by Zoey Parker
“You can’t fight me,” he taunted. “You’ve had so many chances tonight to take me out, Cole, and I think I know why you haven’t taken a single one.”
“Why’s that, Fang?” I asked.
“I define you,” he said, pushing me away. He let go of me and stood his ground as I tumbled backwards. He adjusted his tie while he waited for me to respond or come back.
“You don’t know me,” I growled.
“Sure I do,” he said confidently. “You are so hell-bent on taking me out that you can’t actually do it, because you know that as soon as I’m out of the picture, you won’t have anything else to work towards, and I think that scares you.”
“Nothing about you scares me, Fang,” I told him.
He just laughed.
“Then come on,” he challenged me. “I’m right here. I’m unarmed. Let’s do this. One of us isn’t walking away tonight. Let’s go ahead and figure out who that is so I can go home and get some sleep.”
I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to shoot him or just kick his ass and then shoot him, so I charged at him with the gun in my hands still. I grabbed the barrel and swung it at him like a baseball bat.
He dodged it beautifully, contorting his body so that there was no way I could have hit him.
“Is that all you’ve got, Cole?” he asked. “I figured by your reputation that this was your thing. I heard you were one hell of a fighter, not just some punk who relied on guns to handle his business. So far tonight, though, I’ve only seen you shoot a couple of guys. I haven’t seen you actually fight. Put the gun down.”
He turned to the side and assumed a martial arts stance. I had never been so wrong about anyone before in my life. I should have shot him the first time I had the chance. Tonight would have ended long ago, and most of the Overlords would be headed back to HQ with no more threat of Fang or his men hanging over our heads.
Now, I was about to be stuck in a fight with a jackass who only looked like he didn’t know what he was doing. It was becoming pretty obvious that he knew exactly what he was doing when it came to fighting.
“Put the gun down, Cole. If you want to fight, then let’s fight.” His voice was calm and smooth again.
I had already figured out how he’d created the almost mythical legend of himself on the street with his smooth tongue and his creepy smile. He played right into everyone’s perception of him, so it wasn’t as unnerving anymore. What was unnerving was realizing I’d talked a bigger game than I was prepared to back up with him.
One thing was still for certain, though. There was no way in hell I was talking things over with him to try to work out a deal. He wasn’t going to walk away from here. He wasn’t going home from this one.
I glanced at Dante and Sasha, and I realized that it was starting to get brighter outside again. We weren’t too far from sunrise, it seemed. Traffic would be picking up soon, and people would have to see the outcome of what happened overnight here on the side of the highway. I hoped Dante had the good sense to call a cleaner while I finished off Fang so we could get the hell out of here.
“What are you waiting on?” His voice tormented me. Every time he spoke, it shook me a little more and made it harder for me to focus on what I came here to do tonight.
“Come on, Cole, handle your business.”
I was beginning to see red. I charged him again with the gun.
“You know,” he said, catching the gun with both hands, “for someone who believes so much in hand-to-hand combat, I haven’t seen you put this fucking gun down.” He pushed the gun against me again.
“You know, Fang, I’ve learned something about you tonight,” I responded.
“What did you learn?” he asked me.
“You talk way too damn much. That’s all you are,” I told him.
“I’m glad you noticed,” he said with a smirk spreading across his face.
He pushed me back with my rifle and tucked a foot behind one of mine, tripping me and pushing me down onto the ground.
I fell hard onto my back, almost knocking the wind out of my chest. He pressed the rifle against my throat as he straddled me.
“Part of what they teach you in martial arts, is how to use leverage. You learn how to use a combination of gravity, your weight, and the other person’s weight against your opponent. See, even though you’re a bigger man than I am, I’ve got you on your back, and I’ve got this gun pressed against your throat. There’s nothing you can do about it, either, because I’m using my weight against you. If you’d like, maybe I can show you how to do this sometime. You’re coming to work for me after tonight, right?” he asked with a chuckle.
“I don’t want to learn anything from you,” I said as I pushed back on the gun, trying to get it off my throat.
“That hurts my feelings, Cole,” he mocked me. “But that’s okay, because you’re not coming back tonight anyway.”
He reached to his side, holding me down with only one hand, and he produced a handgun from his pants or suit pocket, or maybe just thin air. I was starting to consider that maybe all the stories about him were true
“Now, before I shoot you, I want you to know that I have really enjoyed being a thorn in your side,” he said as he leveled the gun at my face.
I stared down the barrel of his 9mm.It wasn’t the first time I’d had a gun shoved in my face like that. If he thought that was going to scare me, especially with his smooth talk, he was pretty damn mistaken. I’d had so many guns pulled on me that way before that it had actually become a pretty common occurrence at one point before we established our dominance on the streets.
With his gun in my face, he didn’t realize it, but he’d actually given me the upper hand again. While I wasn’t sure how he was putting so much weight on the rifle at my neck, I knew how to get out from underneath the handgun, but I couldn’t move again. This time it was because of his weight holding my arms down with the gun.
“It’s a shame we couldn’t work together, Cole, but you’ve got to realize the world is changing. There just isn’t room for street thugs like you and your biker gang anymore. Organized crime is going corporate. My business is so much bigger now than you could ever hope to be,” he continued.
“Just pull the trigger already,” I sighed.
“I can’t do that. You know that. It would be too easy to just wipe you out. Besides, I’m trying to pay you a compliment, and you aren’t listening,” he said.
“I don’t need compliments from the likes of you, Fang. Now, blow my brains out or get the fuck off me,” I snapped.
“My goodness. Why are you in such a rush to die, Cole? Is it because your friends are watching and you don’t want them to see you like this?” he taunted me.
“No, but that’s why you won’t do it, isn’t it?” I asked him, laughing at him. “You know that if you go ahead and take me out right now, there are two guns pointed at your head from behind. As soon as they hear the gun go off, they will unload on you.”
I saw his eyes shift then. He realized he no longer had the upper hand, and I couldn’t help but rub it in his face.
“You never actually had the upper hand, Fang. You realize that as soon as you take me out, someone will step right in to take my place. In fact, he’s standing right behind you with an assault rifle pointed at your head. Can you say that about any of your men? Do you have someone to step in behind you and continue your business once you’re dead?” I asked him, taunting him, trying to get inside his head for a change.
“Shut up,” he growled, shoving his gun in my face.
“You’re not even trying anymore, are you? You know that no matter what happens to me now, you’re dead, and everything you’ve worked so hard for will fall into the hands of Hell’s Overlords. That’s right, once we get you out of the picture, we’re taking your business people under our wing, and we’re going to keep your businesses going for you.”
His eyes searched my face, looking for a hole in my words somewhere, looking for something he cou
ld grab ahold of to tear me apart, but he knew I was right. He knew I wasn’t just talking shit anymore. He knew we were about to take everything from him, including his life.
“You know, you were right,” I continued. “We would have made a pretty decent team, but your greed is going to cost you everything. Everything. Hell, even if you manage to walk away from here alive tonight, we’re going to take everything from you.”
“Shut the fuck up,” he yelled.
I could feel his grip on the rifle slipping. His gun wavered. I was getting under his skin, and I was about to earn my freedom back from him.
Chapter 27
Sasha
I raised my gun, but Dante put a hand on it and pushed it back down.
“No, wait,” he told me.
“But look at them. Fang has Cole on the ground,” I pleaded.
“That’s fine,” Dante argued. “Just wait. Cole’s got this. I can feel it.”
“But what if he doesn’t?” I asked.
“But he does.”
I lowered my weapon and watched. I couldn’t see what was going on. Fang’s back was to us. All I could see was that he was straddling Cole, and it looked like he was pressing Cole’s rifle down on his throat. I took a couple of steps closer to try to get a better look. I walked carefully, quietly.
I could hear them talking, but they were keeping their voices low. The conversation was obviously just between them; we weren’t meant to hear it. As I got closer, I realized it was getting much easier to see outside. The light was getting brighter. Soon, the sun would be coming up, and traffic would pick up again along the interstate.
“It’s going to be daylight soon,” I told Dante.
“I know. We need to hurry up and finish this. I wish Cole would go ahead and shoot him already,” Dante said.
“Well, shouldn’t we do something about the mess?” I asked.
“Already on it,” he said, pulling his phone out of his pocket. He lowered his rifle and started tapping on the screen, apparently texting someone.
I turned my attention back to Cole and Fang sitting on the ground in front of me. They didn’t seem to be moving. Whatever their conversation was about, it must have been pretty important. I could still hear them murmuring, though I couldn’t hear a word they were actually saying.
“I’ve got a cleaner on the way,” Dante said. “We need to hurry this up, because anyone who’s left alive won’t be for long once he gets here.”
“Alright, good,” I told him. I’d never been around when a cleaner was working before. I was only a thief. I had never been exposed to anyone else’s job. All I ever did was get in, grab the loot, and get out. I had no real concept of what anyone else did, and I didn’t really care, not at the moment anyway. At that moment, all I cared about was what was going on between Cole and Fang.
“Don’t,” Dante warned me again. “Do not interfere.”
“Look, I’m the one who got him into this mess,” I argued. “I need to be the one to get him out.” I stopped and turned back to Dante.
“That’s where you’re wrong. You may have facilitated it happening this way, but this has been coming for a long, long time, Sasha. These two have been at each other’s throats for years,” he said to me.
I looked back at the two men on the ground. I could have sworn they hadn’t even moved since Fang had pushed Cole onto his back. For all I knew, he’d already choked Cole out and was just sitting there enjoying his victory over his rival.
“Dammit, Dante,” I said, “I need to do this.”
“No, what you need to do is let the fight take its course, Sasha. Let them duke it out,” Dante continued to argue.
But they weren’t duking it out. They were just sitting there. It sounded like they might have been talking, but I wasn’t completely confident in that assessment either. Something wasn’t right, and regardless of what Dante thought I should have been doing, I crept up to the two men to see what the hell was going on.
I couldn’t just let a fight I’d started take its course, not without my intervention. Besides, we needed to get out of here before we created a spectacle. In the early morning light, everything was already pretty obvious.
There was car sitting completely upright on the passenger side. There were bodies everywhere. Less than a mile back on the highway itself, there was a wrecked motorcycle with a body tangled up in it. There were guns everywhere. There was an SUV parked and running along the side of the interstate, where it had plowed into several motorcycles.
To top it off, there were four people with guns hanging out by the wreckage of the car. Two of them were fighting, and the other two were just hanging around with their guns drawn, watching the fight.
Once law enforcement arrived, it really was going to be a mess. They were going to find countless guns on the side of the highway, and some of them were fully automatic, which was going to cause some problems for everyone on the street.
“Don’t worry,” Dante said, catching me looking around at the scene before us. “Our cleaner will have this handled like it never even happened,” he assured me.
“Look, maybe you should get the car ready,” I told him, trying to get him off my back.
“The car?” His eyes focused on the car beside us.
“No, the SUV. I assume we’re going to take it since they ran over the bikes with it.”
He turned and looked at the mangled motorcycles.
“Oh, man, Cole isn’t going to be happy about this,” he groaned.
“I know,” I added.
“No, you have no idea. He was riding the bike Gage gave to him when he became an official member of Hell’s Overlords,” Dante told me.
“That Gage gave him?” I was taken back to when Cole and Dante had escorted Gage out of HQ when I first arrived. Suddenly, I really felt like shit for stirring things up for him. It seemed I had caused a lot more problems than I had realized by coming here and getting involved with Gage. I needed to fix things, and quick.
“Yeah, he didn’t tell you? Gage was the guy who got him in,” Dante said. “That was one of the reasons he kept the old man around. Nobody liked his ass, but Cole stayed pretty loyal to him, all the way to the end.”
“To the end? What the hell did I miss, Dante?” I asked.
“Well, while you were trying to patch things up with your old man there, we were ambushed at the little hideout our sources sent us to.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t tell me.”
“No, you need to hear it. It needs to be real, Sasha. You need to know what kind of trouble you’ve caused for us. We rode out there maybe twenty deep. We came back with four of us,” he told me. “Sixteen members gone, and you won’t hear about it on the news. The police never even came around to ask questions. They just cleaned it up and moved on. I’m willing to bet someone’s got them on the payroll.”
“And Gage?”
“He didn’t make it. In fact, Cole and I were standing right in front of him when it happened,” Dante told me.
I looked back at the two men struggling with each other on the ground. Again, part of me wondered if walking away from both of them was better than trying to hang around whoever came out on top. I had brought too much down on both of them lately, and I felt like I just needed to leave.
“Well, make sure the SUV is ready to go,” I told him.
“What are you about to do, Sasha?” Dante asked me.
“I’m about to speed this process up,” I told him. “This shit has gone on long enough, and regardless of what you think, I’ve caused a lot of it, so I’m going to fix it. We need to be gone before your cleaner gets here, right?”
“Oh hell yeah,” he said. “We don’t need to be around when he gets here. Anyone hanging around then, even cops, won’t be making it home.”
“So it’s settled,” I told him, nodding to finalize everything and let him know I wasn’t in the mood for arguing anymore. I never needed a cleaner for my messes. I always handled them myse
lf, and I was about to do the same now.
Dante lingered a moment longer, giving me a knowing stare, but I could see he also realized there was no talking me down from it now. I was determined to handle this my way. I turned away from him and started walking towards where Fang had Cole on the ground. I wasn’t being careful anymore. I had my gun ready. If Fang noticed me and tried anything, I’d simply shoot him.
I didn’t want to take the moment away from Cole, but I felt I had earned it just as much as he had. Fang had threatened my life the whole way up here. He’d told me all about how this was the end of the line for me. The irony of being the one to pull the trigger on him instead would have been just too damn delicious.
