by Allen, J. C
The two approached. I decided there was no turning back now. If I so loved violence…
I feigned submission. I kept my hands by my purse as the men approached, pretending to realize I was in a battle I could not win.
And then one put my hands on me, and in a swift motion, I took the knife out, sliced the man’s throat, and caught the other one on the arm.
“Fucking whore!” he roared.
“Get her! Falcon wants her alive!”
The man whose throat I had caught fell to the ground, gurgling and soon to be dead. I didn’t have time to think about how I had just killed another man and instead turned my attention to the second guy.
“You fucking bitch!” he growled, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a knife of his own—a much bigger knife. “You wanna go? I’ll fucking slit your throat!”
“Alive, Jared! She needs to be alive!”
“Falcon’ll keep your sorry ass alive even if I stab you in the chest,” he growled.
He roared as he charged forward. I stepped to the side and swung my own knife, but it missed. He turned, swung, and I fell to the ground. I tried to rise, but then the knife came down into my chest.
I screamed in pain, writhing on the ground as tears came out. I tried to find the strength to retaliate, but the pain was so intense that I couldn’t muster anything up.
“You stabbed her in the heart, you fucking moron!” the tall blonde said.
“What was I supposed to do, perform surgery on—”
But before another word came, the tall blonde pulled out a silenced gun and shot the man dead. He turned his gun to me.
“Falcon wanted you alive, which you would’ve been if you had just cooperated,” he snarled. “Instead, I’m going to have to say Jared killed you. A shame, really. We were all looking forward to raping you, whore.”
I sought the words to fight back, but I was losing consciousness. What a way to go out. What a way…
Derek… I’m sorry. I love you so much. You saved my life. You made these last three weeks so… so special… Derek…
“Any last words, whore?”
Forgive me… Derek… wasn’t strong… enough…
“Figures. Your mouth was better used for sucking anyways.”
I closed my eyes.
And then the gun fired.
Epilogue, Pt. 1
The clock had struck noon, and my promised delivery had not yet arrived.
I stared at my watch with some bemusement at my guards, who looked nervous that the promised arrival had not yet happened. This afternoon would mark a special, unexpectedly opportunistic occasion, and yet with the clock having passed the hour of most opportune celebration, to say I felt upset was an understatement.
Not that my men would know that, of course. To show emotion was to show weakness, and I never showed weaknesses. The Black Falcons didn’t deserve to have weaknesses.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t verbalize my frustration and disappointment.
“Gentlemen,” I said. “As I understood, I requested that my gift be delivered to me an hour ago. It is now in the afternoon. Does anyone care to explain to me why your peers are so ineffective that they cannot even provide me something so simple?”
And then someone’s phone buzzed.
“Go ahead, Larry,” I said. “Take a look. Perhaps it is an update on our delivery.”
Larry, a muscular, short man who undoubtedly had the most severe Napoleon complex of anyone I knew, hurriedly grabbed his phone, which looked tiny in his hands. He looked at his phone and turned red. This did not please me.
“They found Rocket in the alleyway dead with two of his men,” he said. “And the girl was gone.”
Gone.
Gone?
“Gentlemen,” I said with a long sigh, an effort on my part not to pull the trigger on Larry. “How is it that I can kill Dominick Knight and Dustin Knight with almost no effort on my part, make Derek Knight’s life insufferable, and raise the prestige of the Black Falcons to above that of the Savage Saviors, but when it comes to one little whore, my entire operation gets cut down to a third of what it once was?”
“Maybe she is dead.”
Someone was foolish enough to say that, and that someone quickly got a bullet to their skull from me.
“Let me make one thing clear,” I said. “Though our operations and games of the last week have bought us the time we need to grow back to where we were, we do not operate on maybes. To do so is a good way to get us all killed, in jail, or put in such a state we will wish we were in one of the two. Until we have confirmed kills of Derek Knight, his fag, and his whores, I will not let this operation have any downtime. Do I make myself clear?”
Everyone gave their nod and verbal assent.
“Do whatever you have to do to find Derek Knight and kill him and his whore. I no longer care enough to inquire into his soul. He has brought me enough damage as it is. I do not care if you have to light his apartment on fire or blow up a hospital. Those two are the only thing standing between me and conquering this city. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
Again, everyone gave their understanding.
“Gentlemen, our efforts have made Derek and the Saviors impatient. Soon, this will all come to an end. But we must stay vigilant and live up to the standards of certainty, clarity, and perfection that I set when we created this club. Let me make myself clear.”
I finally smiled, the better to let them know how much I would enjoy this.
“Dead or alive, bring me Derek and his whore. If they are dead, we will show destroy their bodies and show them to the Saviors. If they are alive, we will record their torture sessions and then show them to the Saviors. Either way.”
I let out a laugh.
“They will die.”
Epilogue, Pt. 2
The Black Falcon laid dead before me, having held his gun just a few feet away from my girlfriend. Eve was wounded, a knife in her chest, but from what little I had learned of anatomy from my father’s visits, Roost’s visits, and my own, I felt quite certain that the knife had just missed her heart. That was not the greatest danger right now.
Instead, it was her bleeding.
I threw her on my bike and roared through the roads, speeding toward the same hospital that had saved my life. In a less stressful and urgent time, I would have to buy that hospital some sweet drinks and a hell of a lot of meals as a thank you for saving so many of our lives. But not today.
“Help!” I roared as I picked her up and carried her through the ER reception lobby. “I need help now!”
Thankfully, the doctors did not disappoint, immediately taking her to a nearby room. I followed, at which point a smaller, probably fresh new doctor came forward and asked me to stay behind. I growled, said I’d stay out of the room but would watch, and he didn’t bother to say anything else.
They took her to a room, conducted some immediate surgery and some work, and had the knife removed within minutes. A short while later, a nurse came out, blood on her hands and on her lab coat.
“Didn’t we have you in here a few weeks—”
“How is she?” I said, cutting through the formalities.
“Her? She’ll survive.”
Truth be told, I’d had too much adrenaline running through me at that moment to feel anything on the way over. I didn’t have stress or worries to feel relief from. I just breathed, trying to calm down the rush of energy that had overtaken me.
“Good,” I said, taking a deep breath and trying to control my breathing. “How long will she be out?”
“Honestly? Just a few hours. She got really lucky. A few more inches to the left and the knife would have killed her. We’re still evaluating the injury, so she may have suffered some bruised or cracked ribs or some strained muscles, but her vitals are healthy and dodged. She got lucky.”
We all did.
I thought back on how I had almost slept through her texts. I had heard the phone vibrate, alerting me to some te
xts, but had felt so tired I didn’t answer them at first. But the fear that I had missed out on something important compelled me to answer them.
Suffice to say, as soon as I saw Eve’s message, I was roaring through my apartment, throwing on the bare minimum and grabbing my gun to find her. And even then, I had just barely gotten there in time—if I hadn’t slowed down for the restaurant, if I had sped past that alley, I would have missed her completely.
Sometimes, it was better to be lucky than good.
“Thanks,” I told the nurse. “I need to make some calls.”
The nurse nodded, headed back inside, and I called the first person who needed to know.
“Derek, yer up—”
“Roost, listen to me closely,” I said. “Some Black Falcons stabbed Eve and almost killed her this morning. She’s alive, I’m with her in the hospital. She’s going to be OK.”
“Thank heavens,” Roost said, the relief in his voice audible.
“But Roost? I don’t think I need to tell you that we need to take the fight to them now, and I don’t care what the cost is. They chose to up the ante big time, and I’m not going to let any time pass.”
“Agreed,” Roost said. “I’mma mobilize our units and get ‘em ready to strike at one of ‘em compounds later tonight. Ya wanna come?”
I looked at Eve. All of her vitals looked stable. If she truly was going to wake in a few hours, then I could put her in the shop or in my apartment. I didn’t care how much it took to pay for someone to come along, I was going to do it. I sure as shit wasn’t going to leave her in a public space like this.
The last thing I needed was for some ill-aware doctor to let a Black Falcon into her room, deliver a silent kill, and then leave me to pick up the pieces. No one had dared to kill someone recovering in the hospital yet, but I wasn’t about to take that chance.
Whatever was necessary to protect Eve, it was now time to do it.
“Yes,” I growled. “In case it wasn’t clear, Roost, it’s time to take them all out. Falcon, the Black Falcons, the whole crew. And we do it as one, and without mercy.”
“Glad to hear it,” Roost said. “See ya later this evenin’.”
We hung up at the same time. I looked at Eve, and then looked past her outside the window.
Somewhere out there, in some fucking rundown complex, Falcon was trying to revitalize the Black Falcons.
And here, in this hospital hallway, I knew I was going to put a full stop to that once and for all before the week was out, or die trying.
