Chapter 1
She and her bosses could have sent someone else to lead the mission. Someone whom they trusted. Someone who could’ve gotten the job done. But West and Vance didn’t trust anyone.
Only Savvy.
Other men and women had turned their backs on their country. This wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. But this situation was delicate and it required a light touch.
Her touch.
“Copy,” Ramirez said from the left ridge. “I’ve got visual. Taking the shot.”
The silence whispered through the jungle, followed by a wet thump. One body down.
“Where’s—”
A deafening crack shattered the air, followed by a bone-rattling concussion meant to punch through a skull.
The explosion ripped through the tree line ahead, the force lifting her off her feet and hurling her backward into a thicket.
Branches clawed her arms. Her head slammed into the dirt.
She stared at the blaze, momentarily stunned.
Flames reached toward the sky like long tentacles.
Thick black smoke engulfed everything in sight, making it impossible to see the compound.
“Collins is hit!” Mendoza’s voice strained through the headset, choppy, panicked.
Savvy forced herself upright, blinking through dust and leaves. “Status. I need a SITREP.”
“Collins is down,” Mendoza repeated, raspy and breathless, wheezing through the words. “No pulse. He’s not—He’s gone.”
“Regroup at fallback point, Delta.” What the hell had just happened?
Every mission was dangerous, but this one was different.
The objectives… were different. The intel and asset…
different. They’d ascertained enough information to know a 73 operative had been selling intel for months.
That intel had been confirmed. Extracting him from an undercover operation would be the tricky part.
He wouldn’t see them coming, but when he did, he’d know his cover was blown—that he couldn’t hide his treason another second.
She didn’t think he’d surrender easily, but this she hadn’t anticipated.
The compound was small, quiet, with few guards.
She’d mapped it out herself. She’d researched this mission from the very beginning.
She knew it inside and out. She’d been watching the compound via satellite, and no way in hell had anyone had the chance to move in the kind of weapons that would make it light up like that.
“Copy.” Hale’s voice—calm, clipped. “Moving.”
The jungle lit up again—automatic fire stitching through the trees just behind Savvy’s last position. She bolted low and fast, heart hammering. Her HUD blinked red warnings. GPS failure. No satellite return. Jammed.
No friendly in the area. No exfil signal.
Her gut went cold.
They knew she was coming. More than that, they knew her plan. Fuck.
She slid behind a moss-covered log and pulled out the compact drone control. No aerial link. No surveillance return. Their eyes were blind.
“This is Ghost Ranger,” she said into the mic, using her code name. “Command, be advised. Multiple team members down, grid location Echo-Nine. Immediate evac request. Respond.”
Static.
“Repeat—this is Ghost Ranger. Team Huntsmen is compromised. I have hostile movement on all sides. Requesting evac and support.”
Nothing.
No static.
No ping.
Just dead air.
Her hand clenched around the mic.
“Phantom, what’s your location?” She used Ramirez’s call sign.
Silence.
“Viking, do you copy?” Again, she used Mendoza’s call sign.
Nothing.
“Gunslinger?”
“They knew.” Hale’s voice came over the coms, soft, final. And then a single, distant burst of gunfire.
Savvy froze.
Not because of fear.
Because the sound came through open air. Not comms.
They were gone.
All of them.
“No. No—” she whispered, fumbling to reboot the device. There had to be a signal. A ping. A backup satellite.
But the screen blinked once and died.
She sat there, mud soaking into her knees, breath heaving, heart pounding so hard it hurt. And in the space between those beats, the truth landed hard.
Someone in the CIA had scrubbed her and her entire team.
She hadn’t known who gave the order. She hadn’t known which bastard up the chain had flipped the switch. Nor did she understand why, but someone had turned off the safety net. Someone had fed them bad intel, sent them in blind, and shut down extraction when the first bullet flew.
And they left her to die.
She was the last one standing. The one with blood still pumping through her veins. The last voice on a dead channel.
Savvy closed her eyes, swallowed back the scream clawing at her throat, and reached into the small waterproof pouch beneath her plate carrier. She pulled out a separate comm unit—a burner not tied to any official frequency. A fallback protocol. Not CIA-issued. No, this one was family-issued.
It was the only thing she’d ever done that broke protocol. Savvy’s hand trembled as she activated it and keyed in a code her older brother had provided.
It rang once.
Twice.
“What’s going on?” McGuire’s voice came in low. Guarded. Her brother. Her anchor. “Are you back?”
“I’m in trouble.” Her voice cracked despite the steel she wrapped around it. “My team… they’re all dead… I need an extraction immediately. No questions. No help from military contacts. Just you. I don’t have much time. I’m a sitting duck out here.”
“Send me your coordinates.” McGuire’s voice was tight.
“But in order to get you out now, I have to use the resources I have with the Bayou Brotherhood Protectors, and it might not be me coming for you. If we have someone in the area, it will be them. You know how this works. You set me up with these guys to begin with. Are you good with that?”
“Just get me the fuck out of here before someone puts a bullet through my skull.”
“Hang tight. Check this phone every hour. I’ll be in touch.” The line went dead. Wrong thought, in the wrong place, where everything had gone to shit in a nanosecond.
Tears burned her eyes, and that just pissed her off. Savvy LaSalle didn’t cry. Last time she had it was because the man she’d loved, she’d let walk out the door.
But her career—and his—meant more.
Of course, she hadn’t bothered to tell him how she felt—that she wanted him to stay. That would have been messy, and Savvy didn’t do messy. Not in her personal life because the world of covert operations was messy enough.
Savvy gripped her weapon, scanning the area.
It was quiet. Only the sounds of Mother Nature filled the air.
She scurried to the thick brush, taking cover.
She’d stay put. She was sure whoever was out there was doing a body count, and they were missing one.
But running would be stupid. They’d see movement.
They’d shoot her on sight. Crouching deep in the thick brush, she lowered herself as close to the ground as she could, while still being able to see over the tall grass.
It was going to be a long few hours—if she even survived.
South America – Remote Jungle Outpost
The ceiling fan did its best, which wasn’t much. Humid air dragged through the bar in lazy swirls, carrying the scent of diesel, smoke, and meat that had probably been grilled two days ago. Mosquitos the size of rats buzzed about, looking for their next meal.
It wasn’t much different from the bayou, which oddly had come to feel more and more like home. Right about now, Patch missed his cabin in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but gators and thick brush.
Patch nursed a lukewarm beer at the edge of the room, seated across from Booker Hayes, a chopper pilot out of the Yellowstone Brotherhood Protector branch.
They barely knew each other—different units, different terrain—but Patch had flown with worse.
Far worse. At least Patch felt confident he could trust this dude.
Everyone who worked for the Brotherhood Protectors had a story.
Whether it be an injury, a mission gone awry, or a betrayal, the men and women who worked for the organization didn’t come in because they were looking for sunshine and rainbows.
They’d been battered, beaten, and worn down by the very institution they’d taken an oath to protect.
Only to be chewed up and spit out like a nasty piece of meat.
Patch and Booker had been tasked to fly an injured government asset back to their own country. An asset who wasn’t supposed to be in the United States in the first place. If something screwy went down, well, by the Brotherhood Protectors moving the asset, both governments had plausible deniability.
Not much had changed since last year when Patch’s mission had gone to shit.
Good people died, and he and his team were forced to live off-grid.
To be ghosts. To be Shadow Hounds. Honestly, he hadn’t cared.
He had no one left anymore. He’d buried his parents and sister.
The only person outside his team who mattered to him had made him a ghost. Talk about ironic.
But others had families. Friends. People who loved them.
That was a hard life.
It was strange that his world had flipped again just a few short months ago and he no longer had to be off-grid. He could leave Shadow Hounds if he really wanted to. But why would he? He liked living on the fringe of civilization.
Booker took a pull from his bottle, elbow on the scarred table, watching the ceiling fan rotate as if it were a hooker on a pole. “You always this talkative?” he asked.
Patch shrugged. “Depends on the company.”
Booker huffed. “Fair. But hell, since we’ve been here, you’re the only guy who hasn’t tried to bribe me, shoot me, or puke on my boots. Figure that earns me a conversation.”
Patch gave a faint smirk. “Not opposed.”
Booker glanced at his hand. “You got a girlfriend or wife back home?”
Patch shook his head. “No.” He guessed this guy didn’t know much about his division of the Brotherhood Protectors. But that was kind of the point. Patch eyed Booker’s ring. “But you’re married.”
Booker smiled, easy. “Yeah, few years now. Calliope. She was DEA, now runs a PI firm back home. Woman could talk down a coked-up gunrunner with one hand on a .40 and the other writing an invoice.”
Patch chuckled once. “Sounds like someone you don’t cross.”
“Exactly.” Booker leaned forward. “So what’s it like in the bayou?”
“Hot. Wet. Quiet. Unless the gators are pissed or it’s mating season. Then it’s louder than a Vegas brothel.”
“Sounds miserable.”
“I wouldn’t live anywhere else, which is damn funny since I grew up in Maine. Like the northern most tip of Maine. Up there, we got two weeks of summer, but we didn’t know that. The temps got over forty-five, and we were in our bathing suits, looking for water to jump into.”
Booker grinned. “Sounds like Yellowstone. And we got mountains. Long stretches of road. Locals either wave with two fingers or a shotgun. No in-between.”
Patch raised his bottle in a lazy toast. “If you’re waving in the bayou, it’s because you’ve got a gator on your tail. Or worse, a nasty python. I don’t mind much, but those things are the worst.”
“I’ll keep my bears, wolves, and cougars, thank you very much.”
“That makes me want to ask if your wife’s a cougar.”
“That’s the dumbest joke ever and the answer is no.” Booker shook his head. “But my work wife is sexy as hell and a really good kisser.”
“I don’t even want to know.” The more Patch sat with this guy, the more he remembered what it was like to be human… and that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Patch’s burner buzzed against the tabletop. He glanced at the screen. McGuire. “What’s up, McGuire?”
“You still in South America?”
“Yeah,” Patch said.
“I need an extraction, not far from where you’re at.”
“For who?”
“Savvy.”
“Can you repeat that?” Patch took the phone pressed to his ear, glanced at it, blinked twice, then pressed it back to the side of his face.
His heart lurched to the center of his throat, which dried up like a prune.
He waved to the bartender and mouthed check, please—even though he’d rather have a double shot of whiskey.
Hell, the whole bottle. He glanced at Booker and pointed toward the parking lot.
Booker nodded.
“Savvy?” he asked, more to himself.
“Yeah.” McGuire’s voice was clipped, strained. “She’s alive. She’s off comms. I’m sending you her last known coordinates.”
“Okay,” he said, rubbing his jaw. “Does she know it’s me coming?”
“No. Should that matter? Did something happen I don’t know about? I swear to God, Patch, if—”
“I haven’t had any real contact with your sister in five years—except hearing her voice when she made us ghosts in the Bayou or when she helped with Riven. Nothing’s changed.”
“I still haven’t forgiven you for… for… hell, I have no idea. But you spent years with my sister in a relationship, and then all of a sudden, it was over. Just like that. As if nothing ever happened and you brushed me off, telling me nothing.”
“Jesus, man. This isn’t the time or place.
Besides, there wasn’t anything to tell.” And that was…
basically true. The time he and Savvy spent together was wild, reckless, and the best time of his life.
But she’d crawled under his skin and refused to leave.
Their relationship wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t easy.
They spent more time trying to figure out how to be in the same country than actually in each other’s arms. When the op orders came down, they didn’t say goodbye. They just left.
And one day, that’s how their relationship ended.
Well, it was a hell of a lot more complicated than that, but sometimes that’s how it felt.
Their jobs always got in the way and neither one of them would ever give it up.
He hadn’t dared to ask her to change because doing so would mean changing the very fabric of who she was…
and he’d loved every inch of Savvy. So, he’d walked away.
He’d never looked back. But he’d never forgotten, either.
“Just bring my sister back in one piece,” McGuire said. “And don’t fucking touch her.”
“I might have to help her onto the heli—” Before he could finish the statement, his good buddy hung up. He tossed a few bills on the table and headed for the door.
“That sounded interesting,” Booker said.
“Wait until you meet the chick we’re going to extract.”