Her Grumpy Protector (A Halo City Protectors Romance #1)

Chapter 1

ONE

BANKS

My brothers Nash and Sin are gone. Not “out of range.” Not “laying low.” Not “radio silent because the mission is hot.” Gone like a door slammed in our faces, like the world reached in and stole two Hawthorne brothers in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

We're all brothers—me, Nash, Sin, Crewe, Colt, Jace, and Mack—bound by blood and a shared history in the shadows of private security.

Each of us carved out our own path in the industry after leaving the military: Nash with his expertise in high-risk extractions for corporate clients, Sin handling covert surveillance ops for elite firms, Crewe specializing in VIP protection details, Colt running tactical training for mercenaries, Jace doing close-quarters combat consulting, Mack coordinating logistics for international security contracts, and me, Banks, piecing together digital puzzles as a cyber-intel specialist. We've scattered across the globe over the years, taking jobs that pay well and keep us sharp, but this mission is different.

It's personal. Our father was presumed dead years ago.

Now it looks like he may still be alive.

He was onto something big, something involving powerful players who don't like loose ends.

So we came together, pooling our skills and resources, to find him.

No contracts, no paychecks—just family hunting for the man who raised us to never back down.

The mountain air still smells like smoke and wet pine, a sharp reminder of the firefight that erupted just hours ago as we closed in on a lead tied to Dad's disappearance. Fog clings to the trees like it’s trying to hide what happened.

It won’t. Nothing hides from me for long.

Not data. Not patterns. Not the shape of a lie.

But right now, all I have is the aftermath.

A torn strip of black fabric snagged on a low-hanging branch, fluttering like a grim flag.

Zip-tie ends scattered in the dirt, their plastic edges frayed from a hasty cut.

A boot print that doesn’t match any of ours.

A tire track that cuts off abruptly where the ground turns to jagged rock and the road dissolves into wilderness.

I kneel in the mud beside the track, the cold seeping through my knees, and drag my fingers through the groove, as if touch could translate into coordinates, IP addresses, or satellite pings.

Like I can pull an answer out of the earth itself.

The mud clings to my skin, gritty and unyielding, but it yields nothing.

Crewe stands a few yards away, phone pressed to his ear, his jaw clenched so tight I can see the muscle twitch.

He's always been the steady one, the brother who plans VIP escorts with the precision of a surgeon, but even he looks rattled.

Colt paces like a caged animal, his rifle still gripped in white-knuckled hands, though the targets vanished into the mist long ago.

His tactical training gigs have made him a beast in the field, but right now, that energy has nowhere to go.

Jace is up on the ridge line, binoculars scanning the tree line with a fury in every controlled breath—he's the close-combat expert, the one who teaches others how to end fights before they start, and I can tell he's itching to charge after them.

Mack’s voice crackles through my headset from his remote setup back at our makeshift base camp, sharp with panic he’s trying to bury under layers of logistical calm.

He's the coordinator, the brother who juggles international ops like puzzle pieces, but family hits different. “Say it again. You’re sure they took them.”

Colt answers before I can, his voice gravelly from years of barking orders in training yards. “They took ‘em. Sin and Nash are fucking gone. Someone ambushed us during the recon, dragging them into a vehicle, and disappeared into the fog.”

A silence follows that feels like a punch to the gut.

Then Mack swears, low and vicious, the kind of curse that echoes his frustration from coordinating failed extractions in the past. My stomach twists.

Not fear. Not helplessness. Anger so cold it feels clean, surgical.

This is the part where people make mistakes. This is where emotions get you killed.

Not mine. I've built my career on staying detached, hacking into systems for private security firms to expose vulnerabilities before the bad guys do. Emotions are just noise in the data.

I stand slowly, wiping the mud onto my jeans, the fabric already stained from the trek up here. I pull my tablet out of my pack. My hands are steady. They always are when the world is falling apart. It's how I can trace digital footprints for clients who pay top dollar to stay ahead.

“Banks,” Crewe says, turning toward me, his phone call ended. His VIP protection instincts kick in automatically. “We have to move. They could circle back, set up another ambush.”

“I know,” I reply, my voice even. I’m already working, fingers flying across the screen.

There’s no signal out here worth a damn, the mountains blocking everything like a natural Faraday cage.

But my kit doesn’t rely on one tower or one network—I've rigged it with satellite uplinks and boosters from my cyber gigs.

I pull the small drone controller from my bag, power it on, and launch.

The drone rises with a faint whine, its rotors slicing through the fog as it climbs above the canopy until it gets line-of-sight to a cell relay miles away. Then the map loads on my tablet.

Heat signatures from the skirmish. Movement lines tracing our paths and theirs. The last place we saw Nash and Sin—Nash with his extraction know-how leading point, Sin covering flanks with his surveillance gear.

I set a boundary radius around the ambush site, then widen it until the screen gives me something other than swirling fog and empty trails.

A single vehicle ping appears on a service road two miles south. It’s old data, a momentary capture from a hacked trail cam, but it’s a start. A dark van, no plates visible, windows tinted black, speed steady at 45 mph, route deliberate like a pro driver avoiding detection.

I pull up the camera nodes I tapped earlier on the way in—part of my prep work for this family mission.

There are fewer than people think out here in the wilds, but there are always more than they notice if you know where to look.

A lodge entrance cam caught a glimpse of the van's side.

A private gate cam on a nearby estate, timestamped just after the ambush.

A forestry road cam with a blurred feed, but enough to confirm direction.

I stitch the clips into a single flow using software I've customized for my security jobs. It isn’t perfect—gaps where coverage drops—but it doesn’t need to be.

It needs to point. The van moves south, then veers east. It avoids towns, skirting populated areas like a ghost. Avoids main highways, sticking to backroads.

Heads toward a corridor that leads straight to Halo City.

My spine tightens, a rare physical tell breaking through my control.

Halo City isn’t just a place. It’s a system.

A gleaming metropolis of money and influence, where offshore accounts fund private airstrips, and corporate security firms—like the ones we've all worked for at some point—hold government contracts with zero accountability.

The kind of city where a man can vanish if the right person decides he should.

Our father's trail led us here initially, whispers of his involvement in exposing some underbelly of it all.

Which means if Nash and Sin were taken, they were taken for a reason. Leverage against us. Information on Dad's whereabouts. Or a message to back off our search.

Crewe steps closer, reading the screen over my shoulder, his protection detail habits making him scan for threats even now. “That route. It's textbook evasion.”

“Yeah,” I say, my mind already mapping contingencies.

Jace jogs down from the ridge, eyes wild but focused—the combat consultant in him assessing the group. “Tell me you’ve got something, Banks.”

“I’ve got a direction,” I answer, zooming in on the projected path.

Colt’s face goes hard, rifle slung but ready. “Then we go. All of us.”

“We go smart,” Crewe says immediately, his voice carrying the weight of years guarding high-profile targets.

Colt bristles, pacing halting. “Smart is how they got away in the first place. We should've hit harder from the start.”

“No,” I snap, and my voice cuts sharper than I intend, echoing my role as the intel guy who prevents disasters. Everyone stills. I take a breath and force myself back into control, the data grounding me. “Smart is how we get them back alive. And find Dad in the process.”

Jace’s jaw flexes, but he nods. “So what’s the plan, professor?” It's his old nickname for me, from when I'd bury myself in code while he trained.

I look down at my screen again. “We don’t chase into Halo City blind. We need a hook. A reason to be there that doesn’t scream Hawthorne brothers on a rescue op for our kidnapped siblings and missing father.”

Crewe’s eyes narrow. “We already have one. Dad’s trail pointed there weeks ago.”

“Dad’s trail is what got Nash and Sin taken,” I say flatly. “We need a new angle. Something tied to the same network. Something we can access without tripping every alarm in that viper's nest.”

Mack’s voice comes through the headset again, controlled now but tight, his logistics brain kicking in. “Banks. Talk to me. What do you have?”

“Halo City,” I say. “That’s where the vehicle path points. They’re moving Nash and Sin into a controlled environment—probably one of those fortified compounds run by the security firms there.”

A low exhale from Mack. “Of course they are. Fits the pattern we've seen in Dad's notes.”

“We need to break their control,” I add.

“How?”