Chapter Fifty-Three

Safiya

I f I had taken anything away from the last eight years, it should have been to expect the unexpected.

He had taught me that.

He had also taught me to watch for the signs.

But I was not looking for a six-foot-two dark-blond man who moved like a ghost, and I was not keeping a vigilant watch on my surroundings for anything that seemed out of place.

I was not looking at anything.

I was thinking about the conversation with a man who owned a security company and was housing sixteen women who were all like me—stolen and collected—and I was replaying one sentence Mr. Trefor had said.

You're unfinished business.

He had said it so matter-of-factly, as if my life was transactional and at the hands and whims of men in high-rise towers and paramilitary operatives who served no government and had no agency.

The seed of anger that had rooted within grew tendrils as I stepped off the elevator and into the lobby. But it did not fully blossom until an impossibly muscled, obscenely tall man with more tattoos than virgin flesh appeared in front of me and blocked my escape.

"Alpha said you need a ride."

I looked up at the man whose eyes were not any one color. "Are you a SEAL too?"

He half snorted, half smirked. "Is that a prerequisite for driving you somewhere?"

I made the assumption that Alpha was Adam Trefor. "I did not ask Mr. Trefor for his help."

One of his eyebrows lifted, but his gaze narrowed as he glanced down at me. "That's not what I heard."

"Are there not other women upstairs to concern yourself with?" Most of them had looked frightened and confused. They had also looked as desperate as I felt when they had looked at the sole reason for their presence there.

"Plenty," the tattooed SEAL answered. "But none like you."

I stupidly asked the same question I had asked another SEAL not five minutes ago. "Meaning?"

"You've got Ghost stamped all over you, and since I hate that motherfucker and you're bailing, I'm man enough to admit I'll take satisfaction in any exfil plan you got that pisses him off."

I pointed out the fault in his thinking. "Grayson has already left. He is not concerned with my whereabouts."

He gave me his sardonic half snort again. "Whatever you gotta tell yourself. You want a ride or not?"

I hated to admit that even now, after everything, I still hungered for information about Grayson like a starving man craves crumbs. Good, bad, worse, frightening—anything this tattooed man was willing to tell me, I wanted to hear. But I also knew I should not ask. Grayson's religion was his protocols, and secrecy was his god. He expected nothing less from me, but that was before I had seen what I had upstairs. Now the questions I had refused to ask Grayson, the ones I did not want to give him the satisfaction of asking, were eating at me.

I wanted to know if he had married all those women. If he had relationships with them. If he had given them all fancy houses and bank accounts and demanding rules. I wanted to know if he talked to them like he had talked to me over the years. If he cared for them how he had cared for me. I stupidly, desperately, wanted to know.

All of it.

But I was not so ignorant that I did not recognize that the man in front of me was an almost identical shade to Grayson. Not that they physically resembled each other beyond their height and hard-earned muscles, but the look in their eyes, the way they moved, the ever-present awareness of their surroundings, the lethality that leaked out of them—it was all the same color.

Except these men were not sheep.

I could not push them for information any more than I could push my way past the tattooed wall of a man standing between me and the lobby exit. If I wanted answers from him, I would have to carefully step around his ego, training, and dominance.

Choosing a question that personally involved him, I started with what I thought he would be the most willing to talk about. "Why do you hate him?"

"Sixteen trafficked women that he bought and dumped are sitting upstairs looking like lost fucking deer, and you're asking me why I hate the motherfucker?"

Bought? "Purchased?"

"Did I stutter?"

My soul crushed even further. "How do you know this?"

"How do you think he got them?"

"I…." I could not think about this. I could not even process it. If he had purchased them, did that mean…? I sucked in a desperate breath, then another before silently praying for my voice, my heart, to not disintegrate any further as I forced myself to speak. "Is this not a security company? Where else was Grayson supposed to take the women if they needed to be safe?"

"Is this not the twenty-first century?" he asked, mocking my pattern of speech.

"I do not know what that is supposed to mean."

"It means you're shit for women's rights."

Defensiveness crawled up my spine and spread like pins and needles. "I do not appreciate you speaking to me that way, Mister…?"

"Echo. No Mister, and I speak how I speak. You want placating bullshit, keep hanging out with the motherfucker who brought you here. But forewarning, this is his MO."

"MO?" I had heard the acronym before, but I had never looked it up.

"Making a mess, then disappearing," the tattooed SEAL amended. "It's his fucking specialty."

I could not swallow past the horrible thoughts churning up my throat like bile. "So that is why you hate him?" Despite the last pieces of my heart being irreparably crushed into dust, I would not call the rescued women upstairs a mess.

The frightening man's gold-and-green-eyed gaze locked on to me, and for a single breath, he stared hard. Then his voice dropped to a lethal calmness that was more terrifying than his deadly presence. "I hate every piece-of-shit motherfucker that abuses women."

Shock hitched my breath. Then I was defending a man who had done nothing but keep me hostage and walk away from me time and time again before I could even think about what I was saying. "Grayson does not hit women."

His stare held.

Anxiety rippled through me so intensely that both my body and my voice shook. "He has never harmed me." Except I did not say the truth like a declaration. I whispered the words as if I were lying to myself.

The SEAL's nostrils flared, then his expression shut down as he punched the elevator call button with the side of his fist. "You want a ride, we're leaving now." The doors slid open, and he stepped onto the lift.

Facing the choice between getting myself back to the house Grayson had evacuated me from for safety reasons versus getting a ride from a man who looked like he pulled the trigger for a living, I did not even pretend to hesitate.

I got on the elevator.