Beautiful Surrender (Pride and Honor Book 4)

by Ember-Raine Winters

  “She likes dinosaurs. Why don’t you sit over there and tell her all about your favorite dinosaurs while I talk to mommy, deal?”

  His big blue eyes lit up with the information. He must really love dinosaurs. Trey handed him over to me and I put him down, holding onto his hand the whole time. If given Trey’s reaction, there was no way I was letting go of the boy. He waddled over to the chairs, tugging my hand the whole way. I nearly melted.

  As I sat there with him learning all about his favorite dinosaurs, my eyes were periodically drawn to the furious looking Trey waving his arms frantically. The longer I watched, the whiter Shelby got until she gasped in horror and looked over at me and Mikey.

  Hmmm, did he not tell her everything? She was certainly reacting as if she truly didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.

  I looked down at Mikey as he told me about his favorite dinosaur ever, the T-Rex. He roared and showed me how tiny his arms were, and I couldn’t help but giggle along with him. When he finished talking, he looked over at his dad, who was still fuming but being a bit more gentle with the now crying woman.

  “Daddy’s mad at mommy? We were supposed to stay at Grammy and Papa’s house but mommy didn’t want to.”

  “Who told you that?” I asked curiously.

  “No one, I heard Justin tell mommy we had to stay cause bad men were after daddy. Are there bad men after daddy?” he asked with his little doe eyes. I felt Trey’s presence before he spoke.

  “Daddy’s tough, right?” he asked Mikey who nodded. “No one’s gonna get me, I promise.” He ruffled Mikey’s hair and picked him up.

  “Come on, you two are staying in the building until we get this thing sorted out,” he said to Shelby gruffly as he walked passed her. No matter how much I disagreed with the decisions she made, I still kinda felt bad for her. She was scolded like a two-year-old in the middle of an airport. It had to be embarrassing.

  “No, I’m not staying at the building.” She looked at him in defiance. “You don’t control me or my life.”

  “Are you serious right now?” I asked dumbfounded. Did I just say I felt bad for this idiotic woman?

  “Whatever Shelby, do what you want. Go to the meeting. I. Don’t. Care. But, Mikey stays with me where I know my guys can protect him.”

  “You don’t even know if it’s the same guy,” she huffed out impatiently.

  Okay, so she really is an idiot.

  “You really don’t know the shit we’ve been through the last couple of months. This is no coincidence, this is a trap!” I barked.

  “Daddy, Kenzie said a bad word.”

  “Shit, shoot. I’m sorry,” I stuttered.

  “And,” Shelby turned around as if just noticing me, “who the hell are you?”

  “She’s my girlfriend so show some damn respect. She has gone through all of this with us over the last couple months and right now, I trust her with my son a lot more than I do you. So get your shit and go where ever the hell you want, Shelby, but Mikey’s coming with us,” Trey raged. He was vibrating with anger. All it took though was one stern look from Mikey and he was softening. “I know, buddy, I’m sorry. I won’t say bad words anymore.”

  “FINE! I won’t go to the meeting, but I’m not staying at the building. I’m going home,” she conceded and stormed off.

  “That’s gotta be the most sensible thing she’s said.” I muttered as we walked out of the airport, thankful that Shelby wasn’t going to put herself in the direct line of fire and potentially ruin our plans.

  It was a good thing that Trey had had enough sense earlier to grab the car that had the child seat in it or we wouldn’t have been going anywhere. We strapped Mikey in the back seat and prayed that we hadn’t been followed. The last thing that little guy needed to be a part of was a car chase, especially since I didn’t have any of my toys with me. Not that I would use them with the kid in the car.

  Thankfully, no one followed us and we made it back to the building with no in incidents. I breathed in a sigh of relief as Trey pulled the car into its spot in the underground parking garage.

  The whole mess with the airport had taken about two hours, so I wasn’t surprised when we walked in the apartment and saw a frazzled looking Buck pacing in front of the window.

  “What happened?” I asked, noticing the blood on his white shirt.

  “It’s just a graze no worries,” he said distracted.

  “Where’s Ace?” Trey looked around warily before sitting down on the sofa, Mickey still in his lap.

  “We got attacked. The whole fucking storage locker was cleaned out and someone was waiting to pick us off.” Little Mikey flinched back and I saw the regret in Bucks eyes as he cursed. “Sorry, I didn’t see him there.”

  “It’s fine. Mikey? This is daddy’s friend Buck. He might look big and scary but he’s really a nice guy, okay?” Mikey appraised Buck like only a child could and then nodded seemingly satisfied that his dad was telling the truth.

  “Can I go play, now?” he asked exasperated as only a three-year-old could.

  “Sure buddy, you know where the playroom is.” Trey smiled and placed his son on the floor before he stood up. He waited for Mikey to scamper off before asking, “Where is Ace?”

  “I’m right here. I had to stitch my side and take a shower.”

  “The storage locker was empty?” I asked again because I wasn’t sure I heard them right the first time. Brock had literally told me about it the night before.

  “Not completely. There were two men waiting with guns to try and take us out.”

  “Shit.” Trey looked at me in horror. “You didn’t tell him about the paperwork did you?”

  “No, of course not. He asked what I was doing back in LA and I told him I was following a lead on Twitch.”

  “Do you think that means Twitch is here? Why would he send men after us, if Twitch wasn’t actually here?”

  “Um… because Barnes is a sociopath?” I said like duh! “He obviously wants us dead and knows we have information that can tarnish his reputation at the least and put him away for life at the most.”

  “All I know is that Brock is at the minimum compromised, if not more,” Trey said darkly and I couldn’t help but agree.

  “What do we do now?” Buck asked quietly.

  “We wait.” Trey sighed. “My guys, the only ones I trust with the wellbeing of my son, are on a plane right now. I can’t go to the hills and get the information we need until I know my son is taken care of.”

  “The same guys that let Shelby slip through their fingers?” I raised a skeptical brow.

  “Fair point, but she’s not here and this place is sealed up tighter than Fort Knox,” he replied, determined, I think, to have at least one thing go remotely right.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  TREY

  It took nearly all day for the guys to get back to the building. I hadn’t expected anything less, but it was killing me timewise. We decided to release some more tidbits of information on Barnes out into the web.

  The brand new site had gotten ten thousand hits in the first day it was opened. Thanatos was trending on social media and the few conspiracy theorists and internet news sources that I had tipped off. They were going wild for it. This was exactly the kind of hype we needed to take him down.

  Most of the stuff we had now was circumstantial and there wasn’t enough to prove what a bad guy he truly was, but it might be enough to tip the scales of the election in the other guy’s favor. I needed more though, I needed to put this guy and every sleazy politician and drug lord he associated with behind bars forever. We were saving the video for later.

  Kenzie had broken into some county office computers to look for deeds or leases that may be in his name or under any alias or company name he may be using. She came up with a few, but they were long shots at best. She recorded the information anyway and then hacked into the security company that they used to see if she could find a
ny cameras that could help us. There was nothing. No sign of Twitch on any of the cameras. Our only hope was to blow this whole thing up and search each property one by one once we’d gotten Barnes in jail. I hated that plan—it would take too damn long with not knowing if they’d keep Twitch alive. He was stuck God knows where and there wasn’t a damn thing any of us could do to help him.

  The knock didn’t come to the door until about four in the afternoon, and I sighed with relief when I opened and my guys were standing there. They all looked like they were about to get an ass chewing, but I didn’t have time for that.

  “Three guys for one itty bitty three-year-old?” Kenzie smirked. “But I guess it didn’t matter last time, did it?”

  “Kenzie,” I warned and she laughed me off.

  “Just giving them a hard time. Lover boy over there looks extra ashamed of himself.”

  She had never met Justin before but he was easy to recognize. He had his head down and his posture was stiff. After Kenzie’s taunts, I could see the tips of his ears turning bright red.

  Mikey came running down the hall all smiles. “Justin!”

  “Hey buddy, how’re you doin’?” The man bent down to meet my son eye-to-eye. I was going to have to give him a pass at some point, but now was not the time.

  “Okay, but mommy got mad and left.”

  He stood up abruptly and questioned me. “Wait? She’s not here? You let her go off on her own with a madman out there looking for her?”

  Okay, well, clearly forgiveness not happening at the moment, moron. I couldn’t tolerate stupidity, even if he was young.

  “He’s not exactly looking for her; she had a meeting with him and I think her exact words were ‘you don’t even know if it’s the same guy so I’m going,’ or something like that.” Kenzie played stupid really well and it was so nice that she was defending me, but all this was doing was wasting time that we didn’t have.

  “Sunshine?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You’re not helping the situation.”

  “Okay.” She shrugged, turned, and walked back to her computer. I smiled in spite of myself. “Hey Mikey, why don’t you come over here and play while the stuffy grown-ups talk.”

  She winked at me, but it had the desired effect and Mikey walked over to her to play a computer game with her.

  “You. You’re just lucky I don’t fire you on the spot.” I pointed at Justin. “I don’t have time for your bullshit. Trust and believe Griffin and I will be having a talk once this is all over. Get the fuck out of here. You’re not watching my kid.”

  He looked at me in shock before it turned to rage. I could see the indecision on his too-young face before he stormed from the room. I didn’t want to be so hard on the guy. He had actually done great work for us in the past and had a natural way with kids. Leanne had clung to him after her dad tried to kidnap her and her brother. Hell, he was the reason we found them in the first place. This was all Shelby; she used her good looks to get what she wanted more than once in her life. I knew her MO, but had never wanted to really admit it.

  “Guys,” As we watched Justin stomp out the door, I looked at the other men, “can you watch Mikey for a while? I have some things to do and I need to make sure he’s protected at all costs.”

  They both nodded and walked in the room. Tony and Zack were two of my best, and I knew they wouldn’t let anything happen to him. Nodding to the others, Buck, Ace, and Kenzie got up and walked out the door.

  “Be good for these guys, okay?” I kneeled down on the floor next to Mikey.

  “Okay Daddy.” He smiled and I hugged him close, giving him a kiss on the head.

  “I’ll be back soon.”

  I really didn’t want to go back down out of the Hollywood Hills at night. I kept seeing the accident behind my eyelids every time I blinked. Unlike Mac’s injury, mine had thankfully healed up quickly even though on occasion I still felt a twinge in my arm from the break. I let out a long sigh and steeled myself for what was to come. Someone told Barnes where the stash of weapons was hidden, so now we had nothing to defend ourselves with if they tried to run us off again. It was unlikely they’d try again, since they weren’t completely successful last time. It crippled us a bit, but we survived. We would survive this and eventually life would go back to normal. That was the only way I was letting this go down.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  KENZIE

  We made it down to the parking garage in record time and I was glad for it. I hated going up to that house at this time of the day. It reminded me of how close I came to losing Trey—even before I had him. I wasn’t sure what this thing between us was, since I’d never really had an occasion to love anyone. Was that what this was? I thought about all the signs that were supposed to tell a person if they were in love and I had every one of them. Well shit. You did it now, Kenzie! The thought of being without him was literally painful and I knew I was in deep. What if we didn’t make it out of this? What if he didn’t make it out of this?

  I was totally in my head the entire trip up into the hills. When we got to the house, we asked the guys to guard the door and do a perimeter sweep to make sure we weren’t ambushed. Bob had told us everything except the location of the safe. It was a big ass house so we started in the one room Trey had already been in.

  Bob’s office looked like a fancy library. There were shelves stacked with books and a large leather office chair behind a huge mahogany desk.

  “Where would you hide a safe?”

  “Are we thinking Bob or Brock?” Trey smirked and I laughed at that.

  “Definitely Bob. At least I hope Bob didn’t take a page out of Brock’s playbook and hide it behind a painting or something.”

  “Actually…” Trey looked up at the large watercolor on the wall between two bookshelves. It was a beach scene but the blues and greens clashed with everything else in the room. It didn’t look like it belonged there at all and I rolled my eyes. Seriously, he couldn’t have been that obvious.

  Trey grabbed the painting off the wall and grinned. “Nope,” he laughed. “We’ve been hanging around with Brock too much.”

  I sat in the chair behind the desk. There was a big picture window behind me with a window seat that had drawers for storage underneath it. I looked through the desk first but got a whole lot of nothing. So, I decided to try the drawers in the seat behind me. When I found nothing that resembled a safe in there, I sighed in frustration. “Where the hell could it be? The only place we didn’t search are the book shelves.”

  “No.” Trey grinned and started pulling books off the shelves. “Maybe he’s more like Brock than we thought.”

  I agreed and walked to the other side of the room and started throwing books to the floor. This was already taking much longer than I hoped it would. Was it too much to ask that Bob just have his safe accessible? I mean, why would he give Trey all the information we needed except the location of the actual safe? I guess I can see his point. If something happened, the safe and all its contents could end up in the wrong hands, but geez give a girl a hint, would ya?

  Trey suddenly stopped me by exclaiming. “Over here”

  There was a book pulled halfway out and the shelf was moving slowly to the side.

  “Holy shit, what is wrong with these guys?” I looked to the ceiling for patience but I found none. All the older generation used the same cheesy spy movie tactics to hide their shit. It was ridiculous.

  “Come on, you know it’s cool.” Trey grinned and I couldn’t help but return it.

  Trey put in the code Bob had given him and turned the handle. There was an audible click and we smiled at each other.

  This was it. The culmination of all our hard work over the last few months. We were finally getting the information we needed on Barnes. I was giddy with excitement as Trey opened the safe and looked inside to find nothing… well at least nothing that I was expecting. I was expecting old video tapes, maybe a thick file wit
h all kinds of paperwork. But, when I looked in the safe I saw one small thumb drive. Picking it up, I turned it over in my hand a couple times and chuckled. All that clandestine nonsense for one tiny little thumb drive? It was like old school spy movie meets new world technology. Trey’s phone rang and I looked at him warily.

  “Shit. It’s Shelby,” he said with dread and the bottom fell out of my stomach.

  “Put it on speaker phone,” I whispered. I had no idea why I was whispering he hadn’t even answered the phone yet but I knew it was bad.

  “Hello Mr. Thomas,” the slimy voice of my sperm donor crackled through the phone and I knew it was bad.

  “Barnes,” he growled and I squeezed his arm in sympathy.

  “Here’s the deal. I want that file that you retrieved from Bob. I have your girlfriend, and I will kill her unless you give it to me immediately.”

  “I get a phone call from a madman, and you don’t think I’m gonna press record on the call? You’re seriously threatening to kill someone over an insecure phone line?” Trey asked smugly.

  “It would never hold up in court you and I both know that.”

  “What about the police I have sitting in the van right now listening to this whole conversation?” he bluffed.

  “Enough games Mr. Thomas. I will kill her. You have one hour to get me the file. Everything that Bob had on me or I will kill the girl.” He hung up the phone and a second later Trey’s phone beeped with a text message.

  “He just sent the address and it’s up even farther in the hills.”

  “What are we gonna do?” I asked thoughtfully. “Just give him everything we need to get him locked up forever? You know this will never end, right?”

  “I know, but he threatened to kill her. I may not like her most of the time but she’s my son’s mom and I don’t want her dead.”

  “I know,” I agreed. “But, we’re wasting time. If we want to come up with a plan let’s do it now before it’s too late.”