Cargo's Deliverance (Black Ops Brotherhood MC #5)

Chapter 1

Midnight inventory was the only kind Cargo trusted.

No interruptions. No brothers asking for ammunition counts or spare parts. Just him and the armory and the methodical process of confirming that every weapon, every round, every piece of equipment was exactly where it should be.

The knock at the shop door was wrong.

Not the pattern brothers used. Not the confident rap of someone who belonged. This was desperate—three quick strikes, then silence, then three more.

Cargo's hand found the Glock on his hip before he'd consciously decided to draw it. He moved through the shop on silent feet, years of Delta training overriding the civilian instinct to call out who's there like some idiot in a horror movie.

Through the reinforced glass, he saw her.

Blood on her face. Split lip swelling. Dark hair tangled and wild. Clutching a manila folder against her chest like it was the only thing keeping her upright.

He knew her. Not well—nobody knew Cargo well—but he recognized the bartender from the roadhouse where he drank without talking. Quiet woman. Observant. The kind who noticed everything and said almost nothing.

Rebecca. Her name was Rebecca.

She saw him through the glass and something cracked in her expression. Relief, maybe. Or the desperate hope of someone who'd run out of options.

Cargo unlocked the door and pulled her inside in one motion, his body blocking the entrance while his eyes scanned the parking lot. Empty. No headlights on the access road. No engine noise cutting through the Carolina night.

"Inside." He locked the door behind her. "Now."

She stumbled forward, and he caught her elbow—steadied her without thinking about why a woman bleeding in his shop at midnight made his chest tight with something that felt like rage.

"I didn't know where else to go." Her voice was rough, shaking. "I couldn't—the police would ask questions I can't answer, and he has people everywhere, and I remembered you come to the bar and you never talk to anyone and I thought—"

"Slow down." He guided her toward the back room, away from the windows, into the space where he kept his secondary inventory. "Sit."

She sat. The folder stayed pressed against her chest.

Cargo crouched in front of her, assessing damage the way he'd assess a compromised weapons cache. Split lip—painful but superficial. Bruising starting to form along her cheekbone. No visible broken bones, but the way she held herself suggested ribs that had taken impact.

"Who did this?"

"Warren." The name came out bitter. "Warren Slade. My boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. I don't—" She laughed, and it sounded like breaking glass. "I don't know what to call him now."

"Start from the beginning."

"I found documents." She finally loosened her grip on the folder, letting it fall open on her lap. "In his apartment. I wasn't snooping, I was just looking for a phone charger, and there was this drawer he always kept locked, and it wasn't locked, and I—"

Cargo looked at the papers spilling across her thighs and felt his blood go cold.

Equipment manifests. Military equipment manifests, with serial numbers he recognized and unit designations that shouldn't exist outside secure systems. Night vision optics. Weapons components. Communications gear.

All of it marked for transfer to destinations that definitely weren't official U.S. military installations.

"Where did you get these?"

"Warren's apartment. I told you, I found them, and I asked him about it, and he—" She touched her split lip. "He stopped being charming really fast."

Cargo's hands curled into fists. He forced them to relax, forced himself to focus on the immediate tactical situation instead of the red haze creeping into the edges of his vision.

"He hit you because you asked about paperwork?"

"He hit me because I saw something I wasn't supposed to see.

" Rebecca's eyes met his, and underneath the fear, he saw something harder.

Anger. The survival instinct of a woman who'd learned early that the world wasn't safe.

"And then he reached for something in his desk drawer, and I didn't wait to find out what it was. I grabbed what I could and I ran."

Quick thinking. Sharper than most people would be with adrenaline flooding their system and a man they'd trusted turning violent.

Cargo gathered the manifests, handling them like the dangerous evidence they were. Equipment theft from Fort Liberty wasn't small-time crime. This was federal territory, the kind of operation that involved multiple players and serious money and people who made witnesses disappear.

"This boyfriend of yours. What does he do?"

"Defense contractor. Something with logistics—he never really explained it, and I never really asked." Her voice dropped. "I should have asked. I should have known something was wrong. He was too charming, too interested in a bartender who barely makes rent."

"He was using you."

"Obviously." The word came out sharp. "Normal girlfriend makes a man look trustworthy. I was cover."

Cargo filed that away—the quick intelligence, the self-awareness, the way she'd already figured out her role in whatever operation Slade was running. Most people in her situation would be crying, falling apart, begging someone to fix the problem.

Rebecca was analyzing.

He liked that more than he should.

"This contractor," he said. "Warren Slade. Describe him."

"Forty-six, forty-seven. Six feet, maybe a little under.

Brown hair going gray at the temples. Expensive suits.

Cold eyes when he thinks nobody's watching.

" She paused, remembering. "He had meetings at the base sometimes.

Fort Liberty. Said it was just routine contract stuff, but he always came back... different. Harder."

Defense contractor with base access and stolen military equipment. Cargo's mind ran through the implications, connecting patterns the way he'd been trained to connect them.

Someone on the inside was feeding Slade information about what could disappear without being missed.

Someone else was handling transportation, moving the equipment through channels that wouldn't trigger red flags.

And Slade himself was probably the money man, the one with legitimate credentials who made the whole operation look like normal military logistics.

Classic supply chain theft. The kind of operation that could run for years if nobody asked the wrong questions.

Rebecca had asked the wrong questions.

"You came here." Cargo stood, moving to check the windows again, scanning for any sign they'd been followed. "Why?"

"Because you're the only person I know who looks like he could handle something like this." She met his eyes without flinching. "And because you never talk to anyone, which means you know how to keep secrets. And because—" She hesitated. "Because I didn't have anywhere else to go."

Something shifted in his chest. That protective instinct he'd spent years burying, the one that got operators killed when they started caring about assets instead of missions.

She wasn't an asset. She was a woman who'd stumbled into something dangerous and had the brains to run to someone who could help.

She'd run to him.

"You made the right call." He crossed back to her, crouching again so they were at eye level.

"But you need to understand what you've stepped into.

These manifests—this isn't just theft. This is military equipment flowing to people who shouldn't have it.

People kill to protect operations like this. "

"I noticed." Her fingers brushed the swelling. "Warren was going to kill me. I saw it in his eyes. Whatever was in that drawer—gun, knife, I don't know—he was reaching for it because I'd become a problem that needed solving."

Cargo recognized that particular violence. The cold calculation of a man deciding that a loose end needed cutting. He'd seen it overseas, in the eyes of operators who'd been burned and the enemies who'd done the burning.

Slade wasn't just a defense contractor running a theft ring. He was a man who'd already crossed the line into elimination. Which meant Rebecca wasn't just in danger—she was being hunted.

"Here's what's going to happen." Cargo's voice dropped into the command register he rarely used anymore.

"You're going to stay here while I secure the perimeter.

Then you're going to tell me everything you know about Warren Slade—his routines, his contacts, every detail you remember about his operation.

And then we're going to figure out how to keep you alive. "

"We?"

"You came to me." He stood, checking his weapon, already running through contingency plans. "That makes you my responsibility."

"I'm not looking for a hero."

"Good. I'm not one." He moved toward the door, then paused, looking back at her. Bleeding, bruised, clutching stolen evidence that could get her killed. "But I don't let people die when I can stop it. Not anymore."

Something flickered in her expression—curiosity, maybe, about what anymore meant. She was smart enough not to ask.

"Stay here," he said. "Don't touch anything. Don't turn on any lights. And don't answer the door for anyone who isn't me."

"And if someone who isn't you tries to come through?"

He considered her for a moment. Then he crossed to his secondary inventory, pulled a compact 9mm from the lockbox, and placed it on the table beside her.

"Then you aim for center mass and keep pulling the trigger until they stop moving."

She picked up the gun with hands that barely trembled, checking the safety with a familiarity that told him she'd handled weapons before.

Another surprise. Another reason this woman was going to be trouble.

"I know how to shoot," she said quietly. "Foster care teaches you a lot of things."

Cargo nodded once, then slipped out the back door to sweep the perimeter.