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  Broken Hearts

  The Fighting Mantis #2

  Mike Gomes

  Broken Hearts

  The Fighting Mantis #2

  Copyright © 2020 Mike Gomes

  Published by Hudson Indie Ink

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it wasn’t purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademark status and trademark owners of various products referred to in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorised, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Broken Hearts/Mike Gomes – 1st ed.

  ISBN-13 - 978-1-913904-41-8

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Mike Gomes

  Other Authors at Hudson Indie Ink

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  About the Author

  Mike Gomes is an Amazon #1 best selling author who loves writing fast paced, action packed novels for Adults. The desire to create fun, page turning books that lets readers slip away into another world is what drives him to write. Mike lives with his wife and four children in Massachusetts.

  To get in touch with Mike, you can check out his website www.mikegomeswrites.com

  Also by Mike Gomes

  The Fixer Series

  The Fixer

  While Collar

  9MM

  Piranha

  Holiday

  Down Under

  Gods Executioner

  Combat Zone

  Alone

  4th and Goal

  The Fighting Mantis

  The Mantis

  Broken Hearts

  Smuggling Blood

  The System Series

  The System

  Peace, Love and Death

  Old Man River

  The Young Adventurers’ Club

  The Young Adventurers’ Club

  Vertra’s Revenge

  Another Day

  Other Authors at Hudson Indie Ink

  Paranormal Romance/Urban Fantasy

  Stephanie Hudson

  Sloane Murphy

  Xen Randell

  C. L. Monaghan

  Sci-fi/Fantasy

  Brandon Ellis

  Devin Hanson

  Crime/Action

  Blake Hudson

  Mike Gomes

  Contemporary Romance

  Gemma Weir

  Elodie Colt

  Ann B. Harrison

  Chapter One

  The single hanging light dangled from the ceiling on a wire covered by a metal shade that focused all the light directly down into one spot at the center of the room. The rest of the room was held in complete darkness, only allowing the man who sat on the periphery of the room to have a vantage of everything. The man in the center of the room tied tightly to a chair was restricted by the bright light, and the darkness came in a wave that enveloped everything outside of two feet beyond his body.

  "You will tell us why you've gone astray," said the man with a thick Russian accent wearing a finely tailored suit that held on his muscular body with perfection.

  "What the hell you talking about?" the man with an equally impressive and thick Russian accent asked. He had long since given up at the ropes that bound him to the chair trying to find a way to escape. "How long have I been with this agency?"

  "That's what makes this all so troubling, comrade." The man in the suit pulled himself into the umbra of the light, shaded between darkness and being visible. "I have placed my life in your hands, Nikolai, you have done the same with yours. We have been there for each other over and over again, so why do what you have done?"

  "Victor!" Nikolai yelled pulling his head up, searching for eye contact with the man, trying to make a connection. "We are as close as brothers. Everything you said is true. Why would anybody think that I've left everything that I hold so dear?"

  "Nikolai, I don't know why you did what you did." Victor slowly started to pace around the man in the circle. "But the fact of the matter is, you did do it. There are more than enough witnesses, and there's more than enough evidence pointing to the evils of your ways."

  "So a lifetime of us working together means nothing?" Nikolai snapped back in the darkness. "Hasn't that earned me anything?”

  "My loyalty is to Mother Russia." Victor put a cigarette up to his lips. "But now you have moved toward treason."

  "A traitor? You call me a traitor?" Nikolai let a small laugh enter his voice. "With all the things that you've done in your life, you call me a traitor? The things I know about you, Victor. They should have you sitting in this chair as well."

  The room held silent with Nikolai’s words challenging the preconceived notion of Victor being the unwavering super-agent. A man to be feared who would do absolutely anything for his home country.

  "You will not disparage my good name!" Victor barked, lashing out, throwing a backhand that cracked hard on Nikolai’s cheek. A small stream of blood ripped from the slice that the ring Victor wore as a symbol of his commitment to his country made.

  "I hit a nerve, old friend." Nikolai laughed. "Let's talk about Afghanistan. You remember the heiress and her home? Her jewelry? It’s hard to live on the meager money they pay us. Sometimes you needed to supplement it."

  “Most men would be scared to speak this way to me," Victor began, before being interrupted by another man standing deep in the shadows.

  "I'd like to get more information about this," came the voice out of the darkness, causing Nikolai to look down to his lap with an ever-growing smile. "What jewelry are we talking about?"

  "Do you want to tell him, or should I?" Nikolai said, watching the man move out of the darkness and into view. "Only one way to keep everything quiet now. Especially since I have the information, and I am ready to release it. A single email that would enter the hands of every member of the KGB."

  "Always on the ready, comrade." Victor nodded his head at the efforts of his friend. "Just the three of us in this room puts the game in a new light after your information. Always a step ahead."

  "It helped keep you alive a few times, didn't it," Nikolai said, making a statement rather than asking a question. "Solutions are right in front of us all the time. We just need to know where to look."

  Nodding his head slightly, Victor moved into a crouching position in front of Nikolai.

  "Why are you in the light?" asked the man in the darkness. "You're breaking protocol."

  "I know what I’m doing!" Victor snapped, looking back in the direction of the man, letting Nikolai know exactly w
here he was.

  "Make it clean, and break it," Victor whispered to his old friend, as his left hand dropped and pulled the knot loose from one of his feet.

  Lurching in a turn, Victor sprang at his commander sitting in the dark, hitting him with a series of blows rendering him unconscious.

  "I am not going to kill him," Victor said as he looked at the bleeding man on the ground. "You can do that."

  Turning back to Nikolai, Victor saw he had removed both his feet from the rope. It would only be a minute or two before he was free.

  "Good play bringing up the jewels." Victor stood in front of his friend. "The email is what's keeping you alive. Nice touch."

  "Thank you. Now stand closer for your clean break." Nikolai grinned. "It will look like an escape, and nobody knows about any jewels."

  Closing his eyes, Victor loosened his body making it ready to absorb the hit.

  Leaning back in the chair, Nikolai pulled his legs in and kicked up hard, planting his boot in the jaw of his partner of fifteen years. The crack was immediate and clean. It would not take Victor much to convince others that Nikolai had broken free and attacked him. The cuts on his hands from beating his superior officer just moments ago would make for a valiant tale of a man fighting with a broken jaw.

  As Victor’s body dropped to the floor in a heap, Nikolai twisted and turned his body, loosening the ropes to the point where he was ready to make a move.

  Holding his breath, Nikolai pushed his thumb deep into the palm of his hand like he had so many times before. His thumb popped, dislocating itself, ripping a pain through the Russian’s body. With his thumb out of place, nothing held him back from extracting his hand out of the loop that held it.

  "Damn!" Nikolai exclaimed looking at his thumb out of place, dangling helplessly.

  Using his other hand, he held the top of his thumb and pulled out, popping it back into place.

  "I hate that!" Nikolai muttered to himself.

  Removing the .45 caliber Glock semi-automatic handgun from the commanding officer, Nikolai placed it in the back of his pants after first firing one clean shot into the man's head, ending his life in an instant.

  "Our deal is done." Nikolai smirked, looking down at his long-time friend, Victor.

  Chapter Two

  Chapter 2

  "Crazy people like killing," said the slim, but muscular woman. "And I'm not a crazy person."

  "Seems like you’re just splitting hairs, Gabriella." The man sitting next to her watched as she peered out of the window with a pair of binoculars.

  "Maybe I am splitting hairs, but when it comes to being called crazy, I tend to do that," Gabriella said. She had her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, allowing no obstruction over her eyes. "Time to assemble the weapon."

  "We haven't seen a sign of anything, why do you want to set it up now?" the man asked as his eyebrows dropped down in the center. "If someone comes up here for us, we’ll have no time to take the thing out of the stand and run."

  Pulling her eyes back from the binoculars, the woman with the striking emerald green eyes cast them up on the man that had been assigned to her, despite her numerous rejections.

  "For starters, Trevor, I won't be needing the stand. I know how to make a shot without one," Gabriella grinned. "And secondly, your position here is not to question me. I am the point person on this mission, you’re here to do what I need."

  "Ten years special forces recon, another five doing this underground shit, I don't take orders from anybody," Trevor snapped. "Even if it is from the Mantis and her great reputation."

  "Mantis?" Gabriella tilted her head to the side. "People have been trying to put that title on me for years. I happen to be a woman with green eyes, and everybody thinks I'm the mythical Mantis. I am very surprised you would fall for such fairytales."

  "There's a lot of people that think you’re her." Trevor smirked. "You seem to come and go, and no one knows what happens to you in between."

  "Isn't that the point?" Gabriella asked, knowing the answer already. "I wouldn't be much of an agent, and things wouldn’t be top-secret, if everybody knew where the hell I was all the time."

  "What about the fact that you don't work for anyone, and freelance?" Trevor asked.

  "You do the very same," Gabriella sharply sniped back. "Does that make you the Mantis?"

  "The Mantis is a woman, and you know it." Trevor shook his head and laughed slightly.

  "I know the popular rumor is that it's a woman, but I've always thought it's a man." Gabriella lifted the binoculars back up to her eyes and looked out over the rooftops of the small Brazilian town. "If the mantis is so great, then it would make sense that the man would cover himself with another layer of gender. Start the rumors out there that he is female. Then add in a few other items that could be spread over anybody, like the color of her eyes and how she looked. All very generic stuff. And then when you're ready to move on, you just leave the rumor behind. Planted in a few places with just the right people thinking they witness this woman being around. It's basically cover your ass 101."

  "It's quite a theory," Trevor mused, not putting his eyes on the woman, but feeling her taking his reaction in. "Though there is the part about some people are said to have seen her actually pull the trigger."

  "Have you ever met anybody that said that they saw her pull the trigger, or did they tell you stories of people that say that they saw her pull the trigger?" Gabriella questioned. "I have yet to find anybody that told me they've actually been with her and witnessed her pulling the trigger. It's all stories. It's always been stories. The idea of some super-agent that's out there that nobody can stop."

  "If that's the case, that it's a man, if someone figures it all out, it might just be the greatest story of black ops there's ever been," Trevor said. "Someone that was able to pull the wool over everyone's eyes, and even other black ops agents, and to do it over many years is pretty impressive."

  "Unless it's a phantom." Gabriella pulled her eyes away from the binoculars again. "If it's nothing but a myth, and it's nothing but a spirit floating around in the air, then no one's going to find it anyways. Legend will continue to live on, and the stories will always be there, and the so-called Mantis will go down in history as the greatest agent ever nobody will ever have witnessed."

  "You make a strong argument." Trevor nodded. "I just hope you're wrong. I like the emerald eyed Mantis being out there. I like the idea that there's someone almost bordering on superhero status. I know a bunch of it is crap, but it's still great to think of."

  "Stories like that don't help us at all." Gabriella fastened her view through the binoculars on a rooftop a quarter mile away with the door opened bringing two men out on to it. "Makes our jobs far too hard when the people who hire us start thinking these fancy people are real, when the reality is that they're not."

  "Well you believe what you want and I will believe what I want," Trevor said. "And if I stepped out of line as far as the chain of command, I'm sorry. I thought this relationship was a little bit more of a give-and-take."

  "It's not," Gabriella replied, watching the men on the other roof as they dropped a duffel bag to the ground and started to unzip it. "The room for debate is zero on any mission with me. With all your experience in special forces and black ops work, I'm surprised you have to be told that. One voice of command fully focused on what's going on, with no deviation from the system. That's how you avoid mistakes, that's how you get things to work out well."

  "Aye aye, Captain." Trevor gave a mock salute to the steely eyed woman.

  "That's exactly what I'm talking about, Trevor," Gabriella said harshly, keeping her eyes on the men on the rooftop. "Your arrogance proceeded you into this mission, and I knew what you were gonna be like. You're the guy that thinks that he knows everything but doesn't know shit. You especially don't like having to hear that you don't know anything from a woman. So put your attitude aside and the chauvinistic bullshit in the toilet, because I am in charge here, an
d if you don't like it, leave."

  "Sorry," Trevor said in a smarmy voice. “Forgive me for overstepping."

  "Assemble the weapon!" Gabriella ordered, disregarding the last words of the man.

  Keeping her eyes trained in tight on the two men on the roof, Gabriella looked for details that others may miss. They both were of average size. Skin tones denoting the men were from the Middle East. From the duffel bag laid on the floor of the roof, one man removed what looked like a small pressure cooker which was obviously modified to create an explosion. The makeshift pressure cooker bombs were a Hallmark of local terrorist groups around the world after the Boston Marathon bombing. The simple timing device assured they could be set down and left alone to do their damage at a much later time.

  There was no better time to unleash hell than the first day of Carnival. The explosion on the rooftop would drop on the people partying down below. Descending chilling bursts of terror for all that came to the famous event. The panic and resulting death would be another feather in the hat for any terrorist attack.

  "All assembled." Trevor confirmed. “How do you think it looks?"

  Gabriella moved her eyes from the binoculars, and placed them down in front of her, knowing that the muzzle of the custom-built rifle he had designed for long-range kills was pointed directly at her.

  “I knew you flipped a long time ago." Gabriella slowly turned her head to the man. "How much are they paying you to betray everything you know is right?"