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Authors: Suzanne Halliday

Tags: #Justice Brothers Book 1

Broken Justice (Justice Brothers) (2 page)

BOOK: Broken Justice (Justice Brothers)
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He liked the boy a lot and reminded Cam of him at an age before innocence got lost and life became serious. In his case, it was the year or two before his mother stuck one too many heroin needles in her drug-wasted body. She took her last breath on their wobbly stained living room couch, leaving him to an uncertain and complicated future.

Drae cast him one of those knowing looks that bordered on a leer before chiming in, “You’ve been spending quite a bit of time with the lovely widow and her son, Cam. You find a way underneath that hijab yet, dude?”

“Shut the fuck up, Drae,” Cameron snapped. “You’re way more likely to go for a pair of brown doe-eyes beneath a veil than either of us would,” he added while gesturing with the tilt of his head to where The Kid stood. “Asef is a good kid and it doesn’t hurt to show the boy that not all Americans are bloodthirsty dickheads worthy of jihad.”

“Hey, leave me out of that argument, Sirs,” The Kid added with tongue-in-cheek humor. “My fiancée would seriously kick my ass if she thought for one minute that any of the female locals were fraternizing with the enemy.” Mention of the fiancée gave pause to Cameron and Draegyn. They’d seen pictures of the couple during happier times and had listened to many heartsick stories from the lonely warrior during his time assigned to their squad.

From Cam’s deep-seated mistrust of women and ability to compartmentalize sexual encounters, to Drae’s man-whore behavior and Alex’s cold-hearted view of romance, the three of them made quite a trio. Truth be told, each of them envied The Kid in his own way. The battlefield hadn’t robbed him of the ability to feel or diminished the desire to forge a future beyond the shit storm they lived in now.

Suddenly, McLain jumped up from his at ease position and lifted his snout in the air. All three men, ever vigilant to even the slightest signal of danger, stopped in mid-thought and actively scanned their immediate surroundings. Something was up, they could sense it. By reflex and from sheer habit, Cam and Drae immediately hoisted their ever-present M-16 rifles and began moving toward the other side of the well-protected compound.

Shit got real when the K-9 took off running at a fast clip around a mortar pit with The Kid right behind him. A commotion was building just beyond their view. They could hear angry shouts and commands to stand down being barked out in Arabic.

All hell broke loose in the next ten seconds as gunfire erupted followed by a small explosion and then a massive
BOOM
that knocked Cam and Drae off their feet. Smoke, dust, shrapnel, and debris clogged the air.

Choking from the blast, Cam was on the ground, unable to move as debris covered most of his body. Frantically clawing away from the mess, he called out for Drae in the ensuing chaos.

“Draegyn! Drae! Are you alright? Where the hell are you?” he hollered as fear and adrenaline coursed wildly through his body. Spitting the putrid sand and dust from the blast out of his mouth, he crouched low, on alert, gun pointed in case of attack while the smoke cleared enough for him to finally see something more than the inside of a dark cloud.

Catching sight of Draegyn’s unmoving form laying thirty feet away under a pile of tin and wood, Cam immediately sprinted to assist his fallen comrade. As he came to the spot where Drae fell a sudden movement from the corner of his eye caused him to swing his weapon into a defensive posture, ready to annihilate any further attack that came their way. When four shit-kicking Marines raced by he stood down, returning to Drae’s aide.

With a burst of superhuman strength and determination, Cameron lifted a tremendous piece of tin attached to a wooden post from his prone friend and wildly tossed it aside in an effort to reach Draegyn. When his battlefield brother was freed and able to slowly lift to his knees, Cam knew a relief that equaled none he’d known before.

A heartbeat later, years of training took over. After helping Draegyn to his feet and checking to see that their weapons were ready to go, they started forward again in a fast sprint toward the center of the explosion.

Upon reaching the area of the HQ, the men stopped and assessed the scene before them. Bodies and parts of bodies were everywhere as shouts of “medic” and “Code Red” filled the air. Half the HQ building was gone and a fire had broken out in another structure nearby.

“Holy fuck, Cam!” Drae shouted. “God damn, motherfuckers,” he growled. “We’ve got to get to Alex.”

Both men took off in the direction of the building where they hoped their friend would be found unhurt. Along the way they encountered McLain, who was untethered and clearly in distress, wandering in circles around a clump of brown camo on the ground. Cam’s stomach dropped away as he realized that The Kid had taken the worst from the blast while the dog had somehow survived. Fear arced up his spine, propelling him forward in search of Alex.

Drae got there first, shouting, “Alex, Alex! Talk to me, man! Where the fuck are you?” All around them soldiers were frantically tossing debris aside in search of the dead and injured.

They found Alex, badly hurt, with blood pouring out of every inch of his body and a leg wound that looked like ground meat. He was alive, barely. The instinct to survive, no matter what the situation, had been branded on their souls in such a way that a pulse meant victory in an otherwise horrendous scenario.

Luckily for Alex, it took only seconds for an entire team to descend on the area and take control of the situation. In the end, sixteen military personnel had been killed or injured along with seven civilians. Magically, the visiting politicos had escaped unscathed, having left for the airfield earlier that morning.

After seeing to Alex’s care and satisfied that he was alive and on the way to the hospital at Ramstein , Drae and Cameron were left to deal with the aftermath of what turned out to be a suicide bomber. In the days and years to come, each battlefield brother would have wounds and emotional scars to contend with. Not only was Alex critically injured and The Kid going home to his fiancée in a body bag, the bomber turned out to be the doe-eyed widow Badirya who sacrificed her only child Asef in some deranged act meant to re-unite her with her dead Afghan husband.

On that fateful day The Justice Bothers were born from the smoke, death and despair of an Afghan battlefield. Things would never be the same for any of them and each would carry demons, ghosts and nightmares from that time into the future. In the two years that followed, one by one, they would leave the desert hell-hole behind and seek a future together, far away from war, in the hot, dusty winds of southern Arizona.

It was fucking hot. Balls hot. It was always hot in this part of the world. He was used to the smell of his own sweat and had been since the years he spent in the arid dust of the Middle East. It made ignoring the perspiration running down his back easier. Using the t-shirt crumpled up in his hands as a towel, he swiped it absently across his chest and face before dropping it to the floor and laying his head on the back of the chair.

Above him, an ancient ceiling fan cranked in useless, lazy circles. From his room on the second floor of the pensión, sounds from the bustling street below choked in the oppressive heat of the mid-day sun. The only noise inside his dingy, cheap-ass room came from the Mexican Lolita on her knees between his legs, who at this moment had his dick stuffed in her practiced mouth.

He should probably give a shit that he was getting a first class blowjob from Amada, or whatever the fuck her name was, but he didn’t. This was just one of those things that happened in his line of work, something that was not always wise to turn down. He’d been south-of-the-border for months, working on an assignment that he knew was just this side of being illegal and seriously dangerous to his health. He would have preferred to wrap things up and silently vanish, leaving behind the distasteful scenario he found himself in currently.

After a troubled youth of neglect and social poverty that was leading him nowhere, the military had straightened him out in a hurry. With a record of minor scrapes with the law, stuff that wouldn’t even get an eye-roll these days, his life had been quickly careening out of control. He had been headed for a shit storm of trouble. The military knocked some fucking sense into his thick head and had given a nineteen-year-old in a downward spiral the skills to manage his adult life. Following ten long years of a hardened soldier’s life and the acquisition of some rather unique skills, he and two battlefield brothers had gone out into the real world and created an exclusive agency dealing in surveillance, protection, and cyber security.

Most of their assignments were straightforward but at times their unusual abilities, and the promise of a substantial payday, brought them to off the radar places like where he was today, doing work that required some of those dubious skills learned on the modern battlefield. He’d been in this dingy room for eight weeks, blending in effortlessly due to his long dark hair and beard that gave him the appearance of a local and let him disappear into the background. Having completed this particular assignment, he was due to start the careful transition from undercover work south of the border to his regular life, but first there were a few loose ends to tie up.

Letting Manuel Santos show his appreciation and satisfaction with the outcome of their professional arrangement meant sitting here in this God-awful room while one of Santos’ best whores ate his cock for lunch.
He probably should give a shit,
he thought yet again
, but why bother?
The ability to compartmentalize gave him an edge. The military taught him that, as did years of fending for himself on the mean streets of New York City. He could sit there in the oppressive heat, think about the rivulet of sweat slowly making its way down his spine as he mapped out his departure from this hellhole, and not even miss a beat while a much-practiced mouth sucked him off with neat efficiency.

Getting his dick hard for the thank you blowjob was no problem, he was a guy after all. Thankfully, the local girl sent to perform was pleasant enough. After dropping his pants and lounging back in an old swivel chair, she’d dropped on his staff once she’d gotten a look at what he was packing in his jeans. The guys can joke all they want about his bad boy looks, but at the end of the day, he had a serious cock that the ladies seemed to enjoy. At full attention, it rose from a thatch of soft black hair, curving ever so slightly on an upward slant. When throbbing with arousal, his dick was topped off with a plump bulbous head that accentuated its girth. Apparently, little Lolita was having a field day as she bobbed up and down on his erection, sucking on him with the force of a goddamn industrial vacuum. She may not be happy about selling her services but she certainly was going to town on an A-1 piece of all-American meat.

Unfortunately, he felt nothing except clinical regard for the blowjob he’d been forced to accept. He should be thinking about how it felt to literally have the come being forcefully drawn out of his body. Instead, his mind was wandering all over the place. He contemplated his departure, taking him far from here into the busy urban environment of sprawling Mexico City where he could shed his scruffy local look and re-emerge as a suited businessman for the trip over the border back to the U.S. Or thinking over the details of this assignment and how Manuel’s arm candy wife had hit all the right notes as a crime lord’s piece, including the one where she tried everything in her power to enjoy what Lolita was. She had made it clear what was being offered and he could have easily fucked the man’s wife and walked away without a backward glance. That thought brought him to the ever-widening sinkhole of empty solitude that was marking his life.

Ugh
.
Where the fuck did that thought come from?
Shit. Thinking about banging the Santos woman wasn’t even enough to hold his thoughts for but a few seconds and now, actual introspection. Jesus. Enough was enough. He needed to get the hell out of this God-forsaken place that reminded him so much of the stifling heat and dusty villages in Afghanistan where his military career had ended. He wanted a hot shower and a shave. He needed to knock back a bottle of very expensive Glenfiddich, and most of all, needed to get some goddamn air into his lungs. This oppressive heat was messing with his head.

A pause in Lolita’s rhythm presented the opportunity to suddenly stand and shove his saliva-covered cock into the briefs and jeans as he hastily pulled them up.
Yeah, he’d had enough.
Numbly enduring a blowjob wasn’t what he needed. Her shocked expression, followed immediately by one edging on fear, no doubt due to the fact that she’d get her ass kicked by Santos if she didn’t please him, didn’t stop him from getting her gone as quickly as possible and with the least amount of drama. He wanted out,
now
.

“No mas?” she murmured a split second before he reached out, hauling her unceremoniously from her knees.

“It’s fine,” he bit out. Knowing whatever he said would most likely be reported back to Santos, he chose his words carefully with an eye to paving the road for his departure. “There are some things I need to finish before I leave.”

BOOK: Broken Justice (Justice Brothers)
6.44Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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