Warrior's Heart: Iron Portal Series (Paranormal Romance) Read Online Free PDF

he wanted me and my parents to meet. I assumed he meant one of his fishing buddies. He’d been doing a lot of fishing. Or so he said. Now that I think about it, I remember how he cleaned his room the day before the army showed up. He even made sure the toilet in our shared bathroom was clean, which—trust me—was something he never did.” An affectionate smile curved her lips. “At the time, it struck me as odd, but I didn’t think to question him. He was just my stupid brother. Then the army came and—well, our lives changed forever after that.”
    Zara shuddered. All this time, she’d thought Vince had changed his mind about her. Didn’t want to be a father at such a young age. Left her, a teenage girl without a loving home or any support system, to raise their baby on her own. After all, he’d never come back through the portal after finding out he was going to be a father.
    “The army took him,” she repeated, trying out the words for the first time. “Took him away from Darius and me.”
    Vince, the boy she’d fallen hopelessly in love with, who was the father of her son, had been wrongly imprisoned for ten years.
    Ten years!
    The pain inside her began to morph into something different. Growing and swelling until it felt like a giant balloon in the center of her chest that was ready to burst.
    She glanced around the tiny, familiar kitchen. Cheery yellow walls she’d painted herself. Gingerbread trim on the cabinets. Colorful tea towels hanging over the oven handle. In a matter of minutes, her whole world had changed and yet everything looked the same.
    “Do you have any idea where he is?” she asked, her voice trembling.
    “We think he’s being held at a high-security facility outside of New Seattle called the Institute,” Asher answered. “It’s where they take all the Talents who refuse to work for the army.”
    She scowled at her brother. “You think he’s there?”
    “Yeah.”
    “But you haven’t confirmed it?”
    Asher explained that Rickert, his Iron Guild commander, was betrothed to a former army agent who said the Institute was where they took Talents who refused to join the army. “Neyla is waiting for confirmation from one of her former co-workers.”
    Zara folded her arms and stared at him. “And then what?”
    “And then we’ll try to drum up support within the Iron Guild to organize a raid.” He talked about what weapons they would need and surmised how many men it would take, but Zara quickly tuned him out.
    Wait? Try? Organize?
    The words left a sour taste in her mouth. Vince had waited long enough.
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    V ince stuffed the last bite of stale bread into his mouth and rose from where he'd been sitting cross-legged on the railroad tracks.
    Palmer leered at him from his perch in the back of the truck bed, a fitting throne for such an ass. “Where are you going, Crawford?”
    “To water the flowers.” Vince gathered up the length of chain and stepped over Sean’s legs.
    “I’ll be watching you,” the overseer growled. He curled his upper lip and spat out a long brown stream of tobacco juice between the gap in his teeth.
    “Enjoy the view then.”
    Chain in tow, he ambled down the tracks toward a large cedar tree at the edge of the woods. The doctor had been pumping him full of drugs, so he’d been drinking a lot of water to flush them from his system. The doc wasn’t kidding when he said that crap gave you a new kind of high.
    When he was finished and starting to walk back, something on the tracks caught his eye. Several small flowers were lying on top of the steel rails that hadn’t been there a minute ago.
    Okay, who was messing with him? Keetch?
    He glanced down, but the poor bastard was sitting on the stack of railroad ties, right where Vince had left him.
    How strange. He must’ve walked right past the flowers without noticing them. Had some kids been playing here earlier and left them there? Although they were out in the middle of nowhere, he supposed it was