CHAPTER 150
The pain hit me like a lightning bolt as I watched the drone feed from Mexico, doubling me over in the command chair we'd set up in our Bangkok headquarters. On the screens in front of me, Harry, Jax, and Lucas were moving through the compound where the children were being held, their progress steady and professional despite being outnumbered three to one.
"Skylar?" Lucas's voice crackled through my headset. "You just went quiet. Everything okay?"
I pressed my hand against my lower abdomen, feeling the sharp cramping that had been coming and going for the past hour. The stress of coordinating a live rescue operation while pregnant was taking its toll, but I couldn't abandon the mission now. Not when they were so close to reaching the children.
"I'm fine," I lied, adjusting the camera angle to give them a better view of the corridor ahead. "You've got two guards approaching from the east stairwell. Thirty seconds out."
"Copy that," Harry's voice was calm and focused. "Jax, take position. Lucas, you're with me."
I watched them move with the lethal efficiency that had made us so effective as a team. But as another wave of pain swept through me, I realized something was seriously wrong. This wasn't just stress - something was happening to the baby.
"Command, we've reached the holding area," Jax reported. "Jesus Christ, Skylar. There are more kids here than Martinez reported. I count sixty, maybe seventy children."
My breath caught as the camera feed showed the reality of what they'd found. Children as young as six or seven, chained to walls in conditions that made my father's worst abuses look humane. Some were unconscious, others were crying, and a few stared at the camera with the kind of hollow emptiness I recognized from my own childhood.
"Can you extract them all?" I asked, fighting through another contraction.
"Not in one trip," Harry replied grimly. "We're going to need multiple runs, which means staying exposed longer than planned."
"Then do it. Whatever it takes, get those kids out."
Another pain, this one so intense it made me cry out before I could stop myself. Through the headset, I heard all three of them react immediately.
"Skylar!" Jax's voice was sharp with alarm. "What's happening?"
"Nothing. Focus on the mission."
"That wasn't nothing," Lucas said, his tactical voice slipping as worry took over. "That sounded like you're in pain."
I looked down and felt my blood turn to ice. There was blood on my chair, seeping through my clothes. Not a lot, but enough to tell me that whatever was happening wasn't something I could ignore or push through.
"I'm having some complications," I admitted, reaching for my phone to call for medical help. "But I can still coordinate from here. Keep moving."
"Fuck the mission," Harry said immediately. "We're coming back."
"No!" I snapped, then forced my voice to soften. "No, you can't leave those children. There are seventy kids who are going to be sold tomorrow if you don't get them out tonight."
"And there's our child who might die if we don't get you to a hospital," Jax replied.
I could see them on the camera feed, frozen between advancing toward the children and returning to help me. It was exactly the kind of impossible choice that had defined our relationship from the beginning - save the innocent strangers or protect the people we love.
"Listen to me," I said, fighting through another wave of pain. "I'm calling an ambulance now. I'll be at the hospital in twenty minutes. But those kids don't have twenty minutes. If you leave now, they'll be moved before you can get back."
"Skylar..." Lucas's voice was breaking.
"I'm ordering you to complete the mission. As your superior officer and as the woman who loves you more than life itself, I am ordering you to save those children."
The silence on the comm was deafening. Through the camera feed, I could see them looking at each other, communicating in the wordless way that came from years of life-or-death operations together.
Finally, Harry's voice came through the headset, rough with emotion. "We finish this fast. Fifteen minutes to extract the kids, then we're coming home."
"Understood," I replied, already dialing emergency services with shaking fingers.
I watched them work with desperate efficiency, cutting chains and carrying unconscious children toward the extraction point they'd set up in the compound's courtyard. Every few seconds, one of them would check in, asking about my condition, demanding updates on my symptoms.
"First load of kids is out," Jax reported. "Going back for the others. How are you holding up?"
"Ambulance is here," I said as medical personnel burst through the warehouse doors. "I'm being transported now, but I can still monitor from the mobile unit."
The EMTs were professional and efficient, getting me onto a stretcher and into the ambulance within minutes. But as we raced through Bangkok traffic toward the hospital, I couldn't take my eyes off the tablet displaying the feed from Mexico.
"Ma'am, you need to stay calm," one of the EMTs said in heavily accented English. "Stress is not good for the baby."
"I can't be calm," I replied, watching Harry carry a little girl who couldn't be more than eight years old. "My family is in danger, and there are children depending on us."
"Second load extracted," Lucas reported. "Twenty more kids to go. Skylar, please tell me you're okay."
I looked down at the blood soaking through the hospital gown they'd put me in, felt another contraction that made me grip the stretcher rails so hard my knuckles went white.
"I'm going to be fine," I said, though I wasn't sure I believed it. "Just get those kids and come home."
"Local authorities are mobilizing," Harry warned through the comm. "Looks like someone called in our position. We've got maybe five minutes before this place is crawling with corrupt cops."
"Then move faster."
As the ambulance pulled up to the hospital, I realized that this was what our life would always be like - impossible choices between personal happiness and saving innocent lives, between protecting our own family and protecting the families of strangers.
"Final load," Jax reported as doctors wheeled me into the emergency room. "All kids are out and safe. We're bugging out now."
"Good," I gasped as another contraction hit. "Come home. Please, just come home."
But as the medical team surrounded me, blocking my view of the tablet, I heard gunfire erupting through the comm system.
And then the line went dead.
I tried to scream their names, to demand updates, to coordinate rescue operations from my hospital bed. But another wave of pain swept through me, and all I could do was pray that I wouldn't lose both our child and the men I loved in the same night.
The nurse was saying something about emergency surgery, about complications, about preparing for the worst.
But all I could think about was the silence on the comm system and the terrible possibility that saving those children had cost us everything.