Hushed Guardian - Shandi Boyes Page 0,3

for something bigger, they let his misdemeanor slide.

I won’t let a second slip-up pass without prosecution. It will only be a matter of time before he stumbles, and when he does, I’ll be there with my foot propped out, ready to aid in his fall.

As the agents check their weapons in preparation for the raid, Grayson scrubs at the beard that no longer looks like bumfluff while mumbling a curse word under his breath. He’s pissed, wrongly believing he is being excluded from the sting because he’s too close to the case to work it properly.

It’s not true. He’s one of the best field operatives in Tobias’s team, but his hacking skills are even better than that. He is the equivalent of three black hatters, and with Tobias needing eyes and ears in every room of the fortified warehouse to ensure his team isn’t walking into an ambush, he has to exclude Grayson from the raid.

Me, on the other hand, anticipated being seconded to comms. I fucked-up four years ago by letting my past affect my future. Tobias is a great team leader, but he can hold a grudge as well as he can down a bottle of vodka and not get a hangover.

My error almost got me kicked out of the Bureau before I was even an official agent. It brought me back onto the straight and narrow, but the hit it caused my personal life is still being felt. The incident took Melody from being the girl I once loved to a girl I no longer know.

While working my jaw side to side to keep my annoyance on the down-low, I slot into a chair behind a bank of monitors. Grayson has already logged into servers that should be unhackable, so I commence working on establishing a connection with the main compound.

Criminal associations like the one we’re raiding tonight don’t store their assets at their residences, they use offsite compounds and commercial properties. The more valuable the asset, the more guards to watch them. This site has three men walking the property line, four guarding the main entrance, and another two in a watchtower.

Once Grayson breaks through the firewall keeping him out of the mainframe, I’m guessing there will be an additional dozen or so men inside. That’s around the standard number of goons for this type of operation.

The web we’re attempting to eradicate is massive. There are more than a dozen organizations sprouting off from it, and the list of suspects grows exponentially every day. Politicians, movie stars, drug lords, and a name I’m more than familiar with are only a handful of the men we’re chasing. It’s such a long process because this network wasn’t built overnight. It has been operating longer than I’ve been born, and very rarely are the men helming the operations’ cooperative with the authorities.

Today’s sting will barely create a ripple to the empire as a whole, but it only takes one thread to loosen an entire web. That’s the thread we’re seeking today, and we will continue seeking until each member on our list of suspects has paid for their crimes, and men like my father realize no amount of power will save them from the law.

“Don’t forget to check the sleeping quarters this time around. There are usually a few men down there every raid testing the merchandise.” Grayson’s jaw tightens at the way I snarl ‘testing.’ This operation isn’t running drugs. They like underage women.

“Do you have a feed for the main residence?” Grayson asks, his tone curious.

I jerk up my chin. “Castro isn’t going anywhere soon.”

He gags when I point to Rimi Castro, suspected leader of a Sicilian crime syndicate currently based in New Mexico. He’s in bed with three women. None of them are his wife, and I doubt any of them are over the age of twenty-one. He likes them young, but his buyers like them even younger than that.

“What’s your total?”

Grayson ensures his live stream has every inch of the compound covered before moving for the infrared system to double-check his numbers. “Looks like twenty-three in total. Nine outside the compound, fourteen inside.” He relays that to Tobias through the radio headsets the agents are wearing. They also have body cams and shoulder mics to stop any questions if our sting goes wrong.

Confident we have everything lined up, Tobias and the team climb into three blacked-out Escalades before testing communications. Once we give him the thumbs up, the operation starts. The two men in the