Dark Runner: LodeStar 3.5 Read Free Page B

but his boss’s safe rescue—the man was going to need everyone who cared about him. And that included his woman. They might be estranged, but Bronc was sure Stark was in love with her. He’d seen the way the man looked at her when they brought her brother home to her, as if it was all he could do to walk away and leave her.  
    Bronc just hoped she was still in love with Stark.
    Tal Darkrunner might be an outlaw, but he was charismatic as hell. Beautiful in his own way, from his crystalline eyes to those beringed hands that promised every kind of wicked pleasure.
    Hells, if Bronc wasn’t hopelessly moonsick over another man, he’d go for the man himself, and for the smaller blond man with the streaky, flyaway hair and pretty brown eyes seated at Darkrunner’s elbow in the club. Darry Wazo, according to Bronc’s intel, was one of the gang leader’s trusted insiders, along with Trix Benali, the little strawberry blond woman on Darkrunner’s other side. Bronc would bet the three of them were intimate in other ways, too. Something about the body language between them.
    The mind-picture that built sent heat arrowing down in his groin.
    But only for a sec, because he’d never have anything to do with the kind of slime that had built an empire preying on the foolish and unfortunate. Darkrunner might be sexy, but he was like a drug promising sweet oblivion, only to drag his unwary victim into the depths with him.
    He wasn’t as bad as the slavers, but in Bronc’s opinion, he was only a shallow step up.

Chapter Two

    Tal paced back and forth in the dark room deep in the bowels of his lair. His long, black leather duster swirled about his legs with each stride, giving him the appearance of a great raven ruffling its wings to take flight.  
    The chill air was rank with sour fear-induced sweat.
    The thud of Tal’s boots on the hard floor punctuated the ragged breathing of the prisoner. The skinny human hung from his wrists, bound with flexible chainrope that had been looped over a hook under a hover platform, and then raised so the man’s toes just brushed the floor. A floor splattered with old, rusty stains.  
    Darry stood before the prisoner, a long whip coiling from one hand. An ancient device, but one that still wrought pain and fear in its recipient. Of course the process of intimidation began when the prisoner was grabbed and hustled into one of Tal’s unmarked cruisers, then dragged into this room.  
    The room hadn’t been used for its apparent purpose in a very long time. Hadn’t been needed. Tough, street-hardened beings had been known to piss themselves when the door creaked shut behind them and to start talking the minute the whip came out. The harder cases received a patch of a drug that freed their tongues.
    Tal had others who usually handled the work here, but this case he wanted kept very quiet, so he’d asked Darry to step in. Neither he nor Dalg would repeat anything they heard.
    The prisoner’s reddened gaze darted from the whip to Tal and clung. He was at least clever enough to recognize the greatest threat in the room, if not smart enough to tell the truth the first time Tal asked.  
    And another time Tal might have waited with greater patience, would have let the man remain safe in his own small, shabby domain until he was ready to tell Tal everything he wanted to know. But not this time. He needed answers now, tonight. Time was of the essence if he was going to catch a female who was already half a galaxy ahead of him. And this miserable street rat was stonewalling him.
    “All right,” Tal said, stopping with his back to the man. “Enough of your lies. Now once again—five nights ago, you helped a woman find a space charter to take her off planet.”
    “Did I?” the man quavered defiantly, a sneer in his voice. “I don’t remember.”
    Tal scowled and gestured. Behind him, the whip cracked, and the prisoner cried out, the chainrope creaking as the whip slashed the air before him.