die. But for reasons she couldn’t explain, she couldn’t give the animal the approval it sought. With a growl, she retracted her claws and her fangs.
She glanced over her shoulder at the man still in the cell. He was curled into a ball on the floor, moaning.
Minka hit the door running and didn’t stop. Around her, the night was completely dark, or it would have been if not for the animal allowing her to see through its eyes. She tried to get her bearings, but nothing looked familiar. There was no mistaking the mountainous terrain of her homeland, though. She was still in Tajikistan.
She was barefoot, her shirt was torn, her skirt was ragged, and she had no food or water. But she was going home.
Tears of joy filled her eyes and overflowed onto her cheeks. After being a prisoner for so long, she was finally going home.
Order Paige Tyler’s second book
in the SWAT: Special Wolf Alpha Team series
Wolf Trouble
On sale August 2015
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Here’s a sneak peek at book four in Paige Tyler’s thrilling X-Ops series,
Angelo and Minka’s story
Tajikistan
Angelo Rios glanced at his watch. The team needed to get moving or it’d take all day to get back to camp. Their A-team had been doing a recon sweep back and forth through the rugged terrain of southern Tajikistan when they heard about a small town near the mountain pass that had been hit hard by a recent storm. Repairing buildings damaged by high winds and torrential rain wasn’t the kind of work Special Forces usually did, but Angelo and the new lieutenant, Brad Watson, figured it’d be an easy way to gain a little goodwill with the locals, which definitely was an SF mission.
He squeezed the last of the cheese onto a cracker from his MRE—meal-ready-to-eat—and shoved it in his mouth, then stuffed the empty wrapper into his rucksack and swung the pack over his shoulder. The rest of the team got the message and did the same.
“So, tell me this,” Derek Mickens said as he tightened the straps on his own ruck. “What does that big bear shifter have that I don’t?”
Angelo chuckled. The guys had been ribbing Derek ever since they’d heard his crush Kendra Carlsen—now MacBride—was having twins with her husband Declan. Angelo was about to point out that the DCO’s resident bear shifter had seventy-five pounds of muscle and six inches on Derek, not to mention a face that didn’t scare small children, when screams of terror from the far end of the village they’d just helped rebuild silenced the words in his mouth.
Angelo had his M4 in his hands and was running toward the sound even as the rest of the guys spread out behind him, checking for incoming threats. He rounded the corner of a dilapidated building and was heading down a dirt road lined with more crumbling buildings when a man covered in blood ran toward him. Two more men followed, fear clear in their eyes and blood staining their clothes.
At first Angelo thought it was an IED—an improvised explosive device—but that didn’t make sense. He hadn’t heard an explosion. He slowed down anyway, worried he was leading the team into an ambush.
One of the men pointed behind him, shouting something in Tajik. Angelo’s grasp of the language was pretty good, but the man was speaking way too fast for him to make out what he was saying. Then he figured it out.
Monster.
He opened his mouth to ask where the “monster” was, but the man was already halfway down the road. Angelo picked up the pace only to skid to a stop in front of a mud-covered shack a few moments later. He knew he was in the right place because there was a guy who looked like he’d been sliced up by Freddy Krueger on the ground in front of it.
Angelo got a sinking feeling in his gut. He’d seen damage like this before.
He jumped over the dead guy and was through the door before he even thought about what he was doing. Thinking only slowed you down in situations like this anyway.
Angelo raised his M4, ready to pop the first threatening thing he saw. If he was right about what had attacked those men, it would take multiple shots to kill the thing.
But what he found stopped him cold in his tracks. Derek and Lieutenant Watson skidded to a stop right behind him.
There wasn’t a square foot of wall space in the one-room shack that wasn’t splattered with blood, and in