Page 1 of Warrior Security
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 theground 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 Icould 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. Thefirst 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.
