Hard As You Can

Chapter 2

Still riding the buzz of last night’s op, Shane McCallan ran down the empty street, dodging potholes, garbage, and the occasional discarded needle, and attempted to clear his head of the shitstorm that had parked itself in his cranium overnight.

The one that had featured his thirteen-year-old self, his eight-year-old sister, and the single biggest failure of his entire life.

Damnit all to hell and back, why had the nightmare returned?

Once a staple of his subconscious mind, he hadn’t dreamed of Molly’s disappearance for years. Not because the guilt didn’t still eat at him—it did. And not because her loss didn’t still weigh on his chest until it was hard to breathe, because that was true, too. Even all these years later.

But he’d perfected the art of driving himself into a state of exhaustion so acute his body shut down everything in favor of a few critical hours of REM sleep, his mind included. So he didn’t dream anymore. At all. Not of Molly or anything else.

Until last night.

And good goddamnit if this wasn’t just one more reason to hate Colonel Frank Merritt. If his former commander hadn’t gotten greedier than a starving hog at feeding time, Shane would still have the job that wrung him out better than anything else he’d ever found, not to mention his friends, his professional reputation, and his honor. Instead, a year ago, Merritt had betrayed the Special Forces team he commanded to make a little coin on the side, resulting in the deaths of six good men on their team and the other-than-honorable discharge of the five survivors, himself included.

Turning a corner, Shane ran past a car up on blocks and stripped to its skeletal frame. He knew Baltimore had some rough neighborhoods, but this one was so run-down that both sides of the tracks were wrong. Why the hell had Nick and his brother opened a tattoo shop here, of all places? Abandoned buildings with boarded and broken windows and layers of graffiti covering the old brickwork were the norm. Close to the waterfront, the old, industrial area had probably once been hopping with port-related business. Now, it was just a sorry mess.

The blight and deterioration opened it up wide for criminal activity, which was why Shane had wanted to get out and eyeball the geography around Hard Ink for himself. Having taken a bullet during the getaway chase from Confessions last night, his shoulder wasn’t in love with this idea. But it had only been a surface wound. No biggie. Still, it was goddamned ironic that the first time he’d ever been shot in his life happened after ten years of active duty service and innumerable deployments to all kinds of places nobody wanted to go. GSW or no, the former intelligence officer in him itched for a full rundown of their surroundings. Given the enemies they’d racked up in the past twenty-four hours, they needed all the intel they could gather. That the running might clear the cobwebs of the past from his mind was just a lucky twofer.

As his sneakers pounded out a rhythmic pace on the cracked blacktop, Shane pondered the return of the nightmare.

Maybe Nick Rixey was responsible for it. Wanting to help Becca Merritt, their former commander’s daughter, find her missing brother, Shane’s best friend—or former best friend, or whatever the fuck they were now—had called together what was left of their discredited and discharged Special Forces team for the brother’s recon and rescue. And everyone from the team—himself, Edward “Easy” Cantrell, Beckett Murda, and Derek “Marz” DiMarzio—had dropped everything and come to Baltimore. Because that’s what brothers did. Especially those forged by war and not blood.

So maybe the reunion, strained as it was by the fubar of a past they all shared and the danger of the present operation they didn’t yet fully understand, was responsible for rattling things loose in his head that had long been secured in place.

Maybe.

Or maybe it was the operation itself. After all, it wasn’t any great leap to think that finding and saving Becca’s brother Charlie might’ve resurrected memories about Shane’s own missing sister. The one no one had ever found and sure as shit hadn’t saved.

Goddamnit all.

Where the street met the harbor, Shane rounded the next corner, mentally checking off another part of the map he’d studied before heading out. With the back of his hand, he wiped the sweat off his brow. Despite only being eleven in the morning, humidity choked the late-April air until it felt like he was running through molasses. Not that he really minded. Having grown up in southern Virginia, the heat was a welcome old friend. But the salt in his sweat stung the hell out of the injury on his shoulder.

Suck it up, McCallan.

Pushing himself harder, Shane picked up the pace, surveying the street as his thoughts continued to churn.

Or maybe someone else was responsible for shaking the subconscious skeleton from its closet. Maybe it was the woman he’d run into in the strip club where they’d found Charlie.

Crystal.

The first time he’d run into her—literally—she’d helped him unwittingly, thinking he belonged there. And, man, she’d been as beautiful as she was skittish. How a woman working in a strip club and wearing sheer lingerie managed to give off such a genuine, innocent vibe, he didn’t know. But she had it—and then some. And the incongruity had been rolling around in his head ever since, like a pinball tripping sensors and ringing bells.

But the second time he’d run into her? When she hadn’t prevented their getaway from the club? When it was clear he had no business there? Her terror had been apparent in the blaze of her green eyes and the tremble of her voice, but whatever mental calculus she’d run had come down in his favor. And she’d helped him—or at least hadn’t hindered him—on purpose.

Yet, she so greatly feared someone there thinking she’d been complicit in his actions that she’d insisted he hit her.

The surreal nature of the request sent him reeling all over again. Shane couldn’t remember the last time he’d been as gobsmacked.

Not even when Nick had called out of the blue after months of ignoring Shane’s emails and phone calls and said he’d found a possible lead into the cover-up that’d gotten them booted from the Army.

The woman had freaking demanded he hit her.

Who did that?

And what kind of people did she know that made her expect he’d actually do it? It told him a lot about the green-eyed girl. That she was scared. And felt vulnerable. And thought punishment was a real threat.

That she was in trouble.

What the hell had happened to her after their cut and run? The possibilities were endless. And mostly piss poor.

And the wondering had nagged at him all night, right alongside his nightmares of Molly.

So, yeah, maybe concern for this woman, who was clearly caught up in a bad situation, had triggered all these old thoughts of his sister. Because Molly had never been found. He had no idea if she’d been killed right away. Or if she’d suffered a lifetime of imprisonment and abuse at the hands of some sicko. Or if she could be alive and in trouble, even now.

Like Crystal.

Another thirty minutes, and Shane had completed his circuit of the neighborhood around Hard Ink, his team’s home base of sorts in their newest covert mission: to figure out how Charlie’s abduction might be related to the cover-up of their commander’s activities that got them a one-way ticket right out of the loving arms of Mother Army. Shane had been dubious as all hell that a connection actually existed, especially when he saw how into Becca Nick was. The man had clearly been thinking with his more southerly head. But the things Charlie told them after they’d rescued and patched him up last night made it clear that Nick was right.

Given the tension between himself and Nick, it rubbed Shane’s ass a little raw to admit that, but there was a connection. And it gave Shane and the rest of his former teammates the first honest-to-God lead into the real reason behind their discharge. No way in hell he could walk away from that. None of them could.

Because they weren’t just fighting for their own honor. They were also fighting for the honor of six good men who could no longer stand up for themselves. Doing right by those men wasn’t a choice, it was a duty.

A half block out from Hard Ink, Shane slowed to a walk. The Rixeys owned the entire L-shaped building that sat at one corner. The place was a whole lotta nondescript red brick from its former days as a warehouse. Nick’s younger brother Jeremy had rehabbed a fair chunk of the building, including the space for what was apparently a very successful tattoo business, at least according to Nick.

Shane had nothing against ink—in fact, he had quite a few pieces himself—but it still tripped him out to imagine that his hard-ass Special Forces teammate had the patience, precision, and artistic skill to put needle to skin himself. Man, they were a bunch of friggin’ chameleons, weren’t they? Changing and adapting as conditions dictated.

Just like they’d been trained to do.

And while Shane had landed on his feet with a decent job at a defense contractor, he almost thought Nick had the better approach in doing something entirely different from what they’d done in the Special Forces. Because being benched on the sidelines of a game you could only advise on but never again play sucked big, hairy donkey balls.

Like there were any other kind.

It was actually nice taking a little leave from the day job—he’d made the call to his superior right before setting out on the run. Question was just how much time this op was going to take. And was Shane going to have enough time or end up having to choose between a paycheck and justice. Because that was really no choice at all.

Rolling the aches out of his shoulder, Shane reached the driveway to their large gravel parking lot and caught movement from the corner of his eye. Jeremy Rixey was up on a ladder, while Nick and Marz stood on the ground calling directions up to him.

Every time Nick tried to talk, Jeremy started drilling into the brick. Trademark grin on his face, Marz adjusted the coiled black cable in his hands and shook his head as the brothers traded insults.

“Look, I’m just wondering if—”

Whirr, whirr, whirr.

“Dude, I know what I’m doing,” Jeremy said when he paused the tool. “Either let me do this or get your moody ass up here instead.”

Shane cut up the driveway toward them. “How many prior military does it take to drill in a screw?” he asked.

“None,” Jeremy, the only civilian among them, called down with a smile and a wink. “Obviously.” With their dark hair and pale green eyes, Jeremy and Nick looked a helluva lot alike though Jer’s hair was longer and his skin bore far more ink. Nick didn’t have any tats showing around the white T-shirt and jeans he wore—and neither did Shane, because tattoos were too readily identifiable in the field, but Jeremy had full sleeves, writing on his knuckles, and pieces on his neck, too.

“Becca saved you some pancakes,” Nick said over the whirr of the drill. “But somebody probably snagged ’em by now. Where’d you go?”

Shane studied the man who’d been his team’s second-in-command and his longtime best friend. After they’d been discharged and sent stateside last year, Nick had pulled a disappearing act and turned his back on Shane like they hadn’t fought and bled at one another’s sides for the past six years. And that bullshit had cut. Deep. “For a run and a little recon,” he finally said. “What’s up here?”

“Security cameras and motion-activated lights,” Marz said.

Shane smiled at the guy. “Boys and their toys.”

“Damn straight.” Marz was their guru for all things computer and technology. The man had a scary kinda smarts where anything technical was concerned, which made him one of their key assets. Always had. In fact, it had been Marz who’d found a way to give them some eyes on the locations they’d raided to search for Charlie the previous night.

Fuckin’ A, it was good to see the man healthy and standing on his own two feet again—even if one of them was prosthetic. Shane and Marz had talked from time to time, but before their reunion two days ago, the last time Shane had seen him was in the rehab unit of a hospital. Of all the survivors of the ambush that had revealed their commander’s dirty little secret, Marz’s injuries had been the most catastrophic. He’d lost part of a leg to a grenade, and Shane and Nick had worked together, despite Nick’s own gunshot wounds to his back, to staunch the bleeding and keep him alive. Where the rest of them could be moody bastards, Marz was and always had been one happy, optimistic fucker. Drove them all batshit sometimes. But absolutely nothing got the guy down—at least not for long. The rest of them could learn a thing or two.

Shane scanned the brickwork closest to the street and found a new camera-and-light fixture already installed. “How many are you putting up?”

“All the way around the building,” Nick said. “Street front’s done. Just need to do two more points in the back.”

“Okay, hand it up,” Jeremy called. Nick grabbed the unit out of the box and climbed the ladder high enough to do the handoff. Marz put a steadying hand on the aluminum as he fed them the cable, then backed off as Nick neared the ground.

“We’re also installing a fence around the parking lot,” Nick said. “Jer’s got a client with a fencing company, so he called in a favor, and the guy will be by to install it this afternoon. Easy and Beckett went with him to help haul the materials.”

Shane nodded. “Shit, I wish I’d have known. They could’ve taken my truck.”

Nick thumbed over his shoulder with a smirk. “Way ahead of you.”

Frowning, Shane walked far enough to see that his big, black F150 was gone. He arched a brow at Nick.

“Don’t give me that look. You would’ve offered. We just skipped a step.” The guy’s smile was tentative, like he was testing the waters and knew they might be infested with sharks.

“Sons o’ bitches,” Shane groused. But Nick was right. He wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t willing to do anything to help figure this situation out. And security had to be a part of that. “Fine. They scratch it all up, though, and I’m taking it out on your hide.”

Nick’s smile turned indulgent, and he nodded. “Well, you can try.”

The drill let out an unhappy, high-pitched whine, and Jeremy cursed, drawing Shane’s gaze. Shane let go of the retort sitting on the tip of his tongue as an idea parked itself in his frontal lobe. “You know, while we’re at it, we should consider a few remote cameras on the approaches to this building. Give us a way to see what might be coming at us before it gets here. Saw a few places on my run that’d be perfect.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Marz said. “Tell me where you want ’em, and I’ll make it happen.”

“I wish I could say this was all overkill,” Shane said. But after last night, when they’d raided two locations of Baltimore’s most notorious gang, stolen back Charlie, and engaged in gunfights with Jimmy Church’s men, the shit was on, and it was deep. And it wasn’t like they could go to the authorities, not after they’d found solid evidence that Church had the cops in his pocket. So, their enemies were highly sophisticated, apparently numerous, and not fully known—a trifecta of luck so bad that if it were raining pussy, they’d have gotten hit with a big dick. So, yeah, these precautions were right on the money.

Nick’s gaze narrowed and went distant for a moment, then he nodded. “You and me both. But we’ve still got more questions than answers at this point, and too much at stake to take any chances.”

It went without saying that Becca Merritt had to be on Nick’s mind. Three days ago, her house had been ransacked and someone had tried to snatch her from her workplace at University Hospital, so she was living here while this situation got resolved. But something told Shane she’d be staying at Hard Ink even once everything was said and done. Any man with two eyes and half a brain could see that the search for Becca’s brother had forged a tight bond between her and Nick. The kind that had a decent shot of lasting forever.

Shane totally got it. Because Becca had proven herself again and again in the short time he’d known her. By staying strong. By pitching in. By putting herself in harm’s way to help their mission.

And by being the first person to ever apologize for the fubar that had stripped them of their careers, their uniforms, their honor.

Given all she’d done, Shane was as committed to her safety as Nick. Especially because whoever had wanted their commander’s children so badly wasn’t going to give up. Someone believed Charlie and Becca had knowledge of their father’s black ops in Afghanistan, and no doubt they’d keep coming until they got what they wanted. Or died trying.

“How’s the shoulder?” Marz asked, as Jeremy made his way down the ladder.

“Eh. I’ll live.” Shane shrugged. “How’s the leg?” He grinned. Marz had taken three gunshots in last night’s firefight, all of them miraculously shooting through the bottom half of his right pant leg, the one that was mostly empty save for the metal rod of his prosthesis.

Marz barked out a laugh. “Good as new, baby.”

Jeremy climbed down the ladder, shaking his head. “You guys are a little twisted.”

“Says the guy wearing a T-shirt with a log-holding beaver asking, ‘Are you looking at my wood?’” Shane said. Jeremy had a whole collection of dirty and irreverent shirts, apparently.

Everyone chuckled.

“Hey, I never said I had a problem with twisted.” Jeremy hefted the ladder and moved it to the next position.

Everyone halted as a three-legged puppy came bounding down the driveway.

“Speaking of twisted,” Shane said, earning a few more chuckles. Becca had rescued the German shepherd from scavenging the hospital trash cans a few days before, and now the cute mutt with a pair of inordinately huge ears had everyone wrapped around her oversized paws.

“Dude, no making fun of Eileen,” Marz said, scooping her lanky black-and-tan body into his arms. Their shared missing-leg status had created a huge soft spot in the man’s heart for the puppy.

“Who, me?” Shane reached over and gave her silky ears a quick stroke. “Besides, how could I possibly make fun of a three-legged puppy with cartoonish ears named Eileen?”

“Last night you claimed credit for the name,” Nick said. “Even though I was the one who sang Becca the song.”

“Don’t remind me. The memory of you down on your knees singing eighties anthems is burned into my brain forever. Besides, you’re just mad that Becca liked my name best.”

The smirk on Nick’s face made it clear he was gearing up for a juicy retort, but just then, Becca rounded the corner from the back of the building. The woman was all-American-girl pretty, with blond hair, blue eyes, and a warm, bright smile. “You guys aren’t making fun of Eileen, are you?” A chorus of negatives rang out, and Becca rolled her eyes. “You totally were. You’re going to give her a complex.” She nuzzled the puppy in Marz’s arms. “It’s okay, pretty girl. Don’t listen to them.”

“You know I wasn’t doing anything but loving her. These guys, though . . .” Marz shrugged.

“Hey, don’t throw me under the bus. I didn’t say a word,” Jeremy said, leaning the ladder back against the building. “It was these assholes.” He pointed at Shane and Nick.

Shane had a defense on the tip of his tongue, but Becca turned her feigned outrage on Nick. “How could you?”

Nick nailed his brother with a glare as he stepped right into Becca’s space. “I didn’t say a damn thing, sunshine. Promise.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, trying to hold back a grin as Nick kissed her cheek.

Shane turned away and busied himself with filching a bottle of water from the box that held Marz’s supplies. The H₂O was warm but did the job.

“Okay, you two. Get a room,” Jeremy said.

“Aren’t you the one who supposedly walks around naked?” Becca asked, crossing her arms.

Jer reached for the button on his jeans and tugged it apart. “No, but your wish is my command, sweetheart.” He winked, stomping all over Nick’s most exposed nerve. Shane rather respected the younger Rixey’s ability to get under his brother’s skin. Nick was usually buttoned up pretty damn tight.

Nick’s glare slipped into an outright scowl as he pulled Becca in tight and buried her face in his chest. “Quick. Hide your eyes, or you’ll be scarred for life.”

Her laughter was free but muffled. “It’s not my wish, Jeremy, it’s not my wish,” she said. She pulled back, face all squinched up, and asked, “Is it safe yet?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jeremy said. “Just know it’s a standing invitation.”

Nick darted around Becca and tackled Jer before he even knew what hit him. The tussle turned into a full-out wrestling match.

“They really are like twelve-year-olds when they’re together, aren’t they?” She shook her head, but the affection for both of the Rixeys was clear in her expression. “Whenever you guys are done, I was hoping someone would take me to the grocery store, so I can pick up everything I need for our special dinner.”

Before they’d gone out on the mission to rescue Charlie, Becca had promised they’d celebrate his safe return with a big meal of everyone’s favorites. It’d been a nice way of letting the team know she believed in them. Sitting down around a table and catching up with old friends, and some new ones, too, sounded like something they could all use.

“Gimme ten to shower, and I’ll be happy to take you,” Shane said.

Becca’s eyes widened in surprise, making it clear Shane had some fence-mending to do there. He hadn’t exactly given her the warmest reception when they’d first met because he’d let his feelings about her father color his reaction to her. Big mistake. She deserved better.

“Your truck’s gone, remember? I’ll take her,” Nick said. Right.

“Why don’t you both go?” Jeremy said. “Derek and I have this under control and, given everything, maybe you should both go with her.”

Shane shrugged and, after a moment, Nick nodded. “Go take care of your swass and swalls, then, McCallan,” Nick said.

Shane threw a punch as he passed the guy, but Nick dodged with a laugh.

“What the heck are swass and swalls?” Becca asked.

“Sweaty ass and sweaty balls,” Shane, Nick, and Derek said in unison.

“Oh. Ew,” Becca said amid the men’s chuckles. “Yes, do take care of that, Shane.”

He grinned over his shoulder and tossed off a salute. “Ma’am, yes, ma’am.” Leaving the joking and laughter behind him, Shane hightailed it inside and took the industrial staircase two steps at a time. In the quiet of the stairwell, the questions that had plagued his run returned, but this time they came with something of an answer.

He couldn’t do anything to save Molly. Sixteen years too late for that.

And he couldn’t control his subconscious.

But he could find out what had happened to Crystal after they left. The question was just when to go, how to approach her, and how to keep from getting caught. Oh, and how to get the guys on board with the plan.

Easy as sin.

Right? Probably not. But Shane was like an old dog with a new bone when he wanted to be. And this was one of those times.