pick up, pick up—”
“Yo,” Blaze answered on the third ring. “If you’re calling to see if I’ve found anything on cams, you’re going to be disappointed.”
“Actually, I gave Meaghan a necklace,” Callen said, the words rushing out of him as he placed a hand to the back of his head. “I put a tracker, one of ours, inside the clasp. You should be able to ping it for a location.”
“You sneaky bastard. That was smart, but damn I don’t want to be in your shoes when she finds out.”
“You’re not the first to tell me that. Now, can you ping it?”
“Already on it,” Blaze said, keys clicking in the background. “Give me… thirty seconds. Maybe less. Would have definitely been less if you had given me a heads up, so I could have had it on standby.”
“I wasn’t exactly planning on her getting taken.” He turned to Elvis. “Get the senator back in the car. We’re taking him with us.”
Roger scoffed. “Like hell you are. I’m a goddamn senator. You’ll be charged with kidnapping.”
“Then we can share cells.” Callen turned, glaring at the senator as he waited for Blaze to give him an answer.
“You think I won’t drag you there? After everything?
If you want her safe, you come. If you want to stay and rot in your marble tower, be my guest. But know this—if she dies, you’ll answer to me. ”
He didn’t wait for a reply. He left Elvis and Gage to get Roger Harrington into the SUV as he paced in a small line back and forth, waiting for Blaze.
Gage grunted, helping Elvis with the senator, both of them limping but too proud to admit the depth of their pain. They shoved Roger back into the passenger seat of Callen’s vehicle, fuming but silent, too shaken to argue again.
“Still there?” Blaze sounded in his ear.
“Did you find her? Tell me you found her.”
“I found her. Your tracker just pinged north of some place called Kingsland, southeast corner of Georgia. Looks like they’ve taken her off the main roads, onto some forsaken rural route.
From what I can see, it’s an old farmhouse.
Looks dilapidated but livable. Probably picked it because they thought no one would look there. ”
“Send all of us a pin,” Callen said, already turning toward the vehicle. “And tell the others. We’re going to need the team for sure on this.”
“Sending. And Cal?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re going to get that lady back. I know it.”
He said nothing as he ended the call, jaw like iron, every nerve tuned to one purpose. He rushed to the SUV, sliding into the driver’s seat next to the senator, while the others returned to their own vehicles.
“Hold on, Meaghan. We’re getting on our way.”
“You better hope you do better than you’ve done so far,” the senator growled.”
Callen cut a quick glance at the senator, a scowl twisting his features. It was time for answers.
“We have an hour and a half drive ahead of us, so now you’re going to tell me everything,” he said, his voice a low, coiled threat, a quiet fury just below his surface.
“How could you let someone use your daughter like that? Put her name on bank records, budget reports, and purchase orders for a program she didn’t even know existed.
What kind of father uses his daughter that way? ”
Roger shifted in his seat, the senator’s normally composed expression cracking at the edges.
“I told you it wasn’t me,” he snapped, rubbing his palms along his thighs.
He then turned and stared out the window, his voice dropping.
“Not directly anyway. I had a partner. Everett Marris. He’s the one who runs the internal operations at New Horizons. ”
Callen’s jaw clenched as he stared at the senator’s reflection. “You expect me to believe you didn’t know what he was doing?”
“I don’t care what you believe,” Harrington sighed, shaking his head. “I suspected. But by the time I found out he was using Meaghan’s name to funnel funds, it was too late. It was a warning to me. A threat, really. He caught me, and this was his way of making me pay, of keeping me in line.”
“Why her?” Callen’s hands curled into fists around the steering wheel. “Why use her as leverage?”
“Because she’s the only thing I give a damn about! Why the hell do you think I sent you away all those years ago? I only want the best for my baby. He knew that. Knew I’d let nothing touch her. So he made sure I’d be too scared to blow the whistle.”
Callen stared at him, his silence heavier than any accusation.
“I tried to fix it,” Roger continued, voice hoarse now.
“I was working to scrub her name from everything: offshore wires, false vendor trails, even the fake authorizations. But Everett must’ve had some kind of alert system in place because as soon as I started wiping the paper trail, he moved to eliminate the liability. ”
“No,” Callen said, with an icy edge to his voice. “Not the liability because that’s you. You were going to be the one to fall, so they turned to your daughter. They’re afraid you would go to the authorities, so they fixed it so you wouldn’t by using her.”
Roger turned away, a muscle jumping in his jaw. “I don’t know for sure. But it wouldn’t surprise me. If Everett can’t pin it on me, he’ll use her. And then disappear.”
A stretch of silence hung between them.
Callen’s stare was hard enough to break bone.
“Then you better pray I get to her first, because if I don’t…
” He leaned in, voice like razors in a velvet box.
“I will use you as bait. On a leash if I have to, but either way, you’re going to help me take this man down, Senator. Or I’ll feed you to him myself.”
Roger’s eyes widened, his face going pale, but he didn’t argue.
Callen faced forward again as the SUV rumbled over the uneven back roads toward the location Blaze had triangulated.
The silence in the vehicle was thick, humid, taut as a tripwire, and he felt the familiar rage just below the surface of his soul.
He never should have walked out on her a decade ago, and he refused to walk away now. No matter what it cost him.
He ran his gaze over the front of the vehicle, and in the rearview mirror, he met his own gaze.
He stared at his reflection, knowing the face that stared back, recognizing it from a time he preferred to forget.
He knew his friends worried about what he was doing, the path he was following to save Meaghan.
Heard the name echoing in his mind like smoke through the cracks of memory.
Wraith.
The old name lingered like a bruise.
Callen shifted slightly in his seat, uncomfortable under the weight of it.
He’d earned that name for the way he moved through shadows, for the grim detachment that kept him alive in enemy territory.
The ghost of a man who felt haunted, hollow, and could be brutal when he needed to be.
They said he looked dead even when he breathed.
But he hadn’t died. Not then.
He’d just stopped living because he had walked away from the one person who made his life make sense, and he did it for her. At least, that’s what he told himself back then. Now? He knew it was bullshit.
And to make himself forget, he poured himself into the mission. Every mission. He crossed lines back then for a paycheck and a cause that wasn’t truly his. But now?
Now he was crossing them for something real.
For her.
He could feel the pull of it like a thread wound around his chest, drawing tighter with every mile.
She wasn’t just some mission.
She was his everything, his world. His life.
And this time… Wraith wasn’t fading into the dark.
He was coming for blood.