I watch Sophie and Severyn run for their lives.
Two vehicles screech to a halt on the street and men unload. They don’t join in on the attack on us, but race after the girls. I heave against Tag’s weight, pinning me against the side of a destroyed vehicle.
“Get the fuck off me,” I snarl at him, then roar, “Sophie!”
“I know.” Tag slams me back down. “I fucking know!” He fists my shirt. “That’s the woman I love, too, running for her life. Now are we going to get ourselves killed, or are we going to get the fuck out of this jam and go get our girls?”
My eyes snap to his, seeing the dark, lethal determination that matches mine. He’s right; we can’t do shit if we’re ripped to shreds by bullets.
Tag reaches up to his left ear, and I don’t realize he has something in his hand until he presses his finger into my ear. I’m about to snarl and clock him until I hear a voice. The voice sure as hell isn’t God, but I want to fall to my knees and worship it as if it is.
A man with a calm, slightly accented voice provides updates through the earpiece, which I quickly realize are based on what he sees from a drone. “I am into the remote gun on the rooftop and disabling it now. Severyn’s tracker is online, and her comms are still in place.”
Tag meets my eyes. “I’m trusting you with more than my life, Santoro.”
“You have it.” My grip around his wrist tightens. “My trust. My gun. My family. Whatever you need, it’s yours. Today. Always.” Tag nods, and I slam our palms together, wrapping my hand around his, knowing this is a momentous deal. “I’ll never betray you or your secrets. You have my word.”
“Aw, sweet,” another male voice says over the earpiece. “We’re witnessing the birth of a bromance.” He grunts, sounding pained. “Now, a little help would be nice.”
The rooftop gun has been disabled, but the swell of even more armed men in the area behind Electric makes us need to fight for our lives. I see Nexin get slammed into a Land Rover by a mercenary, and the huge guy, Rolf, wraps his arms around the guy’s neck and instantly snaps it.
So, not just an emergency and trauma doc… Who the hell is this team?
I don’t have long to ponder that, as Vito howls like an unhinged psycho, using his knives instead of his guns against two attackers. Massimo attacks the guy aiming at Rolf, my brothers protecting our allies without hesitation. Tag shoots a guy without blinking to save Andro.
All for one, one for all.
“Ryn?” Tag demands, and I know he’s directing it to the man in our ears.
“She and Sophie are running through the park.”
“She can hold off four,” Tag says confidently, reloading his gun with a full magazine.
“There are… eight men.”
“Eight?” Acid eats at my gut.
“Ryn can’t fight eight armed men,” Tag says in horror. “They’ll overtake her. They’ll—”
“Take them.” I grip his shoulder. “We can’t let them take them. Ortez… He’s a fucking piece of shit.”
“I know.” Tag looks ready to go nuclear as he stares at me. “We’ve just discovered that this is worse than we thought. Ortez and his crew plan to give Sophie to a death ring.”
I stagger back. “What?”
No. Fuck. No.
“I don’t have time to tell you more right now, but we need to get to them.”
“But we’re fucking pinned in here!”
I’m wild, and Tag fists my shirt. I watch as he battles for his own calm and wins, which settles me. This is a man used to chaos and warfare. This is a man who is a kindred spirit, a brother in arms, who needs to get to the woman he loves.
An understanding passes between us when I meet his dark, determined eyes. “Let’s go kill some motherfuckers and get our women.” I clasp his hand again. “Brother.”
“Brother.” He grips my hand just as hard. “Let’s finish this.”
It was a fight for our lives in the warzone behind Electric, and my family will have their work cut out to deal with it. I killed tonight, all of us did, including Antonio and Miguel. But my only focus is getting to Sophie.
Tag is as determined to get to Severyn, or who he calls Ryn.
He and I race through the trees while the voice over the earpiece continues to talk to us.
Tag wasn’t fucking around when he said he was trusting me with more than his life.
I’ve put a few things together: Ryn’s uncle is Zane Andrews, who is a billionaire tech mogul. His partner of Gādo Technologies, a world-renowned technology and security company, is Kotan Luo, who is Japanese and that matches the accent of the man speaking over the comms.
Tag, Nexin, and Rolf are Len’s team, not her liaison, and from the sounds of it Ryn is somehow involved on that team as well. She has a tracker; that’s the only thing stopping me from completely spiraling.
But I don’t focus on any of clandestine details I’ve discovered tonight, because Kotan has put us back on Ryn’s comms and we can hear what is happening.
My knees almost buckle when we realize Sophie and Severyn are being surrounded and taken.
Tag frantically consults the tracking program on his phone that shows Severyn’s tracker. I don’t need to see it to know… we’re too far away to stop it.
His eyes are dark with lethal intent and a roaring need to get to Ryn. “She’s trained for this,” he tries to reassure both of us.
We listen as the men jeer in triumph, and I can envision those dead fucking bastards surrounding the girls. I nearly hit the ground again when I hear Sophie’s voice—so terrified, but still so strong as she curses her father
He’s dead. I’ll fucking rip him apart with my bare heads.
Tag and I race as hard and fast as possible—the man is a machine, and I match him stride for stride—but I know we’re too late. Sophie and Severyn are quiet now; the motherfuckers sedated them.
Kotan has taken us off Ryn’s comms, but I don’t think Tag realizes it yet.
He’s a rabid wolf, ready to rip the world apart to get his mate back when we reach the spot the girls had been only minutes before and find it empty. He’s all darkness, fury, rage, and hate mixed with terror.
Kotan tries to reach him, calm him down, but Tag hears none of it.
“She shouldn’t have been here.” His eyes are wild. “She left this life. Fuck!” He grips his head. “She’s not even disguised.”
There’s no time to get my rampage of questions answered about Severyn Andrews because that’s not important now. Our women have been taken.
To be delivered to a death ring.
“Focus, Tag!” I slam him into a tree. “We’re wasting time.”
“We’re at the southeast part of the park,” one of Tag’s teammates says over the comms. “About four hundred yards from you. Come on.”
Instantly, a cold, icy calm falls over Tag, along with a stark darkness that mirrors Vito’s when he’s about to end one of our enemies. If I wasn’t so relieved, I’d be startled and concerned for my safety.
His eyes meet mine, and unspoken words flow between us.
Geraldo Ortez. Pastor Salome. Frederico Perez. Manuel Morales. Those names and any others a threat to Sophie and Severyn are inked in blood on his kill sheet.
“Let’s go, brother,” I rasp, then we take off sprinting.
Nexin and Rolf are in the vehicle when we jump in. The big guy, Rolf, is driving and guns the engine the instant our asses hit the seat.
They give us the quick casualty report—two of my brother’s men were killed, Rocco took a gut shot, and Andro was hit in the leg. Antonio and Miguel are okay and on their way to Ollie in the hospital.
Tag is silent, continuing to stare at his phone and the tracking program for Ryn. Suddenly his icy calm is replaced with a flaming fury and he levels his gun at Rolf’s head.
“Turn around, Rolf; you’re going the wrong way. And Kotan, put me the fuck back on Ryn’s comms.”
“Tag, what the hell are you doing?” Nexin shouts, staring back at him from the passenger seat.
Rolf isn’t fazed as he races us into the night. “We need weapons and a plan if we want to get them back.”
Kotan is speaking to Tag over the comms, trying to calm him down.
Every fiber of my being wants to threaten Rolf, too, because the distance between Sophie and me is increasing, but Rolf is right.
I reach forward and place my hand on Tag’s wrist to lower the gun, locking my eyes with him. “He’s right. We need a plan, plus more weapons. We can’t save them if we’re dead.”
Tag had said basically the same thing to me behind Electric. It connects in his murderous, black haze, and he lowers his gun, putting the safety back on.
I sit back, trying to keep calm as they talk, and snap to attention when a female’s voice is speaking in my ear. I realize it’s Len.
“Haul ass to the marina, boys.”
“How far is it?” Tag demands through clenched teeth.
I look around at where we are. “Under ten minutes.”
Rolf cranks the wheel to take a tight turn at fast speeds. “I can get us there in under five.”
My body has never been this tense. Especially as Tag nearly loses his shit again when Kotan refuses to put us back on Ryn’s comms and we contemplate that the girls might be being assaulted. Zane Andrews himself comes on over the earpieces and reassures us nothing has happened to either of them.
I’m hanging on by a thread when Len gives us directions to where she is at the marina, and as we approach a small warehouse the overhead door opens.
“This warehouse belongs to my family,” I say with a bit of shock as Rolf drives us inside and a tall, lithe blonde woman pulls the overhead door down and locks it. “How the hell…”
The blonde woman, who I suspect is Len, strides to a stack of boxes with a laptop open on top. “Once I found out what we were dealing with, I called Army, and he and Ash got in contact with Tommaso, and he had a guy let me in,” she explains to me.
A thick, stocky man with a beard steps out of the shadows, eyeing me warily.
“Jones, what the hell are you doing here?” Tag barks. “You’re supposed to be at the hospital.”
“My men have it covered; Ollie’s safe.” He crosses his arms over his thick chest, and I realize he’s part of the team Len brought in. “And Len called because she knew I’d have what you needed on hand. You know I never travel without explosives.”
Jones… Explosives… Son of a bitch.
I know of an Adamus Jones, who Vito has dealt with to procure hard-to-get weapons. But that man is certainly not the kind I’d suspect Tag and his team would work with. That man has a very dark past—a ghost who only periodically pops up with dark deeds connected to his name.
However, there’s trust between Jones and Tag even if there’s tension. I hear Tag gritting that ‘if Jones smiled at her wrong, he’d flay his balls.’
Jones smirks at Tag. “Don’t tempt me with a good time.”
“You two fucking finished?” Len snaps at them. “We don’t have much time to get Sophie and Ryn back.”
“What does that mean?” I demand, my temporarily distracted attention with Adamus Jones is brought back on track with the critical focus here: Sophie.
“It means that they’re en route right now to deliver the girls to the death ring contact,” Len says.
“How do you know this?” Please, fuck, let her intel be wrong.
“The meet you had with the lead.” Nexin regards Len.
Len had told me she wouldn’t be our meeting tonight; she must’ve met someone about this death ring.
She nods. “He squealed like a pig with whatever details he had. I don’t know who the death ring contacts are or where they’ll meet exactly, but I did get confirmation that this is the plan of Ortez, Salome, Perez, and Morales for what they were planning for Sophie… and now Ryn.” Len glances at Tag. “They’re already on Morales’s yacht.”
“Why didn’t you stop them?” Tag grits, fisting his hands.
Jones steps in. “Because she’s one fucking person, who was providing oversight and coordinating everything that you’d need.”
Len shoulders Jones aside with a glare. “I don’t need you to answer for or defend me.”
“Focus,” Rolf barks. “This is bad. Fucking bad. Even if we intercept them before they make the delivery, Ortez and the others could be in communication with the death ring contacts and have already identified that they have Severyn Andrews with them.”
Nexin fists his hair, glancing at me. “No offense to Sophie, but with who and what Ryn is and what we know about this ring…”
“She would be a powerful and tempting addition for the ring,” I deduce, understanding how criminal minds work when it comes to leverage. “They’d always be coming for her.”
Kotan chimes in over the comms to reassure us he blocked Ortez’s communication with the death ring contacts so they don’t know that they have a prized captive, but my head spins as they debrief. I know this is a necessary part of the process, so we have all the pieces on the board to make the best plan, but my dread and anguish are pushing me toward the breaking point. I feel the same urgent obsession as Tag—him wanting, no needing, to get to Severyn, just like I need to get to Sophie.
“What’s the plan?” I demand, trying to speed the process along.
“Kotan is working on hacking the boat.” Len swivels the laptop toward me and zooms in on a location on the open water that looks like an island. “He’ll tamper with the navigation system, so instead of heading toward their intended contact, they’ll be redirected to this island. Kotan will stop the yacht once it’s within range.”
“Then what?” Rolf leans closer to the screen, studying the island.
“We’ll be there. You guys on land, me in a quiet boat.” Len eyes each of us, ending with Tag. “Once Sophie and Ryn are off the yacht, no one else can live.”
I’m down with that.
“Dead people can’t talk.” Nexin nods, but I get a sense that ‘shoot to kill’ isn’t this team’s regular rule of engagement regardless of what happened in the warzone behind Electric.
“How does Manuel Morales factor into this?” I ask. The possibility that I had brought this risk to Sophie has caused me sleepless nights.
“Ortez connected Salome and Morales,” Len explains. “Morales is the money and had previous access to victims.”
That fucking piece of shit.
“The philanthropic efforts in Sophie’s home community…” My mind puts the puzzle pieces in place. “He was targeting the vulnerable youth he was supposedly making big donations to help.”
Len nods. “According to the guy I put down tonight,” she says without any emotion, “that well was tapped because questions were being asked. Also, there seem to be levels to this death ring—the higher up you rise, the more benefits you have. Salome has been on the low rungs so far, supplying only a few victims at a time, but he’s ambitious and wants to rise.”
“Power is involved the higher in the hierarchy you rise?” Rolf guesses.
“Yes, and protection,” Len says.
This explains why the Garcia soldiers would act to grab Sophie in Lopez territory, even though it would mark them by their own organization. This death ring—which must be extremely powerful—would protect them if they delivered.
But why Sophie?
Then it clicks.
This death ring sounds horrendous. One so horrendous that if someone gave their own flesh and blood to the ring—paid a blood debt—that would be considered favorably. It would be highly valued.
The sick motherfucking fucks.
Ortez had connected Morales and Salome together for the purpose of supplying victims to the death ring. Once their source became compromised, rather than find a new source, they wanted to rise higher in the power structure, and Ortez giving his daughter will do that.
In my gut, I know this is the play—he plans to sacrifice his own daughter to rise in power within the ring.
Len is grim. “They would rise straight to the top level of power with Ryn as a Champion.”
Champion…
Christ Almighty fuck.
Visions of people—Champions—fighting for their lives and getting that label because they killed multiple people in order to survive…
Visions of Sophie, either killed—ripped apart by man-made animals—compete with visions of her being the one who is forced to become the killer. No option is better than the other; they both make me shake with rage.
No… Fucking… Way.
Neither Sophie nor Severyn are being delivered to that fucking godforsaken ring.
“The plan?” Tag grits, on the same wavelength of impatient urgency as me.
“You guys need to get to this island, and Tag, I need you to set up,” Len orders.
“For what?”
“I’m getting to that,” she snaps and paces. “We need two boats, both fast, one that’s quiet, so I can approach the stalled yacht they’re on. I have the explosives from Jones—”
Jones cuts in, “But the detonators from this batch have been faulty.”
“You want me to take the shot to make the boat explode, if that’s the case,” Tag surmises.
“Make such a pretty fireball, brother,” Jones says, his eyes alight.
I step forward. “I’m going on the boat with you, Len, to get Sophie and Ryn.”
“No,” she says flatly.
“You could run into trouble with the extraction,” I try to reason and remain calm.
“Rolf or Nexin will be with me.”
“Both,” Tag and I say in unison, not willing to let anything go wrong with getting our women off that fucking boat.
I want to be the one in the middle of the action, not moored on some goddamn island where I’m the support person to the sniper if he needs to take the shot to send all the bastards straight to hell. But I won’t let my needs and ego slow us down with arguing.
I’d seen Nexin and Rolf fight, kill, behind Electric. Severyn—AKA Ryn—is important to them. They’ve been searching for Sophie to help her. Len is ex-CIA. Even fucking Adamus Jones is involved. This team is legit, battle scarred and capable. I need to trust them with the one thing that is the most precious to me.
My angel.
They’ll bring her back to me. Or they’ll live the rest of their numbered days running from a man consumed with black hate, using both worlds’ resources to hunt them down.
But somehow, my trust-hesitant self is trusting them, especially Tag.
He meets my eyes over the laptop and nods, almost like he’s in my head and reading my dark thoughts.
Rolf points at the island. “Why that spot?”
Len pulls out her knife and taps the tip on the box top. “It’s solid land so our team leader can be more sure of his shot,” she says about Tag. “And it allows me a place to wait hidden from view and then approach quietly once Kotan stalls the yacht.”
“Not to mention, right there,” Jones points to the screen, “is international waters. The response time for authorities will be longer; meaning the evidence that isn’t blown to teeny-tiny bits has longer to burn and sink.”
“It’s a solid plan.” I look from Tag to Len. “What do you need?”
“The boats,” Len answers.
“And a long-range rifle, preferably a .338 Lapua,” Tag adds.
“We’ll need more weapons for the extraction,” Nexin says.
“Done. Vito and Massimo will get us everything we need.”
I’ve already stepped over the line, decimated it actually; however, that was in part survival.
The call I’m about to make feels more momentous. It will be me acting in a proactive, conscious way to play a direct part in killing everyone on Morales’s yacht. But Len’s deduction is correct—no one on that boat, except for Sophie and Severyn, can survive.
I hit Vito’s number, and he answers after the first ring, even though they’re eyeball-deep in dealing with and managing what went down at the club. “Baby brother.”
“I have some things we need.”
“Dom and the Saints are on standby for their San Diego contraband contacts to provide what we’re short on.” That our allies are behind us, standing with us, to save Sophie makes my throat close with gratitude-laced emotion. “Hit me with it so we can save Triple S.”
My angel. My home. My everything.
I’ll do whatever it takes to get her back and keep her safe.
Sending a boatload of some of the world’s worst motherfuckers straight to hell? Well, I’ll do that with a smile.
