Cole: The Wounded Sons

  COLE

  BOOK FIVE

  THE WOUNDED SONS SERIES

  BY

  LEAH SHARELLE

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE

  Copyright © 2021 Leah Sharelle

  COLE: The wounded sons – Book Five

  By Leah Sharelle

  All Rights Reserved.

  Editing and Proofreading: R Corcoran

  Photography: Chic Professional Photography

  Cover Models: Louis Armitage

  Cover Design: Formatting & Design by Jaye

  Interior Design: Formatting & Design by Jaye

  This book may not be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission from the author. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. All characters and storylines are the properties of the author, and your support and respect are appreciated.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  This author writes using Australian English and may include Australian diction

  DEDICATION

  To Pirate and all the members of my Flock. XX

  PROLOGUE

  COLE

  “Mum is still crying, Dad,” I worried, glancing in the direction of my mother, who was being consoled by my Aunt Stella.

  Looking over his shoulder, my father nodded his head. “Yep.”

  That was Creed Stephens, a man of few words. It stemmed from his days as a sniper, being quiet came with the job. My father had been one of the best, second only to Cooper Steel, my uncle. Along with my other uncles, Deck, Booth, and Mannix, they made up the best and most successful commando teams in the Australian Army’s history. They set up the original Team Five, along with Ford, Lucky and Darth, who died before I was born. Their reputation was unsurpassed.

  “She is going to be okay, isn’t she?”

  “Don’t worry about Mum, mate, you know I will look after her. I need you to focus on what you are about to do. Your first deployment as a member of Gabe’s team requires you to be there, not back here with your mum.”

  Dad was right, of course; in fact, I can’t remember a time when he was wrong. My father was my hero, my siblings and me, his MC brothers too, but Dad was the man I wanted to be like the most. Emulating his achievements from his commando days my ultimate goal. My older brother Zander chose to walk in his MC shoes and become a patched member of the Wounded Souls MC, and while I was a lifelong member, too, I wanted a different path.

  “Dad, I have been to war a time or two,” I grumbled, feeling like a kid all of a sudden. “Two deployments in the SASR, remember? One with the Special Operations Engineering Regiment also under my belt,” I reminded him.

  Dad eyed me in that way that made you feel like squirming; you know, when you realise you said something wrong, you just don’t know for the life of you what it was.

  “Cole, don’t go believing you’re invincible. Special Ops is one thing, but being a part of an elite Tier One unit like Team FIVE is a whole other nightmare. It’s you and five other men; you go in where the other units have no business being. It’s an honour to fucking serve with men in the calibre you aspire to be.”

  “Dad, I know that—” but Dad wasn’t finished, not by a long shot.

  “You go in the man you are now, but you don’t come back the same way, son. Whether you know it or like it, what you come across over there is going to change you, Cole. It’s the man that you become, despite what you do and see, is the only thing I can impress upon you. Don’t let it overtake you, Cole, don’t drown in the horror. Will you do that for me, son?”

  Staring at my father, his black onyx eyes mirrored mine. Out of all my brothers, I looked the most like our father. Zander, Dane and Chase inherited the same black hair, the same dangerous looks, the same black eyes, but my brothers had a lot of our mum in them. Me? I was Creed Stephen’s clone from the top of my head to the bottom of my booted feet.

  Maybe that was why Dad was acting so concerned over my selection into the Wounded Sons; maybe he worried that I, too, was going to come back from war a different man as he had. Of course, Dad had some outside extenuating circumstances that helped that process along. The death of a fellow soldier and that of his first wife, both happening well before my birth and any of my four siblings.

  Dad knew death, he faced it, and he almost let it beat him. Then, my mother happened and Dad found the peace her love offered him. Memphis Stephens was a force to be reckoned with, and I thanked God every day she was my mum. That didn’t mean that the same thing would ever happen to me. I thrived on being in the army, being a Special Operator. I loved the rush of being in the military, being challenged every time I stepped into a foreign country. Now I was part of a Tier 1 team with my best friends since birth, and I was ready for everything that offered me.

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” I assured my father, “I’ve got this.”

  Dad gave me his signature chin lift, but his eyes were still narrowed and worried.

  “Don’t get too cocky, son, shit can go south quicker than you can blink, and when it does, because it will at some point, it can take a man out at the knees. War doesn’t have a script, Cole; it’s unpredictable.” Dad stared off into the distance, and I knew instantly he was thinking of his final deployment when Booth lost his blood brother and Steel lost his leg. It was also when my father suffered injuries from the same firefight that made up the team’s mind to get out and start a different kind of brotherhood. One without the bullets but one that still had enemies that could not always be seen coming.

  I appreciated what my father was trying to convey, I understood his concern, but I was not the same person as he had been during his time in the military. I had no baggage, no PTSD, and no worries, other than Gabriel giving me the stink eye and growling at his watch.

  “Not happening to me, Dad,” I promised, slapping him on the shoulder. “As you always say, old man, not on your life.”

  I had no idea that years later, that cocky statement would come back to haunt me. Such is the misplaced exuberance of a man who was yet to see the darkest side of war.

  YEARS LATER

  If there was one thing I hated, it was the humid conditions of a tropical jungle. Thick foliage obscuring your line of sight, thousands of fucking insects and tree animals all making noises at the same time, blocking out the sounds of the enemy. Give me the sparse openness of the desert any day of the week.

  Putting one foot in front of the other, I willed my body to make it up the steep muddy embankment—the forty-kilo pack on my back making the task harder than necessary. I was in peak physical shape, but this hill just might be my undoing.

  I’d separated from Gabe and the team two days ago to get a head start on my objective. Find the hideout of the militia, report back to my captain and sit tight until they arrived.

  This was my speciality.

  I worked alone six
ty percent of the time, infiltrating on covert missions to gather intel, so the team didn’t walk into a clusterfuck. Forewarned was forearmed, and there was no one better than me for the job. My mission name said it all. I was a ghost; I walked amongst the enemy without detection, able to blend in without bringing attention to myself.

  Mud squidged under my boots, sinking me to the top of my laces, my hands filthy and pruned from the wet and steaming mud. Reaching the top, I dropped to my belly, years of experience that there was always something waiting for you on the other side. Sinking my face into the mud, I covered my cheeks and hair with the brown sludge before looking over the ridge and instantly heard the rumbling sounds of a vehicle. The road below was more of a goat track; huge potholes and boulders littered the narrow path.

  Grill is not going to be happy. Grinning at a memory from our previous deployment listening to Grill’s constant complaining about the rocky terrain in Tarinkot Province, Afghanistan, this muddy shit and goat trail was really going to piss the big fella off.

  Reaching for my radio, I sent off a morse code signal, aware that the radio could be heard or being monitored by the rebels.

  Seconds later, the response I was waiting for came back in short and sharp bursts.

  “The calvary is on the way.” I grinned, hunkering down in the mud to wait for the cover of nightfall before executing the next phase of my mission. Absently, I stroked the long sharp blade of my dagger, my constant companion other than my mind. Doing what I did in Team FIVE meant I spent a lot of time on my own, and frankly, I preferred that. I was not a people person, not any longer. Once, I was the main attraction at a party, the hell-raiser, the loud one. Now, I couldn’t stand being around anyone other than my team brothers and my family back home. Talking wasn’t one of my strong suits; talking meant answering people’s questions. Questions like, what do you do for a living? What is the worst thing you have seen in war? Once, at a party at the compound when I was on leave, a young bloke and his girlfriend, friends of Bastian’s, asked me something similar. And being the dick that I was, I simply answered in a bored monotone.

  “I kill people for a living; slit a man’s throat once right through his windpipe, wiped his blood on my pants and kept going.”

  Dick move? Fucking oath it was, but fuck me, what kind of person asked a soldier he knew was in a Tier 1 operation what the worst thing was he had seen?

  The man’s throat I slit from ear to ear had not long finished raping a young village girl, and her mother laid dead next to her while the pig brutalised her. I had been surveying the compound for three days getting intel for Gabe when I recognised the man as one of the most wanted insurgents on the coalition’s hit list. I tracked him to the small, friendly compound, not knowing that his target would be the small school full of young girls and their mothers. The first feminine scream had me leaving my hiding spot amongst the rocks and sprinting for the hut.

  Yeah, I had seen and done some fucked up shit during my time in the army, but I would do it all over again, end the life of rapists and drug lords, hiding behind their uniforms, without missing a beat.

  Movement at the bottom of the ravine caught my attention. Two men dressed in army fatigues and rifles over their shoulders were dragging two women by their hair out of a battered jeep. I couldn’t determine the age of the women from this distance, but it was obvious they had not been brought by their own free will. Noticing one of the women’s tops was torn almost off her body, leaving her torso uncovered, I felt the rise of bile in my throat at the image, knowing what was about to happen to her.

  Dropping my head, I sighed in resignation. The familiar weight of what I was about to do on my shoulders.

  “Sorry, Dad, I not only let the horror drown me, but I also let it consume me.” Remembering my father’s words that day so long ago, also recalling my flippant and cocky retort.

  Sometimes, I wished I had taken his warning more seriously.

  I only half-listened to my mates as we disembarked from the military transport plane. Their banter back and forth about hating the jungle only just computing as I walked past them to the base. I needed a shower, something to eat and a comfortable bed. Tomorrow, most of us were heading back to Ballarat to the compound to celebrate Shiloh’s little girl’s birthday. It was hard to believe the tiny bundle I held not long after her birth would be six-years-old. My mum reminded me the last time I spoke to her about the party and begged me to attend. Generally, I liked to be alone the days after returning from a deployment, preferring to get on my Harley and take off by myself. My destination always unknown, and I always went by myself. My role in Team FIVE meant my work was mostly solitary, not joining my brothers in the fight until they arrived once I gave them the word to move in.

  We all worked well together … but I worked better alone. Gabe understood this and allowed my progression to become what it was today.

  Striding through the open door to the airbase, I headed straight for my bike, eager to get back to Queenscliff and to my own private apartment for a night of sleep and more sleep before heading back for the party to pretend that everything was all right in the world.

  CHAPTER ONE

  COLE

  Right about now, I wished for the humidity and the thick steaming mud of the jungle. I preferred it to the scrublands and the dry, dusty plateaus of Somalia, and don’t get me started on the bustle and crowds in Mogadishu. Yet here I was traipsing in the dead of night with a SEAL unit I have never worked with as my only form of backup.

  This was no ordinary scouting mission, no long-range patrol in the middle of the night while listening to Bastian brag about his sexual prowess and how satisfied he kept Wren or hearing Grill complain that his feet hurt.

  Nope, this was me without my team on the way back into the compound where not three hours ago, we were bogged down in one hell of a fucked up firefight with some local drug lords pretending to be friendlies. The bastards fed the coalition forces faulty intel that led us into an ambush: Team FIVE and the SASR, all of us were overpowered and pathetically under-armed. We hunkered down and fought off the rebellion forces as best as we could with the firepower we had until finally, the Black Hawks and Chinooks arrived with their exceptional gun power. It was on my way to the Helicopter Landing Zone to join my team when I saw a group of rebels roughly hustling a man down a hill. His hands, I could tell, were bound behind his back and an improvised hood shoved over his head. From my hiding spot, I saw that he was a soldier, and going by his limp and scrunched over shoulders, the rebels had done him over pretty thoroughly.

  Every instinct I possessed urged me to follow, to see what the band of rebels were up to and thank fuck I did. Following the path of boulders, using them as cover, I got close enough to hear the voice of the prisoner and my blood ran cold.

  Deke.

  The prisoner was Deke.

  Not taking another second of wasted time, I radioed in to the forward operating base, breaking with protocol. I had a window of opportunity and time for one call only. So I called in, not to my captain, but to the commanding officer of the mission and told him what I’d witnessed and received the order to do what I knew I had to do.

  I didn’t report to the HLZ with the rest of my team. Deke was the team’s radio guy, and he had sensitive information on him, information we could not afford to get into the hands of the rebels.

  I knew by now, Gabe and the rest of the Sons would be aware of my absence, and without being there, none of them would be very happy with me right about now. Leaving a man behind and getting into the helicopter without the whole team was not something any soldier would ever contemplate, but this time there was no other option.

  The whole country was in complete unrest. The government had lost control of the army and people were leaving for the border in droves. Illegal guns and drugs ran rampant, as did the rebels, and the reason why we were on the ground. Deke carried military maps showing the location of the coalition base; amongst other intel, the Australian Army did not want
to become public knowledge. The major knew the importance of locating and rescuing Deke before the rebels knew who and what they had, and we both knew it had to be a quiet extraction. The firefight the team had just been through meant they had to be low on ammo and low on sleep. Once the major explained the team would be rolled out of the country the minute they arrived back at the FOB, the job was placed in my hands. My speciality and purpose, doing things no one else could or should do.

  So, that was how I found myself here, with SEALS and not the Sons.

  “You must be hating this, hey Stephens?” one of the yanks jibbed me as he walked past me at a fast clip.

  “What? Depending on you to have my back, or that you are talking so loud in the quiet of the night that your voice will travel and let the rebels know we are coming?” I muttered back dryly.

  “No one better than a frogman at your back, 2nd lieutenant,” another voice shouted back at me.

  “I can think of five I’d much rather have with me right now.” My growl barely over a whisper because I knew just how far away the sound of a voice could be heard when there was no buffer of bullets flying.

  Three more men sailed past me, each one knocking me on the shoulder as they passed me.

  Fucking pricks.

  Keeping my thoughts to myself, I smirked when they made their way down the hill, taking the wrong direction. See, the problem with wanting to be the first ones there was they didn’t do their homework. I’d spent the previous two weeks walking this particular plateau and I knew that that track was the long way. The direction I planned to take would take me directly behind the compound I knew Deke was being taken to. There was only one rebel hideout where the gunmen wore red and green bandanas over their faces, and the men that took Deke sported those colours. Details were important in my job, as much as knife and gun skills. It was similar to being a sniper, hours of watching, blending in and not calling attention to yourself.