Page 1 of Midnight Torment

Chapter One

Jordan

The Cuban heat made sweat trickle down my back and perspiration bead on my forehead. The smoke and flames from the fire added to it until my eyeballs started to cook in my head.

This had been a simple mission of intercepting a girl being brought to her crazy brother in Cuba who was waist deep in the skin trade. Darius Ramirez was an asshole with a God complex who seemed to be entangled with some of the men on the Council. I had vowed to ensure that every single one of them and their twisted associates were handed a death sentence.

My foot kicked the man who rounded the corner out of the way, my gun sending him into the afterlife. I learnt a trick from Lucas Black a long time ago when fighting in a situation like this—come armed for close quarter combat. I carried a gun in one hand and a machete in the other.

I used both indiscriminately, hacking and shooting my way through the men who had been waiting to ambush us. Their blood soaked into the ground and their death cries echoed on the wind. I understood the dance of battle, the symphony of death, and the agony of my muscles as they hacked and absorbed the ricochet of gunfire.

Grampa had taken a broken boy and honed me into a warrior.

I had known nothing but fighting and misery in my life until the day Megan walked into my life and brought sunshine and light with her. She was my salvation in a world filled with darkness. My entire life I had my self-destruct button primed and ready to press, yet she calmed the beast inside me and removed it from my grip. She didn’t know it, but there was nothing I wouldn’t do to keep her safe.

My blade swung and the severed limb still held the gun on the ground, his finger on the trigger ready to shoot me. Lucas had been right with his fighting technique. Sean Connery famously said in a film to never bring a knife to a gunfight. Someone should have told him that it depended on the knife and the person wielding it.

I rounded the corner of the storage facility, and a guy jumped out at me. He must have watched my progress and decided a surprise attack was the best form of defence. My knee connected with his stomach while he struggled to wrestle my machete off me.

Fuck him, no one touched my weapons. Someone should have taken these assholes aside inhow to be a criminaltraining and told them that weapons were personal and were akin to a man’s balls. You shouldn’t touch them without his permission.

“You’re Jordan,” he sneered. “There’s a price on your head.”

My blade cut into his hand, and I laughed. “Tell me something new. There’s been a bounty on me since I was three.”

“It isn’t as high as the fee for that blonde you’re shacked up with.” His words stunned me, and he managed to land a blow since I was distracted.

What the fuck?

No one was supposed to know Megan was living with me. A cold shiver rippled down my spine at the thought of her being without my protection right now in London. She was in Xavier’s house with his own personal security team there, but none of them were the same as me sleeping in her bed with a gun under my pillow.

I dropped both my weapons and grabbed him by the throat to pin him against the wall. “Who?” I demanded.

His grin made sickness churn my stomach. She was supposed to be safe. I survived the murder of my parents only because I was so young, and Grampa was a formidable force who refused to let me remember them. The thought of losing the one woman who touched my heart was unthinkable.

I slammed him into the wall again to reinforce my question.

“Dante is very interested in meeting her. You have become a royal pain in his ass, and he doesn’t appreciate your interference.” He grinned as if he was a fucking rock star.

Fuck him.

My hand tightened and he started to struggle, his eyes widening in panic.

“Don’t worry,” I reassured him. “Dante will be coming to meet you soon. I’ll make sure to give him your regards when I blow his brains out.”

His fingers tried to prise mine off his neck, but there was no way he was surviving tonight after issuing that threat against Megan. When he started to slump back from oxygen deprivation, I released him and bent to lift my machete. The darkness surrounded me until it eclipsed all the light. The creature that lived inside me crawled to the surface until all the walls of my control crumbled to the ground.

I didn’t know who he was, but there was little left to identify him when I finished. Rage bubbled through my veins and hatred polluted my soul as I returned to eliminating the threat here in Cuba. All my thoughts were back in London, and every instinct in me screamed that I needed to get back there. The only way I could do that was to get through tonight.

I lost myself in the beauty of the fight, forging forward until the line of men standing between me and returning home had been vanquished.

“What the hell?” Nicklas asked, eyeballing the path of devastation I had left in my wake.

I shrugged one shoulder, not even caring about the blood on my boots. “I’m having a bad day.”

“Really?” he drawled. “I never would have guessed.”

“We all done here?” I asked.

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