by Zoey Parker
I took a deep, quiet breath, steadying my nerves and summoning the strength I needed in order to pull the trigger that one time. Just one shot was all I needed to pull off. The rest was going to be up to Cole.
I looked at the back of Fang’s head. One shot to his head would end it all. Shooting his leg to give Cole the chance to get out from underneath him still left a lot of room for error in my book.
My eyes met Cole’s green eyes again. He nodded slightly. I returned my eyes to the gun and my target. I readied myself for the shot, the single shot to Fang’s leg.
I steadied myself and squeezed.
Chapter 28
Cole
“I’m going to end you, Cole,” Fang growled, renewing his grip on his gun and on the rifle at my throat.
“Yeah, okay,” I said, yawning. “You better get on that. I’m willing to bet that Dante has already called the cleaner, and what you want to do isn’t going to matter once he shows up. If we’re all still here then, we’re all dead, but you know how that goes,” I told him. Really, I was just hoping Dante had the foresight to go head and get the cleaner on his way out before law enforcement showed up.
Then, I caught a glimpse of Sasha standing over Fang’s shoulder. She held one of our assault rifles in her hands, and she was creeping up on Fang. It was good to see her up on her feet and okay. She had cuts and dirt on her face and arms, and there was blood on her that probably came from the other guy in the car.
Something else looked different about her though. The cuts weren’t all. It wasn’t that the beautiful, thin blonde with blue eyes who usually kept herself immaculate was actually dirty for once. No, there was something in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. Something had changed inside her.
For one, she was holding a gun, and she wasn’t holding it daintily either. She gripped it like she meant business with it. She was on the offensive now with that gun. She wasn’t waiting for trouble to come her way this time. This time, she was bringing trouble to someone else, and judging by the way she kept eyeing Fang, it looked like she was bringing it to him, though it could have been argued very easily that he’d brought all of his troubles upon himself. And they were about to get a lot worse.
Sasha attacking Fang was like Dante attacking me. It represented a huge change in dynamics. That was a total shift for her. I knew what it meant, though. I knew it meant she’d finally made her decision. She had finally made her choice between the two of us, and I was glad to see it. And not just because I knew it was me.
I watched her while Fang kept spewing his drivel about how he was going to kill me and demolish the Hell’s Overlords MC. I wasn’t nervous anymore about it, though, because I knew that if he was going to shoot me, he would have done it when he pulled out the gun. He couldn’t do it, because he knew he would be shot immediately afterwards, putting an end to all of it for him.
While he talked, distracting himself from what was really going on in front of him, I moved my hands into position so that once Sasha fired her gun, I’d be able to knock Fang’s handgun away and get myself out of harm’s way so I could finally end this.
It was almost daylight. This little game had gone on long enough, but I felt satisfied now that I would be able to have closure by putting one through his brain. If I had allowed it to happen too quickly, it wouldn’t have been satisfying at all.
With my hands in place, I nodded ever so slightly to Sasha.
“What? What are you looking at?” Fang snapped.
He turned his face, and I shoved the gun out of my face at the same time that she pulled the trigger. I felt the bullet shred Fang’s leg next to mine. It was like getting to feel a gunshot without the pain, and it was the most disgusting thing I’d ever felt in my life. I felt every single detail of the bullet’s entry.
He cried out and fired his handgun wildly to the side before I caught him in the jaw with the butt of my rifle, sending him sprawling out on the ground. He dropped his 9mm and grabbed his wounded leg. I stood up over him and put the barrel of my rifle against his head.
“Do it,” he said. “Pull the trigger. You’ve earned it, Cole Masterson. You and your old lady have defeated me fair and square.”
I stood with the gun pressed right against his forehead, watching him grip his wounded leg and hold back the cries of agony. For a brief moment, for just a split second, I considered letting him live and keeping him as a permanent prisoner of the MC, until the day came when we grew tired of keeping him around. I figured that letting him live like that could have been far worse than letting him off the hook by putting him down.
Then again, letting him live in any capacity would have been worse for us as well.
“Do you have anything else you would like to say, Fang?” I asked him.
“Fuck you,” he spat at me. “I’ll see you in hell, Cole.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “On behalf of everyone present and the MC as a whole, I’d like to tell you we’ll be waiting for you when you get there.”
I squeezed the trigger and shot him right there in the grass on the side of the interstate, just as the sun began to rise above the horizon. The new day had begun, not just for us standing on the side of the highway, but for the MC as well.
Fang was gone. It should have felt better to watch his body fall over, limp and lifeless, at my feet, but I was tired, and pulling the trigger like that, so purposefully, seemed to take a little extra energy out of me unexpectedly.
Sasha put her thin hand on my shoulder. I looked at her, standing there with a gun at her side like some vigilante, and I wanted to kiss her. I also wanted to tell her to get the hell on for causing so much trouble. But I figured she’d made a pretty big sacrifice in defending me against her boss. It was obvious that she had some pretty intense feelings for him, so to watch her choose me over him felt pretty damn special.
“Come on, we need to go,” she said, pulling me with her.
“Has Dante already called the cleaner?” I asked.
“He has. You guys were taking so damn long, we thought we were going to have to leave you both here to deal with him yourselves,” she teased.
“Hey, let’s grab some of these weapons real quick,” I told her.
“Yeah, let’s do it.” She waved Dante out of the SUV that Fang’s backup had arrived in, and he quickly climbed out.
“Guys, we probably only have a few minutes before he’s here, so let’s be quick,” he said.
“That’s why all three of us are doing it,” I told him.
We grabbed only what we could carry in one trip. I made sure to get both of the fully automatic guns Fang’s men had brought with them. We hurried back into the SUV just as a couple of cars rode past. I was sure the car on its side with the bodies lying all around it was going to attract some attention.
“Well, there’s some good news,” Dante said as he pulled onto the road.
“What’s that?” I asked him wearily.
“At least we’re in Fang’s SUV, so if anyone sees us and the plates bring anything up in the system, they’ll go back to him,” he joked.
I laughed and sighed at the same time, sinking down into the backseat.
“That’s pretty optimistic of you, brother. Thanks.” I closed my eyes and listened to the car itself on the ride back to headquarters.
No one said anything for the whole ride back. We were all too tired, too stunned, and possibly even too traumatized to say anything. We all needed to process what had just happened the night before. We were leaving a pretty gruesome scene on the side of the road. We lost a lot of men over the course of the whole day. It was the end of a chapter for Hell’s Overlords.
It was the kind of thing that made some MC presidents step down. I’d seen it happen in other clubs, where a major event like that just carried too much weight for the president to handle, and he was almost forced to step down to get away from the stress.
I wasn’t planning on going anywhere. Having Fang out of the way meant we could really unleash o
ur potential. I wanted to tell Dante we needed to start investigating Fang’s weapons connection so we could get the weapons business back, but I knew the ride back wasn’t the time for that. I wanted to thank Sasha for saving my ass back there, but it wouldn’t have been appropriate. She was probably processing the loss of her mentor.
As we rode into the sunrise, I knew a new day was dawning for Hell’s Overlords. I had an old lady at my side. I was excited for the first time in years to go in and announce a meeting, when the time was right of course. Our number one rival was out of the way, and there was no one in his organization ready to take his place. That had been so short-sighted of him. A good leader always had someone ready to step into their place.
My replacement was driving the car. If anything ever happened to me, I knew he’d have my back with the MC. Dante would slide right into the leadership role without a problem.
“We need to ditch this thing after we get back,” I blurted out as soon as I had the thought. I felt the silence in the car shatter as I spoke. No one else was probably thinking about work. Dante was probably thinking about beer and a hot shower, maybe finding a girl later today. Sasha was probably thinking about the image of her boss’s body falling over at my feet. She was probably running through her decisions all over again, everything that led us to this moment together.
“I don’t know. It’s pretty nice,” Dante said. “I wouldn’t mind having one.”
“Well, then let’s send it over to Cortez and let him make sure it can’t be identified,” I told him. “But we can’t keep it hanging around the way it is.”
“Definitely. I already texted him,” Dante said.
“Has he said anything back?”
“Man, you know he just went to bed probably an hour ago.” He laughed.
“Yeah, probably, but we need to handle it as soon as we can,” I urged.
“Hey, boss.” Dante looked at me in the rearview.
“Yeah.” I met his gaze.
“Relax, man. We just went through a lot of shit yesterday, and we all need to chill out right now. That includes you,” he said. “So relax.”
I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to shut work off. I was always working. If I wasn’t at HQ or any of our chapters, I was on the phone or texting someone about work. If I wasn’t doing that, I was running through plans and actions in my head. Yes, we’d been through a lot. Yes, we had a lot to handle over the next week or two from fallout, but we had to be prepared to deal with all of the changes that were about to occur.
As the president of Hell’s Overlords, it was my duty to make sure we were prepared, so I let them have their peaceful silence. I looked out the window at the beautiful trees passing us by on the sides of the road. In my head, I was preparing checklists of what we needed to do to move forward.
At the top of my list was taking Sasha to her apartment tonight so we could start sorting her things out for the move. I was going to ask her to move in with me later, once we had some time alone, and I was pretty sure she was going to say yes.
Chapter 29
Sasha
While Cole was downstairs breaking all of the bad news to other members, mothers, widows, and former old ladies, I found myself back in the second floor bathroom. It was nice to see that the shower curtain had been put back on the rod over the tub, and the linen cabinet had been restocked as well.
I stared at my ratty hair and tired eyes in the bathroom mirror. I wanted nothing more than to crash in one of the bedrooms along the hallway, but I needed to patch myself up from all the glass and clean myself up from the grass and dirt along the side of the road. It had been a long night, and my body could still feel every minute of it.
I ached from head to toe. Muscles I didn’t know I had were in sheer agony. I alternated between hot and cold water on my face to stay awake. I couldn’t imagine what Cole was going through downstairs, having to tell everyone that their friends, sons, husbands, and lovers were dead.
I stripped down and turned on the hot water for the shower, getting it as hot as it would go. Once steam started to fill the bathroom, I knew it was hot enough to get in and wash the long night away. I had to keep moving. If I stopped moving, even to lie down after my shower, I knew that there were things that happened overnight that would haunt me. I wasn’t ready to face those things. I was still too fragile.
I took my time in the shower, letting the hot water run all over my body. The heat penetrated my tender, sore muscles. I felt every bruise I’d earned rolling around in the car when it flipped off the road. I should have been mad at Cole for taking such a reckless shot, but if he hadn’t, I would surely be dead by now. I wouldn’t have made it through the night. Fang had made that clear.
Knowing that I’d almost met my fate, the hot shower felt that much better. It was the first shower I’d taken alone in a while, but I needed to take this one alone. I needed to make sure I was alright before I tried to connect with anyone, especially the man who shot the only father I’d ever known, the father who was planning on killing me.
I leaned against the tile and breathed in the steam, letting the heat cure my insides the way it was my skin and muscles. I considered standing in the tub until Cole came to check on me, but after washing and rinsing my hair, I realized that it could take him a while to finish with the people downstairs.
I cut the water and listened to it drip in the tub as I grabbed a towel to dry off and wrap myself with. The silence in the bathroom was like the silence in the night. It quickly became deafening. Unable to take it, I opened the bathroom door and wandered to one of the rooms where I could lie down for a while and relax.
I kept the towel on, because I was horrible about packing clothes, but in my defense, I hadn’t planned on coming back to HQ after leaving Cole’s apartment with Fang and his goons. I was supposed to be picking up a new assignment.
In reality, I was supposed to be dead.
I didn’t lie down. I just sat at the edge of one of the bed and stared at the hardwood floor under my feet. The room didn’t feel real anymore. Nothing did. Everything was so quiet all of a sudden. None of the energy I normally felt in this place was present. There was no excitement, no sexual tension, no intrigue. It was quiet in every sense.
I stared at the door and waited for Cole to come up, prayed for Cole to come up. I needed something I knew was real beyond a shadow of a doubt. I had to have something to cling to until I could find my way back to the real world from wherever my brain and heart had gone after the shootings last night.
Andre hadn’t even come up to check on me, and he was usually my caretaker in this place. He was the one who got stuck babysitting. I wasn’t going to run this time. I wasn’t going to pull one over on him again. I had to admit, though, it had been pretty funny fooling that gullible kid.
I laughed to myself, bringing back some of my energy to the room. It felt good to laugh. I started really laughing. It wasn’t that pulling one over on Andre had been that funny. It was amusing, but it wasn’t hilarious. I was cackling. My body and soul needed the release, and I gave into it, realizing that it was either laughing or crying.
Or both, as my hysterical laughter turned to sobs. I buried my face in my hands and sobbed, letting out all of the fear, and anger, and sorrow, and fucking disappointment that had been growing for far longer than the last twenty-four hours. The disappointment had been there for years, I realized, ever since my friends from school went off to college and I walked away from my home to live on the street.
So many things had gone wrong to lead me there. I didn’t even know where it started anymore. I just knew that it was okay to cry now because I was finally at the end of it. Finally, after all the years of physical and emotional self-abuse just to try to make a life out of what I was doing, I could let it all go.
It was fitting, I thought, that I was letting it go by myself, alone, in a strange room in a strange building, where a man I had just met was handling his criminal organization downstairs while I poured my emotions
out into my hands and onto his floor. Some things would never change. My independence was one of them, and that had probably been the main thing that had led me out of the house and into the streets.
I wondered if I was going to be giving up my independence by letting Cole take me out of this life. It was a strange, sudden thought to appear in my head. Was I settling by letting him take care of me? Was I going to be missing out on anything? Was my past suddenly going to be in vain?
God, I wished he would come through that door. I needed to run my concerns by him. I needed to know that everything was okay. I needed to know that I was still here and not stuck in some purgatory somewhere waiting on the rest of my life to begin even though it never would.
