SHIELD (Iron Kings MC #5) Read online

  SHIELD

  Iron Kings MC, #5

  Franca Storm

  Contents

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  Franca Storm Universes Unite!

  SHIELD Blurb

  1. ~Shield~

  2. ~Shield~

  3. ~Shield~

  4. ~Shield~

  5. ~Tatum~

  6. ~Shield~

  7. ~Tatum~

  8. ~Shield~

  9. ~Tatum~

  10. ~Shield~

  11. ~Tatum~

  12. ~Shield~

  13. ~Tatum~

  14. ~Shield~

  15. ~Tatum~

  16. ~Shield~

  17. ~Tatum~

  18. ~Tatum~

  19. ~Shield~

  20. ~Tatum~

  21. ~Shield~

  22. ~Tatum~

  23. ~Shield~

  24. ~Shield~

  25. ~Tatum~

  26. ~Shield~

  27. ~Tatum~

  28. ~Shield~

  29. ~Shield~

  30. ~Tatum~

  31. ~Tatum~

  Epilogue

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  About the Author

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  SHIELD. Iron Kings MC. Book 5

  Copyright © Franca Storm (2021). All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author.

  Cover Design by Clarise Tan at CT Cover Creations.

  Cover images provided by:

  ©shutterstock.com Stock Photo 545466709

  ©istockphoto.com Stock Photo 494880368

  The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed”. Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book”.

  Created with Vellum

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  Franca Storm Universes Unite!

  My MC universes are uniting!

  It begins in SHIELD with references to Ax/Black Thorns and a cameo from a Steel Titans character. It continues in RIDE OR DIE (Black Thorns MC, #4.5) with a meet between Ax and Spartan.

  There will be a full crossover book between Iron Kings and Black Thorns too!

  CHECK IT OUT

  SHIELD Blurb

  Steady hand.

  Guardian angel.

  Lone wolf.

  I'm security for Iron Kings MC.

  The guy with all the answers.

  I'm a god in my line of work.

  All-knowing. All-seeing.

  But I didn't see her coming.

  The one that got away.

  My blind spot.

  Responding to her distress call sends her crashing back into my life.

  She's bringing trouble my way.

  The past doesn't want to stay buried.

  I'm losing it.

  Failing.

  Drowning.

  Breaking.

  If I'm going down, I'm taking my enemies with me.

  I'll rage. I'll destroy. I'll unleash it all.

  After all, everybody has a dark side.

  1

  ~Shield~

  BLOODCURDLING SCREAMS.

  They tore right through me.

  They were more than sound.

  It was a feeling now, an awful, brutal sensation.

  And it had one name.

  Agony.

  Our teammates.

  Our friends.

  Our family.

  The enemy was torturing them in front of the warehouse down below.

  Dismembering them, tearing them open with machetes, drawing out the pain and brutality to an exponential degree.

  I felt sick.

  I couldn’t stand it.

  But I was trapped.

  Me and her.

  Tatum Sinclair.

  My partner. My teammate. My… everything.

  Heavy fired rained down all around us.

  Our cover was seconds away from being compromised.

  I was typing rapidly on my laptop, running multiple algorithms, scrambling to make the impossible happen, trying to crack the password and to come through like I always did.

  But it wasn’t fast enough.

  I wasn’t fucking good enough.

  I eyed Tatum.

  She was losing it, big time. I could see it all over her.

  We had to hold position.

  We had to hang on.

  Just moments now.

  I typed in the final piece of code and sent it.

  Tatum bolted.

  I reached out to snag her arm, to bring her back to me, to protect her, to keep her with me.

  I was too late.

  Instinct took me over.

  I bolted after her.

  Her scream ripped right through me as she was hit.

  She went down hard, clutching her left thigh.

  Blood spurted.

  I threw my body over hers.

  I had to cover her.

  Any way I could.

  I had to protect her.

  Keep her breathing.

  Keep her safe.

  I heard myself grunting, my body lurching forward as a sharp pain tore through my right upper back.

  The world crashed down around me.

  Thunder erupted.

  Fire lit the night sky.

  My doing.

  My code.

  I’d hacked the remote turret on one of the armored vehicles inside the warehouse. I’d accessed the camera and controls, directing its furor to the gas lines behind the enemy, facilitating one hell of a mammoth explosion

  But I was too late.

  It was nowhere near enough.

  Too much damage had already been done.

  Screams ripped through the area.

  Not our own anymore.

  Theirs.

  The enemy.

  Silence took its place soon enough.

  An eerie void.

  The mark of annihilation.

  And then I saw him.

  My ally. My friend. My brother-in-arms.

  “Finn,” I croaked out.

  “You’re okay. Just hang on. I’ve got you, J.”

  The world slipped away.

  I bolted up in bed, slapping my hand to my heart, my breathing coming hard and fast.

  “Jesus,” I croaked, scanning my surroundings rapidly, fighting like hell to get my bearings as fast as possible.

  I was in my own bed in my bungalow on the outskirts of Ridgefield.

  My own fucking home, and I was afraid.

  Afraid of ancient history.

  I grunted, annoyed at the ridiculousness of it all.

  It shouldn’t matter anymore. It shouldn’t still be there with me. I should be over it.

  The screams.

  The helplessness.

  The pain.

  Her.

  The last one there was a tall order.

  It had been years and she still crossed my mind way too often.

  The one that got away didn’t even cover it when it came to her.

  We were just connected, so in sync.

  I pulled myself back.

  We had been.

  But that was years ago.

  Another life.

  Another her.

  Another m
e.

  Another us, one that couldn’t exist in our new reality.

  Because of the path she’d chosen.

  “Jeez, get a grip,” I muttered to myself. Going down that road was bad news. And more than even that, it was completely pointless.

  I climbed out of bed and turned my back to the mirror over my dresser by the door. My weary eyes zoned in on the black rose tattoo splayed across my right upper back, hiding the gunshot wound that I’d sustained that day, a wound that was more than just physically scarring.

  The black rose symbolized death and grief and there’d certainly been a lot of it the day of that brutal mission. It had also been the death of the former version of me, the one who’d been more relaxed, idealistic, and still a little green. That mission had changed everything irreparably. But when I’d gotten the tattoo, it was to mark that dark time and put it in its proper place. In the past. Because the black rose also had another meaning attached to it. Rebirth and rejuvenation. Basically, moving on from the bad and the dark. It was hope, really, as well as a reminder to never make the same mistakes again that had led to the failure of that mission that had cost us all so much.

  Way too much.

  When I managed to get myself together and fully come back to reality after that nightmare that had once been all too real, compounded by the memories of Tatum, the first thing I noticed was my phone buzzing like crazy on my bedside table.

  I pulled away from the mirror and strode back over there, snatching it up.

  The moment I caught sight of the time, I realized why it was buzzing incessantly with such urgency.

  I was late!

  It was pushing thirty minutes already.

  I was supposed to be outside Finn’s place meeting him for our early morning run.

  Shit. He wasn’t going to be happy.

  To say he was a stickler for punctuality and keeping to a strict routine didn’t even cover it. It was a holdover from his military days. A lot of his behavior was. It was virtually indistinguishable from his behavior that resulted from him living as a ghost. The two existences were too similar.

  I’d turned my back on that way of life since I’d been out of military service. I’d had to. Being connected to it like that, in my every waking moment, in every action I took, made it too easy for me to be triggered, too easy to remember. I couldn’t reopen those wounds. The scars were enough to live with as it was.

  But Finn could walk that line much better than I’d ever been able to. Of course, the monster aspect was another story, a whole different animal.

  As far as I was concerned, the work I did nowadays was security, pure and simple. Maybe it was rationalizing it away too much, but it was how it had to be.

  The closest I’d come to getting back into my old headspace was a few months ago when I’d taken Spartan’s long-time enemy, Knox Price, out with a sniper rifle. And it had set me back quite a bit. It had triggered me. That was when the nightmares had started coming back. Fortunately, it was old hat for me, and as shitty as it was, I’d had enough experience with it to know how to handle it.

  I made my way over to the dresser. Groggy and not at my best from lack of sleep due to the nightmares keeping me up, it took me a while to locate, then pull on a pair of black tactical pants and a navy t-shirt.

  I was just sliding my phone into my pocket when a knock sounded at my bedroom door.

  “One second, I—”

  Before my sentence was complete, the door opened and Finn filled the doorway.

  I knew I’d locked it. Son of a bitch. He’d picked that in split-seconds. Not just that, but the actual front door of my fucking house. He was damned good.

  “Seriously?” I chastised him.

  He either chose to ignore my attitude, or he didn’t notice, because he didn’t speak to it. Instead, he just stared at me, concern filling his eyes. “You okay?”

  “Fine, yeah.”

  “You’re pushing forty minutes late, J.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I overslept.”

  He frowned. “Overslept?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you.”

  It was more than a statement. It was verging on an accusation.

  But I couldn’t do it, couldn’t risk it. I wasn’t going to go down that road with him. Down that path lay pain, darkness, and deeply etched scars. Worse than that, though, there was a vulnerability down there, a weakness that I couldn’t afford. The club needed me strong, infallible. Finn needed it from me.

  And I owed him more than he even knew.

  I brushed past him and headed for the open door, forcing an upbeat front, as I called, “We’re already behind schedule. I’m sure you don’t want to exacerbate that. Let’s do this thing, buddy.”

  He hesitated for a moment, but then I heard his heavy footsteps following me out. “Fine.” He shut the door, then we fell into step down the corridor. “Don’t think for a second that this conversation is over and done with, J.”

  “Oh, I know you too well to believe that. But it’s not happening today and that’s good enough for me.”

  “So, you’d rather get hit in the face repeatedly than talk about what’s up with you?”

  “What makes you think I’m going to let you get in a hit at all?”

  That smug smile of his flashed my way. “Well, you’re not gonna let me, but it’ll happen.”

  I grinned. “Game on.”

  2

  ~Shield~

  INSTINCT.

  That sensation thrummed through me as I watched his fist coming at me.

  The power and thrill of knowing I had it in the bag, how natural it was, how familiar.

  My arm seemed to act almost of its own accord, coming down and deflecting the blow.

  My body knew what to do before my mind had even managed to play catch up.

  That was just on the surface.

  And it was how it appeared as well.

  To the uninitiated.

  To outsiders.

  But it was far more complicated than that in truth.

  Sure, it was a trigger reaction, but getting to that point had required training, a ton of training that had spanned years.

  “Dodge!”

  I jolted at the warning and that reaction cost me the precious seconds required to do what was needed. I failed to evade the incoming blow, the fist plowing into the side of my face.

  Okay, so the whole instinct thing was a little rusted over right now.

  “Damn,” I muttered, staggering back.

  Finn chuckled, shaking his head at me. “Way too slow, J.”

  I wiped the trickle of blood out of the corner of my mouth with the back of my hand. “That was a dirty fucking move.”

  He cracked his knuckles. “Nah, there’s no dirty moves, no honor in battle. There’s just winning or losing. Survival or death.”

  “That’s disturbingly dark.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s life.”

  I scoffed. “Give me a break. You don’t still believe that. You’re all about the love, sunshine, and cute little puppy dogs now that you have Ashley.”

  He grinned. “Puppy dogs?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, there’s some of that these days, but not right now, not in this gym.”

  “You’re a merciless hardass, buddy.”

  “Whatever I need to do to keep you breathing.”

  I walked over to the bench in the corner of the clubhouse gym where I’d left my water bottle. I snatched it up and chugged a good half of it, parched because of Finn’s utter relentless training session, what felt like the thousandth in the last two months. “I appreciate the sentiment, but you can take it down a notch. Several, actually. My role is basically confined to a desk, just like before.”

  “Before, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So, when Knox and Nemesis beat the living shit out of you and left you for dead on the side of the road?”

  I grimace
d. That was brutal.

  And it burned.

  Deep down.

  Real deep.

  It managed to reach that heavily fortified part of me that I never let myself access.

  “That was an anomaly.”

  “Our entire existence is an anomaly.”

  “Finn—”

  “What happened that day is never fucking happening again, Jesse! Do you hear me?” he exploded in a burst of aggressive emotion.

  Shit.

  I could see it all over him.

  The fear.

  The guilt.

  He felt responsible for what had happened to me a few months back. But he wasn’t at fault. Neither was Spartan.

  I made my own choices.

  And, in truth, it had been a dangerous cocktail of desperation and arrogance that had guided me down the road toward that beatdown that day.

  There were times where being the best of the best at my job made me feel almost untouchable. Of course, that was an impossible status for anybody to achieve. And running with that mindset would bite you in the ass eventually.

  Just like it had to me.

  I might’ve been okay, though, if it hadn’t been for the desperation element that had also been in play. In a huge fucking way. I’d had some major tunnel vision because of it. Taking down Nemesis once and for all was all that I’d been able to see.

  It was because it was my fault.