Chapter 23 Ledger
Twenty-Three
Ledger
They call it a hunt. I call it a reclaiming.
Before there is time to settle in, Chux returns and gives me a nod. They have a lock on Jonas Greene. My time to join in is here. With a quick promise of my return to Kelly I join my brothers in the battle to send this fucker to the ground. No one fucks with the Kings.
The minute I step out of the safe room, it’s like the Earth itself inhales and holds its breath.
In mere minutes Shaft comes to a stop with the van full of us in front of an old abandoned department store.
I can’t remember if it was a Sears or K-Mart, but the old shopping store is gone leaving nothing but asphalt and graffiti covered cinder block walls.
The glass doors in the front of shattered or missing parts. My mind doesn’t care about any of that.
Find Jonas Greene. Only then can I feel free.
End this.
Protect what is mine.
I grip my gun tightly. My knuckles ache. My jaw aches more. My heart aches worst of all, but I bury that behind the rage carving itself into my spine.
Kelly is safe. Alive.
And the bastard who tried to take her is somewhere close.
Breathing. That won’t last long.
Chux signals a halt with his fist in the air. We stop at a junction where the hallway splits into three areas from the old business, some kind of office, a breakroom, and restrooms. Emergency lights bathe everything in a sickly red glow.
Shaft whispers, “Thermals picked up movement in the west corner of the office.”
Mellow taps his earpiece. “But then it disappeared. He’s moving like he knows the layout.”
Chux’s eyes cut to me. “Because he does.”
I nod once. No point denying it. Greene wasn’t club. He wasn’t family. But he was a shadow from before Kings, a ghost from the kind of life I never talk about.
He wasn’t supposed to come back. I left my past in the past and devoted my all to the Kings as did my brother Chux.
The life he was living, the plans they had did align with the men we wanted to be.
The law isn’t something I ever want to be in line with, man makes them and this man breaks them.
But I have my own code to follow. Jonas Greene has no code.
He is dead to me, he knows it. Like a plague he won’t stay away. He shouldn’t exist in Freedom Falls. Hell, he shouldn’t be in Alabama.
But he is. And he crawled back into my world dragging hell with him.
“Split,” Chux orders quietly. “Nitro, Shaft, take the bathrooms. Stunt with me we hit the breakroom. Riot, you’re point. The office is yours with Mellow at your back.”
Nobody questions it.
This is personal.
I move.
Boots silent. Breath calm. Muscles tight. Shadows bending around every corner. Every instinct from the Marines, from the bad missions, from the old life, waking up like a beast I buried years ago.
The office is darker than the others. The red glow of the exit lights barely noticeable here.
Rainwater drips from a busted vent in slow, irregular taps. I advance twenty feet before entering the room where a voice slices through the dark.
Soft. Mocking. Unbelievably familiar.
“Well, Ledger.”
My spine turns to ice. He’s here. Exactly where I expected him to be, hiding in the shadows.
“You always did walk heavy.”
I freeze. Knife on my side. Gun in hand, raised.
“Show yourself,” I growl.
“Oh, come now.” Footsteps echo slowly, purposefully. “Not even a hello? Not even a Jonas, I thought you were dead? Hell, I expected to hear, I hoped you were dead. I’m hurt.”
He steps out of the shadows. A man I buried years ago.
Shorter hair. Lean face. Eyes like ice.
He’s not masked now.
He wants me to see him.
Jonas Greene.
I lift my gun.
He smiles slow, amused, utterly unfazed. “You won’t shoot me yet.”
“Try me.”
“No,” he state calmly. “If you shoot, you risk the unknown of who I may have working for me and the risk to your beautiful lady.”
I go rigid.
Greene chuckles. “Ah. There it is.” He taps his temple. “Your tell. Your weakness. Same as before.”
“You don’t get to talk about her.”
“Why not?” He tilts his head. “She’s the reason you’re here. She’s the reason I could even get close enough to have a conversation with you. And she’s the reason you’re not going to walk away from this alive.”
A growl builds in my chest. “Where are the rest of your men?” I demand.
He shrugs. “Alive. Dead. I lose track.”
“You sent them after her.”
“I sent them after you,” he corrects. “She was simply the pressure point.”
“You should’ve stayed dead,” I snarl. “When the contract came in for Russia, that final mission, I told you man to man, it ends now. We both allowed things, we both did things we can’t take back.”
“Funny.” His smile widens. “When I came to in the hospital after you left me the first name I said was yours. While I couldn’t remember everything, I remember you telling me I was dead to you.
” He lets out a low whistle. “Except, I was anything but dead, Ledger Masters. No, I was a man with vague memories and a grudge.”
My blood goes cold. Then hot.
“You were always supposed to join me,” he continues. “You were as close to me as my brother. Before the Kings stole you. Before you went soft. Before you found some moral code that changed you. And, brother, that was long before you found that woman to warm your bed.”
“Don’t,” I snap, voice breaking on the edge of feral.
“Ah,” he says softly. “There it is again. The weakness.”
I lunge.
He expects it. Greene always expects everything.
We served together in an elite recon unit.
The training we both endured and the torture as prisoners of war during a deployment give him too much knowledge over me.
The handful of years doing contract work when we got out of the military didn’t just pay well, it forced a level of trust to survive.
I am too predictable for a man like him.
He sidesteps, slashing a blade toward my ribs. I twist, the knife grazing my side, burning instantly. I counter with a hook to his jaw. He stumbles two steps but doesn’t fall.
Not enough.
Never enough.
We circle each other in the dim space of the room. Mellow is close but as a man and a brother in the Kings, he knows I need this. He won’t let Jonas kill me, but he’s going to let me fight my own battle and learn what I need to in order to protect Kelly.”
Jonas drags the back of his knife along the wall, scraping metal. “You were always one of the best, Masters. But then you traded purpose for a patch. Friendship for family that isn’t blood.”
His lip curls.
“You gave up all your potential for life as a foot soldier in a club and most of all, you’ve given up your manhood, your existence for a woman.” A smug smirk comes across his face. “I’ll give you this, she’s a fine piece of ass. I wonder if her cunt tastes as sweet as those pastries she bakes?”
I launch forward. My blade slices across his arm. He hisses, twisting away. Blood splashes the concrete.
“Come near her again and I’ll gut you,” I growl.
“But I already did,” he mocks. “I let her feel what I felt after you left me. At least hers will continue to return in time. The drugs I injected right after the accident should be out of her system in a matter of weeks.”
I shoot without thinking, instinct, pain, rage. He drugged her after almost killing her in that wreck.
He dives behind a column, bullet ricocheting. He moves fast for a man with a wound. Too fast. The hall flickers in and out of darkness as the backup lights glitch.
Out of nowhere, the noise he emits startles me. He begins to hum and then to sing.
Low. Uneven. Something from the barracks in another life. An old cadence to keep Marines awake when waiting on the next command.
My stomach turns.
“Stop,” I snarl.
He keeps going. “Oh, Ledger Masters,” He taunts, “always chasing ghosts, always chasing purpose.”
Rage twists my vision red. “SHUT UP!”
He laughs. “You hate when I sing. You always did.”
His voice echoes in the darkness of the room.
He moves, running toward me. He barrels out of the dark, tackling me into the wall hard enough that air blasts from my lungs. Pain explodes across my back. My gun skids across the floor.
Greene’s blade slices my arm, shallow but fast. Blood drips.
Everything becomes instinctive.
I grab his wrist, slam his hand against the wall. He grunts. I knee him in the stomach. He counters with an elbow to my jaw. Stars explode behind my eyes.
He hooks his arm around my neck—I twist, slamming him down onto the concrete.
He wheezes, flipping over, kicking my knee.
We separate.
Breathing hard. Bleeding. Stalking each other.
Darkness flickers again.
“So angry,” Greene muses. “So predictable.”
“You almost killed her,” I growl.
“No,” he corrects gently, “I did kill something, just not her. I did what you did to me, I killed your future.”
A sound tears out of me, something raw, something animal.
He smirks. “Even when she didn’t remember you, I could see it. The way she looked at you. The way you looked at her. Pathetic.”
I charge him.
He ducks.
We crash into the wall. Fists. Elbows. Knees. Blood. Concrete. Rage.
“Ledger,” he whispers, lips splitting into a grin, “you’re bleeding.”
“So are you.”
“Maybe.” He wipes his mouth. “Maybe not enough.”
He lunges again, and we go down hard. He grabs my shirt, yanking me close enough to smell the metallic stink of his breath.
“She screams pretty,” he hisses. “Kelly cried out when I approached her car, metal crunched all around her.”
Something snaps inside me. Not breaks. Not cracks.
SNAPS.
I flip him with a guttural roar, slam him onto the ground, straddle his torso, and punch.
Once.
Twice.
A third time.
His head whips back, blood splattering.
“DON’T YOU EVER SAY HER NAME!” I shout, voice ripping from my throat.
More footsteps. Shouts. Kings yelling down the hall. But I can’t comprehend them. I only hear Greene’s chuckle. Even with his face swelling, blood bubbling from his nose, he grins up at me.
“You’re not going to kill me,” he wheezes.
“Try me.”
“No,” he rasps. “Because she’s watching.”
I freeze.
Cold slices down my spine.
I turn to where he is looking. Slowly, painfully, I look to the desk where a small tablet has a screen with a video call active, It’s there I see a small figure on the screen.
Kelly.
Eyes wide with horror and something else—Fear.
“Kelly,” I breathe.
She doesn’t move.
Greene laughs under me. “See? What did I tell you? You can’t hide what you are from her.”
My hand trembles.
He sees it. He feels it. And he presses on the wound.
“She sees the monster, Ledger.”
“STOP TALKING!” I roar.
A hand clamps down on my shoulder.
I flinch, snapping my head up, Mellow is here.
Shaft. Stunt. Chux. Nitro.
They are all here circling me and hiding Kelly from seeing the monster I am more.
“Riot,” Chux says sharply, pushing through the others. “Off him.”
“He hurt her,” I rasp.
“And we need him alive,” Chux barks. “Move.”
I don’t move.
Not until Kelly whispers, voice cracking through the tablet, “Riot, please.”
My vision tunnels. Not because she’s scared of me.
No.
Because she looks heartbroken. I push off Greene’s body like it burns.
Mellow drag him up, cuffing him with reinforced zip-tie style restraints, then binding his legs. He spits blood, smiling a broken smile.
He thinks he won. He thinks I’ve lost her again. He doesn’t know Kelly at all.
But I don’t move toward the tiny screen. I can’t. I don’t trust myself.
I stay planted, breathing hard, wiping blood from my mouth, trying to shove back the darkness clawing through my ribs.
“Riot,” she whispers. “You didn’t scare me.”
My lungs seize.
“I know you. I remember you, every bit of it,” she continues, her voice getting stronger, “What I know and who you are is a man who would burn the world to protect me. A man who loves harder than he knows how to explain. A man who will withstand the storm in order to protect me from the rain.”
I swallow hard. “Kelly…”
“You’re the safest thing I’ve ever known,” she whispers. “Finish this and come to me, Ledger.”
Something breaks inside me.
Something heals at the same time. And for the first time in my life, I’m not Ledger. I’m not Riot. I’m not a soldier or a fighter or a monster built from war.
I am just hers.