ASHFORD (Gray Wolf Security #5) (13 page)

Mina

I held the phone in my hands, trying to convince myself I was doing the right thing.

If David knew I’d lifted his phone out of his pocket…all those weeks on the streets when I first arrived in Los Angeles had really paid off. But I’d never thought I would pick the pocket of someone I considered a friend.

If my plan worked, I might save Ash and his friends. If it didn’t…I didn’t want to think about that.

This had to end. And I had to prove to Ash that I didn’t betray him.

I knew the number by heart. I dialed, my heart pounding.

“Let me talk to Dimitri.”

Ash

Tension was palpable when I walked into the office. Kate stared me down as if she was the head cheerleader staring down the girl who dared to challenge her authority. Joss wouldn’t look at me at all. Donovan and David walked up to me, their shoulders high and wide, tight with unasked questions and unshakable loyalty.

“What the fuck?” Carrington demanded. “You run out of here without a word and then we get word that Detective Warren was shot? Do you know how scared everyone is?”

I ignored him, crossing the room to my desk to find the key to the armory.

I was a career Army man. I didn’t believe in being unprepared. When I bought this house, I installed what was essentially a very large gun safe in the basement. There was enough firepower down there to take out a dozen terrorists. Against the handguns and rifles the cartel had, we could probably take out the whole crew and then some with what was down there.

Donovan’s eyes widened when he saw what I was doing.

“Ash,” he said, pressing his hand to my chest.

“Get out of my way!”

“Don’t you think we should talk about this?”

“They beat Rose until they were convinced she was dead. Then they rammed Emily’s car and used a machine gun to pulverize her door. What more is there to talk about?”

“I know you’re upset. Everyone’s upset. But we can’t—”

“Get out of my way, Donovan.”

The room fell deadly silent. I stared at the man I considered my best friend, prepared to punch him if he didn’t move. I was doing this. If they wanted to go along, great. If not, I was still going.

This had to end.

I was about to say that when the sound of crying floated down the stairs to us. I knew instantly that it wasn’t Ford’s normal cry. I shoved Donovan out of my way, but not to go to the armory. There was something wrong.

The bedroom door was partially closed. I pushed through it, rushing to the basinet. Ford’s little face was bright red, his little hands and feet flailing at an invisible enemy. I picked him up, and he continued to wail for a long moment, these funny little hiccups shaking his entire body when he finally settled down.

It wasn’t until then that I realized Mina was gone.

And David’s cell phone was propped up on the nightstand.

“Is he okay?” Joss asked from the doorway.

I took the baby to her, kissing his temple before I handed him over. I didn’t miss the look of amusement in her eye as she watched. However, my thoughts were on that cell phone.

David’s phone had a note-taking app that he used often to make notes about his programs. It was already pulled up when I unlocked the phone—David was a smart guy, but he wasn’t smart enough to use a password harder than Ricki’s name.

“I didn’t betray you,”
the note she’d left said.
“I was frightened. But I’m not anymore. You gave me strength and courage. Now it’s my turn to make things right.”

“Oh, hell!”

“What?”

“They’ve got her.”

Mina

It wasn’t hard to slip out of the house. Everyone was so focused on something about Detective Warren that they didn’t see me when I slipped down the stairs. I went out the back door, careful not to make a sound when I closed it. From there, I just had to avoid the security guards walking the perimeter of the fence. That wasn’t hard. I’d been watching them all morning and I had the rhythm down pat.

Dimitri hadn’t been surprised to hear from me and that surprised me a little. I thought I was a little less predictable than that. It also hadn’t taken much to convince him that he didn’t need the baby to inconvenience his plans at this point. There was no way I was going to take away Ford’s chance at a normal life. I had every confidence that Ash would take care of him if things didn’t go the way I was hoping they would.

“Meet us on the highway behind the compound. We’ll be there in an hour.”

That’s where I was waiting, pacing the side of the road. I told him I’d left to help him, to get information on his enemy for him. I told him that I’d be able to show him how to get into the compound.

He believed me.

He was a fool.

The knife was concealed in the sleeve of my sweatshirt. I found it in Ash’s closet, hidden in the back with a few other choice weapons that made me wonder about his sense of security. But, again, after all the things he’d probably seen during his service, I suppose the small cache of weapons was understandable. And it was a huge help in my plan against Dimitri. He’d come in for a kiss and I’d slip the knife out, easy as can be. Once Dimitri was dead, his men would fall into chaos and Ash would be safe.

And, maybe, he’d trust me again.

Worst-case scenario, Dimitri would see it coming and kill me.

Either way, things didn’t look good for me. But Ford was safe and sound at the compound, and I had all the faith in the world that Ash would look out for him. Ash would survive this thing no matter how it went for me. And he’d be the best father Ford could hope to want. Maybe it was best for Ford that I was out of the picture. The kid didn’t need a mom who couldn’t tell the truth even to the man who was generous in taking care of them. He needed a mom who was as kind and gentle as Ash. Maybe he’d get one someday.

Paused in my pacing to look down the road. I could see the dust of an approaching vehicle. It was time. For better or for worse…

They pulled to a stop alongside me and tore open the side door of the van. Andre, one of Dimitri’s closest lieutenants, reached out and grabbed my arm, dragging me inside.

“Welcome back, Mina,” he said.

“Where’s Dimitri?”

“You’ll see him soon enough. He’s a little busy right now.”

“Doing what?”

“Taking care of your new boyfriend.”

I tried to twist around, to look Andre in the eye. “What do you mean?”

Andre eyed me with the bitterness of a lifelong criminal. “You didn’t really think that Dimitri needed you to show him how to get onto that property, did you? We’ve been planning this for a very long time. Dimitri knows what he’s doing. You giving yourself up was just the icing on a cake that was already nearly complete.”

“No…”

“He’ll have his son very soon, too.”

“No!”

Andre shoved me into the back of the van, yanking my arms behind my back. I tried to pull away, but his grip was too hard. He had some zip ties that he easily slipped around my wrists. As he tied me up, he felt my arm and found the knife.

“Look at this,” he said to his comrades as he held the knife up. “Planning on hurting someone, were we?”

“No,” I said. “I was just hoping to kill Dimitri.”

They laughed. “Like a little girl. Like you could even hurt a single hair on Dimitri’s head!”

Andre pushed me down against the floor of the van, hard. Then he leaned close and whispered in my ear, “I’d kill you now if it were my choice. But Dimitri, he wants that pleasure for himself.”

Ash

“How do we know that she didn’t go willing to them?” Donovan wanted to know. “How do we know that she didn’t go to give them information on how to get onto the property?”

“Because she doesn’t know anything about our security system,” I said, watching the feeds on David’s computers. “I never told her, and I assume none of you ever did.”

They looked at each other, but I already knew the answer. None of them had talked to her about much more than the weather and Ford the whole time she was living here. They’d never wanted to talk to her. But now she was gone, and suddenly, they were all very interested in her.

“Mina lied about her relationship with Dimitri Avdonin, but I don’t think she lied about anything else. Her loyalties lie with us.”

“Then why did she go to them? Why did she leave here?” Joss asked.

I knew why. I’d accused her of betraying me. I accused her of things I knew deep in my heart that she’d not done. However, I wasn’t going to explain myself to them. That part was between Mina and me to hash out when we got her back. Because we were going to get her back.

David moved up behind me and touched the screen of one computer. I’d already seen it. They were outside the fence, trying to find a weak spot, a place where they could get in. They were being careful, not touching anything, keeping their faces turned from the security cameras. They thought they were being smart, but they had no clue just how complex our security really was.

There was no way in hell they were getting through that fence short of hiring a magician to poof them over from the other side.

“I’m not going to ask any of you to do this with me,” I said as I watched, never taking my eyes from the computer monitor. “This is my fight. This is my girl, my responsibility.”

“It’s not just your fight,” Kirkland said. “Rose is part of us. So is Emily.”

“Sorry bastards targeting the women. So cowardly,” Donovan said.

“We’re a family,” David said, resting his hand on my shoulder.

“We’re in it together. Have been and always will be.”

I looked at Joss, at the tow-headed baby in her arms. “I won’t ask you to do this, Joss. You have too much to lose.”

“So do you.”

I wanted to argue with her. She’d already lost so much. But hadn’t we all?

Donovan lost his best friend. Joss lost her family. Kirkland lost his first love. And David and I lost our parents. So much loss. But we were finally putting our lives back together, beginning new families, growing roses out of shit. It was our time to be happy, and I was going to be damned if I was going to let some two-bit gangster ruin it for us.

“We do this on our terms. We take the fight to them. Tonight.”

I looked each of them in the eye, searched for even the slightest bit of doubt. I saw hatred. I saw anger. I even saw fear. But there was no doubt.

“Mina told me where their headquarters is. I think we could infiltrate it pretty easily.” He leaned forward and typed a few things into his computer, and new pictures suddenly appeared. “I was able to hack their security feeds. This,” he said, touching a door on one particular screen, “seems to be the best place to start.”

We were going to do this. We were going to end it once and for all.

My eyes flicked back to the screen showing the Russian fools trying to break through our fence. Just as I looked, one of the idiots was fried by the high voltage that ran through every inch of the specially designed wrought iron. The man was dead before he hit the ground. Another turned and ran, a coward if there ever was one. Out of frustration, Dimitri fired a bullet at the fence, and it immediately sparked, dying out just on the other side. Then he looked up at the camera, and his mouth moved slowly, deliberately.

I’ll be back.

“You do that, asshole.”

Mina

Dimitri was angry when he burst into the living room where I was tied to a chair. He was cursing in Russian as he often did when something didn’t go his way. Then his eyes fell on me, and he was as still as a human being could possibly be, nothing moving, not even his chest. It was as if he’d stopped breathing completely.

“Your boyfriend thinks he’s pretty smooth,” he finally said.

“Smarter than you.”

That pissed him off. He backhanded me, slapping me so hard that the chair fell over, smashing my arm between it and the floor. I bit my lip to keep from crying out, even when one of his guys stepped on my fingers when he came to sit me upright again.

“How do we get past the fence?”

“You really thought I was going to give you information on the Gray Wolf compound?”

“You lived there for nearly two months, so, yeah, that’s what I think.”

“You’ll be waiting an awful long time.”

“I don’t think so.”

He pulled a knife out from behind his back, moving close to me as he played with it between his hands. It was the same knife I’d taken from Ash’s closet.

“You were going to kill me. Me. The father of your child.”

“Ford is better off without you.”

“Ford? That’s not his name.”

“It is. Short for Ashford. As in Ash Grayson.”

Dimitri shook his head. “His name is Dimitri. We can call him Misha, like that actor on that silly show you watch.”

“No. His name is Ford.”

Dimitri moved closer to me, running the blade of the knife against my cheek. “We call my son what I want to call him.”

“He’s yours in blood only. You will never see him. You will never touch him.”

“We’ll see. When this thing is over, you’ll be grateful to have that child because he’s the only thing keeping you alive.”

I looked up, meeting his gaze directly. “If you get my son, then you can kill me because I don’t want to watch you turn him into a monster like you.”

Dimitri laughed as though I’d said something incredibly funny. And then he hit me again, sending me sailing to the floor once again. I was pretty sure I felt something snap in my wrist, the pain excruciating as it burst through my body. But I didn’t scream. Didn’t even grit my teeth. I wasn’t going to give Dimitri the pleasure of seeing my pain.

His man lifted me up again, and Dimitri climbed onto my lap, his dark eyes smoldering as he pressed the knife to my throat hard enough to nick me with just the smallest cut.

“Tell me how to get into the compound.”

“Call Ash and tell him you’re coming. I’m sure he’d be happy to open the front gates and welcome you in.”

“He’s a coward, this Ash. He was there, watching us on camera while we tried to get over the fence. If he’d wanted a confrontation right there, he would have shown up. But I stood there for twenty minutes and nothing.” He shook his head again, amusement bringing a spark to his eyes. “Your boyfriend is afraid of me.”

“I doubt that. He was just playing with you. Letting you get over-confident.”

“Bullshit! He’s a chicken.”

I looked up at him, at his dark, good looks. I could see why all the girls at the strip club were so jealous when he chose me. He was a handsome man. He could have been a good companion, a good lover. If he weren’t so sadistic. I’d been happy when he chose me. Now I’d give anything to go back to that sorry job and trade places with any of those other girls. At least what I did there, even if it was off the books, was better than the things I’d had to do since.

Except for Ash. He was the only good thing I’d done since leaving home.

Ash and Ford.

“Why him?” Dimitri suddenly asked. “Why did you choose him?”

“Because you hate him. I figured he’d be the best person to protect me.”

Dimitri pressed that knife tighter against my throat. “After everything I did for you. After everything I gave you. How could you turn on me like that? Go to my worst enemy and raise my child there?”

“He’s a good man. The total opposite of you.”

He hit me again, this time with the butt of the knife. I couldn’t help but cry out this time, regretting it the instant I saw satisfaction in his eye.

Just like my father, he got off on the false sense of power that came with beating a woman. I’d left home to escape that life, to escape the fear and the shame that came with living day in and day out with domestic violence. But then I let myself be taken in by a man who was exactly the same as the one I’d escaped.

This was my fate. No matter what I did, I somehow knew I’d always end up back here.

“How do we get into the compound?” Dimitri asked again.

“You don’t. You wait for him to come to you.”

Dimitri laughed. There was real amusement in it, as though he really believed Ash would never come looking for him. He was going to be surprised.

“Tell me,” he said, running the tip of the knife against my throat, “what did he do that brainwashed you so completely?”

“He delivered my baby. And he gave us a safe home.”

“I gave you a home.”

“You terrorized me.”

“I gave you a place to live. I gave you jewels and clothes. I bought that damn crib that you insisted on.”

“You beat me.”

Dimitri’s eyes narrowed as he moved closer to me. “You don’t even know what a beating is,” he whispered against my ear. “Yet.”

I couldn’t help the shiver than ran down my spine. I closed my eyes as he asked again, “How do we get into the compound.”

“He’s coming here.”

“He doesn’t know where
here
is.”

I opened my eyes slowly, a smile slipping over my lips. The look on Dimitri’s face made it all so worth it.

And then he raised his hand, and the world went dark.