by Paige Tyler
Also by Paige Tyler
SWAT: Special Wolf Alpha Team
Hungry Like the Wolf
Wolf Trouble
In the Company of Wolves
To Love a Wolf
Wolf Unleashed
Wolf Hunt
Wolf Hunger
Wolf Rising
Wolf Instinct
X-Ops
Her Perfect Mate
Her Lone Wolf
Her Secret Agent (novella)
Her Wild Hero
Her Fierce Warrior
Her Rogue Alpha
Her True Match
Her Dark Half
X-Ops Exposed
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2019 by Paige Tyler
Cover and internal design © 2019 by Sourcebooks
Cover art by Kris Keller
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
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Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Acknowledgments
Excerpt from Wolf Rebel
Prologue
Chapter 1
About the Author
Back Cover
With special thanks to my extremely patient and understanding husband. Without your help and support, I couldn’t have pursued my dream job of becoming a writer. You’re my writing partner, my sounding board, my idea man, my critique partner, and the absolute best research assistant a girl could ask for.
Love you!
Prologue
Sangin, Helmand Province, Southern Afghanistan, August 2006
“We have to keep moving, or they’re going to cut off our escape route!”
Even though the city around them was coming apart at the seams from the explosions and automatic weapons fire, somehow Corporal Zane Kendrick still heard Lance Corporal Oliver Shipley’s warning. But while he’d heard it, there was nothing he could do. He was too busy watching one of his best friends in the world dying in his arms.
Lance Corporal Harry Redfield was already unconscious, which was almost certainly a saving grace. The horrific shrapnel wounds covering the front of his body—courtesy of a 107mm rocket warhead—would have had him screaming in agonizing pain. Even in the middle of the war zone Sangin had become, those cries would have only brought more Taliban fighters down on them. And as Oliver had implied, that would mean the end of them all.
They’d considered carrying Harry, but as British special forces soldiers, they’d seen enough men die on the battlefield to know he wasn’t going to make it. Calling in a medevac wasn’t an option, either. With wounds this bad, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
Hoping there was a God up in Heaven to hear him, Zane prayed Harry would die quickly, without ever regaining consciousness and seeing how badly he was torn apart. It was a horrible thing to wish, but in this situation, it was the best they could hope for.
“Dammit, Zane!” Lance Corporal Billy Gordon snapped. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but we’re going to have to leave Harry behind, or we’ll be as dead as he is.”
Zane knew Billy was right, but he couldn’t leave Harry to die here in this dirty alley alone. Zane’s fiancée, Sienna, would have said it was because he cared as much about his men as he did his family. She said that was part of what made him a good leader…and a good man. Zane wasn’t so sure about that. Sienna might have been a little biased when it came to her future husband. He loved her like crazy, but to say she only saw the best in him was an understatement.
This had started out as a simple rescue mission but had quickly gone bad. Earlier in the day, a group of British paratroopers from the third battalion had been ambushed by a large force of Taliban fighters while clearing a compound full of weapons and improvised explosive devices. There had been multiple injuries, and the paratroopers had been forced to retreat. It wasn’t until later they’d realized one of their corporals was missing. Zane and the three other members of their Special Air Service patrol had volunteered to go back for him.
Fortunately, they’d found the injured soldier fairly quickly, even though he’d been hiding. Then that rocket had streaked in out of nowhere and Harry had gotten hit.
“He’s dead, Zane.” Oliver put a hand on his shoulder. “We need to go.”
Zane gazed down at Harry in the darkness, tears burning his eyes. He and Harry had gone through basic recruit and common military training together, then met up again in SAS assessment. They’d gone through the rigorous special ops training and ended up in D Squadron together. They’d been on every training exercise and deployment together for the past six years. Now, Harry was dead. Just like that.
He wished they could bring Harry with them, but he knew they couldn’t. It would take a weapon out of one of their hands and increase the likelihood that none of them would make it home. But there was no way in hell he’d leave Harry lying in the street, not with the way the Taliban treated captured enemy soldiers—dead or alive. So he and his friends hid Harry’s body under some metal sheeting in the alley. Hopefully, that would be enough to keep him safe until they could come back in the daylight and recover the body.
“We all need to remember this location,” Zane said. “That way, someone will be able to come back and take Harry home to his family.”
Oliver and Billy solemnly nodded. There was a lot of dangerous ground for them to cover between here and base camp. The chance of all of them making it back wasn’t good.
It tore him up to even think about, and his thoughts immediately turned to Sienna. They were supposed to get married when he got back from this deployment. He’d gone out of his way to reassure her he wasn’t in a lot of danger over here—not because he wanted to lie to her, but simply because she wasn’t the kind of woman who could deal with the reality of what he did for a living.
If he didn’t make it back, he didn’t want to imagine what it would do to her.
“Let’s go,” he said, pushing thoughts of Sienna aside and hefting his L119A1 carbine, ignoring Harry�
�s blood covering the front of his uniform. “Watch yourselves. This city is full of people looking to kill a coalition soldier, and we’re the only ones here to shoot.”
Zane led them west, toward the river, sticking to the shadows to avoid the groups of armed men roaming the streets. Oliver kept the District Centre apprised of their location as they moved, whispering into his radio to keep from giving their location away.
While Zane tried to stay focused on the present and the need to get the rest of his team back home safely, he couldn’t stop thinking about how crushed Harry’s parents were going to be when they found out he was dead. Zane had spent a lot of time with them over the years, and he would rather be the one to tell him, but that wasn’t the way it worked. Some officer in the regiment who’d probably never met Harry would be the one to do the notification. Zane couldn’t imagine how horrible it would be to learn your son was dead from a total stranger.
He and his team were still two kilometers from base camp when they ran into a group of armed men on a narrow street. The first round caught Zane in the left hip, spinning him halfway around. He grunted as pain gripped him, but he ignored it, putting everything he had into getting his weapon up and aimed at the men. Then he pulled the trigger, carefully putting down one target after another. Billy and Oliver did the same, even as Oliver shouted into the radio that they needed backup.
Zane felt two additional spikes of pain as more bullets slammed into him, but he couldn’t for the life of him say where he’d been hit. It scared him that they didn’t hurt like they should. He dropped his spent magazine and loaded a new one, squeezing the trigger again and again. A few minutes later, the last man fell, and the echo of gunshots slowly faded.
Knowing they needed to get the hell out of there before more bad guys showed up, Zane turned to tell Billy and Oliver as much. At least he tried to. Unfortunately, his whole left side refused to cooperate. He glanced down to see that he’d been hit once in the thigh and once in the stomach, right below his tactical vest. He knew the one in his stomach was bad, but since it didn’t hurt that much, he wouldn’t worry overmuch about it. It wasn’t as if things could get worse.
But when he finally managed to turn around, he realized things could, indeed, get worse. Billy and Oliver were on the ground, and they weren’t moving.
Shit.
What energy he had left drained away. He took a few careful steps, then dropped to his knees between his friends. Behind him, he heard the light thud of feet running across broken ground. It looked like Taliban reinforcements were on the way.
Zane rolled Billy over on his back but knew before seeing his lifeless eyes that it was too late. A round had caught Billy in the neck. He’d probably bled out before even hitting the ground. Another piece of Zane’s soul tore away as he thought about Billy’s pretty girlfriend and the baby they had on the way. She’d wanted Billy to get out of the regiment and get a job at her dad’s clothing store. But Billy had insisted retail wasn’t for people like him and had reenlisted for another tour.
Zane should have talked him out of it. Billy’s unborn child would still have a father if he had.
He forced himself to stop thinking and turned to Oliver, dreading what he’d see. Relief flooded though Zane when his friend groaned. Then he saw the shattered ballistic plates of Oliver’s tactical vest and the blood pouring everywhere. The first shot had broken the protective ceramic plate. The second had punched through his chest. It was amazing he was still alive.
“Stay with me, Ollie,” Zane whispered, sliding his arms under his friend’s shoulder and pulling him up. It struck him then that he was desperately holding on to the last friend he had. The last member of a team he’d been sweating and bleeding with for years. “I’m getting you home. I promise.”
Somehow, Zane got both of them to their feet. Draping one of Oliver’s arms over his shoulder, he gripped the back of his friend’s belt. Oliver tried to help, shuffling like some kind of zombie as they headed toward base camp. They still had a long way to go.
“Help is coming,” Oliver gasped. “I got through to District Centre before it happened. They’re sending help.”
Zane nodded, hoping his friend was right. Because there were a lot of Taliban fighters between here and base camp. Those fighters would do everything they could to slow any vehicles moving this way.
Within minutes, Zane was breathing so hard from exertion he missed the insurgents creeping up behind them…until the shooting started. He spun, emptying his carbine in the general direction of the group of people trying to kill them. He had no idea if he hit anyone, but it made them duck. He would have had to let go of Ollie to reload the assault weapon, and he sure as hell wasn’t doing that. Dropping the carbine, he pulled the Sig Sauer from a holster on his right thigh.
He popped one round at the group of men starting to reassemble behind them, then took off running toward base camp, though with his injuries and Oliver’s dead weight, it was more of a shamble. But they moved. That was all that mattered.
Time became little more than a messy blur of stumbling, gasping for breath, and pain—interspersed with the occasional shots coming at them from the shadows. Zane fired back when he could, taking out a few of the bad guys, but mostly he tried to keep moving. He was carrying limited ammo for his 9 mm. When he ran out, he and Oliver were dead. The goal now wasn’t to wipe out the bad guys. It was to hold them off until help arrived.
A few minutes later, Oliver faltered. His friend was fading fast.
“Go,” Oliver rasped. “I’m slowing you down.”
“Shut up!” Zane snapped. “I’m not leaving you!”
Zane’s first magazine ran out when three men jumped out of a side street. He got the one holding the grenade launcher right before the slide locked back. The other two men ran away, probably not realizing they could have dropped Zane and Oliver without too much effort now that they were defenseless. Reloading the Sig with one hand was complicated. The regiment made them train for stuff like that, for situations like this. Still, practice was one thing. Reality was totally different.
He had fifteen rounds left. That’s all that stood between him and Oliver and certain death.
Zane was so focused on moving forward he barely saw the Taliban fighters slipping out of the darkness. The ground all around them flared with the sparks of ricocheting bullets, and Zane spun Oliver to the side, heading toward one of the buildings lining the street and trying to shield his friend with his body as much as possible.
It didn’t work.
Zane heard the whoosh of the rocket-propelled grenade coming their way a fraction of a second before it impacted the wall of the nearby building and exploded. They both went down, but Oliver took the brunt of the blast wave—and the frag.
Zane hit the ground so hard he thought it would kill him, but he wasn’t that lucky. He didn’t even pass out. He bounced and slid a few feet, then lay there, numb. Frag from the RPG had gotten him, too, and blood was leaking out of him at an alarming rate. The fact that he didn’t feel anything even closely resembling pain still worried him, but he couldn’t focus on that. Oliver needed him.
He crawled on his hands and knees to his friend’s side, stopping every so often to shoot at the insurgents coming at them.
Oliver was a mess, and Zane was sure he was dead. But when he rolled Oliver over, he was still breathing.
“Don’t let them take me alive,” his friend whispered, gray eyes locking desperately on his. “I’m not scared to die, but I don’t want to go out that way.”
Tears filled Zane’s eyes. He knew what Oliver was asking. The Taliban would have no problem torturing his friend, even if it was only for a few minutes before he died. But Zane wasn’t sure this was something he could do. He was supposed to save his friends…not kill them.
But as one bullet after another hit the ground near them, Zane realized he didn’t have to worry about it anymore. Oliver closed his eyes and let out one last, shuddering breath.
Something in
side Zane died then, the final piece of his soul withering away. Harry, Billy, and Oliver—men who’d depended on him to bring them home—were all gone.
How the hell does a person go on after this? Why would they bother?
Zane lifted his Sig out of pure instinct, squeezing the trigger and killing the four men charging him. He wasn’t sure why he did it. There had to be others roaming around. But shooting people who were trying to kill him was what he’d been trained to do, so he’d keep doing it until he couldn’t do it anymore.
But when the part of his mind that had been counting rounds reached fourteen, he stopped. Once he fired the last round, he’d be defenseless, almost certainly captured and tortured by Taliban fighters who would make him pay for every insurgent who’d died tonight. He hated the idea of putting Sienna and his family through the horror of knowing he’d spent his last few hours being tortured.
But before he could fully consider placing the barrel of his 9 mm under his chin, he knew he couldn’t do it. His whole team had gone down swinging. There was no way he could do any less.
He straightened his arm and aimed at the nearest of the men coming at him. There were at least a dozen more behind that guy. Zane would get the first one. Whatever happened after that would happen.
Zane had started to squeeze the trigger when he heard the thrum of big diesel engines followed by the chest-rattling throb of multiple heavy machine guns tearing up the world around him. The rescue party had finally arrived. But as the crowd of Taliban fighters continued to charge at him without slowing, he knew it was too late. The best he could hope for now was to die fighting.
“I’m sorry, Sienna,” he whispered, then aimed at the men again and pulled the trigger.
* * *