Mission Delivery (Ex Ops Series) (2 page)

When we had gone nearly to the end of the hallway, the sound of flesh slapping flesh reached our ears from the last doorway on the right. Riley tried to quietly turn the doorknob yet found it locked and ended up kicking it open instead. I had barely made it into the room when the situation deteriorated to life or death.

Our target had grabbed the woman he had been abusing and pulled her in front of him as a human shield with a knife against her throat. That knife of his had evidently been very busy before we arrived.

The woman he held was covered in weeping cuts, a red trail from her breasts to her thighs. The scary part about her obvious torture was that the tears streaming down her face were silent. She didn’t even whimper when he roughly hauled her by her hair in front of him to save his sorry hide. It was as if he had trained her to keep her misery to herself. Anyone who had lived through that kind of hell didn’t deserve to die when freedom was standing right in front of them.

For a few seemingly endless seconds, I looked into the woman’s green gaze, seeing only my wife.

My gorgeous Belle had been kidnapped eight months prior by a ruthless cartel drug lord we had been investigating for black market weapons deals. Belle still carried scars from a mad man’s knife, much like the silent, defeated woman in front of me would carry for the rest of her life.

As I watched between one blink and the next, Riley took the kill shot, splattering half of our subject’s head on the wall behind him. The woman collapsed to the floor in a heap of sobs; however, those cries had not been ones of sorrow. No. With a look of relief shining in her eyes, she shed tears of joy. Of freedom.

It had taken four months—four long months —to track down the women a Cuban Don named Lazaro Sandoval had sold over the last couple of years. It had not been easy, but with this mission, we had finally ended our recovery of the women. One by one, we had located them, dead or alive.

To our dismay, most of the women had been found dead. Their bodies were buried or burned to ash by their tormentors and left somewhere in a place their owner thought would never be discovered. The only reason we had found their remains was because Arturo was creative with that knife of his. It didn’t take long after he took it out and the blood started flowing before each of the men started sobbing the information we were looking for.

Thankfully, Sandoval had only been a seller in the sex slave underground for a couple of years. In that time, however, he had documented the transactions of over a hundred thirteen women, all of which we would have never known about had it not been for Brett ‘Ice’ Grady. He was a former Green Beret who had worked with Lucas. He was the President of the Regulators Motorcycle Club that owned strip clubs, one of which ran a small time brothel out of the back in Miami, Florida. Although, Riley had confided to me after our mission in Miami that he suspected Ice, and possibly the rest of the Regulators, were a hell of a lot more than just outlaw bikers.

Almost a year’s worth of investigation had finally come to a close tonight. An investigation that had started with Belle in Texas, working as an ATF agent on a black market weapons case. If not for Belle’s kidnapping by the Mexican Cartel leader Rivera, the Ex Ops team would have never stumbled on the sex slave ring.

That mission had almost cost me the life of my woman.

From there, we had been led to Ice in Miami, where Riley, Lucas, and Declan had gone undercover to pose as members of the Regulators MC. That leg of the mission had cost us the lives of two of our teammates and put Declan temporarily bedbound with a spinal injury. We ended up leaving Miami to head back to our headquarters in Virginia to bury our dead and regroup without catching the man responsible for both our losses and the missing women.

Ice and his boys had stepped in to figure out the rest. If not for them, we would have been delayed getting the information on the kidnapped women who had needed to be rescued for far too long.

Now it was over, and I could breathe a sigh of relief. I prayed that I would never have to look into another terrified woman’s face again, imagining that was what my fiancée had felt while being held hostage. I had nightmares over almost losing her. And Belle had nightmares over almost dying and leaving our teenage son Seth behind. Between the two of us, we could keep a psychiatrist busy for years. However, instead of going to a head doctor, I chose to show my fiancée and son how much I loved them every day that I was with them. The rest of it would heal with time.

I looked back over to Lucas, who still sat seething over the traumatized and violated women we had rescued out of the Russian diplomat’s house. Besides the woman we had initially saved when Riley had killed the bastard, there had been another nine malnourished women in cells on the side of the house that the other half of the team had split off to cover.

“They’re safe now, man. We pulled them from certain death, and now they have a second chance at life. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to put this mission behind me. The faster we go back to taking out terrorists, the closer I get to leavin’ all of this behind,” I told Lucas.

He nodded his head. “You’re right. I just can’t help thinking of my little sister every time we find these women. Won’t tell you how bad it fucked with my head when we didn’t find them alive.”

“I know exactly what you mean. Made me relive pulling Belle’s half dead body out of Mexico, and I see that shit enough in my sleep. It never leaves me.”

Lucas leaned his head back against the interior of the van. “Fuck. I can’t imagine what I would have done if that had been my girl. You’re right; we need to go back to blowin’ up the bad guys.”

The sound of an irregular beep caught my attention. I turned my head towards the sound to see my Commander pulling a secured satellite phone from his pocket. Jaxon got a weird look on his face as he glanced at the ringing device and then answered the phone.

“Uncle Sam, I hadn’t expected to hear from you while I was on vacation.”

Translation:
What the hell are you doing calling me while I am still on a mission?

He was silent for a moment before his brows furrowed and he frowned. “That package isn’t due for another month. Are you sure it’s about to be delivered?”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and my gut churned. The look on my Commander’s face was not good. Suddenly, I had a bad feeling that I was not going to like what he had to say. When he glanced in my direction, I knew I was right to be worried.

“Understood. We’ll rush back so we can be home to sign for the delivery.”

Jaxon flipped his phone shut and then tapped on the small, tinted window that separated the back of the van where we were hiding from the cab our driver sat in. The window slid open, a few clipped Russian words were exchanged between Jaxon and the driver, and then the sliding window slammed shut again. Unexpectedly, the van sped up, and we had to grab on to the edge of the benches to avoid sliding into each other when the driver took a sharp right turn.

Not liking the sudden change in both my Commander and the speed the van was traveling, I leaned towards the man in charge. “What’s going on, Jaxon?”

“It’s time to get you home, Baker.” The matter-of-fact statement, paired with his deadly serious expression, made my stomach sink. Then a slow smile spread across his face until I didn’t think he could possibly grin any wider. “Apparently, your baby girl is on the way.”

Chapter

2

Where had all of the oxygen gone? I couldn’t breathe and was starting to feel light-headed.

A slap on the back from Riley was followed by a chorus of congratulations and jokes about my lack of facial color.

“I think he’s gonna pass out,” Arturo murmured.

“Nah, he’s not gonna faint until he sees his baby girl comin’ out of his woman’s hoo-ha. Once he gets a good view of that and realizes just how far she was stretched to push that little girl out, he’s never going to look at gettin’ laid the same way again,” Lucas joked.

“And just how do you know that, Young?” Jaxon asked him.

“My father warned me and my brothers never to look when the time came for us to have children. Said he made that mistake with my oldest brother and was so worried about what he saw he asked the doctor if he could put a couple of extra stitches in my mom when he sewed her up.”

I could not make myself laugh with the others. I had one thought running on a repeating loop through my mind.

It was too soon.

My baby girl’s due date was not supposed to be for another month. Why in the hell was she coming so early? Was there something wrong?

“Nothing is wrong, Baker. Well, nothing except the fact that your daughter apparently inherited your impatience.” Jaxon snorted.

Looking at him in a daze, I wondered how my commander had known that was what I was worried about. Had I said it out loud?

Jaxon rolled his eyes. “Yes, dumbass, you did. And you still are. Now snap out of your shit and get ready to unload. We should be at the airport any minute now. We’ll load up on our bird and make our way back stateside so you can get home in time for the big event.”

I heard Jaxon’s words, but my head was still swimming.

Belle was having my baby. Again.

I had missed my son’s birth almost fifteen years ago. Now there was a chance I would miss my daughter’s birth, too.

“You’re not going to miss shit, Baker! Now stop talking to yourself or I’m going to slap some sense into you!” Jaxon barked this time. “Jesus. Give him bombs, bullets, and bad guys, and he doesn’t blink an eye. Talk about babies, and he turns into a blubbering idiot.”

It took another ten minutes before our van came to a screeching halt at the airfield. Not waiting for the others, I threw the back doors open and leaped out the back with my gun in my hand before hauling ass to the private jet used to ferry us around on some of our missions.

The plane’s door swung open, and the steps dropped down just as I reached it. I took the steps two at a time to push past our pilot who watched my mad dash with wide eyes.

I was seated and buckled in my seat in thirty seconds flat, which caused our pilot, an Air Force veteran, to go on alert.

“Is there trouble I should know about, Mr. Baker?”

“No bogies behind us, Captain. Just fly this bird out of here the second you get those bozos on board. I’ve got some place to be, and you’re damn well going to get me there!” I barked back.

Was I acting like an asshole? Probably. Did I care? Hell no. My woman was having my baby. If I had to travel at the speed of light, I was going to get there in time to witness this birth. I would be damned if I was going to miss another one.

“Ignore his bad attitude, Captain Burke. He just found out his fiancée went into labor, so he’s anxious to get stateside,” Lucas informed our pilot with a smile as he moved to his seat.

Forgetting I had buckled my belt already, I tried to get up out of my chair to lunge at the man who was supposed to be my friend yet was currently taunting me. Of course, I went nowhere and ended up looking like a dumbass because of it.

Pointing my finger at Lucas who was now seated across from me as the others finished loading onto the plane, I snarled, “I’ll show you bad attitude, asshole, when I shove my size twelve up your ass. One day, it’ll be you with a baby on the way, and I’m going to laugh my ass off.”

Lucas’s face went blank, and the sullen attitude he had left Miami with made a comeback. “Not likely, bro.”

With those three words, the conversation ended, and I felt like a jackass. My battle brother was hurting something fierce, but he would not confide to any of us what exactly had happened before leaving Miami to make him that way. Riley and I suspected it had something to do with that girl from his past he had run into at Ice’s strip club, After Midnight, but no one knew for sure.

Sensing the tense atmosphere, Riley waded in as the peacemaker, as he often was these days since his brother Declan was still out of commission. “You’ll never believe what I walked into the other day when I visited Declan at his temporary house.”

“He was doin’ the nurse?” I joked.

Riley shook his head. “Nope. It was the opposite. The nurse was trying to do him, and he was telling her no. Can you believe that shit? The biggest man-whore we know was trying to fight off a chick who was trying to wrap her lips around his cock while he was all but defenseless in a wheelchair.”

Lucas snorted. “Since when did he become Saint Sullivan and take a vow of chastity?”

Riley’s face became contemplative. “I think that explosion took out more than Declan’s back. I think it might have knocked some sense into him, as well. He hasn’t even so much as flirted with a woman since he woke up in the hospital, asking for one feisty redhead.”

My jaw dropped in shock. “You’re shittin’ me, man. He’s asking for Teagan?”

Riley nodded. “Yeah. You know, I’ve always known there was something different about her when it can to Dec. He doesn’t do repeats like that, but whenever she slipped in to see him, he dropped whatever he was doing. He always got a little broody after he’d wake up to find her gone, too.”

“Those two are a match made in Hell; you know that, right?” I asked him.

Riley shrugged in response. “I’m not so sure, Baker. There’s something about Teagan that gets to my brother, a feat no other woman has ever pulled off. For that reason alone, she gets my vote until she fucks it up.”

For the first time since I had met the lady killer known as Declan Sullivan, I was worried about the man. Teagan Roberts might be my woman’s best friend, but she was also a force to be reckoned with. An impenetrable barrier surrounded the woman from letting anyone other than Belle and Seth close. Her childhood had basically ruined her emotionally. I was not sure even a man as driven as Declan would be able to get through that emotional armor she wore.

“Don’t be so worried about Sullivan. He’ll either win the woman over or he won’t,” Lucas muttered.

Bringing my focus back to the somber man, I asked, “And if he doesn’t win her? What does he do then, Lucas?” I was not asking so much about Declan as I was subtly asking about Lucas himself.