Page 8

Kyle

I scanned the room, taking in the expressions of my team as the words left my mouth.

“Jared is coming.”

A ripple of reactions moved through the Ghosts, some subtle, some not. A muscle ticked in Noah’s jaw, Mace let out a slow exhale, his eyes narrowing slightly. Duke’s fingers tapped a steady rhythm against the table, his version of restless energy. No one spoke right away, though, because weallknew.

Jared had been my number three back on our military contracts. At one time, I’d trusted him with my life, same as I did with the men in this room. He was sharp, reliable, one of the best, but then something changed. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was because there were no major incidents, and no obvious betrayals. I’d just a feeling, a slow-growing unease when it came to him. A gut instinct that told me he wasn’t the same man I used to trust. And my gut had neveroncesteered me wrong.

Judging by the way the rest of my team reacted, they felt it too.

There were three reasons I’d invited him here today. First, I needed to see if that uneasy feeling remained when we were back on home ground, working together. Would thatitchstill be there, the one that told me something was off? Second, he was bringing me my newTAC-50 rifle—a custom setup from a friend in the Canadian Special Forces. That rifle was going to be crucial when we went in for Piper.

And third, I had spoken to Cookie earlier that morning. Cookie was one of Wolf’s men—his wife had been a victim of human trafficking, and because of that, he never stopped tracking the industry, never stopped looking for information. He had a network unlike anyone else, and when I’d mentioned my concerns about Jared, he’d only given me one piece of advice—keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer.

I knew—deep down—Jared was up to something.

Maybe he was skimming off the top of military contracts. Maybe he was cutting corners, putting us in danger while keeping himself out of harm’s way. Maybe he was feeding intel to someone heshouldn’tbe. There were amillionpossibilities, and I needed to figure it out, because I knew I’d be getting called back to the pits soon.

And thelastthing I needed was to be watching my own back for the wrong reasons.

JAGGER

I sat, my muscles coiled tight, watching Preacher struggle to process what I had just told him. He wasn’t a man who lost control easily, but right now, his whole world wasshattering.

“She…” His voice cracked, and he swallowed hard. “My baby…”

The next second, hesnapped. With a roar, he flipped his desk. Thesolidwood behemoth that normally took two guys to move went crashing over with an ear-splittingboom, papers were flying through the air, and a bottle of whiskey shattered on the floor.

I jumped up, barely dodging the wreckage as he stalked across the room, his body vibrating with rage. Then, without hesitation, he startedpunching the wall, over and over. Fist to drywall. Fist to brick. Blood smeared across the surface, but he didn’t stop.

“Preach,” I barked, keeping my tone sharp but controlled. “Stop.” He didn’t. I stepped forward. “Preacher, stop.”

His shoulders rose and fell in ragged breaths. His forehead pressed against the cracked wall, his bloody knuckles flexing at his sides.

Then, finally, he spoke. “Ifailedher, Jagger.”

His voice was so broken, sotormented, that it hit me right in the fucking chest.

“No, you didn’t.”

His laugh was bitter, sharp. “How could Inotknow what was happening to her?”

Kyle’s mom had been amanipulativebitch, we all knew that. She’d damn near started a war between us and another MC. Preacher had stopped that, laid itallout in front of her, and given her an ultimatum. That day, he had told her to pack her shit andleave, or he’dmakeher disappear.

She had madea lotof enemies. He had known she was aliability. Aproblem. A psychotic mess that he needed to cut out of his life. But what hehadn’tknown was that she had been beating his daughter bloody. That she had made Kyle’s lifehellevery single day. That she hadbrokenher in ways no one had seen.

His grip on the table of liquor was so tight his fingers turned white. He picked up a bottle of whiskey, pulled the top off, and took a deep pull before setting it down with a thud.

“What do I do?” he rasped.

“Tell her the truth, Preacher.” I let the words sink in before adding, “Sheneedsto know.”

His throat bobbed as he nodded slowly, his gaze locked on the floor. “I’m going toloseher,” he whispered.

I had the same fear, but I was going tofightfor her, and he needed to, too.

Before I could say anything else, Duke burst through the door, his expression hard.

One word left his mouth, letting us know the shit had officially hit the fan.

“Church.”

KYLE

We were gathered in Church, and the air thick with tension. The nameDemingohad been brought up again, and it sent a wave of unease through the room.

Then Duke strode in, his expression grim, and threw a stack of papers onto the table. “We found some shit.”

The room went silent as we passed out the papers he’d thrown around. One by one, we read through the documents. It was bad, reallyfucking bad. I felt myselfstiffenas I processed what I was seeing. More papers hit the table, Data was still finding more.

My fingers clenched around the pages as my stomach twisted. Then I saw it. The piece that lockedeverythinginto place.

“Son of afucking bitch,” I gasped. My pulseroaredin my ears. “He did it.”

Duke’s jaw tightened. “It appears,” he ground out, “that old Demingo was the head of theDiavoli cartel.”

A sick feeling settled deep in my gut.

“He worked his way to the topbeforejoining the FBI,” Duke continued. “Once he got his badge, he used it to becomeEl Jefe. With the combined power of the cartel and his federal authority, he had near total control over one of the major routes from Argentina to the U.S.”

JesusChrist, that kind of power? It wasunprecedented. Normally, traffickers and cartels operatedseparately, carefully avoiding each other unless necessary, but this was somethingelse.

Most powerful cartelsran their own show. They had control, sure, but they still had to navigate the politics of other crime syndicates, and Demingo had bypassed all of that. With afederal badgein his pocket and cartel muscle at his back, he had built something no one had everfucking seen before.

And the most terrifying part? No one had noticed. No one hadstoppedit.

“How thefuckdid he pull this off?” Jagger muttered.

How the fuck didno onesee it before now? Because if we didn’t stop him now, there’d beno stopping him at all.

The room was tense, the weight of everything pressing down like a goddamn anvil.

“What does this have to do with us?” Noah, one of Hunter’s guys, asked. His voice was sharp, clipped with barely restrained frustration. He wasn’t the only one struggling to keep his emotions in check. “We didn’t shop him,” Noah continued. “We never even got thechance.” His fists curled on the table as his gaze locked on the intel in front of him. “Just as we were about tofuck him up, the bastardburst into flames. So why the fuck is he doing thisnow?”

I wasn’t surprised by his reaction. His focus had been solely on Bo ever since we realized she was inside Demingo’s operation. His whole body was wound tight, a controlled fire burning hotter with every second that passed.

Hunter, though, well, he lookedthe same. “It’s not justnow,” Hunter hissed. “Let’s be clear about that. With a setup like that, he’s been doing it all along, it’s just we never knew.”

“Well, nothing like this has happened before now,” Elijah, another one of Hunter’s guys, snapped. “So obviously, itis.”

I caught the look Hunter shot at Kyle just before he dropped his head into his hands. His shoulders shook with a deep, ragged breath, his whole body shuddering under the weight of what he now knew.

Then Noah read the next part of the file, and everythingchanged. His chair scraped violently against the floor as he shot up.

“He planned the bomb,” he snarled, disbelief warping his expression into somethingprimal. His eyes flicked down to the paper again before his head snapped up. His entire bodylocked up. “He paid thatfucking bitchto put her babies in the car and hit the button,” heroared.

The sound of woodsplinteringfilled the room as he hurled his chair against the wall. No one moved. Hell, I don’t think anyonebreathed.

On their final tour, Hunter and his team had been ambushed when a woman detonated a bomb with her kids still inside the car. The explosion had ripped through them, killing some, maiming others. It hadendedtheir careers, and now we knew who had been behind it.

Dragon stood off to the side, arms crossed, his sharp eyes taking in every reaction, every shift in energy. The most astute MC President I had ever met, he knew when to interfere and when to let things play out, but right now he knew none of us would be reacting this way if it wasn’tjustified. We wereluckyit had just been a chair.

“He also planned that RPG attack on us a couple months before that,” Kyle said flatly.

The words barely left her mouth before Jared’s head snapped up. I narrowed my eyes at theweasel. His reaction wasn’tshock.

There was no disbelief, no outrage. Instead, his eyesnarrowedslightly, and if I wasn’t mistaken the fucker was tryingnot to smile. Preacher and I had already had our suspicions about him, this was just confirming that I needed to get to thebottomof whatever the hell was going on with him.

“Youcan’tbe fucking serious,” Blake, one of Valiant’s men, muttered.

“Dead serious,” Hunter gritted out.

Blake shook his head, disbelief written all over his face. “Demingo had his freedom. He wasn’t bound to the government anymore. He couldmoveany way he wanted, wasn’t under the microscope. What the fuck does he want with us?”

“Revenge,” Kyle answered, her voice void of emotion. Heads turned toward her as she leaned forward, elbows braced on the table, her expression unreadable. “He lost the power that working for the government gave him,” she continued. “Now he has to answer to other people. He has toworkwith other cartels, so he doesn’t get to run the show anymore. He wants to prove his strength and get that power back.”

Silence.

Then—

“What does he have planned?”

Mace’s voice was strained, his body wound tight.

I felt for the guy. If it had been Kyle who had been taken… if I had gotten thatphoto… I would havelost my fucking mind.

His handsshookas he gripped the edge of the table, his breathing hard and uneven.

Duke rubbed his chin, his expression thoughtful as he mulled over everything.

Mace was barely keeping it together as he waited, but Duke took his time.

“Weknowhe has Ava and Gia,” Duke finally said, referring to Mace’s sister and woman. “And we know he has Scarlett—who was taken fromherworkplace.Thatmeans she wasn’t a direct target like Ava and Gia were.” Duke paused, running through the possibilities in his head. “In criminal psychology, this would be viewed as amulti-motive move.”

Mace looked like he was about tosnap.

Duke raised a brow but kept going. “Ava and Gia wereundoubtedlyaimed at you. But Scarlett wasn’t involved with them, aside from being Ava’s close friend.”

The realization clicked into place at the same time for both Hunter and me.

“Scarlett is aimed atsomeone else,” Hunter whispered.

“Someone Demingo is making apointto,” I finished.

The table split off into small groups, quiet conversations bouncing around as everyone tried to piece together what this meant for them.

But Duke wasn’t done. “Or,” he cut in, raising his voice slightly, “someonerequestedthat she be taken to send a message. Wecan’tignore the possibility that this is ajobfor someone else.”

“That actually makesmoresense,” Coleman, one of Mace’s guys, muttered. He started explaining the mess going on in their hometown, about how two powerful families were under attack.

“Maybe Scarlett means something tothem,” he suggested, referring to the person behind the attacks.

Hunter scrubbed a hand over his face, groaning. “Fuck me, this just keeps gettingworse.”

I leaned back, watching and listening. This group was toodiversefor knee-jerk reactions. Listening was the only way to see the problemas a whole, instead of fractured pieces.

Then Mace spoke again, his voice hard. “Sohowdo we find them?” No one had an answer. “And why the fuck amIin this?”

Kyle was the one to reply. “You were part of theraidin 2014.”

Mace went rigid.

The room held its breath.

Then it happened.

CRACK.

His fist collided with the wall, punching right through the hole Noah had made earlier. Coleman lunged, wrapping his arms around Mace, restraining him. No one else moved to stop him, because wegot it—the anger, the helplessness, and the feeling of havingzero fucking control. But he needed to be in one piece to get Ava and Gia back.

Coleman’s voice waslowwhen he spoke, but it held every ounce ofcommandthat Mace needed to hear. “We’regonnafind them.” His grip tightened, his eyes locked on Mace’s wild expression. “We’re gonna findallof them, but you need tocalm the fuck down.”

Mace’s head hung low as he panted through his rage.

“Whatgoodare you gonna be if you’re out of your damn mind? If you have afucked handbecause you’re being a goddamnasshole?” Coleman shook him once, hard. “The answer to that, and you know I’m not bullshitting you, is no fucking good. Nowget your shit together.”

The room went dead silent and stayed that way until Kyle’s phone rang. She barely glanced at the screen before she spoke.

“It’sBo.” Her voice was steady, but the slight tension in it told me everything I needed to know.

The anxiety and thefear were there, because she knew what was at stake. We listened in silence as Kyle spoke to Bo, setting the plan into motion.

And just like that, we had our targets. One group forPiper, and another, larger group forAva, Gia, and Scarlett.

And Demingo? He was about to find out exactly what happened when hefucked with the wrong people.

I had my eye locked through the scope of my brand-newTAC-50, every muscle coiled tight as I tracked Bo’s movements. She was dragging Hunter’s woman Piper out of the building, her grip tight despite Piper barely being able to hold herself up. She wasgetting her out, though, and that’s what mattered.

Then allhellbroke loose. The second the door slammed open, and they hit open ground, Demingo’s men realized what was happening.

Gunfire exploded into the night. Bullets kicked up dirt, shattered windows, and splintered wood as theyunleashed helltrying to get them back.

Idid what I do best, I dropped the first one before he could even raise his rifle. Then the second. Then the third. Each shot wasprecise,silent,deadly. But it wasn’tenough, there were too many for me to deal with on my own. No matter how fast I worked, Icouldn’tcover every angle.

I saw the moment it happened through my scope—Bo jerked, stumbling forward, a bloom of red spreading down her side. She’d been hit. My pulse spiked, my finger already squeezing the trigger, taking out the bastard who’d shot her.

But she didn’t stop, nor did shehesitate. She kept dragging Piper, moving toward the vehicle, focused onthe mission. She’d gotten Piper out, but by the time we reached her Bo was gone. And Piper was insuch bad shape we hadno choicebut to get her to the ERimmediately.

Noah was barely holding it together. His eyes were hollow, and his breathing uneven.

He hadn’t spoken since Bo went missing, and no one blamed him. Bo had been inside Demingo’s operation formonths, feeding us intel, risking her life every single day.

And now she was inenemy hands.

But we wouldget her back—no man or woman was ever left behind, and Noah knew that.

We alldid but knowing it andlivingit were two different things.

The waiting room in the hospital wassilent. In fact, it was toosilent. A whole group of us, trained soldiers, mercenaries, fighters—just sitting there, waiting for word onPiper. Mainly for word that she wasgoing to make it, reassurance that she was going to be okay.

Not a single one of us spoke. Not even abreathwas wasted.

We had scrubbed thecamouflage paintfrom our faces before stepping onto hospital grounds, making sure there wasnothingto tie us to what had gone down. There were already going to beenough questions, we didn’t need to draw more attention to ourselves. If anyone—anyone—linked us to what had happened, the risk of the traffickers hunting us down skyrocketed. And we weren’tstupid. We had made sure thatwouldn’t happen.

Now that we didn’t have that worry hanging over us, we stayed vigilant, but we were focused on Hunter’s woman, the mother of his son. And while we did that, we worked on our phones looking for Bo and for the assholes who were doing this.

Word had come in—Gia, Ava, and Scarlett were safe. Mace had them.

Relief hit like a punch to the gut, but it didn’t erase the tension still coiled in my chest. They were safe now but getting them out hadn’t been easy. Not by a long shot.

A friend of theirs had tracked them down, pinpointing their location just hours before our raid for Piper. Timing had been everything. While we fought our way through hell to get her back, Mace and his crew had made their move. But it hadn’t been clean.

One of the guards had been strapped with a suicide vest. One wrong move, one slip of the trigger, and the bastard would’ve taken everyone with him.

That’s why Mace had taken the sniper position.

High ground. Steady hands. A scope trained on a walking time bomb.

He had tracked him, waited, breath slow, heart steady. The guy hadn’t even known he was being hunted. Then, like some twisted stroke of fate, he had wandered into the woods to take a piss.

That was all it took. One clean shot. One problem down.

But this wasn’t over.

Not by a long shot.

We had them safe, but we still had a mess to clean up. And I had a feeling the next problems wouldn’t go down as easy as a lone guard in the woods.

The days crawled by, each hour stretching into an eternity.

Every second felt like a goddamn year.

Piper was still in the ICU, clinging to life, her body locked in a battle she hadn’t asked for. She hadn’t just been injured—she had been suffering.

A deep wound, carved into her skin by jagged glass days before her kidnapping, had festered unnoticed. Infection had spread through her system like wildfire, unchecked and relentless. The filth she had been kept in, the lack of care, the sheer cruelty of it all had turned a manageable wound into something life-threatening. Septicemia had sunk its claws into her, dragging her down into fevered nightmares and whispered prayers.

She was so fucking sick, but she was fighting.

For days we watched as Hunter visited her and held her hand, until finally she was turning a corner.

The beeping of machines still filled the room, the rhythmic hiss of the ventilator reminding me with every breath she took just how close he had come to losing her. But today, there was something different in the air. The doctors had hope in their voices. The fever had broken. Her vitals had stabilized. The war inside her body was shifting, and for the first time in what felt like forever, the tide was in her favor.

She was winning.

And God help anyone who tried to take her from Hunter again.

Duke and I sat at the table, plans sprawled out before us, the weight of the moment pressing heavy on our shoulders. Maps, blueprints, intel reports—every possible scenario was laid out in front of us, and we ran through each one with ruthless precision. There was no room for error. No second chances.

We had to move fast. We weren’t waiting for Demingo to come to us, we were going to him. Jagger and Preacher weren’t happy with the plan. They wanted caution, wanted to regroup, wanted to play the long game. Too fucking bad. This wasn’t about comfort, this was about war, and war didn’t wait for the enemy to strike first.

Every second we sat back, Demingo fortified. Every hour that passed, he had more time to prepare, to disappear, to slip through our fingers like smoke. That wasn’t happening, not on my watch.

I could feel the heat of Jagger’s glare across the room, the unspoken challenge in his silence. Preacher had his arms crossed, jaw clenched, barely holding back his disagreement. I didn’t care.

War wasn’t won by hesitation. It was won by the ones willing to throw the first punch—and make damn sure it was the last.

We had intel on a property where Demingo’s men were stationed. He had a stronghold that he kept locked down and heavily guarded. It was a place they thought was untouchable. They were wrong.

We hit it hard. The breach was swift, brutal—no warning, no mercy. The first shots rang out like thunder, and by the time the dust settled, eleven bodies littered the ground. Blood soaked into the dirt, the air thick with the metallic scent of death and gunpowder.

As I stared down at the bodies, I noticed with satisfaction that two of them were key players in Demingo’s operation. Men who made his empire run. Men he relied on heavily. Now they were nothing more than corpses cooling in the night air.

But we didn’t stop there. We stripped a phone off one of the bodies, fingers slick with blood as we scrolled through his contacts. And then we sent Demingo a message.

A picture of his men dead. Their bodies twisted, lifeless, scattered like garbage. His drugs and money—his precious empire—up in flames, burning bright against the darkness. Reduced to nothing but ash. We knew it would hit the mark, how could it not?

The Knights had already swept through, cleaning up the weapons. Anything worth keeping was ours. Anything that could be traced back was gone.

And the rest, all of the information and hard drives we found, it ended up in the hands of the authorities after we’d downloaded everything from them. Everything we handed to them was done anonymously, though, and was totally untraceable.

Luck had been on our side, and it’d all been perfectly orchestrated. Demingo thought he ran this city. Tonight, we reminded him who really held the power.

By morning, the news was already running with it. A short segment, barely two minutes long, but it was enough.

Apparently, a letter had "mysteriously" blown away from the crime scene, drifting lazily in the wind until it landed in a bush just far enough from the flames to remain untouched. A miraculous discovery, really. And inside that letter had been confession.

The men who had died weren’t just criminals. According to the letter, they had been part of a secret gay cult—led by none other than Jose Demingo himself.

The confession painted a vivid picture of debauchery and disgrace. It claimed that Demingo had shamed his family, had shamed the Lord himself, indulging in drug-fueled orgies, corrupting his followers, luring men into sin with promises of power and pleasure.

And in an act of repentance, they had ended themselves. The whole thing had been a cleansing, and a final attempt to wipe their sins away.

The story spread like wildfire. Not just because it was salacious, not just because it had all the makings of a scandal, but because we had made sure it reached every major news outlet across Central and South America. Every journalist, every tabloid, every headline-hungry media station received an anonymous tip, an "exclusive" insight into the twisted truth of Jose Demingo’s secret life.

If there was one thing we knew about Demingo, it was that he took his dick and his reputation very fucking seriously. And now both were in ruins.

We had also finally gotten a clean look at him. On one of the hard drives, there was surveillance footage of him for some reason, like one of his men was going to stab him in the back anyway. Multiple angles at different locations. The difference with these ones was that there were no more grainy images, no more secondhand descriptions. This was him, clear as day.

And the man himself looked like a fucking monster.

One side of his face was completely melted. He looked like something out of a horror movie. Like his flesh had been devoured by fire or acid, twisting his features into something barely human. Scar tissue pulled tight across his skull, warping his expression into a permanent sneer. He had the kind of face that made children cry, the kind of face that haunted nightmares. It was also clear that he hadn’t been able to seek medical attention for it, and a scar that’d normally make my heart break for the person living with it… Well, karma worked in wonderous ways.

Ironically, his appearance wasn’t even his biggest problem, because now the entire world believed he was the leader of a gay orgy suicide cult. In his world, that wasn’t just an insult, that was a death sentence. His allies would start questioning him, would start wondering if he had gone soft. More than likely, they’d already decided he was losing control.

And once doubt crept in, it spread like a disease.

His men would hesitate before following orders. His lieutenants would second-guess his judgment. His rivals would start circling like vultures, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. And that was more dangerous than anything we could have done to him physically. Because men like Demingo didn’t fear bullets, they feared weakness. They feared irrelevance, and losing their grip on power, so we just had to keep pushing. We had to do it hard enough and relentlessly enough until he had no choice but to come out and play.