by Grant, Donna
The Guardian
Sons of Texas, Book 5
Donna Grant
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE GUARDIAN
© 2020 by DL Grant, LLC
Excerpt from The Hero copyright © 2019 by Donna Grant
Cover Design © 2020 by Charity Hendry
ISBN 13: 9781942017592
Available in ebook, print, and audio editions
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce or transmit this book, or a portion thereof, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author. This book may not be resold or uploaded for distribution to others. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
www.DonnaGrant.com
www.MotherofDragonsBooks.com
Contents
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
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Epilogue
Thank You!
The Hero
Chapter 1
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About the Author
1
St. Petersburg, Russia
Yesterday
“They know.”
The whispered words from behind him caused Luka to stiffen. He’d been careful. So very careful. Trusting only his best friend, Vladimir, because he knew what kind of monsters he was trying to avoid.
Luka tried to calm his racing heart as he scanned the faces of those rushing past him on the street. He’d given his life to the Federal Security Service—the FSB, formerly the Soviet KGB. He’d been an excellent spy, and he’d taught many of the younger generation. So many times, his superiors had come to him with one problem or another, and he always managed to find a solution.
“You’re on your own.”
Luka didn’t turn around. It wouldn’t do any good. Vladimir would have already blended into the crowd. That was his specialty. If Vladimir didn’t want to be found, it was damn near impossible to locate him.
Then again, it wasn’t just anyone after the two of them.
Luka thought about his flat. There was nothing there for anyone to find. Nor in his office at FSB headquarters. He wasn’t that stupid. When they came for him—and they would—he was prepared for the torture they would inflict while demanding he tell them everything he knew. Luka had been down this road before when captured by an enemy. He’d just never expected his own country to turn against him.
He brought the cup of coffee to his lips and blew on the steaming liquid. His hat was pulled low, covering his salt and pepper hair and brows. With the rim near his face, he glanced at his watch. Two minutes until he was supposed to walk across the street and board the train that would take him west out of the city to Estonia.
If Vladimir could be trusted—and he could—then anyone was a potential threat. Luka knew firsthand not to discount anyone. To see everyone as a potential enemy. But he wasn’t just any spy. He was one of the best. He’d survived two years of torture. He wasn’t going to let some nameless group keep him from getting out of Russia and sharing the truth with the world.
He took a drink, but he didn’t taste the coffee. His mind was trying to find threats in the crowd. He picked out two women standing fifty meters to his left. Ahead of him, a man dressed in business attire hadn’t quite hidden the earpiece he wore well enough. To his right, three other men stood out like sore thumbs. It was all so obvious. Too obvious. Yet nobody made a move.
That’s when it hit him. They wanted him to think he’d beaten them. He’d let his guard down, and that’s when they’d strike.
Luka’s mind raced to find a way out. Every direction he turned, there they were, waiting. He couldn’t go home. He couldn’t go to work. He couldn’t flee his beloved homeland. That left only one thing for him to do.
He drew out his phone and sent a two-word text. Then he started walking to the train. He threw away his coffee and put his hands into the pockets of his coat. The fingers of his right hand wrapped around the pistol, while his left found the grip of the small dagger.
No one stopped him. He entered the train station and made his way to the platform. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. He was being followed, and he had a suspicion that more enemies surrounded him. Still, he didn’t slow. He reached the car and took the steps up and inside.
He walked through car after car until he found one that was nearly filled to capacity. He went to the very back and took a spot opposite a mother with a toddler in the seat facing him. Luka nodded in greeting. He glanced to his side to see three men in their early twenties wearing jeans and hoodies. One listened to music or something through earbuds. Another was reading. The third played on his phone. They looked unassuming, which meant they were most likely people he needed to be wary of.
He sat back and looked out the window. His thoughts skidded to Vladimir again, and he wondered if his old friend had gotten away. Despite the normalcy around him, Luka was on high alert. He knew better than most how a good operative could get a job done—even in a crowd.
The moment the train began to roll, his senses became even more heightened. If this were his mission, he’d wait several minutes before he made his move. It would give the prey a sense of security and let them think they had gotten away.
Just a few minutes into the ride, the mother across from him made a sound and spoke softly to the child. The harried woman gave him an apologetic look as she shifted the cumbersome toddler, who was now whining. She shushed the boy, rocking him. As she moved, she knocked over her coat and bag. He smiled and continued studying the other passengers while the mother shifted the child and tried to gather her items.
“Excuse me,” the mother said, just loud enough to get his attention.
Luka’s gaze slid to her, and his brows rose in question.
“Would you mind getting the bag for me, please? I don’t want to wake him,” she said, looking at the child who now lay limply across her chest.
Without question, he bent to retrieve the bag and coat. No sooner had he leaned over than he felt something sharp near his ribs. He froze, unable to believe what had just happened. He tried to sit up, but he couldn’t move. Blood flowed, thick and hot, from the wound in his side. As he struggled for breath, he managed to turn his head to look at the mother. She was gone. The only thing left was a life-like doll he had mistaken for a real child.
His last thought as his eyes closed was that there was no escaping the monsters.
2
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Today
There were monsters in the world. Maks knew that all too
well. He surveyed the bustling city at night, the tourists moving from one hotspot to another. The red-light district teemed with people until the narrow alleys were nearly bursting. People watched the scantily clad women in the windows—some curious, some judging, and others not bothering to hide their hunger.
Some feared the night because they knew there were horrors there. Most believed that’s when the monsters came out to play. And they did.
But the real beasts, the brutes so evil, so morally corrupt that there was no saving their souls, well…they preferred the daytime.
This was the second night in a row that Maks had taken to the streets. He’d been restless since he got the encrypted text the day before. He wasn’t even sure why it had been sent to him. After decoding it and figuring out that it had come from Luka, Maks had been even more confused.
He’d met Luka only twice. The older man seemed nice enough—for a spy. Any words exchanged between them had been for business and nothing more. So why had Luka sent that cryptic text? And how did he even get Maks’ number? Maks initially thought it might have been done on accident. Then he’d heard that Luka had been murdered on a train.
Maks leaned his shoulder against the corner of a building and looked down at his mobile. The screen only had two words: “Watch yourself.”
He put the phone away and blew out a breath. No matter how he looked at it, there was only one thing Luka could be talking about—the Saints. Unease slithered through Maks. The secret organization was global, with the heads of states of all countries involved in some form or fashion. There wasn’t a country that the Saints didn’t have control of somehow.
The alliance was so well-formed and implemented that most had no idea they even existed. Maks had discovered the organization when he was in Delta Force. He’d gotten an up-close-and-personal introduction that had left a sour taste in his mouth. He hadn’t told a single person what had transpired that day.
A few months later, the Central Intelligence Agency came calling, offering him a job. He had known exactly why they were there. He’d wanted to refuse them, but he was also driven to learn everything he could about the Saints. He couldn’t do that if he wasn’t involved. He joined the agency and did everything they asked. Every mission was completed, every target eliminated. They questioned him often about seemingly inconsequential things, but he wasn’t stupid. The root of their queries was always about the Saints.
It took years of Maks keeping his head down, not asking questions, and doing minimal digging. For every mission and each person he met, he made notes. Little by little, he’d pieced together parts of the bigger puzzle. But it wasn’t until the agency asked him to go undercover in the FSB that he found a treasure trove of information.
With his ties to Russia through his family, he’d known that he would eventually be sent there. His grandfather had emigrated from Russia to San Francisco at the age of seventeen. San Francisco was a destination for many Russians, and it was there that he’d met his bride, another Russian immigrant.
Maks had grown up speaking both English and Russian fluently, and it played a large part in the CIA’s interest. He used it to his advantage because he knew the more he was sent on missions, the more information he could obtain.
It wasn’t an easy process, and it took far longer than he liked. But with an organization like the Saints, he had to work carefully. He couldn’t trust anyone, because he didn’t know who was working for them. That was until he discovered that one of his friends from his days with Delta Force was going head-to-head with the Saints. Wyatt Loughman, along with Wyatt’s two brothers, had gone searching for their father, Orrin. The elder Loughman had gone missing after finding a bioweapon that the Saints wanted to release on the world in an effort to control the population.
Maks just happened to be working undercover for Major General Yuri Markovic at the time. It made it easy to help Orrin escape and assist Wyatt with taking out some of the Saints. Yuri had been secretive enough that Maks hadn’t known for sure if he worked for the Saints or not. In the end, Yuri teamed up with the Loughmans in Texas for a battle on their ranch, and Maks joined them.
As much as he wanted to stay with the Loughmans, Maks knew that it would be better for them if he was gone. He could disappear, go off the grid for a few days, but if he didn’t resurface, the agency would stop at nothing to track him down. While the Saints had the Loughmans in their sights, they had gone up against the Texan family and lost. The organization would come at the family again—it was only a matter of when.
Maks wanted to be sure that he knew about those plans so he could help his friends. After all, he trusted no one else in the fight against the Saints. To that end, he had made sure to ditch the two trackers his friends had put on him in an effort to know his whereabouts. It wasn’t because they didn’t trust him. It was so they could find him easily if he got into trouble.
The thing was, he would never ask them for help. They had their hands full as it was. Not to mention, the three brothers had found their wives in their fight against the Saints. And while the women had all helped in one way or another to take down the Saints, Maks knew the brothers would do anything and everything to make sure nothing happened to their women. And he would do whatever he could to help, as well. Because if anyone knew what it was like to lose someone you loved, he did.
Maks blinked and shut off his memories before they took him down a road he wasn’t prepared to travel. His thoughts turned back to the text he’d gotten from Luka. The CIA may have planted him in the FSB, but he knew that it was really the Saints who controlled his movements. What he didn’t understand was their motivation.
There wasn’t a government or security agency on the planet that wasn’t controlled by the Saints. So why take him and put him in Russia? He’d been told it was to uncover Russian secrets, but that was a lie. He’d thought that he would be working as a spy in the FSB—and in a way, he was. Except he wasn’t spying on Russian enemies. He was spying on Russians.
And it was easy to determine that those he was told to focus on were either those who weren’t with the Saints or Saint members who had made someone doubt their allegiance. Luka had never come under Maks’ scrutiny.
A fat raindrop landed on Maks’ cheek. He wiped it away and glanced at the sky. Rain was a part of life in Amsterdam, especially in the winter. And it did nothing to deter the tourists. He put away the mobile and did a quick sweep of the area. His gaze moved over a man who was staring at him. Maks acted as if he hadn’t seen him. Shifting subtly, Maks used the window of a shop nearby to scan the area more closely. He found two other men that drew his interest.
Living the life of a double agent whose agenda was his own left a man ultra-vigilant. He was always careful, but he’d let himself delve into his thoughts in an open area where others had been watching without him knowing.
Maks pushed away from the store and started toward a narrow alley. There were so many people staring at the half-naked women that he had to squeeze through them just to get past. The city was laid out in a grid, so while one man followed him, the other two men took to the side streets to cut him off.
Maks kept his steps even, giving no sign that he knew he was being followed. As he came out of the alley, out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the men rush into the street. Maks kept walking through more red-light sections, restaurants, coffee houses that sold marijuana and not coffee, and tourist shops. He ditched both his phones in case that’s how he was being tracked.
When he came to the intersection, he quickly turned left into yet another busy alley, this one slightly wider. The crowd swallowed him, giving him time to provide the coded knock. The door opened, and he gave the woman clad only in a skimpy bra, panties, and heels a wad of money as he entered.
No words were exchanged between them as he quickly disappeared behind a curtain and headed down a hallway. He ran to the stairs and took them three at a time up to the third floor. Maks took a moment to peer out the darkened window to the ground b
elow, where the three men had gathered, each looking around for a sign of him.
That had been a close call. He didn’t know if it was the Saints, the FSB, or the CIA who had sent the men, and it didn’t matter. Someone wanted to talk to him, and instead of calling him in for a chat, they had sent men to force him to go wherever they wanted. That meant that someone knew about the coded message he’d received on his secret phone.
Maks spun on his heel and stalked out of the room, heading to the roof where he jumped to the next building. Five buildings later, he made his way to the ground via the fire escape. There was no going home for him now. But he’d been preparing for this moment since before he joined the CIA.
3
Vienna, Austria
“Dammit,” Eden said as someone jostled her, making her spill coffee on her coat.
She stopped and wiped it off, but it didn’t do any good. Her new white winter coat would have to go to the cleaners. She adjusted her purse on her shoulder and continued on her way to the office building, along with the hundreds of others headed to work that morning.