THE DEVIL’S BRIDE

by April Lust

  The man had quick reflexes. Watching him in action made it easy to see why so many people on the street compared him to a snake. The way he moved seemed almost unnatural, as did his dark eyes. They were quite possibly contacts, but I didn’t know anyone who’d spent enough time around him to know. I certainly wasn’t going to ask Clara about it.

  That was when everyone else began unloading on the two men. They fired a few rounds back at us, but for the most part we had them cornered behind the car. We advanced on the car. The gunfire calmed as Skull and his goon seemed to be regrouping and my guys were circling the car. They were so cornered and so screwed. I was surprised they hadn’t given up yet. It occurred to me that they could have just texted someone to come for backup, and that would have been a good reason for them to hold out as long as they could.

  That wasn’t going to fly with me. We were going to end this now.

  “Skull,” I called out. “I know it was you behind the thefts, man. Your girl told me everything.”

  I stood with my back to the underside of the front end of the car. I could still feel the heat from the engine. It hadn’t cooled off completely yet, reminding me of how quickly everything was happening even though time felt like it was almost standing still for us. The night certainly felt still enough. The gunshots cracked through the darkness, echoing in the woods along the side of the road.

  The interstate was dead, adding to the timeless feeling of the scene in front of us. The moon didn’t even seem to be moving in the sky above. Everything was still. Even we became still as we stood and waited for someone to make the first move.

  I had seen Skull duck around the front of the car, so I crept slowly around, expecting to find him, but he wasn’t there.

  I heard him shouting at the other gunman, and I stood back to watch what they were doing. I heard a gunshot from inside the car, alerting us to Clara’s presence. Then, I saw the other gunman scrambling atop the car before rolling off.

  “Skull!” My voice rang out in the night like a gunshot.

  In the near perfect darkness, I saw his face snap in my direction. I saw those dark eyes focus on me. He raised his gun, but he didn’t shoot. Instead, he ducked around behind the car, leaving his man on the ground holding his arm. I couldn’t tell if he’d been shot or if something else had happened to him.

  “Dammit,” I cursed under my breath. “Where the hell is everybody?”

  It suddenly felt like the world had come down to just myself and Skull. Everyone else, everything else, had faded into the darkness of the night surrounding us.

  “Come on, Skull, stop trying to delay the inevitable, man,” I called out into the darkness.

  I pressed myself against the hood of the car and started to creep slowly back around.

  “Guys,” I called out to my men, “I think Clara’s still in the car. Someone get her out, but be careful. I think she’s armed.”

  “On it, boss,” someone called out behind me. I could hear footsteps on the car as someone climbed up to get her.

  I crept around the front end of the car until I stood on the interstate side of the wreck again.

  “I’m not delaying anything,” Skull said as I came around the car. We stood face to face for the first time since our little feud began.

  He had been able to elude me for years, and we were finally standing right next to each other. I almost wanted to put my gun away and shake his hand. Someone as successful as Skull—and successful in as many different areas as he was—almost demanded respect. And I would have been willing to admit he had earned it if he hadn’t been stealing business from us. But that was how competition worked. He stole some of our business, forcing us to do a better job in order to earn that business back or pick up new clients to replace the old ones.

  At first, I wondered if Skull was even a real person or just the name of his gang. He had been that elusive. No one had seen him, even though everyone knew his name from his prostitutes and call girls. He was well known among the gambling rings, too, and a few of those guys had claimed to see him on a regular basis.

  I wasn’t entirely sure how it happened, but it came to pass that a lot of his gambling associates had gone out of business over the years, robbing him of gambling business the way he had robbed us of weapons and security deals, but none of that could be traced back to us. A lot of those gambling rings were broken up by police. It seemed like anyone who admitted to knowing Skull had become a target.

  As we turned up the heat on his clientele, he turned up the heat on us, stealing more of our business, and eventually resorting to stealing my product so he could cut into my drug money. I still wasn’t sure exactly how he expected to grow a sustainable drug business if all he was doing was stealing from me to sell what he’d stolen, unless he was working on getting to my supplier.

  None of that would matter in a few moments. None of our history would matter any longer. None of the petty bullshit either of us had done to piss off the other would matter. This feud was about to be over, and once his body lay lifeless on the ground in front of me, I was going to send my guys out to infiltrate every aspect of Skull’s business.

  We were going to take over everything Skull had put his hands in, from the gambling to the prostitution, and from the call girls to his weapons supplier. That was one thing I hadn’t mentioned to Clara yet. As far as she knew, I was just pissed about the drugs. No, I wanted to take his ass over. I wanted to put Storm’s Angels on top of every game in town.

  Once we owned this city, I was going to leave Mick in charge while I went from chapter to chapter, helping them achieve the same status we had. By the end of it all, wherever we were, we were going to run it. And we were going to have people in place to shut down anyone who tried to move in on our business. We weren’t going to have any more Skulls operating as thorns in our side.

  As I stared into his dark eyes surrounded by his dark features, I could see the future of Storm’s Angels. I could see that with one bullet to his head, I was going to set the fate of my MC into motion.

  He narrowed his eyes, and I started to think that maybe he was reading my mind. Suddenly, it felt like he could see my thoughts.

  “Are you going to do it?” he asked. He raised his empty hands. He’d put his gun away. “Go ahead,” he encouraged me. He pressed himself against my gun. “Pull the trigger, Mason,” he growled.

  I couldn’t. The gun was in my hand. My finger was on the trigger. I was just paralyzed. It wasn’t fear that had me unable to make my move. It was the magnitude of the situation. It was knowing that in one split second, I could unceremoniously end this conflict.

  “You can’t do it, can you?” he taunted me.

  I just stared blankly at him. I really couldn’t. I tried to flex my finger, to squeeze the trigger, but nothing happened. He grabbed my hand and pressed my gun harder against himself. He smiled at me, his lips curling up in an unnatural grimace.

  Then, it became about fear. Skull had obviously embraced his reputation for seeming very otherworldly to the people on the street. He had worked to make himself as creepy as possible so he lived up to people’s expectations.

  There was nothing special about this guy outside of his ability to read people, but we all had to be able to do that to be successful in this business we were in. Still, staring into his eyes with that creepy, maniacal smile spreading across his face, I couldn’t stop the chills that spread through my veins.

  I was in trouble here. I was in big trouble if I couldn’t pull the trigger on this creep and stop him. If I didn’t kill him, he was going to kill me. And if he killed me, I was afraid the MC would fall apart shortly thereafter.

  I tried to pull the trigger again, but I couldn’t make my finger squeeze it. I began to wonder if he hadn’t cast some kind of spell on me. Did he actually have the powers that people on the street thought he had? There was no way. That shit wasn’t real. He was just really creepy.

  “I’m waiting on you, Mason,” he said. “Everyone is. If you do th
is, Clara goes free, you get your drugs and weapons businesses back, and you can take over anything of mine that you want. I will no longer be in your way.”

  He pulled the gun slowly out of my hand.

  “Of course, if you can’t, then I will, and you won’t live long enough to see me dismantle your MC.” He held my gun up in my face to show me that he’d pulled it out of my hand without a fight.

  Chapter 25

  Clara

  Gunshots rang out again, but they were irregular. Sitting in the car in the dark, I had no idea what was going on outside. There would be gunshots for a moment, and then complete silence. I wondered if they were just playing with each other at this point. It seemed very odd that they didn’t just finish each other off, but they were dealing with Skull. The normal rules didn’t seem to apply when Skull was involved. He made his own rules, even when someone else was calling the shots.

  After his goon fell off the car, I heard people moving around outside. I waited with one of the guns in my hand. I had no idea who was going to show up next. I didn’t know if it was going to be one of Storm’s Angels or even Skull himself.

  “Dammit, Mason, if you get me out of this, I promise you, I will never betray your trust again,” I said with my eyes closed.

  Someone appeared in the window above me. I didn’t recognize who it was but it wasn’t the goon. It looked like one of Mason’s guys. From what I could see, he dressed like the other guys in his plain t-shirt and vest covered in patches.

  “Come on,” he urged me. “Jump up!” He held his hands down to catch me, and I did the best I could.

  I shoved the handgun behind the belt on my jeans and jumped up to grab his hands. He grabbed the rope tied around my wrists and started to pull me up. I couldn’t really help him from that point because there wasn’t enough room for me to try to get a good footing to push up with my feet.

  He pulled me out of the car and cut my wrists free with a knife he pulled from his pocket. Then he pulled me out the rest of the way and cut my feet free, too. He jumped down from the car and held his arms out for me to jump into them.

  I laughed and shook my head as I jumped down next to him.

  “Is that it?” I asked. “Is it over?”

  “Mason and Skull are on the other side of the car. I didn’t see where the other guy went,” the Angel said, shaking his head.

  In the moonlight, I could see there were other Angels standing around with guns drawn, watching out for Skull or his goon to come back and start shooting again. That was when we saw headlights, and they turned towards the car. The bikers gestured for me to get down as they all ducked and ran back up to the car.

  I heard a couple of car doors slam as it sounded like someone was getting out. Then, in the dead silence of the night, I heard guns cock. My blood turned to ice. After all that had happened so far, it seemed Skull had called for backup after all.

  I could feel the men around me tense up. The air filled with their anxiety as we listened to the men approaching the car. An arm shot out in front of me, holding me back against the roof of the car. I looked around. I recognized Mick, but I didn’t know who any of the other guys were, and I didn’t see Mason. Where the hell was Mason?

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I heard Skull as he taunted everyone.

  Then rapid gunfire erupted.

  The guys all jumped when they heard the fully automatic machine guns rip the night open around them.

  “I don’t have a gun,” I heard someone say. I looked up, and it was Mason, talking to Mick. Mick pulled the assault rifle off his shoulder and handed it to him.

  “Get down,” my rescuer told me.

  “There are only two of them,” Mason said.

  “So that makes four including Skull and the other guy,” Mick added.

  “Right. We’ve got four shooters. From what I can tell, only two of them have automatic weapons. Skull and the other guy might be going back to the SUV that pulled up, so let’s get these two guys out of the way,” Mason said.

  “Piece of cake,” said Mick.

  “Yep, piece of cake. Give ’em hell, boys,” Mason said, and the night erupted around me.

  I crouched down against the roof of the car, wishing I’d stayed inside it. Gunfire blasted all around me. There was the rapid fire of Skull’s backup gunmen. Then there was the pulsing gunfire of Mason and his men shooting back.

  My rescuer fell to the ground in front of me. He’d been shot by one of Skull’s men. I quickly grabbed the rifle from his hands.

  “No offense,” I told his dead body as I grabbed the weapon and held it against my chest. I knelt back down against the car and listened to the gunshots all around me.

  The gunfire started to thin out. I heard a couple of cheers as one of the automatic weapons was silenced. Then I heard a couple more assault rifles go out. Storm’s Angels were down to just Mick and Mason.

  They closed in on either side of me, pressing against the car.

  “We’ve got the one guy out there, and it looks like Skull and his other shooter are in the car,” Mason told him.

  “I’ll get this guy. You start heading over there,” Mick said.

  “You sure?” Mason asked.

  “Oh yeah, I’ve got him.” Mick turned around to face the car and started stepping to the side, walking to the back of the car until he cleared it.

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see Mick get taken out by one of Skull’s men. I heard both of their guns go off—Mick’s and Mason’s. I didn’t look to see where Mason was shooting.

  “All right,” Mick cheered.

  “Yeah, now it’s just me and Skull,” Mason said.

  “I’ll cover you,” Mick told him as he started to walk away.

  The night went silent again. I hated the silence. At least with the gunfire, I knew what was going on. I could hear the action and tell where everything was. In the silence, the only thing I could hear was the hum of the SUV’s engine, the car Skull’s other two shooters had pulled up in.

  I wanted to run out in front and grab the automatic weapons that were lying next to his two dead shooters, but I didn’t know who or what else was out there waiting on us to make a move like that. For all I knew, as soon as I ran out to grab one of those guns, someone would have opened up on me, taking me out.

  “The tension is killing me,” I said out loud, unable to hold it in any longer.

  “Me, too, Clara,” Mick said. “Me, too, but Mason’s got this. They were literally face to face a little while ago, and they didn’t do shit. I don’t know what the deal is with those two, unless they’re waiting for some special main even style fight. Wait, he’s trying to say something.”

  I stood up and turned around to face Mick, to see if I could catch what Mason was trying to tell him.

  “He’s not here,” I heard him shout over the SUV.

  “What do you mean, he’s not there?” Mick asked, lowering his gun.

  “Uh, Mick,” I said, feeling an arm wrap around my neck and the barrel of a gun press against my temple.

  “Oh shit, Mason. We found him,” Mick said as he turned around to see Skull with me in his grasp.

  “Tonight just keeps getting more and more interesting, don’t you think?” Skull asked Mick as he started to pull me away from him.

  “Hey, man, just let her go,” Mick urged him. “This beef is between you and Mason. Leave her out of it.”

  “Oh, she’s going to be left out of it. Where’s Mason?” he demanded. “I want him to witness this.”

  “Witness what?” Mick asked. “What are you planning on doing, Skull?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I’m going to kill this traitor, and then I’m going to kill the two of you.”

  For some unexplainable reason, I wasn’t afraid he was going to shoot me. Maybe it was because I’d been through so much already, but it felt like he was bluffing. It felt like Skull was just trying to use me as a distraction so he could buy some time to find an escape. I could almost h
ear it in his voice. He wasn’t about to kill anybody. He was about to try to run like the coward he was.

  “Put your weapon down, Mick,” Skull told him, and I was surprised to see Mick comply.

  He raised his hands and lowered the rifle he had to the ground, slowly, carefully. He stood back up without taking his eyes off of Skull with an arm around me and the gun to my head.

  “Good, now where the hell is Mason?” he hissed.

  “I’m right behind you,” Mason said, and I felt Skull’s body tense up against mine. I figured Mason must have had his gun drawn on Skull the way Skull had his drawn on me.