Caleb: Scorpio Sons, #6

By Nhys Glover

Arianna McDougall is an unemployed, High School drop-out, still living at home with her parents on the Scottish Isle of Arran. Conventional, religious, and black, she is horrified by the outrageous bad-boy who arrives at her door looking for the White Mouse. Because Ari isn't what she seems, and marrying Caleb Devereaux and telling him her secrets is the last thing she ever thought she'd do.

Caleb is many things: redneck punk-rocker, IT geek, and genetically-engineered warrior clone fighting to save the world. But there's a lot more to him than that beneath his easy-going Southern Charm. When he finds and claims his mate, Ari turns out to be the last woman he would have wanted, even if she's also just the woman he needs. And while others discover answers to the mystery surrounding their creation, Caleb must find answers from him own past to gain the peace and fulfilment only Ari can give him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nhys Glover
• Release date: Jan 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224609369

Nhys Glover

After a lifetime of teaching others to appreciate the written word, Aussie author Nhys Glover finally decided to make the most of the Indie Book Revolution to get her own written word out to the world. Now, with more than a quarter million of her ebooks downloaded internationally and a winner of an SFR Galaxy Award for 'The Titan Drowns', Nhys finds her words, too, are being appreciated. At home in beautiful Durham County England, Nhys these days spends her time "living the dream" by looking out over the moors as she writes the kind of novels she loves to read.

Book preview

OTHER BOOKS BY NHYS GLOVER

ANCIENT ROMAN HISTORICAL ROMANCES:

Liquid Fire

The Barbarian's Mistress

Lionslayer's Woman (Sequel to Liquid Fire)

White Raven's Lover (Sequel to Barbarian's Mistress)

The Gladiator's Bride (Sequel to White Raven's Lover)

WEREWOLF KEEP TRILOGY:

Guardian of Werewolf Keep

Imprisoned at Werewolf Keep

Defiance at Werewolf Keep

Insane (A novella)

NEW ATLANTIS TIME TRAVEL SERIES:

Nine Lives (Cara/Jac)

The Dreamer's Prince (Jane/Julio)

Savage (Faith/Luke)

Shared Soul (Maggie/Travis)

Bitter Oath (Liv/Rene)

The Titan Drowns (Eilish/Max, Karl/Lizzie, Pia/Marco)

The Key (Kat/Bart)

Pieces (Krista/Dirk)

Second Chance (Bree/Hakon)

Watcher (Jin/Rafe)

Vision of You (Ellen/Duke)

Osiris (Takhara/Dan)

Causality (Willow/Jarvidh)

Gods of Time (Teagan/Jason, Lucien/Alba)

Book of Seeds (Shay/Cy)

Echoes of You (Josie/Chen)

Breathe (Meg/Rico)

SCORPIO SONS SF/SHIFTER ROMANCE SERIES:

1: Colton  2: Connor  3: Cooper  4: Chase

5: Cameron  6: Caleb  7: Conrad  8: Charles

GREYWORLD SWEET PARANORMAL ROMANCE

Your World or Mine?

Her World or Ours?

Their Worlds Collide

His World on Repeat

REVERSE HAREM ADVENTURES:

THE AIRLUDS TRILOGY:

The Sacrifice

The Chosen One

Goddess Unbound

THE AIRSHAN CHRONICLES

The Five

Daemon

The Devourer

GLADIATOR

1.Typhon  2.Asterius  3.Talos  4.Orion  5.Marcus

THE DANANS

Captive

Escape

Reunion

Outliers

Gift

Shattered

Stolen

PROTECTORS

Sand, Stone & Steel

Ice, Shard & Smoke

Blade, Hilt & Amphion

Galaxeans

Shadow

ALFIE WIMPLE TRILOGY (Paranormal Romantic Comedy)

Sticks and Standing Stones Can Break my Bones

But Ferrets Can Never Hurt Me

Dragons, On the Other Hand...

MINERVA’S MYSTERIES (Cozy Mysteries)

The Lost Child

The Missing Party-Girl

The Troubled Man

OTHERS:

The Way Home (Ghost Romance)

Caught in a Dream (SF Sweet Romance)

Labyrinth of Light (New Age Inspirational)

For Love of Liam (A Sweet Romantic Comedy)

Haunted (A sweetish Romantic Mystery)

Return to Me (New Age Healing Romance)

Find out more about Nhys and her books here:

www.nhys-glover.com

PROLOG

TWELVE YEARS AGO, SUMTER, SOUTH CAROLINA

CALEB RAN. MOUTH BITTER with the taste of vomit, mind filled with the horror he had witnessed, he ran. The surrounding swamp closed in, stinking of sludge and decaying vegetation. He fought to drag the humid air into his straining lungs, fought to keep his panic, revulsion, and guilt from sending him careening into the water. Once caught by the mud out here alone, his chances of survival were non-existent. Part of him knew that. Part of him directed his flight instinctually.

Tripping on a fallen tree, he sprawled face first into the damp ground. For several long moments, he slowed to catch his breath. But stopping brought the vivid memories flooding back: the woman, screaming and fighting; his brothers holding her down and laughing like hyenas as they waited for their turn with her.

Caleb, here’s ya chance to be a man, boy! Eustace called to him over his shoulder, from his position holding the girl’s right shoulder down. Come on, boy! Show us what ya made of. Thirteen’s old enough ta lose ya cherry.

The woman screamed again, thrashing with all her might. Caleb’s gorge rose, and he puked into a dead bush behind him. She didn’t have a chance. No one could hear her out here in the Congaree Swamp, miles from anywhere. And she didn’t have a hope of fighting the three men off.

But he could have. The demon inside him had screamed to be released. It would have been too easy to end the fun. But once out, Caleb had no control over the feral beast that lived within him. It could have killed his brothers and the woman, too. He couldn’t risk that.

So he ran, while he still could. And heard the cruel laughter and the woman’s desperate screams in his ears long after the sounds faded in the distance.

CHAPTER ONE

Present Day SAN FRANCISCO 

I’M GOING TO SCOTLAND, Caleb declared with a growl. His fists clenched at his sides as he looked up at Chase, the Scorpio Son’s leader. Chase had just dropped a bombshell on him and looked surprised by his reaction.

All you have to do is track down the woman’s number and tell her to catch the first flight to San Francisco. You don’t have to drop everything and deliver the message in person.

Chase scowled at Caleb as if he’d lost his mind. And maybe he had. With plans for the Exodus Mission underway, they needed him at his computer terminal more than ever.

What Chase didn’t seem to understand was that getting any kind of lead on the White Mouse was worth circumnavigating the entire planet for. And if this Arianna was as paranoid as Cameron’s new mate said she was, then talking her into anything over the phone was going to be impossible. Even a video-conference wouldn’t win her over. Sure, he could drop the message Antonia had given them to validate himself. But if it were him, even that wouldn’t be enough to have him crossing the world to share valuable secrets.

And as this was the first serious lead he’d discovered on the White Mouse, he couldn’t afford to blow it. His entire system might already be compromised.

It had been too easy getting past the Exodus firewall. All the computers within the Complex had wireless access to the mainframe, which meant once the Sons had emerged from the tunnels deep within the Carpathian mountainside and were inside the barbed-wire fence, he had instant access to everything, including the security system. It had been child’s play to find and enter the generic password. And creating a hole in the firewall had also been too easy, as they set the system up to protect it against hackers burrowing in through the firewall, not out. It had been remarkably simple, and his ego had at first convinced him he was just that good.

But later, once they were back in Silicon Valley, the worries had set in. What if it was a trap? What if that infamous hacker had created the system, as the chatter suggested? If that was the case, then it shouldn’t have been so easy to breach the firewall. Not unless the White Mouse designed the system in such a way that any breaches would release a Trojan back into the hackers’ systems.

That he hadn’t identified a Trojan yet didn’t mean it wasn’t there. The White Mouse was the best, and he could activate the Trojan at anytime. Once he did, they could lose everything the Sons had done in the last seven years. Or worse, used it against them.

So, if he had a chance of finding the bastard, to make sure his own system was safe, he’d cross the fucking world, and then some, to make it happen.

Ah’m goin’ to Scotland, he repeated stubbornly, his South Carolina drawl intensifying as his temper escalated. You don’t seem to get how crucial this here all is. All o’ this, he gestured to the darkened Comms Room surrounding them.

It held millions of dollars’ worth of high-tech equipment, much of which wasn’t yet available on the open-market. All o’ this could be compromised. The Scorpio Sons and the Résistance could be compromised. If I take a little longer to get the information we need, then so be it. Nothin’ matters as much as trackin’ down the White Mouse.

He crossed his arms over his chest and firmed his jaw. He may not be as muscular as his brothers in the field, but spending at least two hours a day in the gym doing workouts and martial arts training made sure he didn’t resemble the stereotypical IT geek.

You sure this isn’t just a chance to beat your brothers to the next Mate? We still don’t know if being the first Son to meet an unclaimed Mate is what creates the bond. Chase crossed his arms over his own impressive chest, covered as it was with a thousand dollar plus charcoal business suit.

Chase was not only the leader of the Scorpio Sons, an elite band of genetically engineered super-soldiers, but he also helped to run Scanlan Industries, under which the Sons’ HQ was located. Profits from that company helped fund the Sons’ covert activities around the world. Although he’d been just one of a hundred identical, cloned versions of Scanlan himself, Chase had been the baby chosen to be adopted by Scanlan, securing his fate.

Luck of the draw.

That same luck of the draw had placed Caleb in a trailer park in Sumter, South Carolina, with redneck fanatics who were not just White Supremacists but active members of the Klan. And from an early age, he learned to hack government and corporate entities to fund his family’s off-the-grid lifestyle. Sure, he’d known the penalties for such crimes, knew them well, but it hadn’t stopped him.

Paranoia was a constant state of being for his folks. So if this Arianna McDougall was even half as paranoid as they were, it would take all of his Southern charm, his best trustworthy expression, and Antonia’s endorsement to get the woman to tell him what he needed to know. And his charm depended on face-to-face interactions, because otherwise he just came across as smarmy.

Just because I made a play for your mate when you didn’t seem to want her, don’t mean I’m goin’ to claim a Mate that ain’t mine. I’m with Alyssa on this one. Mates are fated. I might not even sense what she is, if she’s not activated yet. And bringin’ her back here so I can put a hen amongst the roosters will sure be worth a little time and effort. He grinned cockily, leaned back in his computer chair, arms still crossed over his Van Halen classic tee-shirt.

He couldn’t be more different from his conservative identical twin if he’d tried. His blue Mohawk, tribal markings—as tats up his arms and shaved into his head at the sides—pierced nipples and dick, as well as a uniform of tatty tee-shirt and jeans, all put him at the extreme end of the clone continuum from Chase.

Their personalities were also dramatically different. Chase was controlled, methodical, and ruled by responsibility. Caleb was flamboyant, intuitive and anti-authority. He came to work for the Sons, not because he saw it as his duty to save the world, but because he got to indulge his passion for tech. If they’d wanted him to be just another grunt on the team, he’d have told them where they could stick their uber-secret organization.

Okay, if you think it’s necessary. Take the jet and get back here as fast as you can. No sightseeing, understand? Everything’s in flux. We’ve got Amy and Coop in London with Randolph Hall, who appears to have killed the Guild’s Alpha. We’ve got Antonia and Cameron off-grid in Germany, waiting to find out what the next game-play is. And while there’s now a prison full of Russian Guild awaiting trial, we still have the biggest mission in our history to plan.

"Things are speeding up, Kohannja, Anna said, coming up behind Chase to wrap her arms around his waist. It isn’t flux or chaos, it’s cat-speed progress."

Caleb watched in amazement as the tension drained out of his brother. Chase reached around behind him and drew his mate to his side, kissing her white-blonde head as if she was the most precious being on the planet. And she was to Chase.

The eighteen-year-old Ukrainian girl had been with them less than a month, but she’d wrought incredible changes to not only Chase, but to the Sons’ work as well. She was the one who’d known the way inside the Exodus Complex in Poland. She’d been the one who provided eyewitness testimony on Gregorov, the Russian organized crime boss and Guild Inner Sanctum member, because she’d lived two nightmare years in the hands of Gregorov’s men as a child sex-slave. He didn’t have all the details, and he didn’t want them, but he’d gleaned that much, bit by bit, as they worked together to bring down those monsters.

I’m gone, Caleb said decisively, as he climbed to his long legs and grabbed his leather jacket off the back of his chair. Without a backward glance at the couple, he retrieved the printout of all the Intel he’d found on one Arianna McDougall and strode out the door.

He wouldn’t have access to his system while he was away. It was just too dangerous, and the safeguards he’d have to set up took too much time. No, he’d depend on the mighty Google and regular access to the net through his standard laptop and smartphone. It wasn’t like he was going to be doing any fancy hacking while he was gone. He just had to meet this girl, convince her he was on her side, find out what she knew about the White Mouse, and bring her back to HQ to meet her mate. Nothing to it.

ARAN, SCOTLAND

ARIANNA CHECKED BOTH her mainstream and encrypted inboxes yet again. Toni had been off-grid for too long. Something was wrong. It must be. She’d felt a surge of fear and dread yesterday that reminded her too well of the empathetic feelings she’d experienced in Rome two years ago.

She remembered that horrific day like it was yesterday. In Rome chasing up a lead, Ari had arranged to lunch with her dearest friend, fashion writer, Toni Maggiarra. But she’d been delayed and, as she’d hurried along the crowded Roman street, her eyes on her phone, she’d glanced up at the very moment it happened.

Ari had seen Toni and called to her. Her friend had turned in her direction, a welcoming smile on her lovely face. The explosion rocked the street behind her. Toni’s expression had gone from joyous welcome to stunned horror as she swung back to the source of the explosion.

A car-bomb!

Flames leaped high into the sky as flying metal and glass sprayed outwards, faster than the eye could see. By the time the ground beneath their feet had stabilized, Ari had been running.

The fear, dread, and sickness she’d felt right then hadn’t been hers. Her heart had been too stunned to register any emotion beyond the desperate imperative to get to her friend. She’d pushed her way through the shocked and terrified crowd around her; sure the bystanders were intentionally getting in her way.

And though Toni was bleeding from flying debris, her friend had made a dash for the road, trying to get to the fiery vehicle. It took Ari wrapping her arms around the girl—screaming for her Papa—to stop Toni’s suicidal, headlong flight into the flames. Only when her friend was safe did Ari’s brain catch up with the events.

Toni’s father, the editor of a liberal broadsheet, had just been car-bombed. And his loving daughter had witnessed it.

The fight had gone out of Toni as she’d lost consciousness. And Ari had sat on the burning concrete with her friend in her arms, an oasis of silent despair amidst the chaos and panic around them.

Now, two years later, she’d felt that same blast of emotion from her friend as she had that day. Ari knew something bad had happened. And that Toni was in Poland, investigating the Guild’s secret project, only fueled that certainty.

She’d rung Toni’s number ten times since then and inundated her with texts until her inbox was overflowing. And still there was no word. If she didn’t hear something in the next day, she’d be catching the first plane to Poland herself, to find out what had gone wrong.

But that option was risky. Especially if she went alone. Though her ancestors were powerful Nigerian warriors, she wasn’t. Back in the day, she might have done a few years of martial arts training to help her in sticky situations. Now, though, Ari fought her war with her brain and fingertips. Taking off for an unknown country like a vengeful Fury, without a plan or backup, could get Toni in even more hot water.

So, she’d wait and plan, drawing on her many Résistance contacts in Europe. If she’d still heard nothing from Toni after that, then she’d take action.

Arianna McDougall, get yer fine self down here this minute and help with dinner, her mum called from downstairs in her sternest voice, her melodic accent marking her as a daughter of the Isle of Arran. Yer dah will be here shortly and bringin’ the vicar and his wife.

Ari was twenty-two years old and still living at home with her parents. To anyone who didn’t know her story, she would appear to be yet another unemployed offspring, unable to leave the nest. But Ari had been working since she was fifteen. It was not the sort of work that earned her money or fame, though. Although, for a short time when she was seventeen, she’d had both from strutting the catwalks of Milan. But that, like all her other undercover assignments, had only one real purpose: bringing to light the misdeeds and atrocities perpetrated by their planet’s greatest enemy, the Guild. In that case, the Guild fashion houses, which employed starving children in Third World sweatshops to manufacture their clothing.

These days, she did less undercover work and spent more time in front of her state-of-the-art computer systems in the attic of her parents’ retirement home in Blackwaterfoot, on the Isle of Arran.

Her adoptive parents had been missionaries in Nigeria until they’d got her. That was twenty years ago. Both had been past the age of natural parenting, her mother pushing fifty and her father five years older, so they’d refocused their lives around the little black baby God had given them. They returned home to Scotland, and her father took up a parish in Glasgow, within the Free Church of Scotland.

Then, eight years ago, Angus McDougall had finally given in to age and retired to Arran. But retirement didn’t make him less active. He still continued to involve himself in the day-to-day running of St. Molios Church, as a lay preacher, and spent the rest of his time assisting his daughter in uncovering evidence against the Guild.

If the McDougall’s hadn’t adopted her, if she’d grown up with her biological family back in Nigeria, she might have been married with children of her own by now. She would know nothing of the underbelly of the world, beyond what she saw from her little village. It could have been a happy life. And a fulfilled one, in some ways. But it would never have suited her. Ari had been born a warrior, and that was what made her life worth living. To know that, in some small way, she was helping to end the suffering on the planet gave her life meaning. Purpose.

If her private life suffered because of it, then so be it.  

Coming, Mum, she called down, as she checked her inboxes yet again.

Toni, where are you? What’s wrong?

CHAPTER TWO

SCOTLAND

GLASGOW INTERNATIONAL Airport was heavy with rain-clouds, fog and the bone-chilling cold of early morning, when Caleb disembarked—backpack over his shoulder, passport in hand—and jogged across the tarmac to the Arrivals Terminal. Not long after, he was first in line at the cab rank beyond the glass doors. He told the cabbie to get him to the coastal port of Ardrossan. There, he’d catch a ferry across to Brodick on the Isle of Arran. If all went as planned, he’d arrive on the Island by 10.40 am and pick up his hire car from the terminal. Then he’d drive the ten miles across to the other side of the island, to Blackwaterfoot, a seaside village that catered to the summer tourist trade. Once there, he’d find Arianna, get the Intel he needed, and be back with a passenger a few hours later.

Don’t turn it into a vacation, Chase had said. How could anyone consider visiting this freezing, dark, and dismal country in March a vacation? More like punishment. Even his years in juvie had been warmer. This kind of cold was making his body ache, his head pound, and his mood deteriorate fast.

Maybe the fall he’d taken