Page 20 of Tank's Temptation

I drive my knee into his groin and shove him into the damaged railing. Below, a gunshot cracks and one of Harlan’s men drops beside the stage as Kingdom Come closes the exits. Men shout. A work light crashes, throwing half the ballroom into darkness.

Tank roars my name somewhere behind me.

I reach the gallery and turn toward the eastern stairs, but Harlan steps from the shadows ahead.

His arm locks around my waist.

The gun presses hard beneath my ribs before I can twist free.

“Enough,” he shouts.

The ballroom stills in pieces.

Tank appears at the far end of the gallery with his weapon raised. His face contains no panic, no plea and none of the heat he gave me in his room.

Only the enforcer remains.

Harlan drags me tighter against his chest, using my body to cover his. The muzzle digs deeper into my side.

Across the gallery, Tank goes motionless.

And I finally understand why men are most afraid of him when he stops moving.

CHAPTER 6

TANK

“Take your hand off her.”

I don’t raise my voice, but Harlan hears the promise of violence anyway.

He stands behind Tessa near the broken gallery rail, one arm locked across her middle and the gun shoved into her ribs. Below us, one of Harlan’s men bleeds beside the stage while another has his weapon trained toward the shadows where Judge waits. Nobody moves because every man in the ballroom understands that Tessa is the only thing keeping Harlan alive.

His fingers tighten against her stomach.

My sight narrows until there is nothing but the gun, his right shoulder and the strip of black shirt visible above Tessa’s jeans. She’s breathing fast, but she isn’t frozen. Her weight stays forward over the balls of her feet, exactly as we discussed before leaving the compound.

Harlan smiles as if he has mistaken stillness for surrender again. “Lower the weapon, Tank. You were always King’s dog. Kane changed the collar, but you’ve spent your whole life waiting for somebody strong enough to pick up the leash.”

He expects the words to reach something in me. They do, but not the part he wants.

King found a nineteen-year-old who was good at hurting men and taught me not to ask where the target came from. Kane gave me the same patch and expected me to think before I used it. Harlan believes one man made me dangerous and the other made me weak, but Tessa knows better.

I lower my gun a few inches. Harlan’s smile widens, and his attention shifts from my trigger finger to my face. He doesn’t notice the two taps of my thumb against the grip—the signal Tessa and I agreed on if the handoff broke.

Her eyes meet mine.

Harlan orders me to put the gun on the floor and kick it over. I lower the muzzle another inch instead.

Tessa drives her heel into the side of his knee.

Harlan buckles with a shout. She drops her full weight at the same time, twists beneath his arm and throws herself toward the floor. His gun fires as she moves, the shot ripping splinters from the gallery rail where her chest had been.

I fire once.

The round hits Harlan high in the chest. His body jerks backward, surprise replacing certainty before his legs give way and he drops beside the broken rail.

He doesn’t get another shot.