Page 11 of Boomer
He walked away, slow and quiet, dust rising in the wake of his boots. Somewhere behind him, the Brit muttered something under his breath, respectful now. But Boomer didn’t need to hear it. He’d done his job. They were all still breathing.
Humberto Delgado Airport,Lisbon, Portugal - 2200 Hours
Detective Taylor Hoffman pulled up outside the Lisbon Airport’s military-authorized hangar, headlights cutting through the night drizzle like knives through gauze. The city hadn’t cooled, not really, just exchanged its heat for humidity and the damp, tired exhaustion that came with late hours and heavier burdens.
She’d been yanked out of bed forty-five minutes ago. A transport was inbound. No details, just a head count and orders: act as point, get them situated, and everyone, including her, would be briefed in the morning. She brought her own personal car and four drivers with her, two vans for personnel, two for gear.
The wind tugged at the edge of her navy windbreaker as she stepped out, fatigue wrapped around her like fog. She was still groggy from the day, eight hours of meetings, three deconflict briefings, and one long, icy call with her superior back in Berlin. In Germany, the hours had been just as brutal, but Lisbon had a different kind of weight. Heavier. Murkier.
She walked to the hangar, even with this late-night excursion, she loved her job. Currently, Taylor worked forBundeskriminalamt, BKA, Germany’s federal criminal police, as the embedded liaison to MAOC (N), the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre – Narcotics.
MAOC (N) was a cooperative of eight EU Member States, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Portugal, plus the United Kingdom, the initiative was funded by its member states with a majority of its operating costs provided by the European Union’s Internal Security Fund, built to track, interdict, and dismantle maritime drug networks.
She’d started her service as a recruit, worked her way to Division SOC, tracking serious and organized crime, before transferring into the highly classified world of GSG 9, where she’d handled cross-border threats with the precision of special forces and the silence of a ghost. She then transferred back to BKA.
She’d once been stationed at the German Embassy in Lisbon as a liaison officer, giving her a leg up for her current position.
Lisbon had always struck Taylor as a city of contradictions, sun-drenched and melancholic, steeped in history yet humming with the pulse of modern urgency. The air tasted like sea salt, citrus, sangria, and seafood, with other more chemical smells, warm from the Atlantic winds but sharp with the edge of old stone and new industry. Azulejo tiles shimmered along alley walls like fractured sky, while graffiti and rust crept just beneath, color and corrosion living side by side.
Just like this mission.
Just likeher.
Lisbon smiled for tourists, tram cars, and custard tarts, waterfront cafés and soulful Fado echoing out of doorways, but she saw what lived behind the postcard. Underpaid and silent dock workers. Cargo containers with contents too valuable to label. Surveillance footage that blurred right when things got interesting, or a ship vanishing from radar. Lisbon had become a pressure point. A place where things disappeared and never came back.
Despite herself, her thoughts went tohim.
Carter Finley.Boomer.The last time she saw him, he had returned to the Bogotá compound, dressed head to toe in tactical black. The matte stretch of his sleeves clung to arms carved from punishment and precision, streaked with soot and sweat, broken only by the dull glint of armor plates and dried blood. His plate carrier bore the scars of close-quarters chaos, dust from a collapsed wall, a graze of gun oil near the shoulder, a red smear from someone else’s last breath.
Behind him, the rest of the team was just as wrecked. Kodiak’s sleeve was torn at the elbow, blood dark around the seam. Breakneck had a split lip and a thousand-yard stare that hadn’t blinked since they breached. Skull was crouched with Bones, one hand still on the dog’s harness like he was holding the line with his whole damn soul. Preacher leaned against the wall, eyes closed, the muzzle of his rifle resting against his boot. No one said it. They didn’t have to.
No one said Hazard’s name. No one said Leigh’s. But their absence filled the compound like a gas leak, silent, heavy, waiting to ignite.
Taylor hadn’t meant to reach for Boomer when he passed her. But she did. He looked at her, weary, devastated. Understanding that kind of grief, she wanted to hold him.
They’d taken down Lucia Alzate’s entire cartel with military precision, yet all the effort hadn’t brought their people home.
It was a miracle when they showed up several minutes later, wounded but alive, and everything had changed in Boomer.
Her stomach twisted. Her body reacted before her mind could shut it down, heat low in her belly, skin prickling, heartbeat skipping into old, dangerous rhythms. She closed her eyes.Damn it.
He’d texted her after Colombia. One message. One promise. Then…nothing.
She wasn’t the kind of woman who waited for a man. She was the kind who kept moving.
But that silence? That unfinished pull? It had stayed with her in a way it shouldn’t have.
She hated that about him.
She’d opened the door. Just a crack, and he’d let it slam shut again.
Yet…she couldn’t write him off completely. Not when her body still remembered the sound of his voice, that slow Southern drawl wrapped in gravel and sin. Not when just theideaof his hands made her feel unmoored.
No. She had a job to do, and control was everything.
Emotion, especially attraction, was a liability. One she’d trained her entire life to suppress. That’s what it meant to survive. That’s what it meant to be her.
She squared her shoulders and stepped toward the hangar. This washercity now. Her terrain. Her responsibility.
