Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 73208 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73208 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Running. It seems that’s all I ever do. I’ve been running since I was fifteen. Some days I wonder if I’ll ever be able to stop. Would I even know how to live a normal life if I could? Doubt it. No reason to waste good time thinking on it either. Sitting around wishing for something never did anyone a favor. If you want it, then you go and get it. By any means necessary. And I was an expert at using my strengths. I’d been born with beauty, and it had been a curse that haunted me until, one day, I grabbed it and used it to my advantage. Don’t judge. You have no idea the demons I’ve fought… and the ones I still do.
Storm
Sure, I was raised to kill when needed and to protect the family. However, my momma also taught me to open doors for women and respect them unless they prove they’re not ladies. It was a damn shame the sweet little piece I’d been unable to get out of my head had never been a lady a day in her life. That gorgeous face and mouthwatering body were real nice wrapping paper to distract men. Briar Landry was a liar, a thief, a cheat, and a very talented gold digger. She disgusted me. The more I was forced to be around her, the more I hated her. I knew the evil inside her and I had enough twisted darkness of my own. Treating her with cruelty, I hadn’t known I possessed, was the only way to keep from letting her pull me inside her web.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
• one •
“You boys must be lost.”
Storm
Well, damn. This little mission that we’d come on was turning out to be more interesting than I’d expected. When King had asked us to come with him to seek revenge on a man who had hurt his fiancée when she was a child, I hadn’t expected we’d end up here. Glancing over at Thatcher, I knew he hadn’t either. He was as intrigued as I was, and getting a reaction from him was hard to do. We’d hunted down and killed many hits in our life, but this was definitely a twist.
“Who’s the singer?” King asked the bartender, although he already knew the answer to the question.
She was why we were here. The only lead we’d been given when the man King wanted to torture wasn’t where he was supposed to be.
“Briar,” the man replied, smirking before setting a glass of whiskey in front of King. “And she’s taken.”
We’d already known she was using the alias Briar Landry, but she’d been born Melissa Ball. That much we had traced down easily enough.
She had gone off the radar from the age of fifteen until she turned twenty, where she reemerged as Briar Landry. She moved around a lot the first three years and had over fifteen different jobs, and from what King had dug up on her, she dated some high-profile men—or rather had affairs with them. Large sums of money were deposited into an account with her name just before she moved out of town. That account had since been drained and closed.
Watching her, I could see how she’d managed to reel in the men she had. A couple of politicians, a minister at mega church, and a CEO. They were always married men with a lot to lose if they were caught cheating. I imagined her tied up, naked, on my bed. Wasn’t like I could go there. Not when King was hell-bent on finding her father and killing him slowly.
Long, dark ginger hair hung in loose curls at the ends, and her blue eyes twinkled with mischief as she held my gaze. The smooth drawl in her voice as she sang while her fingers expertly played the guitar in her hands made a lethal combination. She had every man in here ready to worship at her feet, and she knew it. She expected it. Bastards had no idea they didn’t have a chance.
When the third song we’d listened to came to an end, King drank down his glass in one gulp and set it on the bar. “Let’s go,” he said, standing up.
I already knew we weren’t actually leaving. We were going to find the back entrance and meet Briar Landry backstage. If King tried to talk to her in here, she’d have a roomful of men ready to protect her, and we’d end up causing more damage than was necessary.
“Keep it quiet and tidy,” was all Blaise Hughes, our boss, had told King when he asked if we could do this.
I’d known King all my life, and if this had been pre Rumor, his fiancée, I would have been able to guess how he was going to get the information out of Briar. But seeing as he was now a fucking psycho whenever Rumor was concerned, I wasn’t so sure what to expect. Thatcher didn’t seem too worried about it as we followed King to the exit. But then I wasn’t sure Thatcher’s brain worked like the rest of ours. He was emotionally detached from things. I wasn’t going to be able to let King hurt the woman. Not just because she was a fucking stunner, but also because she was a female. This wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t hurt Rumor.
Sure, I’d pulled a gun on her stepmother earlier, but the crazy bitch had grabbed a knife and thrown it at King. He easily dodged it, but still, that had been unnecessary. Thatcher had taken her knife with ease and held it at her throat, forcing the whereabouts of her husband from her while trickles of blood from where he’d pierced the skin ran down her chest.
When the door to the bar closed behind us, King turned right, which was like I’d expected. We weren’t headed to the SUV. We were going to find another entrance.
“I volunteer to fuck the info out of her,” Thatcher said as we walked around the building.
“Shut up,” King snarled, not looking back at him.
“It’s better than you putting a bullet in her,” he replied.
I wasn’t so sure about that. Thatcher had some twisted shit in his head when it came to sex. But then I didn’t want to see King hurt her either. This was about her father. Not her. As for her profession as a gold digger, that wasn’t our business. If men allowed their dicks to control them, then that was their issue. Not ours. I felt the need to remind King of that.