Chapter 18
Grayson
Six months ago. Astoria, OR.
I shut her bedroom door behind me, ignoring the heavy feeling in my chest and the raging hard-on in my pants while trying to wrap my head around what I just did. Her cum was still on my fingers, her scent on my jeans, and I could still feel her lips against mine.
Fuck, but I liked it. Too much.
I wanted more.
I never wanted to stop.
Carrie was my beginning and ending now.
After weeks of trying to convince myself that coming back to Astoria was a bad idea, I did anyways. For the last few weeks, Red Snake Investigations had been working on something for one of our larger clients, and I dove into it headfirst, hoping it would get my mind off the woman who consumed my thoughts day and night.
Now, I was standing outside her bedroom, fighting the primal urges inside me, fighting every ounce of desire I had to go back in there and fuck her senseless, fill her with me, claim her as mine.
I couldn’t do that.
Not yet.
There was a hunt.
I was tired of fighting. I was tired of ignoring the pull between us.
After that, I would come back here. I would finally tell her my name. I would give her every single part of me. I would—
My phone vibrated in my back pocket, pulling me from my thoughts. Quickly, I moved down the stairs and exited her house before pulling it out of my jeans.
Hayes Calling.
“Grayson,” I answered, walking to my SUV.
“We have a problem,” he said, his voice too calm for my liking—too cold.
I stopped in my tracks, right in the middle of Carrie’s front yard. The warm summer air suddenly became thick around me as fear slithered down my spine.
“What is it?” I demanded.
“Ash has been compromised.”
I turned back around to the blue house with my woman inside of it, my chest aching in a way I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t explain any of this shit when it came to her. A new sense of fear slithered over my shoulders, wrapping around both of my arms, overlapping my tattoos, reminding me of the man I was.
My jaw tightened as I looked away from the house. “Where?”
“Seattle.”
Devils Den.
My upper lip curled as I pulled the phone away, biting off a furious curse. “When?” I barked, heading towards my truck.
“We haven’t heard word from him in sixteen hours,” Hayes stated.
Once I was in the truck, I fired up the engine before taking one last look at the house, my entire future hanging in the balance.
You know who you are, Grayson.
This isn’t you.
Stick to what you know.
When I peeled my eyes off her house, I ordered, “Debrief me. Now.”
Present Day. Denver, CO.
“Doss, I don’t want to hear it,” I barked, gesturing to the map of Devils Den. “Red Snake Investigations will not get involved with that fucking place. Do I make myself one hundred percent clear?”
My friend glared up at me from his seat, his arm in a flimsy sling, his jaw still black and blue. “You saying it was bullshit? That what I went in there for was bullshit?”
Today was Ash’s first day back at Red Snake, and we’d been in my office for an hour trying to understand why he abandoned his hunt to go to Devils Den.
“You know we don’t think that. Whatever or whoever you went down there for, we know you must’ve had a good reason,” Hayes said from his spot by the window. Slowly, he turned around to face us, meeting my eyes for the first time in over a week. “But you knew the rule, and you still broke it.”
“Devils Den is off fucking limits ,” I growled.
Devils Den was a modern-day hellhole, and up until last year, it had been the secret sex trafficking hub in the States. The FBI was trying to shut it down, but it seemed impossible. I’d helped Jeremy Jones with it last year, but only with a full vote from my team.
Ash didn’t discuss his decision to walk straight into hell with any of us.
He didn’t speak to us at all.
“I had it handled,” Ash snapped.
“You call that handled?” I quipped, raising a brow. “By the time I found you, you were nearly gone.” His body was fucking mangled. I’d never seen anything like it. It was going to take years for me to forget those images of him bleeding out on a dark, damp, and dirty concrete floor.
Ash’s gray eyes flashed as a muscle jumped in his cheek, but still, he said nothing.
“Three fucking months,” Hayes said quietly, his eyes on our team member.
That was how long it took me to find him. Three months in that fucking hell hole, listening to all the horrors that came with it, day in and day out.
The next two months were spent sitting in the chair beside his hospital bed. Those fuckers were ruthless, torturing him in ways not even Dominic had heard of. Ash was touch and go for a long time. It scared the shit out of us— all of us.
This past month, I’d been trying to catch up on everything I’d missed while we helped Ash heal.
I scrubbed a hand down my face, muttering a curse under my breath. This career path was supposed to be easier than the Marines. I bent my head, letting out a heavy sigh before pushing off the desk and pacing behind it.
“Do you even care?” Hayes pushed, his voice hard. “We were fucking losing it, Ash.”
I didn’t have to look at Hayes to the see the pain in his eyes. He lost more men when he was in the Air Force than I did when I was a sniper, and I knew that if we’d lost Ash, it would’ve sent him over the deep end.
Ash’s silence was like nails on a damn chalk board.
Spinning on my heel, I tried to keep my voice level as I pushed out, “If you want to die that badly, brother, just tell me. Tell me, and I can make it happen.”
“ Grayson, ” Hayes hissed.
I ignored him, keeping my focus on Ash. He had demons; we all did, but his were deeper, more terrifying. I’d give him peace. If that was what he really wanted—needed—I could give it to him.
Ash’s eyes met mine. “I don’t want to die.”
My shoulders sagged a bit.
“At least, not until I find her,” he finished and my shoulders were back up as I stiffened.
“Her?” I parroted.
He nodded once. Hayes and I shared a look.
“Doss, what the hell are you talking about?” Hayes demanded to know. “There was a woman?”
Slowly and more smoothly than I expected, Ash rose from his seat, walking to the windows, his eyes on the mountains. “The client had a wife.”
Hayes moved to my desk, picking up the file on the client we’d sent Ash to six months ago.
“There was no wife,” I said to his back, folding my arms over my chest. The client wasn’t married, not according everything Jake could dig up about him.
“It wasn’t publicly known,” Ash noted. “It was an arranged marriage performed by his church.”
Hayes dropped the file onto my desk before putting his hands on his hips, letting out a sigh. “Okay, so what about her?”
Ash turned back to us. “She’s the reason I went into Devils Den,” he explained.
My gut twisted. “Ash…”
His gray eyes flicked to meet mine. “The client was holding her hostage in his fucking bedroom, Gray. She was chained to the goddamn bed with a fucking bucket to piss in.”
The client was a preacher. He’d hired Red Snake Investigations six and a half months ago to hunt down an accountant who’d stolen a little over half a million dollars from the church. The client wanted it done under the table, away from the press, which was why he didn’t get the cops involved.
“Fucking finished the hunt, and went to that preacher’s house to collect payment. No one was home, and I was about to leave until I heard screaming,” Ash seethed, baring his teeth.
“Jesus,” Hayes muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“You found her,” I assumed, my voice tight with anger. I was beginning to see red, and suddenly, this woman in Ash’s story wasn’t just a stranger. She was my sunshine.
My Carrie.
“Yeah, I fucking found her,” he confirmed, his voice dark. “Found her naked and starving on the fucking bed with cuts so deep in her fucking wrists from the cuffs, you could see bone.”
Hayes inhaled a deep breath through his nose as he braced his hands on my desk, his head bent.
“Why didn’t you tell us that?” I asked.
Ash said nothing, looking away from us.
I took a step forward. “One call, brother. One fucking call, and we would’ve had her. You know that.”
“I told her that,” he said softly, looking at his feet. “Fuck, I begged her to let me…”
“She was afraid,” I murmured when he trailed off.
“Fucking petrified,” he growled, his anger radiating off him in waves.
“Do you have her name?” Hayes asked quietly.
“No.”
“You remember what she looked like?” I asked, hopeful.
Ash’s eyes met mine for a second time. “I’ll never forget.”
“Then we have something,” I declared.
Half an hour later, Ash was heading home for the day to get some much needed rest while Hayes and I remained in my office.
“Fucking hell,” he muttered, taking a seat on the couch in the corner.
I leaned back in my chair, looking up to the ceiling. Silence filled the office, Hayes and I both thinking the same thing, but neither of us wanting to say it. This could destroy everything we’d built. I swallowed the lump in my throat, my fingers itching to pull up the cameras in Carrie’s house. I’d installed them the day before I kissed her while she was at work, hiding the devices in places she’d never look. Even if she knew they were there, she’d never find them.
I’d only gotten to check on her once or twice in the last six months. With everything going on, I knew I had to focus and not worry about her. The first time I checked on her was the night I got back to Denver, right before I started the hunt for Ash. She’d been sleeping, curled up in the center of her pretty bed, at peace.
Over the last few months, that was how I imagined her: safe and resting. After everything she’d been through, that was what she needed.
The second time I checked on her was two months ago, after Ash coded twice. We almost lost him— twice. I couldn’t handle the hospital anymore, so I drove to the office, sat in the dark, and watched her talking with her friend on the couch. She had her legs tucked under her, holding a glass of wine, a box of tissues sitting next to her. She’d been crying.
The sight gutted me almost as badly as nearly losing my friend.
I knew why she’d been crying. I hadn’t come back. I saw the way she looked at me. I saw the light in her eyes sparking after what we shared, and I knew she saw the light in mine as well.
Carrie Hale possessed me, body and soul, and it scared the shit out of me.
“You know what we have to do, right?” Hayes asked, breaking the silence.
All thoughts of Carrie vanished and I was back to this shit reality with nightmares I’d never want her to face. “Yeah,” I confirmed softly, keeping my eyes on the ceiling.
“We’ll need to vote,” Hayes added.
“You know Dominic and Jake won’t hesitate,” I said. They wouldn’t, not for for something like this.
This woman—this innocent life—was too important.
“You thinkin’ it's a church cult?”
I rolled my neck, bringing my head down to look at him. “God, I fucking hope not. The last thing we need is another church cult.”
Hayes, Dominic, and I had already dealt with a smaller one down in Tennessee years ago.
“I’ll call for a vote tonight,” Hayes sighed, rising to his feet. “The faster we get it done, the sooner you can head to Astoria.”
After getting Ash out of Devils Den, I confessed everything to Hayes about Carrie, telling him how Mags called me on my bullshit, and even about the night I kissed her. Now, after everything, I didn’t think it would be right to go back. I should just let her be, let her find happiness—without me.
The thought alone made me murderous.
“I didn’t even tell her my name, Hayes,” I said quietly, looking at her thick file underneath my laptop. I always kept it close, just in case. After looking over it a hundred times or more, I was beginning to see some more missing pieces, and I knew the only way to get those answers was to go to her.
“Then explain why, Gray.”
My eyes flicked up to him, my jaw tight. “She’s not—”
“Never, in all the years I’ve known you, have you been this hung up on a woman. She has done something to you and from what you’ve told me, you’ve done the same to her. There’s something there, and like Mags said, you owe yourself. You deserve some fucking happiness in your life.”
I tilted my head to the side. “And what about you?”
My friend’s emerald eyes flashed as he looked out the windows behind me, his eyes scanning the city and the mountains beyond. “I thought I’d found it, man. I really fucking did.”
I nodded, remembering his ex cheated on him before we moved out to Denver for the rest of the year. “And if you found it again?”
He looked at me. “If I found what you’ve found, Gray…there’s not a single fucking man on this Earth who could stop me from having it.”
As soon as the words left his mouth, I agreed with him. I needed her, and I hoped to God she still needed me.
“Go to her. Tonight. We’ve got things handled here,” he urged, giving me a small smile.
My heart begin to ache at the thought of seeing her again, holding her again, tasting her again…. I turned to my chair to face the windows, imagining her saying my name for the first time.
Fuck, I couldn’t wait to see my sunshine again.