RIDING DIRTY (Steel Titans MC Book 4) by Franca Storm (best books for students to read txt) 📗

approached the four-poster bed in the ridiculously lavish master bedroom.

I was just a few feet out when a wayward floorboard shattered my imperceptible movements, a creak that sounded more like a foghorn in the deathly silent space.

Sure enough, Adrian Nolan stirred.

I remained stock-still, but it was too late.

He shifted and shot up in bed, a curse leaving him, as he jumped out of his skin when he caught sight of the figure shrouded in the darkness of his room, aiming a gun his way.

No matter. It would just serve to speed things along. Sure, it would’ve been better if I’d been right upon him, with him incapacitated, before he’d woken up. But a struggle wouldn’t be much of a problem for me. I was equipped to handle a great deal.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

Before I could get a word out, he switched on the lamp beside his bed, bathing the room in a muted light. Unfortunately for him, it didn’t do him much good, because my low-hanging hood obscured any defining facial features.

It was against my instincts to reveal my identity to any mark. But these weren’t normal circumstances. Besides, Freeman had already burned me by looking into me so relentlessly and deeply. He’d kicked a hornet’s nest, and Shadow was over and done with now, out in the open.

Keeping my gun steady with my right hand, I flipped my hood down with the other, revealing myself. “Willa Rose. You may know me as Shadow.”

The usual terror I was used to seeing in the eyes of my targets, just moments before I took their lives, came at me like a surging wave. Nolan scrambled up in bed, pulling his covers up to cover his bare chest. “Fuck,” he choked. “I should’ve known Slade had put a failsafe in place, in the event of his death. Anything to ensure my demise, even if he’d failed to do it with his own two hands.”

“You remember me from a few years back when I allied myself with his club,” I realized.

“Yeah. Never pegged you for a woman, though.”

Interesting time to bring his deep-seated misogyny forth. Then again, as far as he knew, he was seconds away from meeting his end anyway. It didn’t really matter what he said.

“Get out of the bed. Hands raised. Nice and slowly,” I commanded.

When he hesitated, I made a show of fingering the trigger.

“All right! Shit!” he cried. “Takes me longer to move around these days, thanks to that psycho you’ve been working for,” he said, holding up a bandaged hand, the one Slade had done such devastating and permanent damage to.

He managed to get out of the bed, less than gracefully, then slowly turned toward me with both hands raised, standing there in just a pair of silky pajama pants.

Dressed down, disheveled, injured, and shaking with terror, there was no sign of the formidable, hard-edged tycoon he’d portrayed himself as for far too long. The person who’d caused so much damage, pain, humiliation, and wrongdoing seemed a world away now.

Now he was alone and about to face justice, he was merely a shadow of his former self.

Nothing.

I closed the distance between us and executed a quick, efficient pat-down to ensure he wasn’t packing a concealed weapon. All clear.

Then I got down to work.

I shoved him into the wall, my knee grinding painfully into his back and effectively incapacitating him, while bringing the intimidation factor with my gun pressed into the back of his head. “The commander of the militia. Who is he?”

“Wh-what?” he croaked.

“The militia you connected with Blake Freeman! Who is the commander?”

“I… I don’t know.”

I ground my knee harder against his back, making him cry out. “Don’t fuck with me. A name! Now!”

“I don’t know offhand. It was a one-time connection. I’d have to look it up.”

Dammit! Exactly what I’d been hoping against. “Then do it. Where’s your phone?”

“Bedside table. But it’s not on there. All secure files are on the hard drive at Indulge.”

A curse left me, before I could reel it in.

“That’s why you’re here? For intel on Freeman?”

“He’s the one who sent me here. He wants you dead. I want intel.”

“Wait… this isn’t about Slade Mitchell?”

“You’ve made it a whole lot bigger than that by connecting a man like Blake Freeman with his own personal army.”

He hung his head and murmured, “I just wanted Slade off my back.”

“You made that impossible for him.”

“He kept screwing with me!”

“He did what was right. He protected the innocent, when you sought to use and defile them for your own ends.”

As he whimpered some more, movement behind me caught my attention, sending a red alert to my brain. But, as I went to pull my secondary weapon from my left hip holster, a voice spoke, stopping me.

“Well, damn, never figured myself as a hero, but I’ll take it from you, darlin’.”

I smiled to myself.

Relief like I’d never felt before surged through me. I couldn’t believe I was hearing that voice again, his voice, the one that infused my senses and captured every part of me.

“Slade,” I breathed.

25

~Slade~

 

I COULDN’T BELIEVE IT.

Willa fucking Rose had my dick hard in an instant, right in the middle of a goddamn mission. The sight of her going all aggressive and kickass and roughing up my enemy was the hottest thing I’d ever seen.

Her eyes locked on mine.

Nah, I was wrong. That was the hottest thing I’d ever seen. Her looking at me with an intense want and need, like I was the only thing she wanted to set eyes on, the only thing that mattered in the whole fucking world to look upon. Like I was everything.

It sure as well was what was going on my end, and I weren’t holding it back, so I knew she’d be seeing it in my eyes too. Damn, I’d missed her. Part of me hadn’t known whether I’d be able to set eyes on her again, until a few hours ago when Rick’s news had reached us about her.