Chapter 26
THE RURAL ROADS OF Kingsland, Georgia, stretched out like dark veins beneath the tires, flanked by endless pine and whispering moss.
The air was humid and tense, each breath Callen took pressing heavy against his chest. In the passenger seat, Senator Harrington sat stiff and silent, arms folded tight against his chest, eyes flickering with a mixture of blame, worry, and rage.
It was a cocktail of emotions Callen fully understood.
However, he also didn’t care.
His focus remained on the red dot blinking steadily on the GPS tracker Blaze had fed to his phone, a tiny miracle embedded in a necklace no bigger than a thumbnail. One that sat against Meaghan’s skin if he was still lucky.
God, please let her still be there. And alive. She has to be alive.
He gripped the steering wheel tighter, his knuckles whitening around the rubber as every tendon in his forearm pulled tight as a wire. The SUV’s engine rumbled beneath him, steady and powerful, but the sound barely registered. All he could hear was the blood in his ears, pounding like war drums.
They were close, with just a few more miles to go.
The Georgia pines outside the window blurred into darkness, tall silhouettes in the headlights, but his mind was elsewhere, caught between the man he used to be and the one behind the wheel now.
Wraith was back. Not the shadow who had slipped through enemy camps under moonlight but the one who had learned to feel again, because of her. And now she was the one taken.
Stupid, reckless, brave as hell woman.
A muscle twitched in his jaw as he downshifted hard and took the curve faster than the GPS recommended.
Roger Harrington shifted in the passenger seat but didn’t speak.
Not anymore. Not after the last verbal lashing Callen had given him back in Savannah.
The senator had retreated to a stony silence, one hand clenched into a fist on his knee, the other braced on the door like a man waiting for a crash.
“Still blinking,” Callen muttered under his breath. “Hold on, Meaghan.”
He didn’t care if the senator heard him.
What he did desperately care about was the fact that the dot hadn’t moved in the last twenty minutes. Static. Centered at the address Tex had pulled from drone footage and county property records. An old house. A forgotten place in the trees, surrounded by nothingness.
And she was in it.
Then his mind went to all the worse case scenarios. They could have moved her. The necklace could have broken loose or fallen in the scuffle and be lying on the floor of an empty room. They could have found it and be using it as bait to lure him in to finish him.
He gritted his teeth against the spiral that threatened to spin him into oblivion. No. He couldn’t afford that kind of thinking. Positive. Always positive. She was strong. Had survived her father’s political world. Had survived him.
His chest ached at the thought.
He glanced in the rearview mirror, the distant headlights flickering behind him. Gage and Elvis followed in the second SUV, and somewhere behind them were Sage and Abbie. Closing in from the west were Hawk and Grim.
They were coming for her. All of them. There was no way they would lose, no way Marris would win.
But for Callen, this wasn’t a mission anymore. Or about duty.
This was about her.
Her eyes locking with his the first night on that back road.
Her voice, low and ragged, telling him she wasn’t broken even when the world tried to shatter her.
Her hand in his, trembling but defiant. Her mouth under his, heat and fire, and forgiveness all wrapped in one.
Her body pressed to his as she whispered, “Stay.”
And since he met her, since the school shooting, she had become his reason to stop running.
Now he would burn the world down to get her back.
He reached for the comm on his dash and pressed the button. “ETA, two minutes. Weapons hot. Wait for my signal.”
“Copy,” came Gage’s voice, grim and ready.
Another light blinked, and a quick glance revealed Tex’s updated drone feed. The structure was still in view, along with four heat signatures outside. Two paced back and forth, with two more inside. And one… Callen swallowed.
One in the far corner of the main room. Sitting still.
He felt his brow pinch as he turned his gaze back to the road. Tied, maybe? Definitely alive, though.
He didn’t blink, didn’t even breathe, as he twisted his hands along the wheel. “Hold on, girl,” he whispered. “Almost there.”
The red dot kept blinking, steady as a heartbeat.
And this time, it wasn’t just a signal.
It was a promise.
Behind them, twin headlights from Gage and Elvis’s SUV sliced through the dark, while Sage and Abbie split behind them, going in opposite directions, setting up their positions.
And then he saw the last set of headlights, Hawk and Grim.
He was called Grim because he had a deathlike stare about him, and really didn’t joke around much.
They pulled off to the side of the road, waiting for the go signal.
Blaze’s voice crackled in Callen’s earpiece.
“You’re coming up on it now. Looks like an old farmhouse, single story.
Forest to the north, swamp at the back. No heat signatures anywhere close other than what you’ve seen.
They blacked out the windows for the most part. My guess? They know you’re coming.”
“Copy,” Callen muttered.
In the passenger seat, Harrington shifted. “This is crazy. There’s no way you’re going to get her out of there.” He pointed to the screen. “Look how fortified the place is.”
Callen didn’t look at him. “You’re the reason she’s in there, remember? You dragged her into this the moment you signed your soul to Marris.”
“I was trying to fix it,” the senator snapped. “I had people cleaning the documents, purging the accounts. But Everett must have seen what I was doing. He somehow managed to lock me out. I didn’t know that they’d go after her.”
Callen scoffed. “You know, with everything you say you were doing to make it right, the one thing you didn’t do was give back the money.” He turned to face the older man, anger twisting his features. “And that’s what Everett wanted in the beginning. That could have stopped all this from happening.”
The senator simply stared at him for a few moments. Then, “I didn’t intend to put her in danger.”
Callen finally turned, fury glinting like steel in his eyes. “But you did. She almost died because of you. She’s been hunted, kidnapped, and god knows what else because you got greedy and trusted a man like Everett Marris.”
“Yeah, I trusted him,” the senator whispered.
“At first, anyway. I didn’t know what I was getting into in the beginning when he first showed up, offering solutions, making promises.
I thought he believed in our mission, that he was a partner we needed.
But then the numbers got bigger, and the doors got darker, and the lines got wider.
And by the time I realized the trap, he had her name on everything.
Everything I was trying to build, he turned it into blackmail, keeping me in hiding, keeping me as his patsy. ”
Callen shook his head. “And now you’re going to help us fix it. Because if you don’t, I’ll use you as bait.”
Silence followed, thick and final. As he glanced over, he noticed the senator’s hands trembling. It was about time something scared the hell out of him.
The SUV crawled to a halt at the edge of a clearing. In the distance, nestled among trees like a rotted tooth, stood the house. It looked abandoned, its paint peeling, porch sagging, but the air was wrong. Stale and alert.
Off to the side, he spotted Hawk and Grim emerging from the trees, rifles held in front of them and eyes sharp.
“I see the four men Blaze and Tex warned us about,” Hawk reported, voice low.
“One stationed on the roof, walking around like an extra from an old western. There are two pacing the front of the house and one on the back porch, smoking. Basement access looks sealed. Do you want to breach from the front or storm the sides?”
“Both,” Callen said. “Sage, Abbie loop wide. Cover the left flank. Elvis and Gage, take the right. Hawk, Grim, you two are with me and the senator here. We’re going through the front.”
“Me?” Harrington almost squealed. “Go in there with you? But—”
Callen handed him a sidearm. “You want redemption? It starts here.”
He slipped the earpiece back in and gave the silent signal to move out, index finger up, a quick flick forward. Go.
No hesitation. No chatter.
The rest of the team snapped into motion like wolves unleashed. Gage was first, melting into the treeline with the low, loping crouch of someone born in the field, his SIG drawn and angled low, eyes scanning. A shadow in motion.
Elvis followed, taking the far left flank, his limp gone now, adrenaline overriding pain. He moved with practiced fluidity, one hand steady on the grip of his carbine, the other brushing branches aside like smoke. Every step deliberate. Every sound accounted for.
From the opposite side, Hawk and Grim took up the rear triangle, sweeping wide and low to secure the perimeter.
Hawk, ever the bulldog, muttered something under his breath that the wind snatched away.
Grim didn’t respond. He never did. Just adjusted the suppressor on his rifle and scanned the windows of the old house with a sniper’s intuition.
Callen moved center, with the senator right behind him.
Boots sank into pine needles, weapons raised in sync, and fingers hovered just outside trigger guards, ready but not rushed. The silence between them wasn’t absence; it was intent.
This was the difference between operatives and soldiers. His team didn’t stumble through the woods like grunts. They floated, sliding through the terrain with quiet ease.
There were no radios buzzing, no shouted orders. Just hand signals passed from shadow to shadow. Callen raised two fingers—eyes on. Hawk angled toward the side porch. Gage pointed to one visible guard pacing out front while Elvis took the other. Grim shifted back, preparing for the drop.
Even the damn senator, tucked behind him and shaking like a leaf, had enough sense to keep his mouth shut.
The house loomed ahead, two stories of sagging boards and rusted gutters, paint peeled back like dead skin. One porch light burned above the door, swaying gently with the breeze like it couldn’t decide whether to blink out or keep watch.
Callen crouched, heart hammering, not from fear, but from focus. Meaghan was in there. He could feel it like a current in his veins. That red dot on the GPS didn’t just mark a location. It was a lifeline.
And now the wolves were at the door.
He signaled again, fist up. Hold.
Two of the guards were within visual range. One leaned lazily on the railing of the porch, AK slung loose, his cigarette ember bright in the dark. The other was checking his phone near the side yard, attention drifting.
That’s your mistake, Callen thought coldly. You stopped watching the trees.
Three silent seconds passed.
Callen raised his hand, took a slow breath. Then dropped it flat.
Go.
The first shot came from the woods.
Muffled. Sharp. The sentry on the back porch dropped like a rag doll. Then chaos exploded.
Gunfire burst from the treeline. Muzzle flashes lit up the windows, and Callen surged forward with Hawk and Grim at his sides, boots pounding over the porch. The front door shattered inward as they crashed through—
Inside was darkness, choked with must and rot.
Callen pivoted left, eyes slicing through shadow. Someone raised a weapon, and Callen dropped him with a clean shot to the shoulder, ducking as another charged from the hall. Hawk took him down with a brutal elbow to the face.
“Clear!”
The team split—Grim heading for the hallway, Hawk to the right. Callen’s pulse thudded like war drums.
He turned a corner, and his heart stuttered.
There she was, zip-tied to a chair in a dim room, rocking side to side. Her shirt was torn at the sleeve, but her eyes—her eyes were defiant and blazing.
Callen froze.
Time stopped.
She stopped rocking, a smirk twisting her lips. “Took you long enough.”
He was beside her in an instant, fingers trembling as he cut the zip-ties. She collapsed into him, arms wrapping around his neck, breath shuddering against his collar.
“God, I thought—”
“Well, you thought wrong,” he murmured, gripping her tighter. “I told you. I’d always come for you.” He turned to point to her father, but Senator Harrington wasn’t there. “That son-of-a-bitch.”
“Who?” she asked.
Before he could answer, however, footsteps thundered on the porch. Gage burst into the room a second later. “We’ve got two down outside. House is almost clear.”
Callen helped Meaghan stand, one arm around her waist.
But then he heard a door slammed in the back and then someone running.
“Elvis!” he barked into the comm. “Perimeter breach—back of the house!”
“I see him!” Elvis shouted.
Callen hurried Meaghan to Hawk, who pulled her into a protective stance. Outside, a gunshot cracked the night.
Then another.
Callen raced out in time to see Everett Marris stumble across the yard, leg buckling beneath him as blood soaked his calf.
Behind him stood Senator Harrington, gun still smoking, hands steady. “That,” the senator said coldly, “was for my daughter.”
Callen lowered his arm and shook his head. Turning he saw Hawk helping Meaghan out of the house, and she could only stand there and stare at her father and the man on the ground.
Fifteen minutes later, they had secured the house, with Everett zip-tied and groaning in the dirt, bleeding but alive.
Callen stood beside the SUV, staring at Meaghan as she sat on the tailgate with Abbie gently tending her wrists.
He didn’t speak.
He didn’t need to.
When her eyes found his again, there was no need for apology.
They had faced the chaos and they were still standing.
Together.