Chapter 6 Hotel Luna Mar – San Antonio, Texas #2
“Right,” Thor said. “The support part of the orders was vague and not fully understood until we got there, leaving no room for our team or Lark to leak that piece to anyone. Which means, someone knew this was probably going to go down this way.”
“So, why didn’t they stop it?” Kawan asked, but the second the last two words tumbled from his mouth, the answer rolled across his brain like a nasty rash that wouldn’t go away.
“Shit,” he mumbled. “They couldn’t stop it without breaching some security or national protocol, so we were the best-case scenario for a lose-lose situation.
” He rubbed his temples. “And we’re supposed to suck it up because not everyone died. ”
“Something like that,” Jupiter mumbled. “Whatever the reason, Grady didn’t want Lorre to know he’d sent anyone. And now we’ve got Grady sending a message through a secure tunnel we haven’t used since before the op. That’s not a coincidence.”
Footsteps pounded from the side corridor. Kawan glanced over his shoulder.
Leif.
He skidded into the hallway, eyes wide, weapon already strapped to his thigh. “We’ve got company. Time to go. Now.”
Kawan’s blood iced.
“How many?” Thor asked.
“Four men. Military-type, tactical gear, moving like they’ve cleared buildings before. Just walked into the lobby like they own the place.”
Kawan turned and used his key card to open the hotel door. “Lark,” his voice was low but sharp, full of steel.
She bolted upright, instantly alert. “What’s going on?”
“We’ve got trouble. Get dressed—now.”
She leaped from the bed as if it were on fire and yanked on jeans and a hoodie. He handed her sidearm to her, and she slid it into the holster at her back without a word.
“Specs?” Kawan called, ducking his head out into the hallway.
“I’ve got her,” Jupiter said, ushering Specs out of the adjoining room. She was pulling on sneakers with one hand, clutching her laptop with the other as if it were her weapon. In a way, it was.
“Tell me we’re not walking into another deathtrap,” Specs mumbled.
“We’re walking out of it,” Kawan said grimly.
Thor met them at the bend of the hallway. “Lobby’s compromised. We go down the corridor, out the far door, hit the lot.”
“I’ll take one SUV,” Kawan said. “Me, Jupiter, Specs, and Lark.”
“I’ll drive the other with everyone else. Comms in.” Thor tapped his ear. “Let’s move.”
They crept down the hallway in silence, the air thick with adrenaline.
Lark was behind him, breathing steady, movements smooth. She was in mission mode now—controlled, precise. It was the glue that held her together. The thing that had given her what her childhood had stolen.
Value.
Only, he wanted her to see that there was so much more to life than slinking in and out of danger.
Gunfire cracked just as they hit the exit door.
Kawan shoved it open and pushed Lark through first, followed by Specs and Jupiter. The parking lot exploded into chaos—rounds pinged off concrete, and a car alarm blared.
“Go, go, go!” Thor barked from the other side.
Kawan shifted, his boots hitting the hard blacktop as he limped along, arm raised, returning fire as he dived behind a dumpster, laying cover as Jupiter threw open the SUV door.
Kawan continued to unload a few more rounds.
“Let’s go,” Jupiter called. “I’ve got your six.”
Adrenaline spiking, Kawan raced toward the open driver’s side of the SUV. He jumped in, pulled the door closed, rammed the gear shift into drive, and peeled out, tires screaming as he fishtailed onto the main road.
Through the rearview, he saw the other SUV lurch into motion behind them. Thor, Leif, Sloan, and Moose were locked and loaded. He tapped his earpiece. “Everyone okay back there?”
“Living the dream,” Thor’s voice crackled through the comms.
More gunfire.
Bullets whizzed past the car. A couple hit the metal as Kawan did his best to zig-zag down the road.
A blacked-out sedan tailed them, inching a little too close for comfort, handling both the speed and the road with the kind of practiced ease that made Kawan more than uncomfortable.
“Two miles,” Specs said, fingers flying across her laptop. “We’ve got a turnoff that leads to a back road. If we take it, we can double back and lose them.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Jupiter said. “Take the turn off, and then I’m gonna light up the sky.”
“Copy that,” Kawan muttered. “Thor, tuck in tight behind me.”
Lark twisted in the seat beside him, watching the road. “They’re gaining.”
“Not for long,” Kawan growled.
“There’s the turn. See it?” Specs asked.
“Got it.” At the last second, he yanked the wheel right and blasted down a narrow gravel service road. The SUV jolted over potholes, but he held steady.
“Thor, move your vehicle off to the right, particularly into the grass,” Jupiter said. “Do it now.” He popped the hatch and lobbed a flash charge behind them. There was a metallic pop—then a whoosh of air as tires on the sedan blew.
The pursuing sedan swerved to the right, then to the left, spinning and skidding until it slammed into the metal railing, dust billowing like a cloud of smoke. Two men jumped from the vehicle, weapons raised, unloading more gunfire.
Kawan pressed his foot to the floor. A couple of bullets grazed the side of the SUV, while others sailed on by. He glanced in the rearview as he took a quick bend, and the sedan disappeared.
The silence that followed was deafening.
“Nice toss,” Lark said, breathless.
“I aim to please,” Jupiter replied.
“That stopped them and gave them something to talk about.” Thor’s voice crackled over the comms. “We’re clear. Rendezvous at our personal safety net.”
Kawan exhaled hard, knuckles white on the wheel.
He glanced at Lark.
She looked at him with something fierce in her eyes.
Respect. Maybe something more. If it was, it had to do with the job…
It’s all she really valued. It’s what had created the woman she’d become.
He understood that. The military had given him so much.
A career—something he was proud of. But it wasn’t the sum of who he was.
He’d become a man on that damn farm back in Central New York.
There,he’d learned about life, love, and heartbreak.
But mostly, he’d learned what it meant to be part of a family. To have a role. To understand the meaning of that role. To live up to it. To respect it. And most importantly, to accept the responsibility of what it means to be part of something bigger than yourself.
“Where are we going?” she asked. “What’s the safety net?”
“A place in New Mexico.”
“You mean that place you told me about? The one you said put you back together again after…”
He met her gaze and nodded. The memories of the single worst day in his life flooded his brain. It hadn’t been a mission that broke him. The battlefield. The carnage that war brought—he could cope with that.
What he hadn’t been prepared for was life—and the simple cruelties of it.
But this wasn’t about him. He’d come a long way since that day. He wasn’t a broken man anymore. Not only had The Refuge stitched him up… but so had his team. They hadn’t given up on him. They stood by him in his darkest hour.
That’s what family did.
“Yeah. That place.” Where broken people went to find their way back. Where he'd found his.
“I don’t need to sit around and talk about my feelings.” She turned and stared out the window. “What I need is to find out who betrayed me—more importantly, this country—and bring them to justice. That’s the job. That’s who I am.”
“We’ve all been in impossible situations.
Thor spent nearly a month losing his mind when Danni had been kidnapped.
Shay was held at gunpoint by her own biological father.
Talk about a mind fuck.” Kawan gripped the steering wheel.
“And we know what I went through. Sometimes, we need to take a moment and just breathe through it. You never give yourself a break.”
“I can’t afford to,” she said. “My team's deaths will not be in vain.”
Kawan reached out and took her hand. She jerked it away.
“Me and the guys are not going to stop looking into this. My injury has… let's say… given us time off to do things in our backyard that the government wouldn’t normally allow. I’m not exactly sure what our commanding officer told Thor, but we’ve got permission to get our hands dirty.”
“I appreciate that. I really do.” She faced him. “But I’m not going to some funny farm to sit around and get all emotional. That’s not going to bring these bastards to justice.”
“If not for yourself. Do it for Specs.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
“Look at her. She’s not doing well. She hasn’t slept.
She can’t stop pounding on that keyboard, and Jupiter says sometimes she’s not doing anything but rehashing the same data points.
She’s not built the same way you and I are. ”
Slowly, Lark shifted. She reached out, tapping her finger on Specs’ leg.
Spec lifted her gaze, peering over her screen.
Kawan turned his attention back to the road. Lark had a massive heart. She protected it with a thick armor of steel, grit, and sarcasm. But her team was her world, and Specs was all that was left.
“Okay,” Lark said softly. “The Refuge it is, and I’ll participate because I know she’ll need me doing things right by her side, but I need something from you, Kawan.”
“Name it.”
“There’s no question that I trust you and your team.
But I can’t sit on the sidelines. I need to know everything, and I need to be part of it.
” She turned, arching a brow. “Once I know Specs is in a good headspace and leaving her to face her demons alone won’t be an issue, I need to forge forward with a plan to take these assholes down.
Whether that’s with your team, or someone else, that’s—”
“It’ll be with my team.” He reached out again, taking her hand. This time, she didn’t yank it away. “You’re going to love The Refuge.”
She groaned.
“Doesn’t matter how hard you fight it, the place is pure magic. It heals the soul whether you want it to or not. The people are the best.”
“If you say so.”
He squeezed her hand. Lark might never open up.
He understood that. It had taken him a long time to lay bare his emotions about the death of his foster mom, sister, and his foster sister’s baby for the world to see.
While he did blame himself, because it was hard not to, intellectually, he knew it wasn’t his fault.
He’d done everything in his power to save them that day.
But his best hadn’t been good enough.
“Just give The Refuge and the people a chance. They saved me, and you know how dark it had gotten. You even said so.” The memory of that time still made his chest tight..
She dropped her head to the window and laced her fingers through his. “Wake me when we get there.”
It wasn’t an admission or an agreement to do anything. To be open to anything. But it was a letting go of something. And that was a start—a crack in the foundation. A way for someone to reach her before it was too late and she was lost to humanity.
Perhaps that was a bit dramatic, but he’d seen it before.
Seen people in this shadowy world of covert ops become solid stone.
Once that happened, their massive, warm, loving hearts closed.
It didn’t make them bad people. At their core, they were still the ones protecting freedom with the fiercest veracity.
Empathy for others was still a driving force.
However, their hardness left them without the ability or the room for love.
Only, they didn’t even know it because they had simply slipped into a way of life that they seemed to be born for.
Lark had been slipping since the day she signed on the dotted line at age eighteen.
It was time to pull her out.