Shadow Warrior Read online

  PRAISE FOR SHADOW KEEPER

  “If you love hot men, sexy women, the good guys winning against the bad guys, love (both sweet and ultra steamy), and family that stands together, then this book is all that and even more.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “This thrilling new paranormal world is full of wonderful characters that are strong, sexy and captivating, easily drawing readers in and holding them hostage until the very end.”

  —Stormy Vixen’s Book Reviews

  PRAISE FOR #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR

  CHRISTINE FEEHAN

  “The erotic, gripping series that has defined an entire genre. . . . I love everything [Christine Feehan] does.”

  —J. R. Ward

  “The queen of paranormal romance.”

  —USA Today

  “Gritty, brutal and wonderfully magical. . . . Unexpected and mesmerizing perfection.”

  —Library Journal

  “Once again, Christine Feehan brings a sizzling story of seduction and sorcery to her readers.”

  —Examiner.com

  “Book after book, Feehan gives readers emotionally rich and powerful stories that are hard to forget!”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “[An] out-of-the-ordinary romance . . . deeply sensuous . . . exquisitely detailed.”

  —Booklist

  “Exciting and full of danger as well as a deeply moving love story.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Ms. Feehan is at the top of her game with this magical romance.”

  —The Romance Readers Connection

  “Suspenseful, engaging—fraught with magic, action and romance. . . . I HAVE to read the next one in the series.”

  —Smexy Books

  Titles by Christine Feehan

  The GhostWalker Novels

  TOXIC GAME

  COVERT GAME

  POWER GAME

  SPIDER GAME

  VIPER GAME

  SAMURAI GAME

  RUTHLESS GAME

  STREET GAME

  MURDER GAME

  PREDATORY GAME

  DEADLY GAME

  CONSPIRACY GAME

  NIGHT GAME

  MIND GAME

  SHADOW GAME

  The Drake Sisters Novels

  HIDDEN CURRENTS

  TURBULENT SEA

  SAFE HARBOR

  DANGEROUS TIDES

  OCEANS OF FIRE

  The Leopard Novels

  LEOPARD’S RUN

  LEOPARD’S BLOOD

  LEOPARD’S FURY

  WILD CAT

  CAT’S LAIR

  LEOPARD’S PREY

  SAVAGE NATURE

  WILD FIRE

  BURNING WILD

  WILD RAIN

  The Sea Haven/Sisters of the Heart Novels

  BOUND TOGETHER

  FIRE BOUND

  EARTH BOUND

  AIR BOUND

  SPIRIT BOUND

  WATER BOUND

  The Shadow Riders Novels

  SHADOW WARRIOR

  SHADOW KEEPER

  SHADOW REAPER

  SHADOW RIDER

  The Torpedo Ink Novels

  VENGEANCE ROAD

  JUDGMENT ROAD

  The Carpathian Novels

  DARK SENTINEL

  DARK LEGACY

  DARK CAROUSEL

  DARK PROMISES

  DARK GHOST

  DARK BLOOD

  DARK WOLF

  DARK LYCAN

  DARK STORM

  DARK PREDATOR

  DARK PERIL

  DARK SLAYER

  DARK CURSE

  DARK HUNGER

  DARK POSSESSION

  DARK CELEBRATION

  DARK DEMON

  DARK SECRET

  DARK DESTINY

  DARK MELODY

  DARK SYMPHONY

  DARK GUARDIAN

  DARK LEGEND

  DARK FIRE

  DARK CHALLENGE

  DARK MAGIC

  DARK GOLD

  DARK DESIRE

  DARK PRINCE

  Anthologies

  EDGE OF DARKNESS

  (with Maggie Shayne and Lori Herter)

  DARKEST AT DAWN

  (includes Dark Hunger and Dark Secret)

  SEA STORM

  (includes Magic in the Wind and Oceans of Fire)

  FEVER

  (includes The Awakening and Wild Rain)

  FANTASY

  (with Emma Holly, Sabrina Jeffries, and Elda Minger)

  LOVER BEWARE

  (with Fiona Brand, Katherine Sutcliffe, and Eileen Wilks)

  HOT BLOODED

  (with Maggie Shayne, Emma Holly, and Angela Knight)

  Specials

  DARK CRIME

  THE AWAKENING

  DARK HUNGER

  MAGIC IN THE WIND

  A JOVE BOOK

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2019 by Christine Feehan

  Excerpt from Dark Illusion copyright © 2019 by Christine Feehan

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  A JOVE BOOK, BERKLEY, and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9781984803535

  First Edition: June 2019

  Cover art by Danny O’Leary

  Cover design by Judith Lagerman

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Katie, my beautiful niece who handles her complicated life with grace.

  CONTENTS

  Praise for Christine Feehan

  Titles by Christine Feehan

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  For My Readers

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Excerpt from Dark Illusion

  About the Author

  FOR MY READERS

  Be sure to go to christinefeehan.com/members/ to sign up for my PRIVATE book announcement list and download the FREE ebook of Dark Desserts. Join my community and get firsthand news, enter the book discussions, ask your questions and chat with me. Please feel free to email me at [email protected]. I would love to hear from you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As with any book, there are so many people to thank, and this one is no exception. Brian, thank you for challenging me to write faster and better. Domini, as always, your editing was invaluable. Sheila, thank you for the notes you put together for me in one place when I thought I might lose my mind because they were scattered everywhere after the computer crash! Katie, thank you for all the advice on handling major events. I had no idea how difficult that business truly is. Cheryl and Denise, what would I do without you?

  CHAPTER ONE

  Vittorio Ferraro stood in the shadows, his skin crawling with the need to move. Something was wrong. Not just wrong. Whatever his churning gut was about, he’d never quite felt the urgency of finding the source of the trouble as he did right then.

  He’d come home from work exhausted. Work had been in Los Angeles this time. He’d been there numerous times, but this particular one had been a bloodbath. He was a shadow rider, one of the very few in existence worldwide. With that came tremendous responsibilities and absolute secrecy. He’d begun his training at the age of two and continued every day of his life since. Now, after carrying out justice in Los Angeles, he’d been more than happy to get home. His house was his sanctuary, and usually, once inside, he felt peace, not this terrible sense of impending doom.

  He hadn’t been able to shake the feeling, so he got dressed and followed the dark dread that strengthened as he approached the nightclub his family owned. The Ferraro Club was in full swing, the music loud, the laughter and conversation blending with the energy of the music.

  The nightclub was the most popular in Chicago and people stood in lines, sometimes for hours, on the chance of getting in. Celebrities frequented the Ferraro Club, and there was always the possibility that one might catch a glimpse of a member of the famous Ferraro family. Tonight, the place was packed.

  As a rule, his family didn’t make it a habit to interfere in the running of the club—they had managers who ran the place far better than any of them ever could—but they dropped in when they needed to be visible. The paparazzi always swarmed around them, giving them better alibis for their work than anything else ever could. Right now, visibility was the last thing Vittorio wanted. The sense of urgency was growing stronger, not weaker, and that meant he needed to find whatever was wrong and fix it before it was too late. That something was here. In his club. Close now.

  He moved from shadow to shadow without being seen. It was a slow process and his body was already torn up from doing this very thing in Los Angeles. Still, this wasn’t about work. This wasn’t about bringing justice to criminals no one else could get to. This was about the knots in his gut that coiled tighter and tighter, and felt personal. Very personal. And that in itself was shocking.

  Vittorio was the largest of the Ferraro men. He was tall, broad-shouldered and very fit, as all riders had to be. He was also a man who knew himself very well. Every strength. Every flaw. What he wanted in life, what he needed—both were impossible, and he’d accepted that he would never have a wife and family the way his brothers Stefano, Ricco and Giovanni had. Even Taviano had a much better chance than he would ever have. It was just this growing feeling that this portent of trouble was connected to him personally.

  He was a man apart—even within his family, he stood apart. Maybe they all did. It was possible their women strengthened the connection between them in some way. Certainly, Francesca, Stefano’s wife, did. Vittorio loved her—they all did—but at the same time, it only emphasized his loneliness.

  He knew it would already be nearly impossible to find a woman he could love the way he needed to love her. Finding a woman who could ride shadows was in and of itself extremely difficult, but finding one who would suit his peculiarities, that was asking far too much. He knew the odds, and they weren’t in his favor.

  Shadow riders were obligated to have children, so if they weren’t married to a suitable woman by a certain age—one he was approaching—an arranged marriage would follow. For a man like Vittorio, that would be an utter disaster.

  For a moment he stood in the shadows watching the women dancing, knowing not a single one of them would ever tolerate him as a life partner. He had to find a woman who would have the genetics to produce children capable of riding the shadows and carrying on their work. That was his obligation. He could never simply fall in love; he had to fall in love with the right person. The odds of finding that were so slim, most riders never believed it could happen.

  For Vittorio, the odds were even slimmer. He didn’t want a traditional partnership. He didn’t have that kind of personality. He needed his woman to trust him implicitly and allow him to care for her. For every aspect of her life. Where, in the modern world, could a woman like that be found? That would be impossible as well. Two impossibilities meant it wasn’t going to happen for him. He would be in a loveless, arranged marriage for the rest of his life.

  He sighed and turned his attention back to that whisper of impending danger that had drawn him to the club. The floor plan had three tiers. The top tier was extremely expensive but provided the most privacy. Most of the celebrities stayed there to party. Bodyguards were prevalent, and the club’s highly trained security were visible as well. The third tier wasn’t a place Vittorio would expect to have any real trouble, but his every instinct pointed him in that direction.

  He waited for the music to change and the light show to begin. The dancing colors cast all kinds of shadows throughout the large club, giving him plenty of choices. He selected a shadow that cut through the bar on the second-tier landing and zigzagged its way up to the highest tier where the Ferraros kept a table reserved just for family.

  He stepped into a thin, dark streak and instantly his body was sucked into the tube, pulled apart and flung through tables and chairs and up two winding staircases to the top tier. Standing in the mouth of the tube, he needed a few seconds for his body to feel as if it had come back together. There was always the sick feeling that came with fast travel, with being pulled apart and put back together.

  The moment Vittorio was up on the top floor, the sense of conspiracy, of danger, became overwhelming. He closed himself off from the noise and concentrated on that feeling of trouble. Of a fated doom. At the third table from the Ferraros’ exclusive seating sat three men. He recognized two as enforcers for the Saldi family. Just seeing them in his club caused the knots in his gut to tighten.

  No one could keep drugs out of a club, but they didn’t allow sales there. The Saldis, a notorious crime family, brought drugs in and sold them from streets and alleys to the private parties of the rich. Every kind of drug anyone could possibly want, they provided. But not in a Ferraro club. It was one of the few things the Saldis knew the Ferraros would go to war with them over.

  The Saldis were recognized as a branch of the largest crime family in the States. Giuseppi Saldi was the acknowledged leader and was certainly the biggest crime boss in Chicago. These particular men worked for his brother, Miceli Saldi. The big question was, why were two of Saldi’s goons sitting in the Ferraro nightclub making a deal with some lowlife junkie? Clearly they were conducting business of sorts. The Saldi enforcers blended in, with their expensive suits and Rolex watches, but the man sitting across from them was, by comparison, in disheveled clothes that had seen better days.

  Vittorio was going to have to review the security tapes. There were certain protocols in place. Every doorman, every bouncer and every security guard was required to be familiar with the Saldis and their employ ees. If they entered the nightclub, the Ferraro family was to be informed immediately. That hadn’t happened.

  The fact that the two Saldi enforcers sat in the VIP section on the third tier and no one had called a family member to let them know added an additional sin against the club’s security measures—or the Saldis had paid off someone high enough up in the nightclub’s management that they were able to sneak through. If that were the case, who else had they allowed in?

  Vittorio needed to move around and listen to the conversations. The sale of drugs was always going to be a problem in clubs the world over, but the Saldis blatantly selling in the Ferraro nightclub was going to start a war no one wanted, and it didn’t make sense.

  Vittorio stayed in the shadows and moved as close as possible in order to hear the conversation over the pounding beat of the music. He recognized Ale Sarto and Lando Gori, Miceli Saldi’s top enforcers. If either or both showed up at your door, chances were you weren’t going to survive the encounter. They were dressed in suits and looked sharp and handsome, but Vittorio had seen their work. There was nothing remotely civilized or benevolent about what they did to human beings. They wouldn’t be sent on some small errand. Not ever.

  “She’s worth every cent of the money,” the stranger in disheveled clothes assured. He twitched a couple of times but kept direct eye contact.

  Anyone sitting with Sarto and Gori should have been intimidated, especially a two-bit pimp who seemed to be talking about his prostitute.

  Ale Sarto hitched forward. “You’re pushing your luck, Haydon. Her service is for your past debts, not any new ones you incur.”

  Vittorio suppressed a groan of annoyance. The Saldis had stooped to an all-time low, negotiating for prostitutes in the Ferraro Club. He didn’t turn away, his gut still screaming at him. Nothing really made sense about the small exchange he’d overheard. Top-level enforcers like Sarto and Gori didn’t get involved in such mundane matters as acquiring another prostitute for the Saldi stables.