Chapter Seven
“How’d it go?” Pete wasted no time getting down to it.
I didn’t need to look around the long makeshift table Pete had pieced together in one of the Quonset huts. This was new—normally we met in his living room when we had briefs.
“If we’re making this HQ, we need a table and not sawhorses with OSB on top,” I commented by way of deflection.
“Afraid of getting a splinter, Sailor Boy?” Cat jabbed.
“No, Kitty Cat, it’s just the Navy taught me standards,” I shot back as I made my way around the table, opting for a seat at the opposite end of the table near Gavin.
“I know the Army’s budget made it so you grunts had to make do with your shitty accommodations, but I think we can do better than this. ”
I swept my hand around the setup.
“Aw, someone woke up with sand in his—”
Mason quickly cut off Gavin. “There are ladies present.”
I was looking directly at one of those said ladies and she was rolling her eyes at Mason, but it was the other lady, Calli, who quipped, “If he has sand in his clit, he should flush that before he gets a UTI.”
Beside me Gavin grunted his amusement. Aiden, Fallon, Jack, and Pete just let theirs be known by outright laughing.
Beckett Yates, not an official member of our team, cracked a rare smile.
But Mason just stared at his woman in what looked to be shock she’d be so vulgar as to say clit out loud in front of the team.
“Careful, Calli, our guy Ryan is a hella fact-checker,” Cat warned. “He’s probably already planning his DuckDuckGo search to prove that sand can’t cause UTIs.”
“DuckDuckGo?” Calista laughed. “What the heck is wrong with Google?”
I sighed and sat back, preparing for the onslaught of jabs. Which I’d walked straight into at the onset. All because I didn’t want to talk about Chloe.
Actually, that wasn’t true. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk about her, it was that I didn’t want to think about the exhaustion I saw last night.
I didn’t want to think about her slumped forward, falling asleep mid-conversation.
Or the piles of laundry she’d admitted she hadn’t had time to fold and put away.
I didn’t want to think about why she was so adamant about not quitting the Vault, referencing—more than once—a lack of money.
She drove an ace ride. Her apartment was three blocks from the Dirty Plank, one block up from the beach. The building was old but well kept. And rent had to cost a whack, but I knew how much she made at the bar. She wasn’t rolling in it, but neither was she destitute.
Something wasn’t adding up. Chloe didn’t strike me as someone who blew her money on frivolous purchases.
I knew she didn’t have an issue with drink or drugs, and that knowledge went beyond the random drug test all employees agreed to.
There was no way she’d be able to hide an addiction from five men who had spent their adult lives around the dregs of mankind.
Add in Jack and Cat, both of whom would’ve sniffed out an issue immediately, it was safe to say Chloe didn’t abuse drugs.
I highly doubted she gambled away the money she made working on her feet all day.
As far as I knew from the conversations I’d heard around the bar, she worked, she surfed, and she spent time with her friends. And as of this morning I knew she also spent time with her mom.
Yet she needed money. More money than she made working at the Plank. So much so she mentioned dog walking and cleaning office buildings. And she refused to listen to reason about quitting the Vault. To be fair, I never actually got to the reasoning part of quitting.
It took me a moment to realize no one around the table was heckling me.
“What? Why are you all staring at me?” I asked.
“You tell us?” Pete’s loaded question hung in the air.
This was the downside of having good friends who were more like brothers. Men who not only paid attention to every nuance but also were highly intelligent—despite behaving like toddlers most of the time.
“I figured you not coming home last night meant the two of you got shit sorted.” Gavin dropped a fucking grenade and did so with a smirk.
Dick.
“I’m kickin’ your freeloading ass out of my house,” I grumbled.
“Freeloading? When’s the last time you stepped foot into a grocery store, or took out the trash, or mowed the lawn?”
I held up my hand to stop Gavin from saying more, but the damage was done.
Aiden jumped on it faster than a rat up a drainpipe.
“Damn, I must’ve missed the wedding announcement.”
Gavin and I simultaneously flipped Aiden off.
“I think they’re cute,” Calli put in. “All domesticated, sharing chores.”
Never being one to let a good shit-talking session go to waste, Fallon jumped in. “I just want to know how you two keep your tighty-whities straight. Is this a bootcamp situation and you’ve stenciled in your names, or do you just share?”
“Maybe they color code,” Mason speculated. “Gav gets white and gray and Ryan get black and pink.”
“That tracks.” Beckett uncharacteristically joined.
My gaze slowly moved to Beck. Seeing him sitting at the table with the team was surprising in and of itself.
Him participating in slinging good-natured insults was another level of shocking.
He’d been living in one of the houses on the property, helping with the upkeep of the range and buildings but keeping to himself.
After spending years undercover in a motorcycle club in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Beck held himself apart and rarely said much about his time under, but we knew he was struggling with some of the things he’d been involved in.
The lawman forced to be a criminal.
It was a tough pill to swallow, and Beckett Yates, being a good man, was understandably choking on it.
Beck at the table was a good sign.
He’d be a welcomed addition to the team if and when he was ready.
“Maybe we can stop talking about Gavin and Ryan’s boxers and focus on work,” Pete, always the voice of reason, suggested.
“I pegged Ryan for a briefs kinda guy,” Calli stage-whispered to Cat.
“Actually, it’s Fallon who does the pegging around here and he gets testy when someone insinuates differently,” Catarina told Calli.
Pete let out a harried breath and looked between Mason and Jack. With a raise of his brow, he clearly communicated he wanted his men to get their women in hand. Cat narrowing her eyes on her somewhat new boss stated plain she didn’t misinterpret the look.
“Got something to say, Pete?” Cat pressed.
“Nope. I got nothing,” he muttered, but then decided he did because he continued.
“But just to say, Ryan’s got to get to the Plank, Gavin apparently has a lawn to mow and groceries to buy, and I’ve got calls to make, so if you ladies wouldn’t mind holding off discussing who pegs who, that’d be helpful.
And for your trouble I’ll tell you we called Fallon Shit for Brains for a whole deployment while we were in Germany. ”
“Shitty for short,” Mason educated.
Fallon groaned while the rest of us busted out laughing.
“The good old days,” Aiden said through his laughter.
“Sure, if eating meals that refuse to exit and sand fleas are what you consider a good time,” Mason noted.
“Right. Sand. Let’s get back to why Ryan walked in here looking like his balls were chafed,” Gavin the asshole proposed.
I’d rather talk about Fallon’s misadventure into scat porn. Which, if the look on his face was anything to go by, he wasn’t all that fired up to explain his accidental discovery and subsequent nickname.
“She’s working there because she’s got money troubles,” I told the room.
“Did you explain why we were there?” Pete asked.
“Didn’t get that far before she fell asleep.”
Aiden snickered. My gaze slid to him, and I shook my head.
“No, brother, she literally fell asleep while I was talking. Sitting on her couch full of laundry she hadn’t gotten around to folding because she’s been too busy.
The woman was dead on her feet. Not the kind of tired from slinging drinks all night, rolling in at four in the morning.
The kind of tired that settles in your bones.
She mentioned cleaning office buildings and dog walking.
After she fell asleep, I snooped. Fridge is empty except for condiments.
Kitchen spotless. Nothing in her trash. She’s not eating there.
Clean clothes on the couch, dirty laundry piling up in the hamper, her bathroom was a mess.
It looked like she goes home, crashes, wakes up, does her business, and leaves.
She doesn’t spend time there, likely because, as she said, she’s too busy.
She’s working two, maybe three jobs, and we all know how much our employees make because we cash them out.
She’s not getting rich working at the Plank, but—”
“But she’s pulling in a good living,” Gavin interjected.
“Did you get anything from her this morning?” Pete asked.
“I snooped. I folded her clothes. Laid down on the couch to catch a few hours of sleep so I’d be ready for her this morning. But she had a call from her mom that seemed urgent, so I didn’t stick around and make her later than she already was.”
“I’ll run her,” Fallon offered.
I checked my watch and nodded. I needed to get back to the beach for my shift at the bar.
“I talked to Shep this morning,” Pete started.
“There’s no electronic footprint for the Vault.
I think it’s safe to say, they’re running the club old school—Rolodexes and ledgers.
The card Muriel gave me last night confirms this theory.
I have a phone number for Mr. Mercer. No email, no website.
The club is by invitation only, from membership requests to nonmember nights.
Dorian Whitmore is willing to sponsor us, but that’s committing roughly half a million in fees. ”
Christ.
Pete zeroed in on me, and I knew that look.
It was the same expression I’d seen when shit was fucked and he had a plan to get us unfucked but none of us were going to like the plan.
Typically, these tactics included bloodshed, pain, and destruction.
Further, they included us taking heavy fire while we got our asses out of whatever clusterfuck we’d found ourselves in.
Needless to say, I wasn’t fond of the look. Being on the receiving end of it during this particular discussion, I was less so.
“Or we can talk to Chloe. Explain to her what’s going on and coach her to get us the intel we need.”
There it was.
Every cell in my body protested. My ears revolted, desperately wanting to unhear Pete’s suggestion. My gut churned and my throat clogged with something that tasted a lot like over my dead body.
“If she doesn’t feel like she can do it, or simply doesn’t want to be involved, we’ll pay the half a million and get us in. But that means the long game.”
My vote was for the long game. It would take time for us to get in and get the lay of the land. More time to earn trust. Even more to find our way into the inner circle. It wasn’t like we could go in and start asking around if anyone knew where we could order up a woman.
“Or we can skip talking to Chloe altogether and pay the fees,” I suggested.
Though my proposal was less of a suggestion and more of demand.
I already wasn’t a fan of the look on Pete’s face. I was less so when he leaned back in his chair and frowned. “Shep found two missing women connected to the Vault.”
His announcement was an unwelcomed punch to the gut. So the long game talk was bullshit. We needed an in, and we needed it quickly.
“Connected how?” Gavin inquired.
“A bartender, Lucy Macmillan, went missing two years ago. A coat check girl, Amber Sadler’s been gone thirteen months.”
Fuck.
“Missing? So, no bodies have been found?” Cat queried.
“No bodies,” Pete confirmed.
The cold hard reality was, no body didn’t mean alive. The flip side to that was those women could right now be living a nightmare, wishing they were dead.
So, yeah, fuck me, there was no long game.
I was contemplating kidnapping Chloe and taking her to Pete’s bugout location deep in the Alaskan wilderness—no cell service, no easy way in or out, when Gavin kicked my leg under the table.
“Jesus, I know that look,” Gavin groused. “Kidnapping is illegal.”
I didn’t know what my expression telegraphed, but I’d never considered kidnapping a woman before. So he was guessing, albeit his presumption was correct.
“I hate to pull the woman card here, but she does get a say whether or not she wants to be involved,” Catarina reasoned.
She wasn’t wrong—normally. But this had nothing to do with Chloe being a woman and everything to do with her not having the first fucking clue about undercover work.
“She’s not trained,” I pointed out.
“But we all are,” Cat parried. “As Pete said, we’ll coach her, and it’s not like we’d just send her in. We’d have her back.”
And that wouldn’t do a bit of good if she was whisked off onto a private jet, taken overseas, and sold before we could get to her.
Worst-case scenarios ran rampant through my mind until all I could think about was Chloe’s beautiful body used and abused.
I blinked away the horrific images and looked at Beck.
A trained DEA law enforcement officer still struggling with the aftermath of undercover work. There were some things you couldn’t unsee. Conversations so horrific you couldn’t erase them from your memory. Deeds you were forced to do to keep your cover that would haunt you for the rest of your life.
I was staring at Beck, but I didn’t need to look at the man to know the struggle. It lived inside of me—plagued my dreams, invaded my DNA until it had fundamentally changed me.
The last thing I wanted was for sweet, happy, funny Chloe to be touched by the filth we dealt with.
The fuck of it was, I didn’t get a say.
At least, not yet.
“If she agrees, I’ll walk her through it,” Beck said.
And suddenly it made sense why Beck was sitting at a table when he never sat in on meetings. Pete had already talked to him. Which meant Pete already had the mission planned—all he needed was to convince Chloe to work with us and it would be go time.
“I don’t fucking like this.” I spat my understatement.
“Ryan—”
Before Pete could say something that would further piss me off, I spoke over him. “I’m going to do what I can to convince her to quit.” I warned. “If I can’t, there’s zero chance she continues working there without me a member.”
“I already called Mercer and left a message we’re interested in membership.”
Motherfucker.
Out-fucking-played by one of my closest friends.