Ruthless Protector (A Lawless Kings Novel Book 4)

by Sherilee Gray

  We all dipped our chins. Ready to go. She knocked, a wide, welcoming smile on her face. Nothing. She tried again. “Yoo-hoo? Anyone home? I just moved in across the hall and wanted to introduce myself.”

  Still nothing.

  She tried a few more times, then turned to us, eyes narrowed. “I’m ready to take this door down.”

  He either wasn’t there or not answering. Either way, I was done waiting. “Do it,” I said.

  She pulled her gun from her holster, double handing it, stepped back, and kicked the door open. We all filed in, rushing every room, checking the place from top to bottom.

  Fucking empty.

  Zeke cursed from the bedroom and walked out, holding the phone. “Wherever he’s taken her, it was without this.”

  “Goddamn it.” I kicked the piece-of-shit couch in the middle of the room. “Where the fuck are they?”

  Ruby touched my arm, fire blazing in her eyes. “We will find her.”

  I fucking hoped so. I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to Tilly. If Trent hurt her. If he decided to run.

  Willa and Tilly, they’d become everything to me. Everything. I’d spent a lot of years believing I didn’t deserve happiness after what happened to Kate and Louis. But Kate had loved me, more than I’d deserved, and she would have loved Willa and Tilly as well. She’d want me to be happy. And Willa and Tilly made me happy. In a way I never thought I’d find again.

  I couldn’t imagine my life without either of them in it.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Zeke said, and they all filed out.

  I didn’t move. Van came up beside me. “Zeke’s gonna take surveillance and Ruby’s scouring the apartment building, going door to door. If they come back, we’ll know.”

  I nodded numbly, feeling fucking helpless. Hunter and Neco were out following a couple of other leads. We had informants out on the streets asking questions. We’d called in markers all over the city. Tomas was even talking to some of his “associates” to get us more intel. We were doing all we could at this point, but it wasn’t enough.

  “Go home to Willa, she needs you,” Van said.

  I held my friend’s gaze. “How can I go home to her and tell her we’ve got nothing. That the most important person in her world is still missing, and I can’t do shit about it?”

  His expression was sympathetic. “None of this was your fault, you know that, right?”

  I gritted my teeth. “Christ, Van. I don’t need a damned psych assessment. I’m not going rouge. But I shouldn’t have waited. I should have dug up every damn one of her secrets, but I didn’t. I let her go it alone. And I’ll have to live with that.”

  Van said nothing, but I could see it in his eyes. I was already living with the biggest failure of my life, a bigger loss than anyone person could handle—one more, and fuck knew what would happen. What I’d do.

  I strode out of that shitty apartment and headed for home.

  I had to tell Willa I’d failed her.

  Fuck.

  Willa

  I paced around the living room for the millionth time. I was losing my mind. Jude hadn’t been gone long, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to just sit around here waiting.

  I just wanted Tilly back. I just wanted her to walk back though that front door with Jude, safe and sound.

  The knock on the door was loud in the silence, startling me out of my thoughts. It had to be Jude. I rushed over and pulled the door open.

  I froze.

  A scary-looking guy, almost as big as Jude, stood there. I recognized him instantly. One of the goons from the poker game.

  I tried to shove the door closed.

  The guy put his shoulder to it and heaved, knocking me back. I stumbled and slammed into the wall. He advanced on me, followed by another thug.

  I spun, wanting to make a break for the back of the house, but one of the henchmen was prepared for the move and blocked the way. With nowhere else to go, I grabbed the hall table and knocked it over, then dove in the opposite direction, hitting the stairs, taking them two at a time, up to the second floor.

  I was cornered.

  With nowhere else to go, I ran to the bathroom and slammed the door shut, throwing the lock, and backed away. There was no escape. I couldn’t fit through the window, and there was nothing to push in front of the door.

  It flew open a second later, bouncing off the wall, hinges splintering. One of the big men strode in, a nasty grin on his face.

  “What do you want? Why are you doing this?” I said, backing up until I was pressed against the wall.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he gagged me with a dirty rag he pulled from his back pocket to stop my screaming, and carried me out of my house, to a waiting car.

  As soon as the door shut, the car sped off. I was in the back, pressed against the door, scared out of my mind. My pulse raced so fast I felt dizzy. I sucked breaths in through my nose, desperate for a decent lungful of oxygen, but I couldn’t seem to get enough.

  I was pretty sure I was going to pass out.

  The last thing I wanted to do was lose consciousness. Not when I had no idea where they were taking me, and not when I didn’t know who was at the other end.

  The two assholes in the car with me had been guarding the door at the poker game, which meant I was on my way to meet one of the criminals who sat at that table, someone Trent had obviously pissed off.

  I just didn’t know which one.

  The black dots dancing across my vison grew bigger as I continued to struggle to get enough air. Then everything went black.

  I heard a vicious curse, then…nothing.

  25

  Willa

  As soon as I hit the stairs to Willa’s apartment, I knew something was wrong. Call it a sixth sense or intuition or whatever, but the feeling of something crawling down my spine only increased when I knocked on her door and it swung open, unlatched.

  I almost tripped over the rug by the door when I walked in. It was shoved back, half of it flipped over on top of itself. Then I took in the rest of the entrance hall. The table was overturned; the framed picture of Tilly, Willa, and Rebecca that had had sat on top of it, lay on the floor, the glass shattered.

  Willa was gone.

  As I stormed the rest of the downstairs, calling her name before heading to the floor above, I knew I wouldn’t find her. I fucking knew it. The bathroom door hung at an odd angle, dangling drunkenly from one hinge, the outline of a dirty boot print still on the white painted surface.

  I took in the small room, each breath exploding from my lungs, adrenaline pumping mercilessly through my veins, tightening my muscles, as I desperately tried to keep it together. As I tried to piece this together.

  She’d run up here, trying to get away. And whoever had pushed their way in the front door, had chased her up here. They kicked in the door, while she stood in here, scared out of her mind, and dragged her from this house.

  I shoved my fingers through my hair.

  What the fuck was going on?

  None of this made sense.

  Why would Trent take her? Why would he come for Willa when he had Tilly? When he already had his bargaining chip. He hadn’t even given her time to get his money, hadn’t called with details for the exchange.

  No, none of this made any damn sense.

  Logic told me Trent had to be involved in this. I moved back through the house, more carefully this time. Two sets of footprints. Two people had come in here, and wherever they’d come from, they’d walked through red-tinged dirt or grease.

  What I did know, was if it was Trent, he hadn’t come in alone.

  I pulled my phone from my back pocket, while calling on every shred of control, forcing myself to stay focused when I wanted to roar at the top of my lungs and tear this city apart. I needed to lock it down. I needed to do my job, and I couldn’t do that if I lost my shit. I had to be the ex-cop, the P.I. I couldn’t be the man whose woman and kid had been snatched out from under him. I couldn’t b
e him and stay sane, not if I wanted to save their lives.

  I sucked in a rough breath and called Van.

  “Yeah?”

  “Willa’s been taken.”

  Van growled out a curse.

  “I won’t lose them,” I said. “I can’t.”

  “We’ll get them back, I promise you that,” Van said.

  We both knew he couldn’t make that promise, but if I thought of the alternative—that dark and ugly place I’d lived in before Willa and Tilly came into my world, bringing back to life a heart I thought was nothing but a shriveled, dead husk—I’d have to be committed.

  They got it beating again. It was all them.

  They’d brought me back to life.

  I wouldn’t quit until I had them home and safe.

  Willa

  I was jostled roughly and startled awake. It took me a moment to orientate myself. I was upside-down, looking at one of the goon’s backs. He had me slung over his shoulder and was carrying me up a steep set of stairs.

  A door opened and a moment later, I was dumped on the floor. The wind was knocked out of me, my head spinning after having all the blood rush to it. Before I could take in where I was, the sound of the door shutting echoed through the room, followed by a decided click. I jumped up and stumbled to it, trying the door handle, yanking on it as hard as I could. Locked.

  I spun around, searching the dark corners. Everything was black, the only light came from a lamp in the corner. I was alone. The dull flash of a small red light caught my attention up by the ceiling. A camera. I was being watched.

  I searched the room, looking for another way out. No windows. When I spun back, I spotted another door. I rushed over and tried the handle. The door swung open. A bathroom, bright and white and such a contrast to the black walls of the main room, I stumbled back a step.

  What the hell was this place? Where was I?

  I took in the large room, and when I realized what I was looking at, froze solid.

  The walls, the floor, were all lined with black plastic, and there were manacles hanging from the ceiling in the center of the room.

  I thought I was here because of Trent. I didn’t think that now.

  Somehow, I knew, I just knew, this was the place, the kill room of a monster. The man who’d killed all those women. I backed into the bathroom, my knees giving out from under me. I hit the tiled floor hard.

  And I was next.

  Jude

  Twenty-four hours had passed since Willa was snatched from her home.

  Nothing. We’d heard nothing.

  “Whoever has them, they don’t want money,” I said.

  “Trent’s wanted by a lot of people,” Van said. “Maybe he was forced to go deeper underground? He’s gotta know Willa’s yours. It’s not hard to work out you’ve got access to a lot more money than she does. The guy’s dumb enough to think he can blackmail you as well.”

  “Maybe.” That made sense, of course. He could have got someone to work with him for a cut of the cash.

  One of our informants had reported a sighting; a guy, his description fitting Trent’s, with a kid, the day before. Neco was behind his computer, searching property in the area, places they could be hiding, if they were still there. Warehouses, abandoned apartment buildings, vacant stores.

  A series of beeps came from his computer, an alert of some kind, and I watched Neco click open another screen. His eyes hardened, then lifted to mine.

  “What?”

  “Got him,” he said.

  I strode over and stared at a red dot flashing on the map filling his computer screen.

  “Trent just turned his phone on,” Neco said.

  He’d used two different phones to call Willa, the burner we’d found at his apartment and this one. Please don’t let this be another dead end. “Let’s move out,” I said, heading for the door.

  We had a team assembled and ready to go in ten minutes.

  I was bringing my girls home today. Anything else was unacceptable.

  Thirty minutes later, we were in an area known for its dealers and crack houses. My gut tightened when we pulled over outside an apartment building with a “Condemned” sign on the front door, and smashed and boarded windows.

  “Christ,” Hunter said beside me.

  He didn’t do many field jobs anymore, not since he got Lulu and Josh back, but he refused to sit this one out.

  My throat wouldn’t work, the rage inside me was so intense I shook. With all agents on board, we surrounded the building. Zeke and Ruby, Hunter and Van, Neco and me. We nodded, and entered the building. Neco had accessed the floor plan, and we’d studied it on the way over.

  We split up and headed to our allocated areas.

  The stench was overpowering. Vomit, shit, piss, mold, rot.

  Zeke and Ruby stayed on the ground floor, while Hunter and Van moved to the first and Neco and I carried on up to the second.

  Neco glanced down at his phone. “Still getting the signal.”

  Doors were left open in some of the apartments. Dirty mattresses, people passed out, syringes, condoms, and whole lot of other shit everywhere, littering the floors.

  We searched each room.

  The second to last door on the floor was shut, and when I tried the handle, it didn’t budge, no doubt bolted from the inside. I didn’t hesitate; I kicked the fucker in and stormed the room.

  Thank fuck.

  Trent was there; he and two other guys were passed out on the floor. There was a needle still hanging out of the fucker’s arm.

  Van checked his pulse. “He’s still alive.”

  I didn’t care if he was still breathing or not. “Tilly! Willa!” I called, running from room to room.

  Not a sound, or a movement.

  I entered the second room, calling their names again. There was an old bedframe, no mattress. I checked underneath. Nothing.

  A whimper.

  I spun around. There was a closet behind the bedroom door. I strode over and yanked it open.

  Sitting on the floor, with tears streaming down her face and Trent's phone held tight in her hand, was Tilly. She scrambled back with a little shriek.

  Oh God. I crouched down slowly, got down nice and low, so I wasn’t looming over her, so she could see me.

  “It’s all right now, it’s going to be all right. It’s Jude, honey.”

  She blinked up at me and her lips started to quiver. “Jude?”

  “Yeah, sweetheart. It’s me.”

  She threw herself at me, wrapping her tiny arms round my neck and hanging on for all she was worth. She started sobbing. I already knew I loved this kid, but Christ, in that moment, she became mine. I felt it all the way down to my soul.

  “I got you, baby. I’ve got you.”

  “I was so scared,” she said through her sobs, blurting her words. “When Dad went to sleep, I took his phone and I turned it on. So you could get a signal. I remembered what you said, how you sometimes caught the bad guys. It had a password and I couldn’t call Willa, but I knew you would be looking for me, I knew you’d find me if I turned it on.”

  “Your aunt? Has she been here, honey? Have you seen her?”

  Tilly shook her head.

  Fuck.

  I held Tilly tightly to me, and strode through the room. The others were there now as well, cuffing Trent, getting him ready to carry out. I kept Tilly’s face against me, shielding her from it, though she’d probably seen a fuck of a lot worse the last few days in this place.

  “You did so good, Tils, so good.” I talked the whole time, reassuring words, not just for her, but for me was well, holding her tight the whole way.

  Where are you, Willa? Where the fuck are you?

  26

  Willa

  I jumped at the sound of the door opening and closing, scuttling back stiffly, until my back hit the vanity. My body was tight and ached from being on the cold tile all night, but the adrenaline pounding through me washed the pain away quickly.

  I sho
t to my feet when footsteps grew closer.

  A man filled the doorway, with flesh-colored lips and unusually pale eyes. “You are a pretty one, aren’t you?” he said. “I’ve thought about you in this room since the poker game.”

  Donny. Jethro’s business partner.

  It was him. Donny had killed all those women.

  “What are you going to do to me?” I said, voice cracking on the last word.

  He moved into the room with me. “I won’t be doing anything to you,” he said. “But we need to get you ready.” He had a long, white piece of fabric draped over one arm.

  I stared at him, my skin crawling. “Ready for what?”

  He moved to the door and hung up what he was holding, what I now realized was a sheer robe, on the back of the door.

  When he turned to me, his eyes were empty, hollow of emotion. “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  Jethro. He had to mean Jethro.

  Oh God. I needed to get out of here. Now.

  “There are guards just outside the door, and we’re being watched. Whatever you’re thinking, don’t bother. You won’t make it two steps out the door.” He strode past me and started filling the tub. “Let’s get you ready.”

  Jude

  I shoved Trent’s head back in the bucket of ice water, longer this time. He came up spluttering and cursing, crying.

  Shoving him against the wall, I got in his face. “No one will miss you if I wipe you from the face of the earth.”

  I was done playing. I’d been done playing thirty minutes ago. For a sniveling piece of shit, he’d held out longer than a lot of guys, which told me one thing—he was more afraid of the fucker who had Willa than he was of me. I needed to change that. “If you think I won’t take off your fingers one at a time and feed them to you, you’re mistaken. I’ll do whatever it takes to get the information I need, but when it involves the people I love, there is no limit to the depraved shit I’ll rain down on you, motherfucker.”