Page 78 of Guarded from Havoc

“Some cuts and bruises,” Dante replies. “Rafe said the man with him has a broken arm. But nothing life threatening.”

Relief rushes out in a gust. “Good. Now we need to get them out in the same condition.”

Ever since we sent our friends into the game undercover, I haven’t stopped worrying. Or feeling guilty. Rafe and Tyler don’t have a stake in this, not like I do, so it feels terrible knowing they’re in danger while I stand safely outside the electrified fence with my team. Especially knowing firsthand just how treacherous the game is. How violent. How deadly.

As we were planning our mission, initially, I thought I’d be one of the ones going in. It made sense, having been through the experience already and knowing the clues to look out for. Plus, with my skills with explosives, I’d be better equipped to disarm them.

And in all honesty, I wanted to go. Be there to dismantle the game from the inside. To show the piece of garbage behind this that he fucked with the wrong person.

But after a lengthy discussion among the team, we decided trying to go in ourselves wasn’t the best strategy. Even though we planned on using fake identities when Matt added us to the list of nominations for mice in the game, the chance of us beingdiscovered when we were finally seen in person was just too great.

Especially me. No matter how good of a fake identity I had, if the mastermind behind this spotted me on the camera, there’s no way he wouldn’t recognize me.

So we turned to our friends. Our former teammates and brothers. Men who didn’t hesitate to step up once we asked for their help.

First, Rafe, who was in Niall, Xavier, and Rhi’s battalion, and one of the first people we thought to ask. He lives in Texas working as a bounty hunter and takes pride in tracking down the most violent fugitives and putting them away.

Tyler we were less sure about to start. Not that we doubt his skills, even with his prosthetic. But ever since he lost his wife last year, he’s been living like a hermit out in California, keeping in touch only through texts and making it abundantly clear he wants to be left alone.

It’s horrible. It really is. Losing his wife only a year after getting married, I can hardly blame the guy for wanting his space. But when Matt, Dante, and I talked about it, we thought maybe giving Tyler a purpose might be a way to draw him out again.

And it did. As soon as I called Tyler to explain everything, telling him how the woman I love will never be completely safe until this is over, he immediately agreed.

The woman I love. Barely three weeks after meeting her, and I already know.

She’s the one. After watching my teammates all fall in love, thinking I’d always be the single one, love came to me when I least expected it. Now I just want to get this fucking game ended so I can go back to Tate and work on building a normal life. Together.

“I’ve got Tyler approximately five hundred yards from the northern line of the fence,” Rhiannon reports while staring down at her phone. “And Rafe is two hundred yards from the southern side. So if our point of entry is at the southwest side, like we planned, it seems like a good idea to make contact with Rafe first, then move on to meet Tyler and find any other captives.”

I lean over to glance at the two red dots blinking on her screen; one for Rafe, the other for Tyler. They have trackers on them—not rings like the team wears, but subcutaneous ones, just in case the people who captured them were on the lookout for wearable trackers this time.

Niall glances around at the acres of mountainous woods around us. “I still can’t believe how much work went into this. Not just installing all the traps and the electrified fence around them, but getting all the equipment here when the closest road is over two miles away. In the most remote part of Idaho, no less. This fucker must be making—” His jaw clenches. “It’s so fucked up. Creating these elaborate death traps just to get rich.”

“I don’t think it’s just that,” Rhiannon replies with a shake of her head. “Yeah, this guy likes the money. But it’s the power he really gets off on. Playing God, so to speak.”

“More like the Devil,” I grit out. “And if—no, when—we catch this guy, he’s going to wish?—”

“I’ve got it.” Matt looks up from his phone. “I’m in. Now I’m just waiting to trace the signal to the source. As soon as we get it, we call Cruz, and he’ll get the FBI to move in.”

“Then we disable the feeds,” Dante says, recapping our plan. “Once they’re off, we deactivate the fence. Get to Rafe first, like Rhi said. Depending on what the thermal camera tells us, we’ll determine our routes from there.”

Niall slides his phone from his pocket and glances at it. Then he puts it back. “That was Xavier. He said everything back athome is fine. The women and babies are secure. He and Hawk have everything under control.”

Even in the best of situations, we never leave HQ without at least one of the team guarding it. And with Blade and Arrow in the sights of some crazed mastermind, there was no way we were going to risk leaving HQ unattended. So Xavier and Hawk are back in Texas, making sure the people we care about most are safe.

But still, Tatum must be so scared. So worried. She tried to hide it before I left, but I could see the fear in her eyes. And I could hear the desperation in her voice as she quietly pleaded with me before I left, “Come home to me, Erik. I need you.”

Fuck. Why didn’t I hug her one last time before I walked out the door? Kiss her again? Told her I loved her, though it was the worst possible time?

“Shit,” Matt hisses. “I can’t believe it.”

We all tense. In unison, we grab our guns, ready to defend ourselves against an unexpected threat.

After we hiked two miles through the woods to this mousetrap, so to speak, we found a dense cluster of trees to finish our final preparations. We checked the area several times with a thermal camera, with mine detectors, metal detectors, basically any kind of detector possible, really. And it alllookedsafe.

But we all know all too well that danger can lurk in the most unexpected places.

“Rhi, is something approaching?” Dante asks. He moves next to her to look at her phone. But a beat later, he answers his own question. “It’s just us. What?—”

---