Warrior Security (Lark’s Song #5)

Chapter 1

Logan Stroud

The carpet in the seventh-floor corridor was the color of dried blood, with an ugly diamond pattern, worn flat from years of luggage wheels and housekeeping carts.

I’d been staring at it for four minutes, which was long enough to decide that whoever had chosen it had either been color-blind or sadistic.

“Two in the east stairwell,” Travis Hale said through my earpiece. He was the eyes and ears of Warrior Security, providing us real-time info from his bunker a couple hundred miles away. “Passing the fifth floor. Moving with purpose.”

I adjusted my grip on my weapon and kept my eyes on the corridor ahead.

Thirty feet of bad carpet between me and the stairwell door.

The client’s suite was behind us. Ryan Cooper—Coop—was inside with him.

Beckett Sinclair was three feet to my left, pressed into a shallow doorway alcove that gave him a decent angle on the same stretch of hallway.

“Armed?” Hunter Everett’s voice. Calm and unhurried, the way it had been all night. He’d built Warrior Security from the ground up, and he was positioned near the elevator bank around the corner, covering the second access point to this floor.

“Both carrying. Handguns visible, could have more under the jackets. They’re not trying to be subtle about it.”

“Copy. Seventh floor is cleared of civilians?”

“Confirmed. Hotel management pulled everyone thirty minutes ago. You’ve got an empty floor except for the client.”

I exhaled through my nose. Adjusted my stance. The fluorescent light above me buzzed at a frequency that lived right behind my left eye.

I’d been in Garnet Bend for one week, training with the Warrior Security guys, learning the way they moved and talked and thought.

How Hunter ran things clean, no ego, no theatrics.

How Beckett could crack a joke at a whisper thirty seconds before a breach and then go dead silent when it mattered.

How Coop held a room like he’d been born in one.

How Travis fed information from off-site with a voice that never wavered, even when the information was bad news.

I’d spent the last few months trying to find something that worked.

A routine. A reason to get up. A place where the skills I had meant something and the structure I needed existed.

Private security contractor jobs had kept me moving after the Army, but that had fallen apart spectacularly a few months ago.

So when Hunter had called and said there was an opening with Warrior Security if I wanted it, I’d packed my shit and headed to a tiny town in Montana.

And here I was, standing in this corridor, comms live, a team around me, a job in front of me. My pulse was steady and my breathing was even. The noise in my head had gone quiet for the first time in longer than I could remember.

Everything I’d been grinding through for months, all the sleepless nights and empty days, and here, right now, I felt like I could do this. Like maybe the worst of it was behind me and this was what came next.

“Sixth floor,” Travis said. “Still two. No visual on a third, but the lobby feed showed three entering the building.”

“So we’ve got one unaccounted for,” Hunter said.

“For now.”

Beckett shifted beside me. “Great. A scavenger hunt. My favorite.”

The corner of my mouth twitched. Beckett caught it and gave me a look that said he’d consider that a win.

“Logan, Beckett, hold that corridor,” Hunter said. “Perps come through the stairwell door, they meet you. Coop, stay with the client. Nobody moves him until I say.”

“Copy.” Coop’s voice from inside the suite.

“Copy,” I said.

Beckett and I settled into the silence. The stairwell was at the far end of the hall. A heavy fire door, the kind that closed on a hydraulic arm and sealed with a metal click. The hostiles would have to come through it single file. Tight space, limited angles.

Advantage: us.

I could hear them now. Movement behind the stairwell door. The dull thud of boots on concrete, getting closer.

“They’re on seven,” Travis confirmed. “Right outside the door.”

Beckett’s chin dropped a fraction of an inch. Ready.

The stairwell door cracked open. No one came through. A hand came around the edge and fired three blind rounds down the corridor. I pressed flat into the alcove. The shots hit nothing—wall, carpet, wall—but that wasn’t the point. The point was to make us flinch.

It bought them two seconds. The door swung wide, and both hostiles pushed through together, moving low, splitting apart the moment they cleared the frame.

They’d done this before. The first one went left and found cover behind a housekeeping cart that had been parked against the wall.

The second went right, dropped to a knee, and fired twice toward Beckett.

Beckett swore once, short and vicious, and pressed deeper into his alcove.

I leaned out and fired at the first hostile. He ducked back behind the cart. The second one used the opening to move forward, closing the distance.

That was the problem with a thirty-foot corridor. It didn’t stay thirty feet for long.

The second hostile fired again. The round chewed into the doorframe by Beckett’s shoulder, spraying splinters. Beckett couldn’t return fire without stepping into the first hostile’s line. They were boxing us, one holding Beckett in place while the other pushed up the hallway toward me.

The first hostile came out from behind the cart. He was fifteen feet from me, moving fast. I stepped out of the alcove to meet him because letting him get closer on his terms was worse than closing the distance on mine.

We both fired. His round went past my ear, close enough that I felt the air move. Mine hit him in the shoulder and spun him sideways. He didn’t go down. He swung the gun back toward me with his other hand, but by then, I was on top of him.

I grabbed the slide and drove the barrel at the ceiling.

He squeezed off one more round into the plaster above us.

I stripped the weapon and tossed it behind me.

He swung at my head and connected with my jaw hard enough that I tasted copper.

I took it, got behind his arm, and drove him face first into the wall.

His forehead hit the plaster and his legs quit.

I looked over and found Beckett had made quick work of his bad guy also. I zip-tied the first hostile’s wrists behind his back. Beckett had the second man facedown on the carpet, knee in his spine, pulling a zip tie tight. Blood on Beckett’s knuckles. A raw scrape up his forearm.

“Two tangos down on seventh floor,” I said into comms. “Situation contained.”

“Copy,” Hunter said. “Travis, the third?”

Silence on the line. Three seconds. Five.

“I lost him.” Travis’s voice had changed. Tighter, faster. “He was behind the other two on the fourth-floor feed, and then he wasn’t. Could’ve exited on five or six. Could still be coming up.”

Beckett stood and wiped his knuckles on his pants. “Could’ve is going to get us all shot if we’re not careful.”

“I’m checking every feed I’ve got.”

Hunter made the call fast. “Logan, Beckett. Get to the suite. Move the client out through the service corridor to the freight elevator. Secondary route. Use it now. Local PD are going to be coming in soon, and then things will really go to shit.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“I’ll find our third. Go.”

Beckett and I moved. The two men on the floor weren’t going anywhere. We left them and went down the corridor toward the suite.

The hallway was quiet now. That was worse. The known threat was behind us, handled. The unknown threat was somewhere in the building, and every closed door we passed was a question I couldn’t answer.

I was on point. Beckett was behind me, covering our six. We moved the way you move when someone might be around any corner. Smooth, controlled, every doorway a potential problem.

Twenty feet from the suite.

Fifteen.

Somewhere on the floor, a door slammed.

It was just a door. A heavy hotel room door caught by its hydraulic arm and released, swinging shut with a thick, percussive thud. That was all it was.

The hallway split right before my eyes.

The carpet under my boots became packed dirt.

The fluorescent light above me was sunlight cutting through a shattered wall.

The door that slammed was still slamming, except it wasn’t a door anymore.

It was the concussive punch that comes before the ringing, the one that hits your chest before your ears catch up.

I was moving. My body didn’t stop because ten years of training had built a machine that ran whether I was inside my own body or not. My feet kept going, my hands stayed where they were supposed to be.

But my eyes weren’t tracking the corridor ahead. They were tracking a doorway in a building I’d cleared six years ago in Kabul, and the light cutting through it was wrong. Too bright, too sharp, coming from an angle that didn’t exist in a hotel in Spokane.

Sounds bent. Travis’s voice in my earpiece stretched thin and then compressed, layering over radio chatter that hadn’t existed for years. Someone was talking. Someone was always talking. The ringing was there underneath everything, the way it always was underneath everything.

Three seconds. Five.

“Stroud. Yo, Logan.”

Beckett’s voice. Not the first time he’d said my name.

“Logan. Hey, you good?”

The alley in Kabul disappeared and the hotel snapped back all at once.

The ugly carpet, the buzzing fluorescent, the stale recycled air.

My stomach dropped and my vision swam before it steadied.

I blinked, and the corridor in front of me was just a corridor.

No sunlight, no dust, no shattered concrete.

“Good,” I said. “Moving.”

We kept going. Beckett didn’t push it. But I caught his look at me. A fast sideways glance, there then gone. He was filing it away. He didn’t know what he’d just seen, but he knew it was something, and he wouldn’t forget.