Tyrone (The Four X's Group: La Spezia #7)

Chapter 1

The Four X’s Compound, La Spezia, Italy.

The bottle of Birra Moretti was the only thing keeping Tyrone ‘Zorro’ Power anchored in place at the table.

It was a crisp, cold local brew, and it almost made up for the trauma of having to watch his teammates play happy families.

Around him, the kitchen of the Mason del Tempio—the Four X’s Group’s home base in La Spezia—was a riot of noise, laughter, and the domestic bliss that gave him a dose of hives.

He scratched at his forearm and leaned his back against the ancient, cool stone of a restored archway. He’d opted for a black t-shirt today, the sleeves ripped off at the seams to accommodate the heat of an Italian summer, leaving his heavily inked shoulders and thick biceps on full display.

Ain’t nobody here looking at my ink, and they definitely aren’t running their fingers all up it like Marissa is doing to Midas.

He snorted in his head. There had been a time when he’d wondered what it would be like to find a woman made just for him, as his teammates had.

A woman he’d fall in love with, would have half a dozen kids with, and create the family he’d always craved while he was growing up.

But the warrior he was now knew better than to pin one single hope on dreams or wishes.

Those things were for men way better than his sorry ass.

Beside him, the party raged on. This wasn’t just one of The Four X’s Group’s Saturday BBQs; this time, it was a victory lap.

They’d brought the girls home—Remi ‘Zipper’ McKinley and his wife Serena’s daughter, Ember; and Levi ‘Nemo’ Waters’ and his partner Chari’s kid, Jules; along with Kelsey, the other little girl found with them.

All three were safe, tucked behind the protective barbed wire of the McKinley brothers’ refurbished Templar cloister on the west coast of Italy.

The only thing keeping him in the room right now was the scents of garlic, expensive olive oil, and the rumbling of his stomach reminding him that everyone in this room was a hell of a lot better at cooking than he was.

If he wanted to eat decently today, he’d have to either stay here or venture into La Spezia, and going into town wasn’t something he felt like doing today.

Look at these fuckers being all kinds of domesticated.

To his left, Talon ‘Lego’ McKinley was currently being used as a jungle gym by his new Malinois puppy, Chaos.

The dog was a whirlwind of tan fur and needle-sharp teeth, yapping and nipping at Talon’s boots while the big man laughed, his wife Petra watching them with a soft, indulgent smile as she rubbed their older dog, Zombie’s, ears.

Further down the long, Italian farmhouse-style table, Remi and Serena shared a look that was entirely too private for a room with this many people in it.

Marco ‘Midas’ Guerriero was hovering near Marissa, his hand pressed possessively against the small of her back as he whispered something in her ear that made the fiery Italian blush.

Colt ‘Radar’ McKinley stood by the stove, arguing with his wife, Siobhán, about the proper way to sear a steak.

Even without the eldest McKinley brother, Gunnar—or Grizzly as he was better known—and his wife, Jorja, in the kitchen, it was too much.

There was too much light in this room, too much hope.

It made his skin crawl, but as much as it irked him, he wouldn’t insult the men who’d taken him into their crazy-ass family and kept him when he was at his lowest, by leaving when they were celebrating the safe recovery of their children.

The three little girls, Ember, Jules, and Kelsey, played on the floor with enough dolls, crayons, and sparkly shit to run a toy store in the run-up to Christmas.

The kids were lightning-fast and gave zero indication of which way they were going to move next.

He had no idea how the guys managed to avoid standing on them as they moved around the room, because there was zero chance that he wouldn’t step on one if he moved from his spot at the table.

Maybe if I go right and around the table, I can leave without squishing one.

Tyrone took a long pull of his beer and risked looking at the clock on the wall.

Nineteen-thirty. If he slipped out now, he could be at the range in ten minutes.

He needed the smell of cordite. He needed the rhythmic, mechanical percussion of a suppressed M4.

He needed something that didn’t remind him that he was the outlier, the medic who had saved dozens of strangers but let the people who mattered most slip through his fingers, and the only one who was running the shitshow called life, solo.

Happy endings were for the likes of the McKinleys. He was a realist who knew that happy marriages and even happier families were a rarity in the world of Special Operations; to have so many of them in this room was an anomaly and not the norm.

“Hey, Zorro, why the hell are you brooding? Lighten up,” Colt yelled over the din, tossing a wadded-up napkin at his head. “We’re celebrating. The girls are home. The bad guys are horizontal. Drink your beer and quit brooding.”

“I’m not brooding, Radar. Observing,” Tyrone countered, his voice a low, gravelly drawl that carried years of Chicago’s South Side. “Wondering if the tangos of this world would be so scared of us if they could see into this house right now.”

“They won’t even get a glimpse over the fuc—fecking wall,” Colt replied without looking up from the grill. “That shit will never happen again.”

Never say never, brother.

Tyrone offered a non-committal grunt. He was restless. His internal radar was pinging—that low-level hum of ‘wrongness’ that usually preceded an ambush. But there was no ambush here. Just family.

Isn’t that kinda the same thing?

He glanced toward the kids, grateful that they were blissfully unaware of the international incident their kidnapping had sparked.

Ember and Jules were now tangled in a heap while Kelsey, the older girl they’d rescued alongside them, sat at the edge of the group.

Kelsey was six, maybe seven, with dark pigtails that were currently lopsided and a bright-red ketchup stain on the front of her yellow shirt.

While the two younger girls were shrieking with laughter as Chaos the puppy licked their faces, Kelsey was quieter.

Her movements were careful, her eyes older than they had any right to be.

Tyrone knew those eyes. He saw them in the mirror every morning during his shave.

They were the eyes of a survivor who hadn’t quite decided if the world was a safe place to be yet.

He felt a familiar tug in his gut—the healer’s instinct.

He’d spent his entire adult life fixing broken things, but the psychological wounds were always the hardest to grasp.

He’d performed the initial medical check on Kelsey when Caius Mercier had purchased her from human traffickers along with Ember and Jules.

She’d been brave then, silent and steady while he’d checked her vitals and cleaned the grime from her face.

Damn, I hope Grizzly can find her family. She’s too young to be alone.

As if she felt his scrutiny, Kelsey looked up then, her gaze locking onto his. She didn’t smile, but she didn’t look away. Instead, she stood up, brushing dog hair off her leggings, and began to walk toward him.

The room seemed to quiet in Tyrone’s ears, the banter of his teammates fading into a dull roar. He shifted in his chair, setting his beer bottle on the table.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said softly as she stopped a few feet away. “Puppy getting too rowdy for you?”

Kelsey didn’t answer right away. She was staring at his right shoulder.

Specifically, she was staring at the ink that peeked out from under the collar of his shirt and wrapped down his arm.

An eagle clutching a Raider stiletto, a banner underneath etched with his old platoon number, flanked on either side by crossed arrows to signify the mission that had nearly cost his team their lives.

It was a mark of brotherhood, a brand he and his unit had all stayed up late to get together after returning home from their second deployment into Afghanistan.

Kelsey took another step forward. Her small hand reached out, hovering just inches from his arm. “Can I?” she whispered.

Tyrone froze. He wasn’t great with kids. He was the guy who patched them up and handed them back to their parents. He didn’t know the protocol for this.

“Sure. It’s just ink, kid.”

She reached out and touched the edge of the eagle’s wing with one fingertip.

Her skin was cool, her touch light as a feather.

Tyrone held his breath, a strange, localized paralysis taking over his muscles.

Children didn’t gravitate toward him, so he had no freaking clue how he was supposed to react.

What the hell is she doing?

“My daddy had a tattoo like that,” she whispered, her voice so low it was almost drowned out by Talon laughing at the puppy in the background.

The world tilted on its axis. It wasn’t a common tattoo.

Sure, plenty of guys had eagles, and even more of them had knives.

But the specific configuration of the Raider Recon insignia, combined with the stylized numbers of their specific platoon, and the crossed arrows?

That was a closed circle. Only twelve men had that exact design.

Tyrone’s heart stalled. His peripheral vision went black, narrowing down until all he could see was this small, haunted girl and the finger she had resting on his skin.

“What did you say?” he asked, his voice sounding like it was coming from the bottom of a very deep well.

Kelsey looked up at him, her dark eyes clear and earnest. “My daddy. He had the magic bird and the sword, and the arrows and the numbers. Right there.” She pointed to the exact spot on her own shoulder. “He used to let me trace it when he put me to bed.”