One

THE KID’Seyes were the color of fiery anguish poured into crystal blue waters, a shimmering shift of pain and fear clouded by tears and thick lashes stuck together by grime. Standing in the middle of a cloud of dissipating tear gas, he—maybe she—shook when Lt. Connor Morgan’s light beam swept through the trash-filled room.

Not something Connor expected when he strapped his body armor on that afternoon. Sure as hell not where he ever thought his life would lead him to… standing in front of a frightened little kid who smelled of piss and fear.

Back at the station the raid scoped out like any other—breaking down doors and rousting whoever they found in the hopes of finding someone to connect the SFPD to a well-known and even more well-hidden drug dealer. On paper everything looked routine, but Connor and his team had rapped open enough doors to know the job was never routine, and this one was no exception.

This one sure as hell kicked them all in the balls.

The house wasn’t much to talk about from the curb, unless of course it was one of the neighbors who bemoaned the abandoned rusting car parked in the weeds growing up through missing fenders and floorboards or complained to the city about the overturned trash bins spilling out used syringes and rotting food onto the broken cement driveway. At one point, the tiny cottage had boasted a bright blue coat of paint and cream gingerbread trim, but that was before time, neglect, and harsh weather had a chance to pick away at its frame. Half of its roof was missing shingles, leaving black tar paper flapping about when the wind picked up, and its few screens hung off-kilter on mostly broken windows.

Even with his face mask in place, Connor smelled the rot and mold as soon as they hit the porch, his team ducking down to avoid catching their equipment on the sagging overhang above their heads. A battering ram made quick work of a frail front door, the blasting boom of the leads coordinated with the second team’s breach of the back entrance.

They’d gone in quietly, as swiftly as shadows moving across a grassy lawn on a hot midsummer day. Briefed on their target, each team member had memorized the sneering face they’d been presented with, but there were other unknowns to consider, especially since the house was a known buy-and-use spot. Bullets weren’t the only thing they had to worry about—a stray needle prick brought its own horrific troubles, and every cop going through the doors that evening was well aware of the consequences of one wrong step. Steel or lead could bring them down, either quickly or slowly, but death was a grim certainty if something got through their heavy combat boots and body armor.

That wasn’t the way Connor wanted to go out. And it sure as hell wasn’t going to be how he’d ever lose a team member. He’d told his squad time and time again that retiring out was the only acceptable way to hang up their SWAT designation, yet at every briefing, he studied his team’s faces, knowing it could very well be the last time.

Every time Connor went through the door, he reminded his team to stay safe. Everyone had people waiting for them to come home, and he was no exception. He saw the worry in Forest’s soulful eyes every time they kissed each other before Connor left for work. The same look his mother often had when his father and any of her children who also wore an SFPD star walked out of the front door. There was always a slight chance the next cop on the stoop would be wearing a dress uniform, hat in hand and words of deep sympathy on their tongues. He never wanted to wear another piece of black tape on his star ever again, and he sure as hell didn’t want one worn for him.

He’d gone in hot, weapon raised and leading the charge with a couple of other senior cops, ducking around the ram to burst into the cramped front hall. A rolling canister of gas hit the stained carpet clumped up over the living room floor, and from there, they began their assault.

“Left cleared!”

The rattle of thin floorboards being hammered by heavy boots partially muted the screaming coming from somewhere in the back of the house. Smoke from shield grenades shifted the air from dank to milky, the swirling ghostly fronds grabbing at the illumination spots on the ends of the team’s weapons. Connor’s team cut through the choking gases, their faces obscured by masks and goggles, but he knew them well enough to ID who moved around him, skulking through the decrepit, abandoned house to clear the way for the retention team that followed them in.

Broken furniture and rusted appliances gathered at the edges of the main room, much like seafoam and flotsam brought in by an erratic tide. Several stained mattresses lay on the floor, cheap fleece throws bunched up between them. The acrid scent of cooking drugs was probably being drowned out by the tear gas they’d used after breaching the front door, but Connor could only smell the faint metallic tang of the filtered air he was pulling into his lungs. A bout of coughing alerted them to their first suspect—a skinny, scab-encrusted young man with wild eyes. Hansen grabbed him before he could bolt, the junior member of the team working the protesting teen’s hands into a pair of crisscrossed zip ties to immobilize him.

“Leave him for the perimeter guys,” Connor ordered. “Let’s get the house clear.”

It was a textbook takedown, scattering the squatters in the front of the house like cockroaches under a bright light. Connor’s team followed the screaming as they hunted through the shadows for any of the faces they’d been briefed on. At first glance, the dilapidated property’s cramped rooms didn’t look large enough to hold more than five people at a time, but every single SWAT member knew appearances could be deceiving. There were bolt holes in the walls, drywall barriers set up along spaces that should have been hallways. The blueprints they’d studied before going in were wildly inaccurate—giant holes punched through old plaster in some places and a tangle of barbed wire and steel plates blocking what should have been open doorways.

Connor slowed his team down, pulling back slightly in order to give everyone time to adjust to the reconfigured layout. On his right side, Yamamoto gave the all-clear to enter through the door ahead of them, throwing up a hand signal and motioning the backup team forward. To Connor’s left was a gaping maw where a wall should have been, and he covered the opening as the two-man crew hustled past. Someone shouted—probably Yamamoto—and another gas canister rolled down the hallway, obscuring progress of the advancing teams.

Even as hastily put together as the operation was, they knew who they were looking for. The DA and their captain kept their division hot on the trail of a drug dealer named Robinson, and a few hours ago, someone’s informant gave good intel about the slippery criminal’s intentions of shaking loose the squatters so he could use the property to cook up meth to supply his pipeline. Concentrating on breaking his supply chain, Connor and the other SWAT leaders coordinated their strikes, pulling in as many resources as they could to support the multi-pronged offensive. It’d been a long month, and this was his team’s third pop-up raid in two weeks, with little time between them to plan.

The aggressive tactics orchestrated by the district attorney and the San Francisco Police Department appeared to be working, because Robinson seemed to be scrambling, working his way outward to locations far beyond his normal stomping grounds and into territories already held by other crime factions. It seemed lately the best way for someone to get rid of their competitor was simply a phone call to the cops, choosing to let the SFPD take them out rather than enter into a bloody war.

Whoever it was that dropped that dime would have his own reckoning sometime soon, but for today, he was safe in the shadows. As Yamamoto often said, they had bigger roaches to pin down.

“Morgan, I’ve got a runner in the back,” a voice Connor recognized as another SWAT team leader rumbled through his earpiece. “Might be Robinson. My team’s going to follow for backup.”

“Typical Grady, always hogging the spotlight,” Yamamoto teased over the mic. “Alpha C, continue to sweep.”

“Watch your backs,” Connor warned his team members over the line. “We don’t know who Robinson brought with him and what they’re carrying. Yama, cover me. I’m going to take the first room.”

“Got your back.” Yamamoto stepped in tight against the opening. Putting his weapon up and his back against the wall, the cop nodded at Connor. “On your go.”

Turning toward the small bedroom visible only through the hole in the wall, Connor pulled up as soon as he spotted the kid.

Those damned eyes held him, trapping Con in midstep. Shocked wide but filled with pain and resignation, the child couldn’t have been much more than five, but it was as hard to tell as trying to figure out its gender. Scrawny to the point of bony, he trembled when Connor ducked his head down to enter the room. Keeping the kid in view as he swept the room wasn’t hard. The area was little more than a closet, walled off from the rest of a larger space by a few braced drywall sheets and heavy dinged-up bookcases.

None of them ever expected to find a kid, but no one was surprised either. Or at least Con wasn’t. Not now. Not after finding so many tiny bodies nested in the filth shored up around society’s edges. And here the boy was. Or at least, up close, the kid looked more like a boy. Only time would tell.

“Morgan—” Yamamoto’s shout was cut off, staggered bits of sound sliced in between rapid pops of gunfire.

Something hot and hard struck Connor’s shoulder, pushing him farther into the room. The kid peeled his mouth open, chipped front teeth cutting at his upper lip when he let loose a terrified yowl. Like Yamamoto’s warning, the shrill fear-driven siren murmured beneath the louder screams of a hail of smoking bullets tearing into the hall’s walls, and Connor leaped forward, hooked one arm around the boy’s skinny torso, and pulled him down.

The bite of fear grabbed at Connor’s throat, and he tamped away the flickering embers before they could catch hold. Facedown in a scatter of debris, he held the boy against him, chin to his chest, hoping his SWAT armor would be enough to stop anything from piercing the kid’s body. The punch of bullets through the wall stretched out, elongating seconds, and Con sucked in some air, tasting the filth of the room even through his mask.

It wasn’t until he moved his head to the right that he saw the dead woman lying half hidden under a pile of grimy blankets, her white, glazed eyes fixedly staring at some point in the universe only she could see, her slack lips speckled with blood and dried fly shit. Long knotted chunks of hair obscured a good part of her face, bits of blue dye faded to a dull aquamarine at the ends. Buried beneath the trash, he hadn’t seen her when he’d come into the room, but lying on the ground, protecting the kid from gunfire gave Connor a very clear view of where she’d taken her last breath.

It was hard to tell how long she’d been dead. Her flesh stretched tight across her cheekbones and pointy chin, but the smeared mascara around her dulled dun-colored eyes could have hidden a number of sins and years. Her face, savaged by addiction and split-open sores, was as gray as the thin mattress she lay on. Her left hand poked out from under a crumpled blue tarp that covered the rest of her body. She’d been caught in the throes of a seizure, or maybe she’d been reaching for something or even someone, like the kid, but death grabbed her before she could grasp what she wanted. Her broken nails were as filthy as the boy’s face, and her skeletal fingers were clenched at the empty air, cheap silver rings rattling around her bony knuckles.

Another booming blast shook the house.

“Keep your head down, kid,” Connor growled when the boy began to squirm. If anything, the fray and shouting in the rest of the house seemed to intensify. “Yama, give me a status.”

“Pinned down at the end of the hall, sir,” the man’s voice crackled over the headset. “You okay? Who ya’ talking to?”

“Got a little boy—I think—here. Anywhere clear to get him out?” Pain flared in Connor’s shoulder when he moved. The child’s weight pulled down on his muscles, straining the tender spots blooming on his back. He’d either landed in something wet or the hits he’d taken were more serious than he thought.

“Negative, but I can give you cover,” Yamamoto said over the comm. “Working back down the hall. Can you hold?”

“Holding.” Connor wrapped his arms around the boy’s torso, trying to cover as much as possible. “Get your arms down, kiddo, and grab anything you can on my vest.”

The child was rigid, legs stick straight and stiff. His tiny hands were dotted with bruises and dried blood, his knuckles bleached white when his fingers tightened around the straps on Connor’s armor. He buried his face into Connor’s chest, breathing hard and heavy when another round of gunfire opened up in the hall.

A pair of large dark shadows fell across the opening in the wall, and then Yamamoto angled his back against one side of the broken drywall. He gave Connor a hand signal, then counted down from three to a closed fist and began a heavy barrage of sprayed shots. Gun drawn, Connor ducked out to the right, keeping the boy against his chest. He moved quickly, pausing at openings and long stretches of the hallway, alert to any movement.

When his boots hit the living room floor, Yamamoto gave the all-clear to move the fight to the back of the house again, leaving Connor with an easier egress. The young man they’d left for the other team was gone, hopefully safe and sound away from the raid. The pain along Connor’s shoulders was turning from a dull throb to a raging fire, and as he tried to clear the mound of debris, he stumbled and caught the tip of his boot on something hard. The kid let out a short yelp of terror when Connor’s grasp loosened. Then he sobbed brokenly as Connor tightened his grip.

“I’m not going to drop you,” he reassured the little boy. “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

The front door seemed miles away, the small house telescoping outward with each report of gunfire. Keeping down, Connor shouted his egress to the team members waiting outside. The canister smoke thickened as he ran, making the little boy cough with each breath. He burst through the off-kilter screen door, breaking the hinges with the force of his shoulder against the wobbly metal frame. The air outside wasn’t any clearer, but Connor shoved his gun into its holster then removed his mask while he ran toward the SWAT vehicles parked along the opposite curb. Pressing the plastic cup over the boy’s face, he picked up speed, trying to get them clear of the house and the raging gunfight.

Promises weighed heavy on Connor’s shoulders—promises to come home, promises he’d keep someone safe. He felt every word he’d turned into a vow piercing his soul with each pounding stride he took and the boy’s scared, rigid body trembling against his chest.

The comm chatter was a distraction, giving Connor a good idea of what was behind him. Children out first. That was how they operated, what the team swore to do on each raid. Another promise he’d made, despite the fear he was leaving his people behind to die. Yamamoto was good. Hell, the other team was nearly as good as his own. He should have had nothing to worry about, but dread crept in, wiggling past his defenses and eating away at the idea that everyone who answered to him would walk out of that door on their own.

The strobing blue-and-red lights flashed over the rain-damp asphalt, and a pair of medics broke from their cover behind a line of armored trucks and angled cop cars. Connor recognized one of them—an older woman named Darcy who’d done more than her fair share of stitching his team up after a brutal raid. This time her attention was focused on the little boy he held close, her hands automatically reaching for Connor’s charge.

As soon as she touched him, the boy screamed, a piercing cry sharp enough to cut past the racket of the raid. His fear punched into Connor’s guts, flashing memories of the squalor Connor had found the boy in and the dead woman lying on the floor. Their shuffle to safety was a clumsy affair, dodging cop cars to reach the relative cover of the thicker-walled transports. Uniformed officers covered them, weapons trained on the ramshackle house.

“Shit, tell him to let go.” The female paramedic swore. “Is he hurt?”

“I don’t think so. Kid, she’s here to take care of you,” Connor said, moving forward to herd them all to cover. The other paramedic hustled beside them, trying to dislodge the boy from the other side. “I’ve got to get back in there. My team—”

“Morgan, we’re clear,” Yamamoto’s voice echoed in Connor’s headset. “Moving to the back of the house now. Team is all good. We’ve got this.”

“And you’re bleeding, Morgan,” Darcy cut him off, holding her hand up so he could see the blood smeared over her palm. “Shut up and let me do my job. You die on me and I’ll end up shoveling horse shit out of the cop stables for the rest of my life.”

“Not going to die on you,” he growled back. “Just probably a crease or something. Happens sometimes. Him first. Then we worry about me.”

As soon as they got behind the SWAT vehicles, Connor was surrounded by people, some trying to dislodge the boy while Darcy attempted to undo his vest. She pushed at him to sit down on a lowered gurney and his world tilted slightly, his stomach grumbling at the vertigo hitting him square between the eyes. The boy’s screams grew louder, more frantic, and Connor closed his arms over the child, rocking slightly despite the nerve-churning dizziness clawing at the back of his head.

“Hey, give him some time, okay,” Connor ordered, cutting through everyone’s chatter. He was beginning to feel the spots of pain along his back and arm as adrenaline bled out of his system. The blood on Darcy’s hand hadn’t been a lot, but something had gotten through somewhere, and he needed triage. “See if we can’t get my vest off, and then we can work on getting him calmed down. He’s scared. He just needs a little more time to feel safe before he can let go.”

“He’s going to have to let go of you at some point, Morgan,” Darcy shot back. “Because no matter what he wants, you can’t carry him forever. CPS is on their way, and then he’ll be their problem.”