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- Herausgeber: Valley Publishing Ltd.
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
A betrayal from within has Terkel frantic to protect those he can, as his team falls one by one, from a murderous killer he helped create.
With the bulk of his team down, Terk tries to establish a new base, while struggling to heal the team through the special connection each has. Damon is concerned about finding Tasha, one of their admins, and keeping her safe. But, without any secure place to take her, Damon’s making do with the little they have—whether she’s happy about his plan or not.
Tasha, barely surviving an assassination attempt, is not sure who to trust. When Damon comes to check on her, she can only hope her instincts and her heart are right about him. This man meant everything to her for the years they’d worked together, but he’d always kept her at arm’s reach. Now to learn that he and Terk are the only fully cognizant members of her old team, she wants to help but doesn’t want to risk her life … again.
Still struggling with their new reality, both Tasha and Damon need to find out who did this to them. It’s the only way to get their lives back—and to have a future together …
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Ähnliche
Books in This Series:
Damon’s Deal, Book 1
Wade’s War, Book 2
Gage’s Goal, Book 3
Calum’s Contact, Book 4
Rick’s Road, Book 5
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
About This Book
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
Epilogue
About Wade’s War
Excerpt from Magnus: Shadow Recon
Author’s Note
Complimentary Download
About the Author
Copyright Page
About This Book
Welcome to a brand-new series from USA Today best-selling author Dale Mayer, where dark-ops SEALs have special senses and skills, needed to solve intrigue, betrayal, and … murder. A series with all the elements you’ve come to love, plus so much more, … including psychics!
With the bulk of his team down, Terk tries to establish a new base, while struggling to heal the team through the special connection each has. Damon is concerned about finding Tasha, one of their admins, and keeping her safe. But, without any secure place to take her, Damon’s making do with the little they have—whether she’s happy about his plan or not.
Tasha, barely surviving an assassination attempt, is not sure who to trust. When Damon comes to check on her, she can only hope her instincts and her heart are right about him. This man meant everything to her for the years they’d worked together, but he’d always kept her at arm’s reach. Now to learn that he and Terk are the only fully cognizant members of her old team, she wants to help but doesn’t want to risk her life … again.
Still struggling with their new reality, both Tasha and Damon need to find out who did this to them. It’s the only way to get their lives back—and to have a future together …
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Chapter 1
Ice poured herself a coffee and sat down at the compound’s massive dining room table with the cup. When her phone rang, she smiled at the number displayed. “Hey, Terk. How’re you doing?” She put the call on Speakerphone.
“I’m okay,” Terkel replied, his voice distracted and tight. “Barely.”
“Terk?” Merk called from across the table. He got up and walked closer and sat across from Levi. “You don’t sound too good, brother. What’s up?”
“I’m fine.” Terk paused. “Or I will be. Right now, things have blown to shit.”
“As in literally?” Merk asked.
“The entire group, … they’re all gone. I had a solid team—seven like me—and they’re all gone.”
“Dead?” Ice’s jaw dropped in shock.
Several others stood to join them, gathered around Ice’s phone. Levi stepped forward, his hand on Ice’s shoulder. “Terk? Are they all dead?”
“No.” Terk took a deep breath. “I’m not making sense. I’m sorry.”
“Take it easy.” Ice’s voice remained calm and reassuring. “What do you mean, they’re all gone?”
“All their abilities are gone,” he stated. “Something’s happened to them. Somebody has deliberately removed whatever supersenses they could utilize—or what we have been utilizing for the last ten years for the government.” His tone was bitter. “When the US gov recently closed us down, they promised that our black ops department would never rise again, but I didn’t expect them to attack us personally.”
“What are you talking about?” Merk asked in alarm, standing up now to stare at Ice’s phone. “Are you in danger?”
“Maybe? I don’t know,” Terk replied. “I need to find out exactly what the hell’s going on.”
“What can we do to help?” Ice asked.
Terk gave a broken laugh. “That’s not why I’m calling. Well, it is, but it isn’t.”
Ice looked at Merk, who frowned as he shook his head. Ice knew he and the others had heard Terk’s stressed-out tone and the completely confusing bits and pieces coming from his mouth. Ice spoke next. “Terk, you’re not making sense again. Take a breath and explain. Please. You’re scaring me.”
Terk took a long slow deep breath. “Tell Stone to open the gate,” he said. “She’s out there.”
“Who’s out there?” Levi asked, looked outside, and shrugged.
“She’s coming up the road now. You have to let her in.”
“Who? Why?” Ice asked.
“Because … she’s harnessed with C-4.”
“Jesus.” Levi bolted to display the camera feeds on the big screen in the dining room. “Is it live?”
“It is, and she’s been sent to you.”
“Well, that’s an interesting move,” Ice noted, her voice sharp, activating her comm to connect to Stone in the control room. “Who’s after us?”
“I think it’s rebels within the Iranian government. But it could be our own government. I don’t know anymore,” Terk snapped. “I also don’t know how they got her so close to you. Or how they pinned your connection to me,” he added. “I’ve been very careful.”
“We can look after ourselves,” Ice replied immediately. “But who is this woman to you?”
“She’s pregnant,” he explained, “so that adds to the intensity here.”
“Understood. So who is the father? Is he connected somehow?”
There was silence on the other end.
Merk said, “Terk, talk to us.”
“She’s carrying my baby,” Terk replied, his voice heavy.
Merk, his expression grim, looked at Ice, her face mirroring his shock. Merk asked, “How do you know her, Terk?”
“Brother, you don’t understand,” Terk stated. “I’ve never met this woman before in my life.” And, with that, the phone went dead.
Chapter 2
Damon Wilcox stared as Terkel slowly lowered his phone, his attention still on the screen in front of him. That was a hard conversation. Damon could only imagine the reaction on the other end of that phone right now. “What do you think they’ll do?”
“I think”—Terkel raised his gaze to look at Damon—“No, I know that they’ll let her in.”
“It’s a risk for all of them,” he reminded his old friend.
Terkel nodded. “Yes, it is, but I have faith in who they are as people. That woman didn’t deserve what those assholes did to her.”
“We don’t even have a name, do we?”
“Celia,” he noted quietly. “That’s all I know.”
Damon nodded slowly. “And while they are looking after her”—he watched as Terk started texting on his phone again—“where do you want us to start?”
Terk looked at him, the briefest of smiles on his face. “You need to focus on regaining your abilities. Of everybody, you’re the one who appears to have most of them. Or at least didn’t lose them all.”
“No.” Damon frowned at that and stared off in the distance. “I can feel something.” He paused. “I don’t know what it is—maybe a block, maybe a burn or a scar through my sight or something. I don’t know. But I can sense something foreign.”
“Foreign? As in something inside you?” Terk asked sharply.
Damon sighed. “I can’t explain it.” He looked at his friend curiously. “And you don’t have any disruption in your talents?”
“No, but I was off-line, doing some … maintenance,” he noted, for lack of a better word. “That’s when I noticed you guys were all slowly going down.”
“Yet we weren’t even all in the same place when this happened,” Damon reminded Terk. “We were spread out all over town, like always when we’re busy.”
“I know,” Terk agreed. “That’s why I’ve always kept you guys on my radar, on a mental map of sorts.”
Damon nodded. “I get it. I know all about that system. We’ve used a similar one to keep track of people, while they are out on jobs.”
“Exactly, and it’s a mental system, so, therefore, when I sense something happening,” he explained, “I shut down my own senses.”
At that, Damon’s gaze widened.
Terk nodded. “I know. Don’t think I didn’t feel like I was betraying you. Believe me when I say, it wasn’t an easy decision, but I knew I had no choice.”
Damon immediately shook his head. “Hell no,” he argued. “Self-preservation is always at the top of all our priority lists. What I was reacting to was the fact that you could sense it happening. That was huge.”
“Only if I could have sensed it enough ahead of time to do something useful. And I really think it was due to the disconnection that I noticed.”
Damon got up and paced the small room, empty except for the table and the electronics. It was a warehouse storage compound. In their warehouse, they had one fully concrete room to themselves. Nobody else in this area knew who they were or what they were doing. But the concrete had been important for their own abilities, a place where they might actually relax. It should be steel, six inches of thick steel and concrete. But they didn’t have that resource available to them anymore.
They used to be part of a special black ops team, working for the US government. The program was being disbanded, and, on the last day, a lovely coincidence was that everyone, not Terk, but the seven other men on the team started to experience agonizing pain and a complete wipe of their senses. Or at least Damon assumed it was complete. From what Terk had said, it sounded like it was, as Damon knew two of the men were in comas, two of the men were coming back out of a similar state, and two were … presumed lost on the ethers. Terk, as the boss himself, was in the best shape of all. Wade was, in a way, fighting hard to heal and to regain some consciousness, like Damon had been not too long ago. “I’m not sure why I didn’t get hit as hard as the others,” Damon murmured. “My instinctive thought was because I wasn’t as much of a danger.”
Terk snorted. “You guys are all dangerous to anybody who knows what we can do.”
“And yet we aren’t terribly powerful.”
“We’re more powerful as a team,” Terk acknowledged quietly. “But still individually, you each have specific talents.”
“But individually, we all have the ability to connect or see or feel or sense various things at a very long distance. And most of our work has been done on government jobs.” Damon shook his head. “I still can’t believe our government disbanded our group.”
Terk stiffened, turned, looked at his friend. “I have to suspect that, due to the timing, they’re the ones behind this.”
Damon slowly nodded. “I wondered if you would come to the same conclusion as I did.”
“Absolutely,” Terk snapped. “But it’s only guesswork at the moment. A gut feeling. We need to investigate. Plus, the department wouldn’t have done this themselves. They’d have contracted the job out. But who and how?”
“Whatever they did, it’s continuing to affect the team.” Damon studied his friend, then decided to ask the question in the back of his mind. “So you have an ability to filter into each and every one of the team’s psyches?”
“Sometimes to transmit messages, sometimes just to check up on their health,” Terk admitted. “I can do a bit more, but it’s limited.”
“I’ve always known that to some degree,” Damon admitted. “We’ve discussed it slightly but never in detail.”
“And that was partly on purpose,” Terk stated, “because it seemed like I was pushing the line by getting into their heads at all.”
“I don’t know about that. I don’t think anybody hated you for it, and I did speak with a couple of them because they could sense when you put in the messages that you were also taking a look around. And your telepathic abilities have always been phenomenal.”
“That was a two-second mental check, like, ‘Hey, on a scale of one to ten, how is this guy doing?’ And then getting a response and getting out.” Terk smiled.
“Even in mine?” Damon asked, a sharp look at his friend.
“Even yours,” Terk agreed with a nod. “We are part of a team, and keeping the team safe, healthy, and functioning is always my goal.”
“And, because we understood that, it was fine,” he agreed. “Can you communicate with any of them now?”
“Wade, yes, but he is not capable of responding, yet I sense brain activity. As for the others, I know they’re there, but I’m not getting even that.”
“Are you getting any response?”
“Like a life-support system,” Terk noted. “Other than that, not a whole lot.”
“Well, that’s a start. We have to make sure that we keep them safe.” Damon frowned. “But that kind of security may need to be physical,” Damon said. “Keeping them safe on the energy level is a different matter, not to mention we don’t know what happened in the first place. We have to stop a second attack.”
“And that’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Terk confirmed quietly. “I know it’s like closing the barn door after the fox got in,” he admitted, “but I’ve got a psychic guard around each of the team members. Less around you because you are recovering.”
“And Wade?”
“On a scale of one to ten, I’d say his health is at a five, so 50 percent. If I can even get that inched up to 52 to 53 percent, he’s heading in the right direction. The problem is, I can’t maintain this level of energy around everybody alone.”
“And I can’t help you and be on the hunt,” Damon replied.
“I know, so somehow we have to sort our priorities.”
“No.” Damon shook his head. “Somehow we have to get help.”
At that, Terk raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know who you’re expecting to come help us. We don’t have any government-sanctioned assistance anymore, and very few can help at this level.”
“I know, and that just sucks too because we need resources.”
“Money is not an issue,” he reminded him. “We have plenty of that.”
“And that’s a damn good thing,” Damon noted, “because we need it all. Particularly with this kind of a security issue.”
“No, I hear you,” he agreed. “I’m just not exactly sure where to turn.”
Damon hesitated for a moment. “What about your brother?”
Terk looked at Damon sharply, then frowned. “If I asked, he would come,” but his reluctance was very telling.
“You don’t want to put him in danger, do you?”
“Of course not,” he admitted. “My brother and I have always been close, but, more than that, not many people out there understand or even accept me for who and what I am, like my brother does.”
“But you’re twins too, right?”
“We are.” He nodded. “With one very important difference.”
“He has no abilities?”
“None. We didn’t even realize I did, until I hit about nine or ten.”
“Huh. What if he has abilities now?” Damon asked. “And, if he does, and they’re latent, that’s an entirely different issue.”
“Very latent. He’s never been tested and has never shown any interest in being tested.”
“Yet, as long as he’s been supportive of you, maybe we can utilize that.”
“And again, it would not be my choice. Anybody who even has any inkling of what we’re doing still doesn’t understand the kind of predators that we’re dealing with. How could anyone? Although my brother would more than most.”
“Do you think somebody else can do what we do?” Damon asked instantly.
“We took care of that—right? In Iran? But, if there was one group, maybe there are others.”
“I’m not sure.” Damon slowly reached up to rub his temples.
“And because my energy is split, trying to individually funnel a guard around our team, I don’t have the power I need to defend you and me properly.”
“And that is not acceptable,” Damon snapped. “I get we have to save everybody, but you are the strongest of us all. We must have you at the forefront of every investigation in order to make it all work.”
“Well, that’s the theory,” Terk agreed, “but each and every one of us will have to pull a little bit more, if we can.”
“You know we might need to bring in Wade, regardless of whether he’s fully healed or not.”
“And that could kill him,” Terk replied instantly.
“It might.” Damon hesitated. “Look. I know. I don’t want to do it either, but, if he can do anything, even if just run basic comms for us, so that we can get out and start hunting, then he needs to.” He could see that Terk was torn. “Maybe think about it from his perspective. Right now you’re saying he’s completely useless, even though so many other people out there would say that, even without his extra abilities, he is a hell of a better man than most.”
“He absolutely is,” Terk noted quietly. “But I also know that the more he drains his energy, the less he’ll utilize to help us, and, with his energy drained, it will stop his healing. Not to mention he’s slowly waking, but he’s not conscious. And yanking him out of that state could kill him.”
“Dammit,” Damon muttered because Terk was correct. But when did this stop and start being something that they could utilize in a different way? “We have to do something,” he replied. “We’re sitting ducks right now.”
“We’ve already been taken down,” he stated. “What we have to do is keep anybody from finding out that we may not recover from this.” And then he stopped and whispered, “Not all of us, but maybe a few of us.”
“Do you really think not everybody will recover?”
“I don’t want to say,” he murmured. “But, in some cases, we’re definitely on low life support.”
Frowning, Damon stared at the table and the tablet of notes. “Where do we start?”
“I’d say Iran, in the cell that we shut down, doing the same kind of work as we are doing, but of course for the other side.”
“And how many other sides are there now?” Damon snapped bitterly. “It seems like we’re up against the Russians and the Chinese all the time. Now you’re saying Iran.”
“And I can’t say for sure it’s them. It could all be connected.” He took a slow deep breath. “And it could be connected to our bosses.”
Damon leaned back, dropped the pencil. “I know, and that means that we need to investigate them and Iran, while keeping an eye on China and Russia. And we don’t have anybody to help us do that.”
“I can bring in some help,” Terk replied. “I don’t think our three admins are doing anything right now. We all went our separate ways that night, with the expectation of the team getting in touch in a few days. Only we never got that chance.” He cast Damon a raised eyebrow.
Damon realized who he was talking about. “Interesting.” He hated the idea. He didn’t want her in any more danger than she already was. “I’m not so sure that that’s even a wise idea.”
“But at least they understood what we were doing, and we still need people to run searches and people to do tracking.”
Damon frowned, still not liking the idea. “You mean Tasha. She was good at that.”
“I’ll contact her. I think they’re still working for the government though, and, if we don’t want the government to know that we’re alive and well …” Terk raised his eyebrows.
Damon shook his head. “Tasha was given her walking papers the same day the government shut us down.”
“Why?” Terk asked in surprise.
“Mostly I think because of the connection to us.”
“Has anybody talked to her since? I haven’t.” Terk looked at Damon.
“Neither have I.” Damon immediately snatched up his phone. “If they killed off our abilities, hoping that they would completely close down the department,” he noted with emphasis, “what are the chances that they did something to permanently injure her?”
“Well, they sure as hell better not have. We had three great hackers, IT staff. Let’s see if we can find any of them.”
“I’ll check in with Tasha.”
Terk nodded. “I’ll contact Wilson, and then we’ll have to look for Mera.”
“Yes, and, if any or all three of them want to come back and work for us while we sort this out, we need them. That just brings back one other issue.” Damon turned toward Terk. “When we got shut down, they removed our access, I presume?”
“Yes, access to databases, access to security, access to everything.”
“What about the bank accounts?”
Terk gave him a ghost of a smile. “Yeah, that’s not happening.”
“Will they accuse you of stealing?”
“I highly doubt it because they didn’t know about it in the first place.” He was torn on that because, of course, that was in theory how it was supposed to be. “It was access we had before anyway.”
“What are the odds that this annihilation was actually done because of that money? How much money are we talking about?” When Terk gave him a ballpark figure, Damon whistled silently. “We could have all been targeted just to get access to the money. Hell, they hide our budget from Congress so nobody without the highest of clearances knows what we’re up to. This money is dark. Someone steals it, and who’d be the wiser? If it would never openly go into the government coffers because they didn’t know about it, because it was hidden money, maybe someone did know and decided to get it for themselves.”
“It’s possible, but they could have done that without taking us out,” he reminded Damon. “We would never have known once we were ousted.”
“No, that’s quite true. But still, it makes me suspicious.”
“Anytime big money’s involved, it makes us all suspicious,” he murmured.
“Yeah, that is very true.” His fingers were already redialing Tasha’s number. But, so far, no answer. He bolted to his feet. “I don’t like anything about this. I’ll run over to her place.”
“If she’s still there. Remember. The bosses knew that we had some abilities, but they didn’t really know all of what we did.”
“No, they knew exactly what we did. They just didn’t always understand the nuances of how we did it.”
“Okay, good enough,” Terk agreed. “I don’t have a problem with that definition. Use your connection with Tasha to bring her back.”
Damn it. How did he know? Terk was like that. He knew things—that no one should know. Damon pocketed his phone and shook his head at that. “I just want to make sure that I find her alive.”
Terk’s smile fell away. “Yeah, I hear you there.” Just then he got a text, and he frowned. “I need to handle this.”
As Damon went to walk out the door, he turned back to Terk. “Anything I need to know?”
“Not necessarily. My brother is about to call.”
“Ah, well, let me know, and don’t forget we could use the additional manpower.”
Terk eyed him knowingly and then slowly nodded. “It is what they do. So maybe. I’ll talk to my brother and see.”
“Remember. They’re already involved. She’s there.”
“You go look for Tasha. I’ll talk to my brother.”
With that, Damon exited. Outside, he hopped into a black truck—nondescript, beaten up, slightly dirty, with nothing to cause any attention. He drove out of the huge compound of warehouses and headed to the address he had on file for Tasha. He didn’t bother calling again. Besides, this would need to be personal.
It didn’t mean it was still the current address though, and that was a bit of a concern. They’d never gotten personal on the job, and he had deliberately kept it much less than personal. Mostly because of the heavy attraction. Personal relations on the job never worked out. However, they weren’t on the job anymore, and that was even more dangerous because whatever the hell had happened had affected their whole team.
Only two days ago this had all come down; Damon had barely even surfaced when he found out that Terk was alive, and so they immediately banded up to try to find the rest of their team. What they’d found had been horrific.
The phone call to Levi’s team, warning them about Celia’s arrival, had been heartbreaking when all of them had realized what was going on. And even that knowledge came from Terk’s psyche. And, of course, the text message saying that she was carrying something special had Terk sending out a probe and finding out the truth; she was carrying his child.
When he realized it was his own child, they had just sat here in stunned fury, realizing just how much somebody was playing games of life and death with the next generation. And one of the reasons why Terk’s team had been disbanded was all over the arguments inside the government of how dangerous the group was. It should have been an easy job to shut down their operation, but now it looked way too much like the government had plans to shut them all down in another way too.
Yet why Celia? Surely that didn’t play into the government’s shut-down orders?
Damon understood, he really did, because to anybody in black ops oversight, who knew what Terk’s team could and would do was terrifying. But, if they thought they would shut down and injure this entire team, like they had in an attempt to cover the behinds of some bureaucrats, they had another think coming. That would never be something this team agreed to.
Terk was the most powerful of them all, and yet, at the same time, he was also the most exposed because he had family. It was one thing to have a team like they did, but, with families to intimidate or to use as blackmail threats, it became a whole different ball game.
Especially now with this woman and Terk’s unborn child.
Damon had no family. He had been abandoned at birth and had no clue who anybody was. He was raised in foster homes until he was old enough to join the military, all the while realizing something very strange was going on, so he cultivated it. Only when Terk had showed up at his door about eight years ago and had suggested that Damon come to work for him did he realize anybody else like him was out there. Since then, the two of them had been like brothers.
That it was possible that not all of them would regain their senses or potentially even survive was just devastating. Every one of them had a different ability, and some that they shared. Most of them could see either a location or people somewhere else, could communicate from another location, often on the other side of the world. Some of them could do so much more. And the longer they worked together, the more their individual skills improved.
That was one thing Damon could do. As long as he had something from that person, just a picture even, he could connect to wherever they were, sometimes talk to them, although they weren’t necessarily amiable to psychic communication. Most of them thought he was speaking inside their head and thought they were going crazy. He’d learned a few tricks to help them believe, but it made his job that much more challenging. But, if he could get them to provide information to help a rescue go down, it was all worthwhile.
However, once the government found out more of what they could do, there had been a big push to annihilate the program. And maybe the team itself, in order to have their gifts no longer available to be exploited. And, of course, that was just the brass speaking.
Damon had always wondered whether his job would end in a good way or he would get out of this industry in a box. He finally figured out that it would be in a box, and whether he liked it or not didn’t really matter because, when you knew the stuff that he knew, nobody out there would let him live.
Particularly when it came to the government.
He had absolutely no doubt in his mind that his own government was behind the attack on them. But proving it and getting payback or at least stopping somebody else from trying a repeat attack was a whole different story. The biggest problem would be finding out how this was done. And how could he protect himself and his team from a future attack?
