BRAKING HARD To Load

by Bloom, Cassandra

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE

  PART 1

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  PART 2

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  PART 3

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  PART 4

  EPILOGUE

  RUNNING ON EMPTY

  RIDING ON FUMES

  THE AUTHOR

  BRAKING HARD

  The Crow's MC

  BOOK THREE

  Cassandra Bloom

  &

  Nathan Squiers

  Copyright© Cassandra Bloom, 2018

  THE CROW’S MC SERIES

  PROLOGUE

  ~PAPA RAVEN~

  “GENTLEMEN!”

  His voice rang out across the room, and the others in attendance fell silent. Papa Raven, satisfied, settled back into his seat.

  He had referred to them as “gentlemen,” but there was a hint of playfulness here; as if he were sampling a joke that none found funny. And if he’d been insulted by that fact—if truly he had been aiming for humor and that aim had been misfired—every soul at that triangle, head and best alike, would undoubtedly fall into a forced and panicked scream of laughter.

  As would the group were they only half that number.

  As would the group were they only half that yet again.

  And so on and so forth.

  None laughed when Papa Raven addressed them as “gentlemen,” but, having not been aiming for humor, he spoke on without pause, unoffended and, therefore, unprovoked.

  He sat at one corner of the triangular table. The other two corners were occupied by two other Carrion Crew “heads.” There were other heads to the Crew, yes, but only two of them were in attendance at that moment. With the three corners occupied, the three remaining sides, each long enough to comfortably occupy five chairs, found themselves occupied with fifteen of what the Carrion Crew heads considered to be their best men. Like the heads, these fifteen did not encapsulate the whole of what was considered to be their best men, it was just the fifteen that were presently in attendance. Of the fifteen, each Carrion head present had summoned five of their best to come to this gathering; each line of five sat to the left of the Carrion head that had invited them. Had the group been larger—had there been more Carrion heads present and, therefore, another group of five summoned on their behalf—the shape of the table would have been adjusted to accommodate for just that number.

  A square for four heads and twenty best.

  An octagon for eight heads and forty best.

  And so on and so forth.

  Papa Raven was meticulous in that way. He was also not above sharing roles—“head,” in this case—and he took no steps to set himself above any other. Whether it was three corners, four corners, eight, ten, or ten-thousand—and he most certainly aspired to see the day when the Carrion Crew could boast ten-thousand heads, preferably with each one overseeing well over five “best”—he had no interest in crude displays of power or authority.

  However…

  However!

  However, as the Carrion Crew—all of the Carrion Crew—were his, as he was in essence the founder, the CEO… hell, the fucking father of the Carrion Crew, it was his right to assume some sense of superiority.

  Even if he chose not to boast one.

  It was simply in their place to know.

  And, should there be a Crew member who did not know, or one who forgot themselves and should think themselves bold enough to challenge, it was not much of a challenge to handle such things.

  No more than clipping a young bird’s wings, Papa Raven imagined.

  And so, though his chair was no different and his corner was no more angled or widened than any other corner of the table, there was no challenge when he addressed the triangle and its eighteen occupants.

  And so, as it should be, when he called out to the room for silence, the room fell into a silence so deep—so awe-inspiring in its suddenness—that one might imagine they’d up and died.

  Up… and died.

  “I’ve come to speak of matters most pressing,” he said, keeping his voice was low; keeping it monotonous. A particularly poetic listener in the room might go so far as to think his words sounded rehearsed, and in this they would be mistaken.

  Papa Raven was a man of action, not one of words.

  The most rehearsal that Papa Raven put into his words was the careful structuring he applied to them inside of his head moments before he articulated them. Should this be considered “rehearsal” then, yes, they were rehearsed. But, being a man of action and not of words, Papa Raven believed that one thinking before they spoke was hardly akin to practicing.

  It was not the methodic repetition of assembling and disassembling a weapon so that, should the need arise, they could be armed and ready to end a life in a matter of seconds.

  It was not the agonizing repetition of striking oneself with lashes or subjecting oneself to high temperatures—holding one’s hand over an open flame until the flesh blistered and bled—so that their enemies couldn’t elicit so much as a scream should one find oneself captured.

  It was not hours in a shooting range or in a dojo or out there, on the streets, toiling over the finite details that would one day—one day soon!—make the city theirs.

  Make the city his!

  No, the manner in which Papa Raven spoke in that instant was in no way rehearsed. It was simply how Papa Raven chose to speak in that instant. And anybody who’d heard him speak before would know that this was not how he typically spoke. In actuality, nobody could truly say how Papa Raven spoke; his tone, his rhythms, and even his vocabulary seemed to change as randomly and as quickly as the path of a flock of birds; just like a pack of birds, too, was the bizarre grace and beauty that it took regardless of all elements—but this, like everything else, was just how he was.

  And that was just the way Papa Raven liked to keep things:

  Unpredictable.

  Random.

  Chaotic.

  For only when one slipped from the grounding binds of predictability could they truly hope to overwhelm their enemies; only then could they truly hope to soar.

  “Most pressing, Papa Raven?” one of the Carrion heads repeated. His tone was curious, his words representing an obvious effort to bleed more information from their leader. But there was more there, too; there was fear—to question Papa Raven, even in such an innocent fashion, could be very, very dangerous.

  Depending on the circumstances and, of course, his mood.

  The rest of the room seemed to hold its breath in that instant.

  The moment held for an unbearable time.

  Then Papa Raven smiled at the question. “Numbers,” he said with calm simplicity, his voice friendly and accommodating. “I’d like to open on the subject of numbers.”

  “O-of course, Papa Raven,” the Carrion head who’d first spoken said, still shaking the nervousness from his voice. “Which numbers would you like to—”

  “The dead,” Papa Raven interrupted, the friendly smile he’d been wearing only seconds earlier remaining, but his eyes suddenly dark, furious, and calculating. “Firstly, the number of dead Carrions. I want to know how many of our own we lost in the attack on the neighborhood—my neighborhood!”

  The room flinched at that.

  Everyone there knew about the Crow Gang’s recent attack on the cul-de-sac.

  Only “
attack” felt too polite a word. It had been closer to an “assault”…

  Or maybe “massacre” was a more suitable word.

  And it was no secret that Papa Raven had liked his cul-de-sac. He had even boasted one of the houses as his own. As such, the attack—the assault; the massacre—represented not only a loss of Carrion Crew members and a great deal of product, but, for Papa Raven personally, it had represented a loss of a lovely piece of business property as well as a personal home.

  Understandably, everyone in the room was uncomfortable with anything to do with the subject of the attack.

  Especially when it was in regards to losses the Carrion Crew suffered in that attack.

  But if there was anything worse than giving Papa Raven an answer he didn’t like, it was…

  “Ahem…” one of the Carrion Crew’s best men cleared his throat and rose to his feet. He’d been summoned by the head seated to Papa Raven’s right, and, seeing one of his own rising to the call, this Carrion head’s face was flooded with a comical mix of pride and terror.

  Despite all, the man spoke clearly as he said, “We lost seventy-three Crew members, Papa Raven.” Then, ignoring a small cycle of murmurs around the table, he went on: “Of those seventy-three, only sixty-one were actually killed.”

  Papa Raven sneered at this, though no one could be certain if it was a gesture towards the number or the follow-up statement that had been presented. “And what of the other eight?” he demanded.

  The man, nodding—expecting the question—said, “Four of them were wounded badly enough to no longer be of any use to us. We have them on life support, but only because we weren’t certain whether you’d want them kept alive for questioning.”

  “I don’t,” Papa Raven said flatly, and the Carrion head to his left pulled out his cell phone, punched in a brief message, and quickly put it away again.

  The man nodded again and went on once this was done. “Another two were too far gone to even serve as viable witnesses—they were seen to almost three hours ago—and…” he paused to refer to a series of pages he’d been keeping neatly stacked in front of him. He flinched, seeming for the first time since he’d started speaking to be uncertain of what he was doing, and, finally, said, “And another two—one Joel Eisteen and Andrew Irons, according to a few of our survivors—chose to flee.”

  “Flee?” Papa Raven repeated the word as though its meaning was lost to him.

  The man, looking less and less like one of the Carrion Crew’s best, worked to gulp away a nervous lump that had begun to form in his throat and nodded. “Y-yes, Papa Raven,” he answered.

  Papa Raven looked around the room. Every Carrion Crew member his wandering eyes came to land upon flinched at the contact, and flinched they remained until their leader’s gaze had moved well beyond them.

  Then, returning to the one who’d been daring enough to answer his question in the first place, Papa Raven returned his focus on the man and asked, “Flee to where, exactly?”

  “We’re…” another pause to scan the pages. They were becoming less and less neat; the stack becoming a hectic fanning of papers.

  Nobody was daring enough to say that those pages seemed to perfectly symbolize the nature of the room, of the table.

  “We’re really not sure,” the man finally said. “They were seen running away during the attack on the cul-de-sac, and none of ours have managed to track them down since. It’s fair to assume at this point that they must have left the city in general. We’re deeming it a willful abandonment.”

  “An abandonment…” Papa Raven said the word through a jagged exhale, “… of the Carrion Crew?”

  “Yes, sir,” the man nodded, though, with the rest of his body beginning to tremble in terror, it was difficult to tell where the nerves ended and the nod began.

  Papa Raven’s hands clenched into fists, tightened until the skin had gone white, and then released only enough to make curved talons of his fingers. “I want all reports to state that we lost seventy-three in the attack, and I want those reports to be factual. Any of those seventy-three who aren’t dead as of this moment will be by next sundown. Is that understood?”

  Everyone in attendance nodded.

  The Carrion head’s cell phone made another appearance.

  “And…” the bold speaker injected then, “What of the ones who fled?”

  Papa Raven fixed him with his dark, furious stare. “You mean Joel and Andrew?”

  The man nodded.

  “Were they among the seventy-three you just told me of?” Papa Raven asked, sounding almost genuinely curious.

  Another nod.

  “And what the fuck did I just say?” Papa Raven challenged.

  The man flinched, but still held enough of himself to ask, “But… what if they can’t be found?”

  Papa Raven’s body seemed to relax at this, and he offered a casual, businessman’s grin along with a single-shoulder shrug. “Then you track down their families; their loved ones,” he answered matter-of-factly.

  “Sir?” the man pressed.

  Papa Raven, nodding, said, “Their family and loved ones will either know where they are—how to find them—or…” he gave another shrug, “… they’ll serve as leverage. And, should you be so bold as to ask what should be done if Joel or Andrew can’t be coerced to return even still, then let me make it clear now: I want seventy-three deaths chalked up in the records of this attack. If we can’t have Joel and Andrew’s deaths to fill that quota, then they’ll be taken from whoever I feel was closest to each of them. Understood?”

  It was.

  Papa Raven smiled, though it was more toothy and less joyous than any smile any of those in attendance had ever seen. “Now…” he stretched the word to nearly two syllables, “how many Crows—the vile sons-of-whores!—were we able to take out during their attack?”

  The same man, still standing, grimaced as Papa Raven’s gaze held him. Once again the pages were referred to, this time with a great deal of muttering. It appeared that the growing mess was beginning to interfere with how easily the information could be gathered.

  “Uhmmm…” he hummed, obviously trying to stall for time as he worked his panic-soaked brain to perform a few calculations. “It… it seems to be in the… twenties?” he said the last part as a question, and the rest of those in attendance grimaced at the damning inflection.

  “In the twenties?” Papa Raven chimed back at him.

  The man nodded, shaking even harder now. “It… it’s hard to say, really. All of the Carrion Crew members were either laid-out and easy to count or… well, let’s just say it was easy to count ours. The Crow Gang… th-they took their wounded with them; some were even well enough to get away on their own. And… well, not all of the Crow’s corpses were left behind.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Papa Raven demanded.

  The man whimpered. “W-well, a few of ours said they saw some of the Crows carrying some of the bodies away. Proper burials and all…”

  Papa Raven’s lip curled in disgust and he shook his head, muttering, “And we call ourselves ‘Carrions.’”

  Once again, nobody laughed.

  Nobody dared.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the man offered, “but there’s just no way of knowing that number for certain.”

  “But what it says on all of that”—Papa Raven waved a hand in the direction of the mess of papers—“leads you to believe that the number of dead Crows is something in the twenties, correct?”

  The man nodded again.

  “And our numbers—according to all records from this point forward—cite exactly seventy-three dead Carrions?”

  Another nod.

  Frowning at this, Papa Raven produced a semi-automatic pistol with an extended magazine jutting from its polished handle like an angry phallus aiming to fuck its way straight into Hell. Before any, the standing best especially, could react to this motion, the trigger was pulled and a bullet was delivered into his head.

>   The body of this man, who’d only done as he was asked and delivered the news of numbers, fell dead; sprawled and leaving a growing pool of blood roughly in the center of one of the triangular table’s sides.

  Papa Raven, seeming no more flustered by this turn of events than if he’d simply rubbed an itch from his nose, set the semi-automatic pistol with its extended magazine in front of him, letting the barrel aim lazily—a bored and yawning, gunmetal mouth—back towards the now-dead best man.

  Nobody at the table spoke, but all of them had the same thought:

  That extended magazine offered the semi-automatic seventeen shots. Assuming that Papa Raven would not soon turn the gun on himself—and he most assuredly would not—there was easily one bullet waiting for each and every one of them should he see fit to deliver them.

  As this thought passed, each of the remaining sixteen souls shared another thought, this one far less technical but much more disconcerting. Moreover, it was just one, simple, and even beloved word:

  “Carrion.”

  “Moving on with the subject of numbers,” Papa Raven said. “Accounting for lost product, holdings, and anything that cannot be retrieved or replicated, just how much did the Carrion Crew lose?”

  Another of the Carrion Crew’s best, occupying the side beside Papa Raven to his right, stood. “A-Actually…” the man started in a clear attempt to soften the news, even going so far as to make it sound upbeat; a not-so-bad tone carrying along that single, shaky word. The others were amazed to see that he was even wearing a smile as he spoke. “Be-because a… er, a great deal of what was kept in that neighborhood was… er… uh, well, not so much… well, what I mean to say is… none of it was… liquidated…” He shivered, paused, and sucked in a deep breath of fresh air. “Apologies, sir. What I’m trying to say is that there was very little actual product kept there. It served mostly as… well, as a sort of dormitory for the Crew.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Papa Raven, who had been the driving force behind acquiring the cul-de-sac for just that purpose, challenged.

  “Well… no. I mean, of course you knew… uh, know, I mean. I just meant,” the man paused to wipe his face. “I just thought you’d be pleased to know that not very much actual product was—”