Free Vigilante 01 - Who Knows the Storm by Tere Michaels Page B

up. If she knew who he was, she’d send someone to the house….
    Oh God.
    He got off the main drag quickly, ducking onto a small side street. It looked more residential—newly built apartment buildings with wide front windows and tiny balconies—no one out and about, no activity for the entire length of the block. Worker housing, he thought.
    A parking garage sign caught his eye; he went purposefully into a side door.
    He needed transportation.
    The tiny electric car was his first choice. It wasn’t hard to break into—this model had a nasty habit of shorting out, and Nox knew what the hell he was doing with wires. Four and a half minutes—a record, considering his hands were shaking and he couldn’t stop looking over his shoulder.
    She was alive.
    She looked right through him, but that meant nothing. He was already on the Iron Butterfly cameras. That man had scanned his card.
    If she recognized his picture even though the name was different…. Seventeen years had done a lot to change his appearance, but Nox had recognized her right away. Was he burned into her mind the way she was in his?
    Swallowing down the panic, Nox quickly started the car. He could barely maneuver inside the curved interior, but comfort wasn’t his priority. He needed to get home.
    Nox used a second pass, one he had tucked in his sock, to exit the parking garage. The streets were nearly deserted as he eased onto the main road; a few cops crawled down the strip, making sure the tourists got to their destinations safely as the rest of the force seemed to be streaming in the other direction toward the Iron Butterfly. Plows and salt trucks were already lined up at the south entrance, ready to make sure this part of town was accessible at all times.
    He went north.
    The snow hit the windshield; the tires ground in protest at the slick road. He drove onto the Freck Memorial Highway, going past the District line until the paved road ran out and the uneven broken concrete of the old highway began.
    He took the car as far as he could, abusing the undercarriage until it whined and shimmied with each bump and crater it hit. When a tire blew on an especially hard hit to a buckled piece of pavement, he stopped.
    A few wires snipped and touched together—the smoke started a second later as he exited the car. Nox cracked the window, then slammed the door, white tendrils creeping out as if to follow.
    He walked through the growing piles of snow, hands in his pockets for warmth, head down as he walked toward home.
    The tux and silly shoes provided no actual protection or warmth against the building storm that obscured the moon and his vision. Instinct was the only reason he knew where he was. Each step seemed to pull him closer into the memory of that night, and every moment, his worry intensified.
    If Jenny wasn’t dead, that meant someone knew he was alive.
    And if she was the one sending Sam the messages…. Nox stumbled over some debris in the center of the sidewalk. No one lived in these abandoned brownstones; they’d long been ransacked and left for ruin. The power grid didn’t extend here, and the people a block over ran off squatters. You got what you worked for, that was the motto—if you wanted to siphon off electricity, go fuck with those bastards in the District, not here.
    The cold seeped through his tux and undergarments, into his skin until his teeth chattered uncontrollably. He thought about Sam and Jenny—and then his scattershot attention went back to the young man he left handcuffed to the bed.
    Did Jenny get him out?
    Was there real danger—a bomb, a fire?
    What was his role in this whole deepening mess?
    The burning attraction he’d felt, the clouding of his mind thanks to a nice ass and practiced bedroom eyes…. Nox felt a wrench of shame twist his solar plexus. If he’d let his dick lead him into trouble….
    Nox would never forgive himself if everything he’d worked and battled for was undone by his base desires.
    He struggled