Off the Record with Mack Callan: What Hawk Loves About Alyssa
Mack Callan notices everything.
Call sign: Hawk.
Former Marine Scout Sniper. Shadow Point Security team leader. The man who checks exits without thinking, memorizes sight lines, and can sit quietly enough to make you wonder whether he’s still in the room.
He is.
He’s watching.
Mack’s story in Shadow Target is also a second-chance romance, which means interviewing him about Alyssa Bennett comes with some history. A lot of history.
She was his fiancée. Then she believed her brother over Mack, and everything they planned together fell apart.
Two years later, Alyssa accidentally walked into a cartel meeting, and Mack became the only man standing between her and a very dangerous cartel leader.
So naturally, I invited Hawk to sit down and talk about the woman he once lost—and never really stopped loving.
Mack studies me for a second. “You already interviewed Garrett, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And he agreed to this?”
“Eventually.”
Mack sighs.
Good enough.
Misty: What did you notice first about Alyssa?
Mack: “Her eyes They’re green. Very green. But that’s not really what I mean.”
I wait.
“She watches people.”
Coming from Mack, this is high praise.
“She’s an artist, so she notices things most people don’t. Faces. Expressions. The small tells people think they’re hiding. The first time we met, I remember realizing she was studying me.”
“Did that bother you?”
“No.” A pause. “It should have.”
I laugh.
“What I didn’t understand then was how much I liked being seen by her.”
Misty: What do you admire most about her?
His expression turns serious. “Her courage.”
I expect him to leave it there. He doesn’t.
“People misunderstand courage. They think it’s kicking in a door or running toward gunfire.”
“Very Marine answer.”
“It’s also wrong.” He leans forward slightly. “Alyssa had to admit she trusted the wrong person. Her own brother. She had to look at everything she believed, realize part of it was built on lies, and then do something about it.”
He shakes his head. “She walked into a federal courthouse knowing her testimony could destroy what was left of her relationship with her family, and she did it anyway because it was the right thing to do.” Mack is quiet for a moment. “I’ve been in combat. What she did took more guts.”
That one feels familiar.
He catches my expression. “I told her that too.”
Good man.
Misty: What does Alyssa understand about you that other people don’t?
Mack: “That silence doesn’t always mean something’s wrong.”
That sounds very Mack.
“I don’t need to talk just because a room is quiet. I don’t need noise all the time.”
“And Alyssa?”
“She can sit with me.” He rolls one of the old quarters across his fingers. Of course he brought them. “She sketches. I do whatever I’m doing. Sometimes we don’t talk for an hour.”
“That sounds romantic.”
“It is.” He considers that. “More than people think.”
Misty: You kept those quarters all these years. Why?
The quarters were a gift from Alyssa before his first deployment, engraved with their initials and the date they first got together.
He looks down at them. “Because they were hers.”
Simple answer.
I give him the look.
He gives me one back. Then, reluctantly: “They reminded me of who I was before everything went wrong.” His thumb traces the edge of one coin. “And of the future I thought we were going to have.”
“Even after she left?”
“Especially then.” Mack exhales. “I was angry. I had every right to be angry.”
He looks at the coins again. “But anger doesn’t erase love.”
There’s the pull quote.
Misty: What does Alyssa do that drives you crazy?
This finally earns a small smile. “She asks questions.”
“That’s it?”
“She asks all the questions.”
I laugh.
“She wants to understand everything before she moves. Who, what, why, how, what happens next. If there are six possible explanations, she wants all six.”
“You don’t?”
“I want the threat neutralized.”
“Ah.”
“Exactly.” His smile grows. “She makes me slow down. Explain things. Think about what information belongs to her instead of deciding what she needs to know.”
“That sounds useful.”
“It is.” A beat. “Still drives me crazy.”
Misty: When did you realize she wasn’t the same woman you’d lost two years earlier?
He doesn’t answer immediately. “At the cabin.”
“During the blizzard?”
He nods. “She pushed back.”
I wait for more.
“The Alyssa I knew before was always trying to make things easier for everyone else. Smooth things over. Keep the peace. When things got hard, she’d second-guess herself.” His expression shifts into something quieter. “This time, she argued with me.”
“And you liked that?”
“No.”
I laugh. “No?”
“It was incredibly inconvenient.”
There it is.
“But I respected it.”
He looks down, then back at me. “She’d learned to trust herself.”
That, I realize, may be the thing he loves most.
Misty: You’re a team leader now. What has SPS given you that you didn’t have when Alyssa knew you before?
Mack thinks about that longer than the others. “A place to belong after I thought that part of my life was over.”
His military career ended under a cloud of blame that never should have been his. Shadow Point gave him a way to use everything he’d been trained to do without asking him to pretend the past hadn’t happened.
“Garrett trusted me before I trusted myself again.”
That one surprises me.
He shrugs. “CB too. The whole team.”
“So SPS became family?”
He smiles faintly. “Don’t start. Garrett warned me about this part.”
I grin. “Is that a yes?”
“It’s a yes.”
Victory number two.
Misty: Last question. If Alyssa could never doubt one thing about you again, what would you want it to be?
Mack goes still.
Very still. “That I believe her.”
Not what I expected.
He sees that. “She spent too much of her life being told her instincts were wrong. That she was overreacting. That someone else understood the truth better than she did.”
His voice drops. “I never want to be another man who does that to her.” He closes his hand around the quarters. “And I want her to know that when I say I’m staying, I mean it.”
I let that sit between us. Then I smile. “That’s very romantic for a sniper.”
Mack stands. “Interview’s over.”
I chuckle and wink at him. “I know where to find you if I need a follow-up.”
____
Mack “Hawk” Callan and Alyssa Bennett’s story unfolds in Shadow Target, Book Two of the Shadow Point Security romantic suspense series.
Want more from Hawk? Visit Mack’s SPS personnel dossier, open the Shadow Target case file, or continue deeper into the world of Shadow Point Security.