Free Odin (Billionaire Titans Book 2) by Alison Ryan

overlooking the main dining room, where a waiter appeared with a wagyu beef carpaccio appetizer and a caviar dish. I was suitably impressed, even Titans didn’t usually eat like this.
    Raven, however, was nowhere to be found.
    I didn’t love caviar, but I had to admit that the stuff I’d been served was top quality. The wagyu beef was nonpareil, and I considered asking for a main course of the stuff, if ever Raven arrived.
    My phone was quiet, and I began to go through my mental rolodex to see who I might be able to coax into the city to join me for dinner when the curtains to the room I was in parted and the hostess from downstairs waltzed in.
    Without bothering to introduce herself, she slid the blonde wig she was wearing off her head, and then pulled the dress she’d been wearing off as well. Beneath it, she had on tight black leather pants and a white tank top. She shook out her braids and sat down, pulling out a pair of glasses from the bag I’d just noticed she was carrying. She produced a black sport coat from the bag and put it on. “Dress code, you know?”
    With a broad smile, she reached across the table and extended a hand.
    “Raven. Nice to meet you, Odin. By the way, you’re paying for all this, in case that hadn’t occurred to you yet.”
    I shook her hand and then leaned back to give her a slow clap. “Well done, Raven. I had no idea. What happened to the Bob Marley accent?”
    With that, she went into a startling recital of accents, from French to German to Aussie and then various American dialects. She sprinkled in actual foreign languages as well, Russian, Spanish, and what I guessed was Mandarin.
    When she finished, I raised my eyebrows and then made a show of counting the fingers on my right hand. I caught a quizzical look on her face.
    “Anybody who can do disguises, accents, languages, computers, and everything else as well as you obviously can is either a criminal mastermind or a super hero. Since I don’t see a cape, I’m checking to make sure you didn’t keep anything when you shook my hand. Who are you?”
    I laughed, hoping I hadn’t offended her.
    She set about carving the slab of Kobe beef she’d ordered, carefully considering her reply.
    “I,” She chewed a bite of her steak, eyes closed in an expression of gastronomical bliss. “Am someone in need of the sort of legal shield that goes with being part of your father’s organization.”
    I started to answer, but she raised a hand to quiet me.
    “As good as I am, and I think you’d agree, I’m damn good, even I can only stay ahead of the authorities for so long. I can disappear in an empty room, reroute my internet trail to servers on every continent, talk my way in or out of pretty much any situation you can imagine. The Justice Department, however, is a different story. I have some trouble looming, and although I know how they operate; they’ll offer me a job with them in order to avoid prison time, I don’t want to work for the government. I don’t always get along well with others. I want to go to school, have it paid for, and come out the other side with a job waiting for me. Not necessarily with Titan, but with the Firm.”
    I savored my lobster while I listened to her pitch. “Which firm are you talking about?” I asked. “And what makes you think I can magically snap my fingers and make whatever legal problems you may have disappear?”
    “Oh, Odin, I know you can’t do much of anything, but you’re my connection to the people who can. Your father has influence, which in many ways supersedes wealth, fame, or privilege. He can make a phone call and make the JD forget the name ‘Verna Conway’ ever popped up on their radar. As for which firm I’m talking about, do you mean to tell me you don’t know the name Richard Hunt?”
    I was baffled. That name didn’t mean a thing to me. I shrugged and shook my head.
    “Well, that’s disappointing. I guess maybe I let your name distract me. The Odin-Raven