Don't Take My Baby (Twisted Ghosts MC)

by Zoey Parker

  The memory of Bastille tugged at him, and he pushed it sharply away.

  “You understand I can’t promise to behave?”

  He laughed. “Sweet thing, you don’t seem the sort I’d ever rely on to behave.”

  She gave a crisp nod and folded her arms under her breasts in a way that propped them up deliciously. He hadn’t gotten a chance to really get his tongue around the tight brown nubs, and dear God what was he even doing thinking like this on a job?

  “Can I get my robe first?”

  Chapter Three

  Tess was doing her damndest to put off every Don’t-Give-A-Fuck vibe she had to spare, but she was shaking hard inside. This man – she’d taken him inside of her, and he’d been lying the whole time. He had to know what she’d thought, what she’d assumed. It wasn’t that she hadn’t had sex she didn’t really want before, but this was something else. Somehow, the way he hadn’t bothered to even explain who he was seemed worse than anything else.

  Of course, she could hardly blame a hired gun here to kill the man who was her keeper for being less than scrupulously honest. And she’d hardly stood up out of that tub to ask for his identification. And he’d been good to her, the second time. Even the first time, he hadn’t been bad, just rough. She liked rough, but, well, it didn’t matter now.

  When she raised a sardonic eyebrow, the man rolled his eyes and gestured toward the back of the door with his gun, pointing her towards her silk bathrobe. That was good. Now she wouldn’t have to strut through the penthouse suite naked. She’d done it before, but usually for a much more specific purpose. And definitely not with someone’s cum drying on her thighs. That was going to feel terrible later. It felt bad enough now.

  It had been quite a thing – watching the man shift from a relaxed lover into a trained killer. It was interesting, she thought idly as she put her robe on, trying to think about what in the world she was going to do to maximize her chances of surviving this afternoon, to wonder which had been the mask. Or were they both masks, hiding someone else entirely underneath them?

  “So, you know my name,” she said, turning and giving him a full flash as she settled the robe around her, tying it loosely around her middle. “Do I get to know yours?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said.

  There was something to his voice, but she couldn’t place it. In general, he had a standard American TV accent, just plain and relaxed. But there was something underneath it; she’d bet diamonds that he’d been born somewhere else or traveled somewhere else for a long time. The accent he had was too cultivated.

  “Right after I reveal my master plan to you so that you can foil it like James Bond.”

  Tess shrugged her shoulders. “Suit yourself. I mean, depending on what you are aiming to do, I might be able to get you closer to Toro than you’ll get on your own. But you be petty and fussy if you want, it’s fine with me.”

  She didn’t expect it to work, so when he sighed and scrubbed his hand through his fine auburn hair, she was incredibly surprised.

  “I’m here for Toro. There’s a contract on him. Silk Road wants him dead. He’s intruded on enough territory. You know he’s running out of miles, don’t you?”

  She did indeed. It wasn’t for nothing Tess had started to think about her future once someone took down Toro. She needed to either be gone or claimed by then, and both were dangerous options. She tried to be surreptitious as she looked this man up and down, but she already knew; a man who fucked that rough but came back to make sure she was taken care of too, that was a man who could protect her. She could trust him. Not far, of course, but at least as far as seeing how his plan unfolded.

  “I’ve heard rumors,” she lied. “Tell me your name, and I’ll take you to him. Through back rooms, ways that are – Well, nothing in this place is unguarded but less guarded.”

  “You were unguarded,” he pointed out.

  She raised an eyebrow again. “There’s a silent alarm. I could have tripped it at any point.”

  That was a blatant lie, but if he was noticing them, he wasn’t giving away his realizations. There wasn’t a silent alarm in this room. In the hallway that she would take him through, however, there absolutely was.

  “Milo,” he said after a moment. “Now move.”

  Milo. Interesting. She gave him a quick jerk of her head and then shifted into motion, leading him carefully through the suite towards the rooms set aside for Toro’s “business” interests. He used them for everything from dealing with employees who stole from him to cute little whores he liked better than her – which she did not mind in the least – to watching sports loudly with his most favored lieutenants. To get to the office, you normally have to go through a long hallway which always had at least two, sometimes four, goons posted along its length. Today, Toro had been entirely clear that Tess was going to spend time on her own because he had important business to conduct with a visitor who didn’t want his face seen by anyone. That worked for her just fine. But it also meant there’d be plenty of goons in the hallway, and probably more inside the office.

  Instead of going down that hallway then, she’d use the panic route Toro had installed a year ago. It wasn’t supposed to work in reverse; the doors were only supposed to work outwards, leading from Toro’s office to the bedroom to a recessed door in his closet. But never hire budget contractors; the idiots hadn’t installed anything right, and if you had a decent nail file, it was an easy thing to get the closet door open. From there, it was just turning doorknobs. Tess had started keeping a decent nail file in all of her outfits, for just such an occasion. She never thought she’d really have to bolt, but if she actually did, she wanted every single option open to her.

  She pried the door open, then gestured for Milo to follow her. He did so, moving fast and shutting the door behind him. In the moment where he closed the door, she nudged the alarm by the closet door.

  There. If Toro managed to take down Milo, she’d be able to argue that she was at gunpoint, tee-hee, what could she possibly have done? And if Milo shot Toro and escaped, she’d be able to swear she did everything to help him, and the alarm must have been triggered accidentally. She had covered as many bases as she could without much in the way of prep time.

  It was kind of shitty – ending things with Toro like this. He’d been good to her, in as much as an emotionally stunted drug kingpin could be good to anyone other than his bank account. He hadn’t made her put up with gross stuff that she didn’t want to do, he’d made sure she got regular testing, visits to doctors when she was sick, and every creature comfort her heart could desire. He treated her well. But if she stayed too long with him, she’d be considered tainted, especially if she was still there when his empire fell. She’d seen it before; the kind of criminal that kept a prostitute as a companion was not the sort who thought rationally about such things. Too many beliefs depended on gut feelings and superstitious omens.

  And honestly? While she’d slap anyone in the outside world who called her “older” at twenty-three years old, the fact was that for men in Toro’s position, she was practically decrepit. There were so many girls who were eager to take over spots like hers – the younger model that was traded in for. She’d been one of those girls once, dancing her ass off to impress Toro and get kept. She remembered the cold, angry eyes of the woman she’d been replacing.

  Milo came up behind her, stepping carefully through the mess of the walk-in closet. Toro was a lot of things, and none of them were neat. It was one of the things about him that put her absolutely through the roof. He used to come into her room, drop his crap everywhere, poke her for a little while, and then disappear naked into the suite, leaving all his junk behind. He expected her to pick up and keep her room pin-neat, but, well, it was typical anyway of that sort of self-centered person.

  “Let’s go,” Milo said.

  Tess nodded, taking a long, deep breath.

  Chapter Four

  Tess expected the bedroom to be empty, even though she’d t
apped the alarm. When she slowly opened the door and found it yanked out of her hand, she gave a little shriek. She wasn’t proud of it, but she couldn’t contain the sound. Or the horrible little jump, as if she was a goddamn rabbit and not a woman in charge of her fate. At least she wasn’t wearing heels; if she’d been wearing heels, she was pretty sure she’d have ended up right on her nicely shaped ass.

  Milo didn’t scream, shriek, or jump. He moved quickly into the doorway, pushing past her and shoving her back into the closet in one swift movement. She grabbed onto one of Toro’s hanging suits to try and keep from falling to the floor, so her angle on what exactly Milo was doing wasn’t great. But she could see enough. She saw him yank one man in close, punch him in the stomach, and then pull him down onto his knee, knocking him to the ground in just a few moments. Somehow, he then had a knife in his hand, flipped to an attack position, and within just a few seconds, he’d slit the second man’s throat, cutting deep enough that he couldn’t make a sound as he fell to the floor.

  Tess felt a scream bubbling up in her throat and swallowed hard. The man she’d just fucked twice was covered in arterial spray, and the contrast was more than she could handle. But something inside her wasn’t afraid; there was something incredible about how quickly he’d dispatched those two men. She’d heard stories of Toro’s monstrous temper when he was younger, but the entire time she’d known him he’d had someone else around to do his dirty work for him. She’d seen men dead at his command, but never at his hands.

  She shouldn’t have found the display of raw power sexy, but she did. She absolutely did. And the way he took control of her before, owning her body the way he did… it just made her even more intrigued by this man. She found herself hoping that he did manage to take down Toro. Maybe she could convince him to take her with him at the same time. She’d come up with something. Surviving was basically what she did.

  The door from the bedroom into the office was open. The goons must have come in that way. She didn’t need to point it out to Milo. Odds were that if she stepped into that doorway, Toro would be able to see her, and that would be the end of her playing both sides of the fence. So, she did the most sensible thing she could think of.

  She took a deep breath and screamed as loud as she could.

  Chapter Five

  Milo would never allow himself something so amateur as a flinch at a sharp sound, like a woman screaming her throat out, but if pressed later, he might have admitted that the sound surprised him. He glanced up and surveyed all corners; for the most part, he assumed he would see another woman who had come in from another location. But no, there was no one in his visual range except for Tess. The look on her face was almost apologetic; he could see the moment when she dropped into a mask of total fear, as if she’d found him there when she was on her way to see Toro. He could understand why she needed to do that. She had to look out for herself. Playing both sides until there was a clear victor was annoying, but he could understand why she’d do it.

  Kept women in this world rarely ended up in good situations when their keeper was overthrown. She’d need to demonstrate that she’d tried to help Toro, that she hadn’t been disloyal, if she didn’t want to end up in some low-end bar bending too far over the table to try and get tips. It made sense.

  It was annoying as fuck, but it made sense.

  Well, he could play along. And if his instincts were on at all, he could get her all hot and bothered again.

  He reached into the closet and grabbed her wrist, yanking her out and close to him. She screamed again, but he wondered if that flash in her eyes was anger or appreciation. He spun her, twisting her arm up behind her back as he had in the bathroom. She leaned into him, letting him shove her along in front of him, his weapon showily brandished in front of them. He had to admit, he wasn’t entirely sure that a shithead drug dealer like Toro wouldn’t shoot the woman just to hit him, but, well, it gave her a chance. That was better than nothing.

  He pushed her into the office where everyone had guns pointed at him and Tess. Except Toro. Toro lounged behind his desk, fingers steepled, his eyes fastened on the doorway. There were goons watching, their guns generally pointed in his direction. None of that surprised him.

  The man standing in front of Toro’s desk, however – that man surprised him. He had to stop himself from hissing Bastille’s name like some kind of bad movie villain. He hadn’t seen the other man since they’d both been young men, learning their trade and struggling to find companionship in a profession that discouraged any kind of connection whatsoever. And then Bastille had destroyed everything that had ever given Milo an identity that he understood, and Milo had spent the intervening years chasing the other hitter’s shadow.

  He hadn’t caught so much as a sniff that Bastille had also been following the contract on Toro. Perhaps the other hitter was working a contract for Toro? No, that didn’t track. Milo had looked pretty deep into Toro’s financials before moving on him; there was no way he could afford Bastille. He wouldn’t have been able to afford Milo, either, and the fact that Silk Road had come to Milo indicated that Silk Road considered Toro much more of a threat than his narrow mustache and scrawny build would indicate. So, the odds were that Bastille was here for the same reason that Milo was. But why? Had Silk Road decided not to trust him after all?

  Bastille seemed less surprised than Milo was, or else he’d become just as practiced at not showing his emotions. That made more sense; Milo was moderately certain that no hint of his surprise was visible on his face. He did, however, flash a bit of a grin at Milo before he drew the gun he wore in a hip holster and trained it right on Toro’s face. The other man’s complexion went pasty under his spray tan, and his hands gripped the armrests of his chair in a way that betrayed his concern. It couldn’t be enjoyable to face down death for the first time. It had been part of Milo’s life for so long that he no longer remembered how it felt to stare into that black chasm as a novel moment.

  Bastille turned to Milo with a smile. Milo couldn’t see the other man’s second weapon, but in all the years he’d known Bastille and followed his career, the man had never been without two guns. He was equally precise with both hands, although he favored slightly different guns in each. It was a matter of time before Bastille had the second gun trained on him. Which meant that as much as he wanted to draw down on Toro and get the job done and over with, he needed to maintain control of the situation. And that meant pointing his gun at Bastille and raising an eyebrow.

  There would be no cliched dialogue here, no “How dare you!” He shouldn’t have even waited a moment before pulling the trigger; the only reason he did was that Tess chose that moment to struggle in his grip. His aim went off, and he’d been trained too well to waste the round. He pushed Tess away, knowing she went to her knees and feeling crappy about that, but the woman had chosen to be used as a pawn, and that’s what happened to pawns. He could feel his head shutting down, his body switching into a kind of vision where he was presented with isolated images that allowed him to make decisions without providing any unnecessary information.

  Toro, perhaps realizing that the two men were about to fire on each other, saw his opportunity. Milo would have pegged him for a guy who would run around the desk, but instead, he went over the top like he was running hurdles. He crashed into Bastille as the other hitter drew his second gun – damn him and his two weapons, Milo had tried it over and over but couldn’t ever get accurate enough with his right hand to make it worthwhile –, knocking him off kilter. Bastille’s training had rusted, apparently, because he fired a shot into the ceiling. Milo’s brain made a note to feel worried about unrelated casualties later – not because he inherently cared, but because it could bring trouble with the cops – and he stepped sideways to intercept Toro. Toro didn’t go for him, however, trying to run for the door and his escape route. He went for Tess, still on her knees. He dragged her up to her feet, shifting her in front of him just like Milo had done moments before. Bastille let out a
snarled curse and brought his gun down on Tess. Tess screamed, and this time, Milo didn’t think she was exaggerating her terror even a little bit. He saw Bastille’s finger tightening on the trigger.

  In a moment he wouldn’t understand for the rest of his life, he took the single step forward that put him between Bastille and Tess. He heard the shot fire; Bastille’s gun also bore a silencer, but a thing the movies always got wrong was that silenced guns didn’t make little pbt pbt sounds. They were still goddamn loud; they just weren’t “deafen you loud”. The gun was goddamn loud, and the pain in his shoulder when the bullet entered was also damn loud. It rocked him back onto his heels, and he had to fight to keep his feet.

  He didn’t know what made Bastille curse a second time and decide to run. Milo saw both the goons, who were just now realizing where the hell they should be aiming, drop with neat little holes in the fronts of their heads and really goddamn messy disasters on the backs. And then Bastille ran through the main door of the office. Milo wavered again, then turned to face Toro, who was coming up from the ground and trying to hit him. Milo saw the dull metal of brass knuckles on the drug dealer’s hand and ducked just in time. The pain was breaking through his manufactured calm, and he could feel the neat precision he needed shattering in pieces.