Chapter Seventeen
Luke
I head down the stairs with every intention of figuring out who I need to kill right now. After all, as Ana said, in not so direct terms—I’m a killer.
We both know you know how that goes.
She was talking about my first kill morphing into a hell of a lot more—too many, the kind of numbers that only a few men in Walker even understand. Savage does. He was another version of me, an assassin for the government. Before Savage, I told myself I was different than the rest of the lot Kurt trained. I was a pilot, and being a pilot drew a line in the sand between me and all the rest. But then, Savage is a surgeon, and a skilled one at that, and yet he only defines himself as a killer.
We don’t. He saves lives as well as he takes them.
His wife sees him as a hero.
Though he didn’t kill her brother, either.
I step into the living room to find Adam sitting on the couch, watching TV and pigging out of a bag of potato chips. For just a moment, I think back to how I got here, counting on him and the Walker team when I was hell-bent on never trusting a damn soul again after Kasey and Trevor turned on me. Not that I ever really trusted those assholes, but Kasey was family, whether he liked it or not. To my family, my mom and dad, family had mattered. Family was the good, the bad, and the ugly, just as it was supposed to be with Ana and her people.
When I left her, I abandoned my overseas missions for private hire work for the government, doing what I decided back then I did best—killing people, bad people. The job had taken me to Kansas City, Missouri of all places. A small, friendly city, where a really bad guy who’d been hired by another really bad guy, decided to hide out at a Hilton hotel with a woman, a government informant he’d kidnapped. She knew things he planned to torture out of her.
Walker had been hired by the woman’s family. The government had hired me.
The hired bad guy was supposed to be alone. He was not. Adam got to him before me, killed him, grabbed the woman, and was about to take a bullet in the back. I killed his intended shooter and then held a gun on him.
Adam, cool as a cucumber, meets my stare and says, “You saved me, man. You actually going to kill me now?”
“Let the woman go and we’ll talk.”
“If I let her go, you may well take her or kill her. I can’t let that happen. Her family expects me to bring her home alive.”
“I came to kill her attacker and set her free, not kill her. How do I know you came to do the same?”
“Can I call my family?” the woman asks.
Adam arches a brow at me. I pull my phone from my pocket and kneel, sliding it to her. “Use that.”
A few minutes later, I exit the building with Adam and the woman, where a car waits for them. Once the woman is inside the vehicle safely, Adam turns to me and says, “Hell of a good shot back there. I’d be dead if not for you, and she would be as well.”
He offers me his hand. I ignore it. He smirks and climbs into the vehicle himself.
I didn’t expect to see Adam ever again, but the bastard had shown up at my door only three weeks later to recruit me to Walker Security. It was his way of schooling me on how connected and resourceful Walker could be when they wanted. Adam had convinced me there was a better life than the one that paid me for killing.
I hadn’t needed a lot of convincing. There was a reason I was fucked up when I met Ana.
Since then, I’ve found that Adam’s low-key, chill attitude about everything, including enemy fire, works for me which is why he’s just about the only human being I can tolerate right now.
I walk to the fridge, grab a beer, and join him on the couch. “What’s the word on anything?” I ask, popping open the beer and downing a long slug.
He glances over at me. “Nothing new. Savage and Parker are getting some sleep like we should be. Why aren’t you with your woman doing just that or whatever else you’d rather be doing with her?”
I give a small snort. “She’s not my woman.”
He laughs. “Oh, come on, man. “She loves you. You love her. You’d die for her. She’s your fucking woman.”
I think about what just went down with Ana, and grimace. She might as well have called me Lucifer. Ana was the one person I believed I could tell everything to and never have her throw it in my face or judge me. But then, everything between us has changed. I knew that. It’s why I left and stayed away. I knew this shit would exist between us and I knew that couldn’t be changed.
“Sometimes love just ain’t enough, man. She knows everything about me, and I mean everything, and I should never have told her.”
“Ah,” he says. “I see. So, you had a fight and things were said.”
“She went down that rabbit hole, man, and she apologized,” I say. “But she went there. And who the fuck am I to blame her? After what happened with Kasey, it was inevitable. It’s part of why I left. I knew she’d have to call me a killer in every way possible. I’d make her worse for the wear in every way. I can’t be with her if every time she looks at me, she sees her brother’s killer. Nothing has changed. The story is still the same.” I down a slug of beer. “I can’t be with her. I have to settle for saving her life.”