Final Target (SEAL Team Blackout), page 1
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Final Target
SEAL Team Blackout
Book 7
Copyright Em Petrova 2022
Ebook Edition
Electronic book publication 2022
Cover Art by Bookin’ It Designs
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SEAL Team Blackout
SHATTERED TIES
RUTHLESS PROTECTION
MERCILESS SURVIVAL
SAVAGE PAWN
REBEL MISSION
WICKED INSTINCT
FINAL TARGET
DIRTY JUSTICE Apollo’s Story
SWEET REFUGE Lena and Overstreet’s Story
The only person who can save her is the one man she told to stay away…
SEAL Crew Spence is in desperate need of a dangerous, high-stakes adventure to help him forget that his wife left him. So when he’s sent on a mission to rescue a captured spy from a terrorist group, he thinks it’s just what the doctor ordered. Until he finds out exactly who he’s supposed to save…
Teigen Spence wouldn’t mind a new mission, either. Being held captive in a dank cell is hardly her idea of a good time. Now, her estranged husband is the only person daring enough to get her out of this mess. Too bad their marriage is in even worse shape than her current op…
They’ve always pushed each other’s buttons in the worst—and most pleasurable—ways. But with their lives and marriage on the line, can Crew and Teigen come together when it matters most?
Final Target, book 7 in the SEAL Team Blackout series, is a spicy, emotional, second chance, military romantic suspense thriller full of action, adventure, and a guaranteed happily ever after. Download today and let the binge reading begin!
FINAL TARGET
BY
Em Petrova
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
Crew Spence hoped he lived through the night.
Then again, he had nothing to lose. No home, no family. Being on SEAL Team Blackout meant he didn’t even have a life outside of this team.
And his wife had fucking left him.
Through his night vision goggles, he scanned the bunker they were about to raid. No matter how many times he told himself the school was abandoned, he struggled to remember who really was inside.
The front doors with the name of the school and the orange brick practically rang with the echoes of young kids playing in the schoolyard, their high-pitched voices carrying on the mountain wind.
The school doors were shuttered and everyone had been shipped off to some other school due to downsizing in the district. The playground equipment was still here, though—dark, looming shapes like monster aliens in the night.
As if what was going on inside those walls wasn’t eerie enough.
When the Blackout team got word that Mashala Abubakar and his terrorist cell were hunkered down in an old school in middle-class America, none of them were surprised. And Crew was the first one out the door of Blackout headquarters. Anything to get away from his own thoughts.
Flattened against the cold, damp ground, he stared at the doors. As fucked up as it sounded, he was sort of glad he had bad guys to fight. It kept him going during those days he was stir-crazy and the nights he ached so bad for his wife that he could hardly breathe.
Teigen’s face flitted across his mind. But after five months, her features were beginning to blur in his memory. He couldn’t remember the exact slope of her nose, only that it was delicate and fine. When he closed his eyes at night, his mind was flooded with dreams of her—laughing at some stupid joke he made, tossing her reddish-brown hair…or in his bed.
Yeah, nighttime was the worst. Yet he didn’t want to let go of the dreams of her long legs twined around him or how good it felt to sink into her hot pussy.
Ever since she called him to say she was finished with him, he’d replayed their moments together a thousand times. It wasn’t just the sex either. Sure, they’d married during a whirlwind weekend after he completed BUD/S training. They’d celebrated him becoming a SEAL with lots of wine, food and sex. When he looked at Teigen, he felt like she latched on to his soul. She was the freaking one for him, and he didn’t need months of dating or living together to know it, either. He asked her to marry him within hours. She said yes, and they never looked back.
Those were some of the best moments of his life. But all the long weekends that came after were really packed with all the fun they missed out on when he was away on ops. Movie marathons, trying out every restaurant in the city.
Pushing their limits between the sheets.
He shook the scattered memories away and focused on the school-turned-terrorist-bunker. His skin crawled with the need to jump up and blast through those halls.
“On my signal, Blackout.” The order came into his ear through his comms device. His commanding officer Sparrow’s gruff voice had his adrenaline surging and his grip locking around his weapon.
On Crew’s nine, Lachlan nudged him. “Ready, Mustang?”
The nickname the team had given him felt right from the start. They’d dubbed him Mustang because they claimed he ran wild and held nothing back.
And that was when he still had something to lose.
They hadn’t seen anything yet.
“I’m fucking ready.” Every muscle tensed in readiness.
The signal came, and he shoved off the damp earth. His legs ate up the ground to the front door. When Sparrow was handing out duties, Crew asked for the job of breaking down the door. It came with the most risk, as the terrorists inside would rush to defend the entrance. Meanwhile, the Blackout team would be infiltrating the school from all other entry points.
His boots drummed the ground. He hit the sidewalk and raised his weapon, shooting the lock off the door. The silencer on his weapon meant the sound was muffled, and he and Lachlan made it to the second set of doors before the guys inside knew they were there.
Bullets whizzed past them. Crew tossed a tear gas bomb and ran into the building. Two guys dressed in military camo but who definitely weren’t military greeted him with raised weapons.
The mask he wore protected him against the tear gas, but the guards dropped to their knees, hands plastered to their faces. Crew took out both guards and pushed deeper into the building with Lachlan on his six.
The cacophony of breaking glass and screams filled the air underneath the blast of weapons. Crew fixed his focus on the banter in his ear between his teammates as he stormed the corridor.
His goal? Find Abubakar and end his reign of terror lasting more than two years. The terrorist had taken the lives of Americans and civilians overseas. He was responsible for lethal attacks on Washington, DC and even threatened the world with a biochemical weapon that attacked the human nervous system and was created in a lab.
The man more than deserved the bloody end Blackout would give him. But Crew had a personal vendetta with Abubakar.
He was the reason that Crew never got away to see his wife. For the past five months the team had been hunting the terrorist without pause. In his eyes, the terrorist had started the breakdown in his marriage, and now he only had vengeance in his soul.
He swung his weapon right and left, picking off people hiding in rooms that no longer looked like classrooms. Black blinds drawn over the windows and crates of weapons and ammo were stacked to the ceiling in places.
They came across a room of heavy artillery—enough of it to start a war.
Crew saw no one and rushed to the next door, passing some of his teammates who were checking this wing of the building. When he paused at the next opening and took in the massive TV screens and dozens of computer monitors, fury welled in his chest.
Maps of the country had red targets circling not only cities but entire regions. What the fuck were they planning? An attack of this level wouldn’t just cripple the country, it would shut down the world as they knew it.
“Mustang!” Lachlan’s alert came just as a body slammed into him from the side.
He brought his rifle up but the guy jumped him. Locking his legs around Crew, he struck at him with a hard object.
A roar ripped from Crew’s throat. All reason and the need to stay alive fled in a spark of rage.
He bashed the man with his rifle. His assailant rolled off and came back at him just as hard.
“Stand back so I can make the shot, Mustang!” Lachlan’s bellow filled his ear through the comms device and the airwaves too.
“Mustang! Stand down!”
The man he was grappling with went for Crew’s throat. Rage and fury didn’t begin to cover what he felt. He felt…atomic.
They struggled for supremacy for several heartbeats. Crew wasn’t going to lose this fight.
He detonated, and when he was finished, the man lay crumpled on the floor.
Crew spun and neutralized two other threats, saving one of his teammates.
What felt like hours passed before the gunshots ceased and Crew walked out the doors into the darkness. Rain was falling now, and he tipped his head up to the sky to let it wash over his hot, sweaty face and ease the bruises and cuts he’d taken in the fight.
A hand clamped on his shoulder. He whipped around and caught Lachlan’s thunderous expression.
His eyes glittered in the dark. “What the fuck was that, Mustang? Do you have a death wish?”
The question sank into his brain, digging like barbs through layer upon layer of frustration, remorse, guilt and a hefty amount of pain he wasn’t willing to talk about.
“I’m already dead. We all are, last I checked. That’s why we’re Blackout.”
“You were fucking berserk, man. I’ve never seen you like that. I’ve never seen anyone like that and I’ve been black out for three years.” Lachlan shook his head. “Next time you decide to go off the rails, warn the guy on your six first.” He turned and walked back inside.
Crew watched him go but wasn’t really seeing anything. Or feeling anything either. All the cuts and bruises he bore had no meaning.
He could wear down his body, throw himself into a hundred deadly hand-to-hand combat brawls…nothing would help him get back the woman he loved.
ONE
“Full house.” Lachlan smirked as he slapped his cards on the table.
With a groan, Crew tossed his cards down and rocked back in his chair. “I’m finished for the day.”
Lachlan gathered up the cards and began to organize the deck to shuffle. “You sure? We can play another hand. We got nothin’ but time.”
Yeah, time. Fighting bad guys was preferable to battling the urge to rip the clock off the wall, smash the glass and tear the hands right out of it.
He couldn’t get out of there fast enough. When he shoved his chair back, it almost flipped, and he put out a hand to steady it before he walked out of the rec room.
Blackout HQ felt too damn small these days. Since the raid on the school-turned-terrorist-hideout, the team had been sitting on their thumbs waiting for the next order.
Three fucking weeks with nothing to do but catch up on sleep, eat three square meals a day and get well acquainted with the sofa and the remote. He’d watched so many games on ESPN he’d lost track.
He’d also played more poker and Monopoly than he had in his entire life, even as a kid growing up with two annoying younger brothers who always needed entertained. The Spence brothers were latchkey kids and since Crew was oldest, he had to come up with ways to keep his brothers out of trouble. His brothers were little shits back in the day and if Lachlan thought Crew was out of control, he could count himself lucky that neither of Crew’s brothers had joined the military.
He strode to the end of the hall, ignoring the joking voices coming from the kitchen as well as the smell of whatever Lena was cooking today, and ran down the flight of stairs. He’d hit the gym twice a day every day for three weeks, but the only thing it was doing was keeping him out of trouble. It didn’t diminish a bit of anger at his situation with Teigen.
His wife left him, but on the surface nothing had changed. He was still here in Washington, DC awaiting orders. Teigen was in an apartment in Virginia Beach—their cozy love nest—working her translation job from home.
Their life together—what little time they had of it—was at an end. She would keep the bungalow that he’d only visited on swift weekends of leave and he would be here with his team.
He loved the guys, but if he didn’t get a respite from them soon, he’d probably end up picking a fight just to break the monotony.
The small gym was empty, thank god. He didn’t want to chat while powering through reps. Arm day and leg day had merged into one, and that blurred into one longer, more endless blur.
After adjusting the weights to his liking, he took a seat on the equipment and grabbed the pull-down bar. His chest was still sore from pushing himself to the limit yesterday and taking no break at all. He didn’t care. The pain felt good. He needed it to block out the other pain of losing Teigen.
When he hit the weights, he could think about her with less emotion. Somehow using his muscles to work out—or fight—kept him disconnected from the real world he no longer lived in and hadn’t since joining Blackout.
Damn, had that been more than a year ago now? The day he and his first SEAL team tore through an army of renegades in the Congo seemed like a lifetime ago. That op got Crew recruited by a Navy general who pulled him into his office and asked him to join the Blackout team.
At the time, he understood that he’d be deep underground, off the grid, without a life of his own. The guys were forced to leave everything they knew behind. They were given Blackout papers—a death certificate—and told where to report for duty.
But while the rest of the guys had to leave family members behind, Crew hadn’t been forced to give up his wife of less than a year. He told the guys it was because he was just that good. But privately he wondered what made him different. He figured his newlywed status had won him favor, and he agreed to keep Teigen in the dark about his new situation.
Now he saw how isolated she must have been. He didn’t have many chances to see her. Looking back, he wished he’d spent more time on his leave asking her about her feelings than making her scream his name.
Even if she was insatiable in the sack.
They never had any issues in the chemistry department. One look would have them both on fire. Two, and their clothes would fall off. Three required a safe word.
He pumped the weights faster, pushed harder. Sweat broke out on his brow and trickled down his spine. After counting fifty reps, he paused to peel off his shirt.
He draped it over the bench, cranked up some heavy, driving rock music and threw himself into his workout.
While he could do without the spell of peace for Blackout right now, at least he could work on bulking up. His body was ripped and lean, but his physique wasn’t naturally stacked with muscle. Back when he played high school football, he never could make it on the defensive team because he lacked the bulk. But he didn’t mind being quarterback either—it got him more than enough girls.
Women on the brain. At least one woman.
The minute he clapped eyes on Teigen at a party at an old friend’s house, he’d arrowed through the crowded room to reach her. She met him halfway, a smile lighting her beautiful face, and they didn’t quit talking until dawn, when he’d taken her to the nearest hotel and taken her to bed.
They didn’t come up for air the entire next day or night. His leave was short. He’d just completed BUD/S training, and there wasn’t much time before he needed to report for duty.
Neither he nor Teigen wanted it all to end. So they decided the only way to continue was to get hitched.
He let out a growl and poured more energy into pushing his muscles to the point of no return. Was it smart to exhaust himself? If they were called out right this second, he’d already be at half steam. But that wasn’t going to stop him. He could always go harder, longer—
Moving to curl another rep, he met with resistance. He stopped and looked up to find Sparrow standing there, a hand on the bar.
He met his commanding officer’s eyes and set down the barbell. Sparrow walked over to the radio and cut the music.
“I didn’t miss something, did I? Sorry, I got into my workout,” Crew said.
Silence rang in his ears. Sparrow moved to one of the benches and sat down. Crew watched him warily, sensing he was in for a come-to-Jesus moment.
He fought the urge to grab his phone and check the tracker app. He had forced Teigen to install the app on her phone even though it broke all the rules of Blackout. Every night he was able to look in on her and see the little red dot in Virginia Beach.
