by Shauna Allen
Text copyright ©2017 by the Author.
This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program and has not necessarily been reviewed by Stoker Aces Production, LLC. All characters, scenes, events, plots and related elements appearing in the original Special Forces: Operation Alpha remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of Stoker Aces Production, LLC, or their affiliates or licensors.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, thank you, Susan Stoker for allowing me to be a part of this world and for all of your love, support, and encouragement. And to all of her awesome Stalkers that have embraced these Kindle World books—you guys ROCK!
A huge thank you to my assistant, Kimberly Dawn. She is the wind beneath my wings, the peanut butter to my jelly, the powdered sugar to my donut, and lots of other wonderful things I couldn’t do without. I love you, girl!
To Ella Gram, thank you for all you do to make my books shine. You are a true friend and I’m lucky to have you.
Huge love to the lovely LeTeisha Newton for this gorgeous cover! Seriously. Go look at it again…don’t you just want to eat him up?! Thank you, girl!
Thank you to my Shauna’s Angels and my Divas for, well, everything!
My sincerest gratitude to the men and women in uniform, our veterans, and to those who will serve in the future for your commitment to the red, white and blue. I salute you.
And, lastly, all my love always to my husband and my children, who are my world and my reason.
~ ~
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Prologue
Tex
I sat back in my squeaky office chair and sipped my coffee with a fierce frown at the error message on my computer screen.
I cleared it just as my phone buzzed with a text. Before I could check to see if it was Melody calling from her mini getaway with our daughters, more messages began to pop up on the screen. One after the other after the other after the other littered my screen like roaches crawling from the woodwork.
“What the hell?” I leaned forward and slammed my mug down, my stomach dropping to my feet as dread slithered through my gut. This was more than a simple virus. I could feel it. I clicked a few buttons, trying to clear the errors. Nothing. “Damn it!”
My phone was going crazy now, as was my computer.
I grabbed my cell phone and took the call without checking the caller ID, something I never did. “What?” I barked, fully pissed now.
“Tex?”
My eyes moved away from the screen at the concern in my buddy’s voice. “Wolf? What is it, man?”
“Something’s fucking wrong, brother.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Tell me about it. My computer is acting all kinds of crazy right now.”
“You, too?” Now he sounded flat-out scared, which had the hair on the back of my neck standing at attention.
“What do you mean me, too? What the hell is going on?” I spun in my chair and leapt to pace to the window, peering out the blinds at the empty, dark street, my heart suddenly racing. My SEAL instincts were kicking into high gear as I mentally catalogued every house, every car, every shadow, and where every weapon was located in my house.
“The team’s all at my place, man, and so is the Marine Recon Unit that took Mendez down with us a few months ago.” He took a breath. “We were all hacked this morning, and we all received packages. Hand-delivered. To our fucking front doors.”
I turned and unlocked my gun box, tucked my Glock into my waist band, then sprinted out of my study and down the hall toward my front door as fast as I could with my prosthetic leg. “What was in them?”
The phone hung with dead silence as I skidded to a halt near my door.
“Wolf!”
Sigh.
I held my hand on the cold metal knob. “What’s in the packages, man?”
“Remember the envelopes that were delivered to Senator Lytle before the gala?”
I had vague recollections of surveillance photos of our teams and our women, the senator, his wife, family, and staff, and the veiled threats the Mexican drug cartel that had kidnapped the senator’s daughter had eventually made good on . . . or tried to before we took their leader down. “Yeah.”
“Worse.”
“Christ.”
I kept one hand on my pistol as I unlocked the door and inched it open. Outside, the street was quiet. The air was sweet from Melody’s roses and the scent of rain in the distance. I scoured the perimeter. Not a soul in sight. Nothing. I heaved a sigh of relief.
Then I saw it.
There, propped in the corner behind Akilah’s bike. A yellow business envelope. No markings, no nothing. I yanked it up, glanced around, then rushed back inside and locked the door behind me.
“Tex?” Wolf asked.
“Yeah.” I moved back to my study and collapsed back into my chair, the envelope in my lap.
“Did you get a package?”
“Yes.”
“Shit.” He muffled the phone and I heard him tell the rest of the team as their voices mixed in the background, combined with some of the women. He came back on the line. “Did you open it?”
I cleared my throat. “I’m doing it now. Gimme a second.”
Carefully, I broke the seal with a letter opener then dumped the contents of the envelope straight out onto my desk to avoid touching them just in case there was any evidence to be collected. But, as I took inventory of the images before me, it was clear there would be none. We were dealing with someone new. Someone entirely too smart to leave behind trace evidence.
Just as before, recent surveillance photos of the entire team and our wives—Wolf, Caroline, Abe, Alabama, Cookie, Fiona, Mozart, Summer, Dude, Cheyenne, Benny, and Jessyka, as well as me and Melody. But it didn’t stop there. They had picture of the Marines we’d become friends with—Tito, Red, Maverick, Bubba, Kid, and Lucky. And? And the sick bastards had taken pictures of some of the team’s family members and our children.
“SIN PIEDAD” had been carved in blood red ink over the baby’s faces. Over Hope’s face . . . my daughter. No mercy.
The threat was blatant. More than ballsy, considering who he was messing with.
But who was he?
I raked a hand over my head. My eyes blurred. Bile rose in my throat.
There, in black and white, was the evidence of someone out for more than vengeance. He was out for the love of the game . . . the love of the kill.
“Tex?”
“Yeah?”
“Who’s the blonde?”
“What?”
Things quieted as he moved to another room and a door closed. “We were able to figure out who all the people in the pictures were except for one. Mostly parents, siblings, a couple cousins. But not the cute blonde. Does she belong to you or Melody?”
I rifled through the pictures until I found the girl in question and narrowed my gaze, cataloguing her
features. Petite, maybe five feet, if that. A buck twenty, soaking wet. Chin-length, curly, bottle-platinum blonde hair, huge baby blue eyes. Cute as a button, and she wore innocence like I wore my prosthetic.
“Nope,” I finally said. “Never seen her before in my life. Maybe—” Before I could finish my thought, my computer made a sound and a chat box popped up.
El Lobo Blanco: Did you receive our package?
Ice filled my veins. Who the fuck was The White Wolf and why hadn’t I ever heard of this hacker?
Tex: Who is this?
Instead of answering, a photo simply popped up, making my heart freeze painfully in my chest. I blinked, clearing my vision to be sure I was seeing it correctly.
Melody and Akilah, laughing by the lake as Hope dipped her toes in the water. Timestamped yesterday, 6:07 p.m.
“I gotta go,” I mumbled to Wolf, ending the call without waiting for his reply and immediately dialing Melody. It rolled straight to voicemail. I cursed and threw the phone down on my desk.
El Lobo Blanco: Any more questions? Or do I need to further get your attention?
Without waiting for my reply, another image popped up. The girls going to their cabin at night, happy smiles on their faces. Timestamped yesterday, 8:48 p.m.
Then another photo. This time, the blonde I didn’t recognize dressed in a waitress’s uniform, stepping out of a beat-up old truck in front of a small, nondescript house. Timestamped today, 10:01 a.m.
El Lobo Blanco: Your wife and daughters are very beautiful. So is your cousin. It would be a shame if something bad were to happen to them.
Cousin? I didn’t have any cousins.
My mind began to tick through my entire family, but I couldn’t fucking think. All I could focus on was the fact that some sick bastard had taken photos of my wife and daughters and I was here, hundreds of miles away and helpless. I tried Melody’s cell again. No answer. I fumbled around for the number she’d left me to the resort. The line was busy.
“Goddamn it!”
Tex: What do you want?
El Lobo Blanco: Glad to see you are finally listening.
I bit back a growl of rage as the cursor blinked tauntingly back at me.
My phone rang and I snatched it up, praying it was Melody. “Hello?”
“What the hell, man?” Wolf’s voice was an echo as the blood rushed through my ears and words began to appear on the screen.
My mouth opened, closed, opened again as rage poured through my body. I’d never, ever in my life been filled with this kind of wrath.
I stood, ready to go storm the gates of hell if need be.
El Lobo Blanco: We want you all to die . . .
Chapter One
Tanner
The line went dead as Wolf ended the brief call with Tex on speaker phone. Both my team and his SEAL team were behind locked doors in his small den, all the women and children safely tucked away upstairs behind closed windows and under his state-of-the-art surveillance system and our watchful eye on monitor screens. No one was getting by us. Not tonight anyway.
“How the fuck did this happen?” my teammate and best friend, Red, barked, raking a hand through his hair. “I thought we took Mendez down.”
“Whoever was his second must’ve stepped up to the plate in a big way,” our leader, Tito, murmured, throwing us a steely look.
We’d taken a week of R&R after the Op that put down Mendez after he’d kidnapped Red’s girlfriend, Danielle, and her sister. We’d literally just gotten back to Camp Pendleton and were prepping to deploy back to Syria for another recon mission to hunt down Mustaf Al Shadeek, the ISIS general who’d evaded capture in our last mission and managed to kill a dozen more marines since we’d last had him in our sights. But now, here we were, back playing grab ass games with the fucking Mexican cartel, only this time they were playing much dirtier, and our commander wasn’t in the mood to fuck around anymore. He’d gotten wind of our little care packages and had arranged a little closed door sit down with the SEAL team commander and now we were in it together for the long-haul until this shit was over. Not that I didn’t like my new SEAL friends—they were cool as hell and I trusted them nearly as much as I trusted my own team—but I wanted to get back to our primary mission. Shadeek.
But, it looked like this El Lobo Blanco and whoever he worked for would have to take priority.
Dude glanced at the girls on the screen then back to Wolf. “Well, however it happened, and whoever this asshole is, we take him down.”
Benny lifted his hand for a fist bump. “Amen to that, brother.”
Lucky popped a piece of gum in his mouth and sat back to cross his legs, his eyes concerned. “So, how do we begin to do that?”
Wolf glanced up from his wife’s iPad, which had miraculously managed to remain unscathed in the cyberattack. “We hope Tex can figure this shit out and point us in the right direction so we aren’t chasing our tails. He’s grabbed an emergency backup laptop and is seeing what he can do while he flies up to get his girls.”
“Where are they?” Abe asked from his perch near a window, keeping an eye out through the blinds.
“Somewhere in the Allegheny mountains. They were having a little girly getaway and he hasn’t been able to get ahold of them. He’s about to lose his mind. He had to go.”
“Of course, he did,” Cookie said.
“So,” Wolf went back to pecking awkwardly at the iPad screen. “In the meantime, he’s asked me to use the clues in the photo to see what I can do to find this supposed cousin of his and get her under our protection since he can’t be in two places at once.”
Kid picked up her photo from the desk and whistled between his teeth. “She’s cute.”
Wolf glanced over. “I guess.”
“Let me see that.” I reached over and snagged the picture from Kid’s hand with a smirk.
Sure enough, the mystery girl was . . . more than cute. She was fucking epic. Even in a candid surveillance still from twenty meters, it was obvious that she was smokin’ hot. I glanced up. “We sure she’s related to Tex? I mean, no offense, but Kid’s right . . .” I shook the picture. “This girl shares your guy’s DNA?”
Wolf and his entire team swiveled their heads my way, stared for a moment, then burst out laughing.
“Who knows?” Wolf shrugged and turned back to his task as he sobered. “But these bastards think so, and that’s all that matters right now.”
True enough.
A couple of minutes later, he stood, iPad in hand. “I’ll be goddamned. I got her.”
Her picture still clutched in my hand, I jumped up and strode over to look at the DMV photo on his tiny screen. The hair was a bit darker and longer and she wore a tiny diamond stud in her nose, but yeah, it was her all right. My eyes raked over her delicate features, took in the haunted look in her gigantic sky-blue eyes that were fringed with long, dark lashes and a worldliness I would’ve never guessed from the surveillance shot.
Then I spotted her address and my breath seized in my lungs in a tangled mass of painful memories. Biloxi, Mississippi. What were the odds she lived in my hometown? The place that still haunted my nightmares—that no matter how far I ran, I could never run far enough from to escape the demons of my shame?
“So, it’s her? Tex has a cousin he never knew about?” Mozart asked, breaking the spell.
“Rebekah Anne Keegan,” Wolf read her name aloud then glanced up with a bemused smile. “Well, I’ll be damned. I guess so.”
Dude glanced around. “Well, we can’t leave her. She’s Tex’s family and now the cartel has a hit on her. Who’s gonna go get her?”
Abe frowned. “I figured a team of us would go.” He glanced around. “Right?”
Wolf shook his head then glanced at Tito for backup.
Tito leaned forward in his seat. “We can’t all go. We have to be smart about this until we know exactly what we’re facing. There are just too many of us with targets on our backs and too many family members to protect.”
> “So, what’s the plan?” Lucky asked.
He and Wolf exchanged a glance and Wolf nodded as if they’d already discussed this. Tito interlaced his fingers as if in prayer before continuing. “Well, Tex has his immediate family covered, then he’ll set up comms and be in touch as soon as he’s able. Wolf and I have decided there’s power in numbers, so we need to stick together, and Commanders Hurt and Briggs have given us a lot of latitude on this Op due to the personal nature of the threats.” He glanced around. “I don’t need to tell you how sensitive this is for all of us, so we’re going to keep our heads on straight and our emotions in check. We’ll all have each other’s backs and our family’s backs at all times. Are we clear?”
We all exchanged quick glances and nods. Crystal fucking clear. We’d have it no other way.
“Now, down to business,” Wolf picked up where Tito left off. “We’ve decided that my team will hunker down here for the duration with the women and children.”
No one said a word.
“And Tito’s team will take point on making sure every other person whose photo is in those packages is safe and accounted for one way or another. Either bring them here or put them in a safe house. Do what you need to do to make sure they’re safe then get back here ASAP.”
I flipped Rebekah’s photo over and over in my hand as they made plans for who would go where to fetch which family members, my heart still a jumbled mess as my past filled my heart and mind.
“So, that just leaves the girl,” Tito announced, and somehow, I felt his eyes on me.
I swallowed, thumbed the photo face-up once more, and forced a smirk. I’d outrun my fucked up past so far. What was one tiny blonde? “I’ll get her.”
He eyed me closely. He knew where I was from and a bit of my history. “You’re sure? You don’t always have to jump right into the fire, Maverick. One of the other guys can take this one if it’s too much for you to go back home.”
“Mav—” Red started, suddenly cueing in to what was happening.
I shook my head once, shooting him a cocky grin. “It’s Mississippi, guys. Not Syria. It’ll be a cake walk.”