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Hushed Guardian: Brandon's Story

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by Shandi Boyes




  Hushed Guardian

  Shandi Boyes

  Proofed By: Kaylene @ Swish Editing and Design

  Edited By: Nicki @ Swish Editing and Design

  Cover By: SSB Cover and Design

  Dedication

  To the women brave enough to move on,

  We see your strength.

  We see your courage.

  We’re inspired by you, so keep being you.

  Shandi xx

  Contents

  Want to stay in touch?

  Also by Shandi Boyes

  1. Brandon

  2. Brandon

  3. Brandon

  4. Brandon

  5. Brandon

  6. Brandon

  7. Brandon

  8. Brandon

  9. Brandon

  10. Melody

  11. Brandon

  12. Melody

  13. Brandon

  14. Brandon

  15. Melody

  16. Brandon

  17. Melody

  18. Brandon

  19. Brandon

  20. Brandon

  21. Brandon

  22. Brandon

  23. Brandon

  24. Brandon

  25. Brandon

  26. Brandon

  I. Quiet Protector Teaser

  Disclaimer

  1. Melody

  2. Brandon

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Shandi Boyes

  Want to stay in touch?

  Facebook: facebook.com/authorshandi

  Instagram: instagram.com/authorshandi

  Email: authorshandi@gmail.com

  Reader’s Group: bit.ly/ShandiBookBabes

  Website: authorshandi.com

  Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/cyEzNv

  Also by Shandi Boyes

  Perception Series:

  Saving Noah

  Fighting Jacob

  Taming Nick

  Redeeming Slater

  Saving Emily (Novella)

  Wrapped up with Rise Up (Novella - should be read after Bound)

  Enigma:

  Enigma of Life

  Unraveling an Enigma

  Enigma: The Mystery Unmasked

  Enigma: The Final Chapter

  Beneath the Secrets

  Beneath the Sheets

  Spy Thy Neighbor

  The Opposite Effect

  I Married a Mob Boss

  Second Shot

  The Way We Are

  The Way We Were

  Sugar and Spice

  Lady in Waiting

  Man in Queue

  Couple on Hold

  Enigma: The Wedding

  Silent Vigilante

  Hushed Guardian

  Quiet Protector

  Bound Series:

  Chains

  Links

  Bound

  Restrained

  Psycho

  Russian Mob Chronicles:

  Nikolai: A Mafia Prince Romance

  Nikolai: Taking Back What's Mine

  Nikolai: What's Left of Me

  Nikolai: Mine to Protect

  Asher: My Russian Revenge

  Nikolai: Through the Devil's Eyes

  RomCom Standalones:

  Just Playin'

  The Drop Zone

  Ain't Happenin'

  Christmas Trio

  Falling for a Stranger

  Coming Soon:

  Skitzo

  Trey

  Brandon

  Six years later…

  “Our window is small. We need to be in and out in under ten minutes.” Tobias, head operative of my unit, points out the most direct entrances of the Sicilian militant compound we’re about to raid. Our objective is simple—seize the operation of an underage sex-trafficking ring with minimal casualties. “Martin, Copen, and Ellis will go in via the west entrance, Trace and Lloyd via the east, and Charlton and I will take the north.”

  Tobias spins back around to face the group of twelve heavily-armored men hanging off his every word. It’s like this everywhere we go. From the moment I joined his team as a ‘consultant’ to repay the debt I owed when he kept my ass out of jail after the stunt Grayson and I pulled at the airport saw us being arrested for terrorism to right now, he’s forever admired and respected.

  Many men have come and gone from Tobias’s team the past six years, but not once have they left on bad terms. Tobias is big, crude, and Russian, but he’s also one of the most respected members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  He climbed the ranks quickly when he caught the eye of the Associate Deputy Director after a sting in Ravenshoe almost eighteen years ago. A Russian sanction was attempting to sink a foothold in the sleepy town where Tobias was once a detective.

  There was no way in hell Tobias would ever let that happen.

  I don’t usually endorse rumors, but the story about how Tobias singlehandedly took down a consortium over ten years in the making is hard not to believe. The story was shared with me many times during the three years I worked as a ‘consultant’ for Tobias’s team, over a dozen times during my six-month stint to become an official member of the Bureau, and more than a handful of times the past three years I’ve been a field agent, yet, the facts have never altered. Not once. They stayed exactly the same.

  I can tell you from both experience on and off the job, that doesn’t happen unless it’s true. So, as the rumors have it, Tobias ran a Russian sanction out of his hometown for one reason and one reason only—his daughter, Isabelle.

  The tales never included the reason why his daughter was the focus of his campaign, and her name was never mentioned in any of the write-ups he logged with the Bureau, but it must have been important. Even now, years after Grayson unknowingly disclosed Tobias’s operations are solely chosen on if Tobias sees his daughter in the eyes of the children we’re endeavoring to free from captivity, his team is still fighting the crusade he commenced over eighteen years ago.

  Usually, operatives like his fold within six months. If they’re not shut down completely due to a lack of resources, they’re passed on to less-experienced agents whose funding would be sliced to a pittance of what’s needed to bring down a massive cartel ring like the one we’re endeavoring to seize today.

  The only reason that hasn’t happened is because despite Tobias’s team not netting the primary player of an operation believed to be worth over 7.8 billion dollars, his team has notched up an impressive number of arrests since it was founded. They have disbanded more notorious crime syndicates the past six years than all the other divisions combined for the entirety of the Bureau’s history.

  Some say Tobias’s unusual fondness for the man we’re hunting is the reason he’s failed to snag the number-one-wished-for-item on the FBI’s hit list. Others say it’s because Henry Gottle is always one step ahead of the authorities.

  I’m somewhere in the middle.

  It’s clear Tobias’s relationship with the mob boss of New York City blurs the line between corruption and righteousness, but Mr. Gregg taught me it’s okay to cross lines when it comes to keeping your family safe. As long as you know how to find your way home, you can cross as many boundaries deemed necessary to uphold your pledge. You just eventually have to return to the right side of the law.

  It was those infamous words ringing through my ears six years ago that kept my feet planted on the ground when Melody boarded her flight to California. They also had me looking at the bigger picture when Tobias explained exactly how long the piece of string I was endeavoring to unravel was.

  At the start, my ‘consultant’ position with the Bureau involved scrubbing toilets, shredding files, polishing Tobias’s boots, and any other mundane task he
required me to do. Tobias milked it for all it was worth, and in all honesty, I hated him for it. My girlfriend had left me, my brother had supposedly killed himself, and my father won his bid to become the District Attorney of New York.

  My life was shit, but Tobias never gave me time to dwell on it.

  Grayson didn’t fare much better than me. At Tobias’s request, he was transferred to work under his father’s division of the Bureau. It was a temporary, six-month rookie exchange, but to Grayson, it was more punishment than cleaning up after men who ate way too much fiber.

  We were both in the shit—literally.

  Grayson sucked it up, portrayed the ideal agent, and was returned to Tobias’s team as a new man within four months.

  It took a shit ton more effort for me to get on Tobias’s good side.

  Keeping my head down and my mouth shut added a handful of murmured merits to Tobias’s daily grunt regime, but it was only after he walked in on me packing up after his team at a firing range did he add sentences into the mix.

  While Tobias’s crew washed off the lead burning their skin from target practice, I coated mine in it. It had been over a year since I had held a gun, so I was more than eager to discharge a few rounds, and perhaps some of the anger I was still harboring over Joey’s death and Melody’s affair.

  The fifteen bullets in the gun’s magazine made the paper silhouette’s head non-existent, and the one in the chamber ensured even if the target had survived fifteen kill shots to the head, he would have wished he was dead because I shot him right in the cock.

  Thinking back now, it seems a little immature, but at the time, it felt fucking good to disperse some of the rage festering in my gut.

  I looked into Melody’s claims she had slept with someone the instant I was out of Tobias’s idea of lock-up. I went through the belongings she had left in her room in my family’s mansion, interviewed her friends, and I even sat through several of her lectures to see if anyone gave off any indication they were missing her as much as I was.

  I found nothing, not a single shred of evidence to corroborate her claims. It was as if she hadn’t lied until I went to supervise the removal of the old oak tree between Joey’s childhood bedroom and mine.

  As I sat at the window watching the arborist cut down the tree that had destroyed my family, I thought back to the many fond times I had looked at it. In particular, the last time Melody had climbed it.

  For the first time in weeks, I smiled.

  My happiness didn’t last long.

  With one set of memories instigating the wish for more, I dragged an old shoebox full of photographs from the headboard of my bed to my desk. The six-strip of condoms my mom had snuck inside the day after Melody and I had given each other our virginities had been reduced to five, and an empty package was sitting in the waste-bin under my desk.

  I’ve never once in my life craved a violent, all-in rage as I did that afternoon. I wanted to demolish my room as the arborist was doing to the oak tree. I wanted to smash every piece of furniture I owned before dragging my mattress outside to set in on fire. I wanted my room to feel as bare and as hollow as I felt, and I was willing to lose everything to do it.

  But instead of doing any of those things, I shoved the box of pictures under my arm, paid the tree chopper the exorbitant fee my father negotiated to have evidence of Joey’s death removed from our lives as soon as possible, then left my family ranch without so much as a backward glance.

  I’ve never been back since.

  It was that afternoon that Tobias caught me expelling my rage on a defenseless paper target. I was in the process of reloading the Sig Sauer P226’s magazine when Tobias said, “Liam always recruited the best officers, so how come he never mentioned you?”

  Unaware his question was rhetorical, I replied, “The Bureau requires a degree. I was also too young.”

  Tobias smirked a smug grin before he turned away and mumbled, “I wasn’t talking about the Bureau.”

  His reply stumped me for days. I was truly lost. It was only while pondering over a decade of stories did pieces of the puzzle start falling into place.

  After a quick google search, I discovered the university Wren and my mother attended is one of the highest CIA recruited universities in the country. Mr. Gregg attended the same university as his wife four years prior. He possessed as bachelor’s degree in political science that I can’t find payment for, had a 3.4 GPA, was an American citizen, and his tax records for his senior year stated he was a military operative who hadn’t left campus for more than a few days at a time.

  It could have been a coincidence, but Tobias’s lack of denial when I brought it up the following week all but confirmed my suspicions. Tobias is quick to tell you when you’re wrong. His lectures last as long as my father’s, and sometimes, he even goes as far as using a spreadsheet to show you exactly where you went wrong, so for him to keep quiet, I knew I was on the money.

  Furthermore, despite what the movies portray, US-born employees recruited and trained to work as Intelligence Officers for the National Clandestine Service (CIA) are never referred to as ‘agents.’ They’re called ‘Operations Officers’ or ‘Case Officers’ or some go by ‘Officer’ for short.

  Tobias said ‘Officer.’ He doesn’t fumble over his words, and he has never cracked under pressure, so to this day, I’m confident he didn’t make his remark for no reason. Between cleaning urinals with a toothbrush, and making beds like I was an army cadet, I gave my theory a little more thought.

  AKA—I snooped while Tobias and his team were sleeping.

  Without Grayson’s help, it took me eight weeks to unearth information that now would take me six minutes. The evidence wasn’t damning, but it did add a stack of wood onto my claims that Mr. Gregg was an Operations Officer for the CIA.

  He was either that or a mobster.

  I prefer my earlier theory.

  Just like Tobias’s relationship with Henry Gottle gains criticism, so has links between the CIA and certain mafia syndicates. For decades, conspiracists have alleged connections between the CIA and organized crime. Rumors range from reputed members of the Chicago mob being killed days before government inquiries into the conspiracists’ claims to CIA officers colluding with members of the Bureau to cause gang-related violence. If the head of one crime syndicate takes out another, who’s going to mourn the loss?

  Once again, I’m not a fan of rumors, especially ones that alter the more they’re disclosed, but from the photograph Grayson shared with Melody and me in the dress shop years ago, to the many phone conversations between Henry Gottle and Mr. Gregg noted in confidential FBI records, I can conclusively say they knew one another. I just haven’t deciphered how or why.

  If Wren had been a defense attorney, their contact could have been brushed off as an acquaintance by association, but that isn’t the case. The meeting Tobias’s team intercepted between Mr. Gregg and Henry Gottle wasn’t the only one they had in the weeks leading to Liam and Wren’s death. They met a handful of times, including the night Melody said Crombie had tailed her mom from Mary’s Diner.

  My focus returns to the present when Tobias says, “James and Rogers will run communications while the rest of you enter via the south entrance.”

  No one blinks an eye at Tobias referring to me by my middle name because as far as anyone in this room is concerned, my name is Brandon James. I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and my father isn’t Vincent McGee, recently appointed Governor of New York. That would only make things awkward when rookie agents connected the dots. It’s not every day a federal agent is on the team hunting down his father.

  I’ve known since I was young that my father is an evil man. Years of service reveal I am right. The only thing is, just like many of his ‘associates,’ he’s clever enough to keep himself out of jail. He hides bank records, keeps his hands clean by ensuring his name isn’t associated with anything shady, and believes his position of Governor makes him untouchable.

  I’m determined t
o prove him wrong.

  He got away with admissions fraud by stating the car he purchased with campaign funds was for his campaign leader. That’s how arrogant my father is. He doesn’t believe the authorities are smart enough to realize Florida and New York aren’t the same state, but because the Bureau would rather catch him 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.

 

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