“With... With everything that happened.... I assumed you didn’t want me to.”
“I didn’t. Still don’t. I should hang the fuck up.” He should, but he wouldn’t. He couldn’t wait to find out why Ellie Cooke was calling him.
No, that wasn’t right. It was Ellie McMaster since she married one of the rich motherfucking McMasters. A man who could give her way more than Walker ever could.
“No! Please... don’t hang up. Please.” The determination was now gone, replaced with desperation.
He set his jaw. “Why the fuck are you calling me, Ellie?”
“I hear you do... jobs.”
Jobs.
“Whatever the job is, Ellie, have your husband handle it.”
“I... I don’t have a husband.”
Walker stilled. “You leave him, too?”
“In a way, he left me,” she whispered.
“Hurt, did it?”
“I—”
“Bye, Ellie.” He pulled the phone from his ear and swiped his finger across the screen, cutting off her plea.
Chapter Two
Hopeless.
Totally hopeless.
She didn’t know what to do.
She had nowhere to turn. No one to help her.
George’s family wanted nothing to do with her. Refused to help her, even though it was their son who caused the problem in the first place.
Ellie paced the small motel room. She had finally sold her wedding ring yesterday and only received fifteen hundred for it. But it was fifteen hundred more than what she had.
Unfortunately, that would only last so long. Then she’d be flat broke again with nothing but two suitcases full of clothes.
She didn’t even have a car.
She’d had thirty days to pay the 1.3 million dollars. But now most of that time was gone. And if she didn’t pay? She’d end up like George.
Not only dying but doing it horribly at the hands of some bad men. They said they tortured him. They didn’t have to tell her. She knew.
They had texted her the pictures.
The proof.
The motivation to find a way. Any way to get them their money.
1.3 million was a lot to come up with in a lifetime, forget a month. She did her best, but it wasn’t good enough.
And now that clock ticking was like a noose around her neck, getting tighter by the day.
She’d gone through all the scenarios in her head, how she could turn her last fifteen hundred into what she needed. Besides a lucky break with the lottery or at a casino, she had no way.
Her only hope had been Trace Walker.
Now, she was...
Hopeless.
Her desperation almost had her calling him back immediately. She wasn’t above begging.
She’d never been one to simply give up. Though, he might think otherwise.
She had given up on him.
All those years ago.
The biggest mistake of her life. Next to marrying George.
She was surprised his sister Crissy had even given her Trace’s phone number. But she did so reluctantly and then hung up on her, too.
Ellie stopped in front of the bed and stared at the phone in her hand.
She couldn’t give up.
She closed her eyes, filled her lungs, then blew it all out until she was empty. Then she ate her pride. Her fingers flew over the tiny keyboard as she wrote Trace a text. Do you know anyone who can help me disappear? I have $1500 to pay them.
Her heart thumped in her chest as she waited.
And waited.
And after a while, she sank to the floor, pulled her knees to her chest and buried her face against them.
She could do this. She just needed to think of a solution.
Her phone rang, startling her. She looked at the screen.
BLOCKED CALLER.
It could be them. The men George owed money to.
“Shit,” she whispered, her finger trembling as it hovered over the screen.
It stopped ringing and a text came through, making her jump. It’s Walker. Answer.
The phone immediately rang again, the number coming up blocked once more. Weird.
She answered it but said nothing.
“Where are you?” came the low growl through the speaker.
“In a motel.”
“Where?”
“Outside of Denver.”
Nothing. Silence. Not even breathing.
Until... “Is that where you lived with him?”
Him. “Yes.”
“You by yourself?”
She opened her mouth to answer but before she could, he barked into the phone, “You by yourself?”
She flinched. “Yes.”
“Where are your kids?”
Ellie dropped her forehead back to her knees and took a shuddered breath. “I don’t have any.”
More silence. But even so, that silence was thick with tension.
She didn’t want to admit that to him, but she had no choice.
She needed help.
She needed him.
He was her only lifeline at this point.
She had to give him what he asked for.
“Text me the info I’ll need for your plane ticket, then get your ass to the Denver airport first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll text you your boarding pass info. You get on that fucking plane, Ellie, and you get here. If you want help for whatever reason you need help, then you need to listen. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Someone will pick you up when you arrive at the airport.”
“Which airport?”
The call was cut off.
Ellie stood by the luggage carousel watching the metal belt move in a continuous loop.
One by one, passengers from her connecting flight in Chicago to her destination in Pittsburgh, of all places, grabbed their bags and headed wherever they were heading to.
Ellie had no idea where she was heading besides where she was currently standing.
Until she felt a dark presence behind her.
She turned her head to glance over her shoulder and bit back a gasp. The man behind her was big. And intimidating. Scary, even.
The scariest part wasn’t even the fact he had a long scar diagonally cutting his face in half.
Had those men tracked her down?
“Ellie McMaster.” He wasn’t asking a question.
Ellie’s eyes slid to the side looking for the nearest airport security guard.
“You’re Ellie McMaster.”
Her eyes bounced back up to his face. His eyes were silver, cold. His face expressionless.
“Who are you?”
“Mercy.”
Mercy?
“Walker sent me.”
Some of her muscles loosened and she spotted her two bags circling again. Before she could grab them, Mercy did.
“Let’s go.” He turned and began to walk with long strides toward the exit, carrying her heavy bags instead of rolling them like a normal person.
Just outside the doors, he went to a huge beast of a vehicle that looked like something out of a dystopian movie. Mad Max or something.
He opened the back of the... whatever it was... and threw her bags inside, then moved around to the driver’s door while she still stood just outside the revolving glass doors, unsure what to do.
“Let’s go!” he yelled over the hood of his... beast.
That got her moving.
She opened the door, which was heavy as all get out, and scrambled into the passenger seat. Barely. Just as she was closing the passenger door, he took off.
“I need to put my seatbelt on,” she insisted, searching for it as he took the curves around the airport faster than he should.
He said nothing.
“Do you know Trace?”
Silver eyes landed on her, something flashed behind them, then quickly disappeared. “Better fucking hope so, or you just got into a vehicle with someone you shouldn’t hav
e.”
That still might be true.
They were out of the airport loop lickety-split. He turned onto some highway heading... the compass in the vehicle said south.
A phone rang. He grabbed it from the dashboard and put it to his ear.
Ellie blinked in surprise as Mercy totally transformed into a warm-blooded man from an ice-crusted robot.
“Hey,” he said softly.
Ellie raised a brow, but the man ignored her.
“Yeah... Warehouse,” he continued in a voice which he had not used with Ellie. “Got it. Yeah. Same.” Then he threw the phone back onto the dashboard.
“You should be using hands-free—”
The look he shot her made her swallow the rest of her words.
She stared straight out of the windshield for the next half hour or so until they pulled up behind a huge warehouse. The parking lot had an interesting mix of motorcycles and expensive-looking vehicles.
She glanced around. “Where are we?”
“Here.”
Obviously.
She sighed as he got out and slammed the driver’s door, striding toward the back door in the plain grey metal warehouse. It was nondescript. No sign. No windows. Nothing to indicate what it was.
She knew Trace worked for an outfit called In the Shadows Security and this business did a variety of jobs. That’s why she contacted him directly.
Personal protection was one of them. Investigative work another.
But besides that, she didn’t know much more about it. Could this be their headquarters?
“Let’s go!” she heard bellowed from outside the vehicle.
So, she went.
Walker leaned back against the wall, his eyes closed, listening.
“Ain’t a fuckin’ charity,” he heard his boss bellow. “Got fuckin’ bills to pay an’ kids to feed.”
“Might wanna slow down on pumpin’ out those kids, D,” Walker heard Ryder bust their boss’s balls.
Silence. Which, in Diesel’s case, could be deadly.
“I’ve got fifteen hundred dollars,” came a female voice. “I just need to disappear.”
“Can make you go ghost for less than that. Just won’t be breathin’ afterward,” Diesel grumbled.
That was Walker’s cue to move into the room. He’d been avoiding it as long as possible, but D was getting crankier by the minute. He didn’t like any of them doing jobs for free.
They all had skills he charged a fuck-ton of money for from his clients. Fifteen hundred wouldn’t even begin to get his team scratching their balls.
Walker had a feeling, depending on what Ellie’s malfunction was, he’d be taking this job up the ass.
Diesel wasn’t the only one who had fucking bills to pay. Especially since Walker had a large rancher built in the DAMC compound recently.
No matter how grumpy the boss man was, working for him beat being in the military. Especially since he hadn’t been shot at in a long fucking time. In fact, the last time was when Diesel got winged by that fucknut, the now dead biker Black Jack.
Walker smirked, thinking about his boss’s minor “scratch.”
His grin flattened when he heard Ellie ask, “Where’s Trace?”
Fuck.
He pushed off the wall and strode the few steps down the hallway to the new “interrogation/meeting room” D had built since his office was now jammed with playpens, toys and girlie shit, and so they were unable to meet in there anymore.
He stopped short of the edge of the doorway, where he could see Ellie sitting at the end of the long table, but she couldn’t see him in the dark hallway.
Something twisted deep inside him as he took her in.
It had been nineteen years.
Nineteen fucking years and she looked the fucking same.
Maybe a little more filled out from what he could see since she was sitting down. A little more mature in the face. But everything else...
Her long, deep reddish-brown hair, what she called auburn, was pulled into a messy ponytail, her bright green eyes were unmistakable even from where he stood. Her lips...
He had them. In a few different ways.
They had also parted with laughter, with sighs, with gasps, and groans. They had said his name. Fuck, had they said his name.
What came out of them had also broken his motherfucking heart.
For fuck’s sake, simply sitting there, even unaware he was watching her, she might as well have jammed a knife in his chest and turned it.
“Brother,” Steel said quietly behind him.
Walker glanced over his shoulder and Steel jerked up his chin. “She yours?”
“Was,” he admitted. “A long fucking time ago.”
Walker waited for his fellow Shadow to say something smartass. Strangely, he didn’t, instead just muttered, “Damn,” under his breath. “Know why she’s here?”
Walker simply shook his head.
Steel clapped his hand on his shoulder and said, “Let’s go fucking find out.”
His teammate pressed past him and Walker knew he couldn’t put it off anymore. Like a lot of things in life, he just needed to push past the pain.
When he stepped into the room, he realized he was the last one to arrive.
Diesel was scowling as he stood to one side of the table with his legs spread, his heavily tattooed arms crossed over his massive chest. His ol’ lady’s nickname for him, The Beast, couldn’t be more fitting.
Steel had jerked a seat out near where Diesel stood and had settled into it and was eyeing up Ellie as if determining if she was a threat.
Brick leaned back against one wall, pretending to be on his phone, when Walker knew he was also eyeballing Ellie, but not in the same way Steel was. Walker began to bristle, but he quickly tamped that shit back down.
Brick would fuck anything that walked, talked and didn’t have a hairy set of balls hanging between its legs.
However, Ellie wasn’t Walker’s. She hadn’t been his in a very long time. She’d been someone else’s for almost that same amount of time.
Ryder sat in another seat, his eyes on Walker, almost as if he was waiting for a reaction. Because of that, Walker made sure to keep his expression neutral.
Hunter leaned against the wall behind Ellie, his eyes also glued to Walker as soon as he’d stepped into the room.
Walker dropped his gaze to Ellie from Hunter’s smirk and slight chin lift.
His nostrils flared to temper the burn bubbling up from his gut.
“Trace,” Ellie whispered, starting to rise to her feet.
“Sit down,” he barked at her, keeping his voice cold. Unwelcoming.
Regret filled her face and she sank back into her chair, tucking her hands into her lap and turning her eyes downward to stare at the table.
He felt everyone’s eyes on him, except for hers.
Yeah, he might have just screwed the pooch by not keeping his emotions on a short leash.
He ignored everyone else and looked at his boss. “She tell you why she’s here?”
“Needs to go ghost,” was his answer.
“Heard that part. Why?”
D lifted and dropped his heavy shoulders. “No fuckin’ clue. Was waitin’ on you.”
“Well, I’m fucking here now.” He reluctantly let his gaze land on Ellie again. “So, spill it.”
Mercy lifted his hand, stopping Ellie from speaking, his silver eyes wary. The man, like Diesel, didn’t miss a fucking thing. Two peas in a motherfucking pod. “You two got history?”
“Ancient,” Walker answered.
“Want to do this on your own and catch us up after?” Mercy asked.
“Nope. Don’t want to be alone with her.”
Brick let out a long, low whistle, and shook his head with it still bent to his phone. Walker ignored him.
“Brother, you need to take a minute and think about that?” Ryder asked, his brow furrowed.
“Nothing to think about.”
Ryder raised his e
yebrows, glanced around the room and shrugged.
“Guess it’s time for you to start talkin’,” D told Ellie.
Ellie also let her gaze circle the room before it came back to Walker. Their eyes met and he pressed his lips flat and gritted his teeth.
She was here on business. That was it. He should’ve asked her what business before paying for her fucking plane ticket and having her show up in Shadow Valley. But then, he hadn’t wanted to be on the phone with her long enough to find out.
Whatever it was, they’d see if they could deal with it and then he’d be shot of her ass.
Again.
Chapter Three
It wasn’t a chill coming from Trace. It was the deep burning heat of anger. Maybe even hatred. So hot, it scorched Ellie’s skin. It left her with no doubt how he felt about her. She didn’t blame him, but she needed him to put that aside. If only temporarily.
Once they helped her find a solution, she’d be glad to leave him alone.
From what she’d heard, they were good... his team one of the best. And when she heard Trace Walker was part of that team...
She had pictured In the Shadows Security in an office building, with a crew of men who looked like security guards. She hadn’t been prepared to be surrounded by men who looked... badass. Even dangerous.
None of them open, warm or friendly.
They were all business.
And her having “ancient history” with Trace made the room temperature drop a few degrees cooler when he mentioned it.
All except for the man who still stood by the door as if ready to bolt, his gaze searing her, shredding her from the inside out.
“Maybe we should talk alone,” she suggested softly to the table.
“No,” was his curt answer.
She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, opened them, put her palms flat on the table, her fingers spread wide and she nodded. That’s when she noticed the indentation circling her left ring finger which remained from her wedding band. She quickly curled her hands into fists and put them back in her lap.
She took a deep breath, lifted her chin and began. “George—” A sharp noise interrupted her from the direction of the door. She took another deep breath and started again. “George owned an investment company.”
Guts & Glory: Walker (In the Shadows Security Book 4) Page 2