Crash (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 1)

by Susan Fanetti

  Delaney spoke first. He didn’t use the gavel. “I’m sorry you had to come to Tulsa like this, Irina. Kirill was a good friend to us and a good partner. We’re deeply sorry to lose him. I won’t do you the disrespect to think I know how deep your loss goes.”

  She nodded brusquely. “Spaciba. Thank you. But we need no talk of grief. We talk…your word…payback, da?”

  Rad wondered if she meant that as a threat.

  Delaney nodded. “The hit was a club beef. Kirill and his men could’ve avoided it, but they helped us out. He saved our lives. We ask the honor of taking revenge for his death.”

  “No,” she said and didn’t elaborate. For a few seconds, that single syllable, uttered quietly, resounded in the room.

  “Is this a debt we owe you, then?” Delaney asked.

  Rad couldn’t think clearly enough to be sure, but he thought their president was asking if the alliance was broken and they were sitting with their enemy now. A glance around the table told him his brothers were wondering the same thing.

  “This world we make, deaths are every day. Every day, we wake and know death. I am born into this world, in darker place than this. Kirill born in same place. We know death. It is price of power. In such a world, to make enemies of friends, this not good business. My son knew your…what word? Beef?” Delaney nodded, and she went on. “He knew your beef with these Dirty Rats. We talk about it.”

  Irina turned her icy eyes on Rad. “You killed Rat, da?”

  Not expecting her to address him, and struggling to stay upright in his chair, Rad was caught off guard and almost repeated her last word. “D—yeah. Yes. He went after my old lady.”

  “He hurt her before. Badly.”

  “Couple times, yeah.” Delaney had told the Volkovs everything Rad had told him, it seemed. He wouldn’t tell Willa how many people knew she’d been raped.

  “Then kill is…how to say…dobrodetel’nyy.”

  Not one man in that room could have repeated that word, much less translated it.

  She flicked an impatient, imperious hand. “Made of good justice.”

  “Righteous,” supplied Dane.

  “Da.” She nodded and stared again at Rad. “Righteous.”

  “Yes,” he replied, not knowing if she’d expected him to speak.

  “We know of this beef. We decide work goes on. This is our risk. Kirill’s risk. When Rats come, he help because Volkov and Bull are friends.” She waved her hand in a circle, encompassing everyone at the table. Then she set her hands flat on the scarred oak and leaned in. “Dirty Rats are no friend to me. I make hole in Lubbock and no more will be Rats there. Then I take Kirill home.”

  Gunner grinned, wide and characteristically crazy. “Goddamn. You want to blow ‘em up. That is fuckin’ beautiful.”

  “Gunner, mind your mouth, boy,” Delaney snarled.

  “No. His words foul, yet right. Vengeance is beautiful. And is mine.”

  She was basically quoting God, taking those words for her own. The audacity was chilling and completely accurate. Anyone with a lick of sense would know to fear Irina above all others.

  ~oOo~

  The next day, Irina took her Volkov men to Lubbock. Of the Bulls, only Delaney and Dane were invited along. The Rats had hit the club and seemed to have had no idea that they’d grabbed the Volkov tiger by the tail, too—or at least no idea about how that tiger would bite—but Irina had taken control of the payback.

  Rad was just as glad that more Bulls weren’t along for the ride. He’d been more than ready to start a war with the Rats, but blowing up their clubhouse, a few months after Oklahoma City? The fewer people involved in that, the better. The Feds would be crawling all over that scene.

  They left early that morning. At dusk, Delaney called to say it was done. They’d waited to be sure all the patches were present, those that had survived the shootout, and then they’d blown up the clubhouse.

  It was the lead story on all channels during the ten o’clock news.

  “Whoo-hoo! Look at that!” Gunner crowed, jumping up in front of the television. “She really made a hole! Damn, I wish I was there.”

  Sitting on the sofa with Willa at his side and Ollie at his feet, Rad smiled. But he couldn’t feel much satisfaction. The Lubbock Rats were finished, yeah. Irina had flattened them without breaking a sweat. The Rats were national, but Rad wasn’t especially concerned that this would trigger a whole-club response. Irina would take credit for this in the right way, and she would hold the Rats at bay. Hell, knowing her, she might make use of other charters in some way that kept them beholden to her.

  No. Rad’s disquiet had little to do with the destruction of the Lubbock charter. Now that he’d found the balance between the painkillers and the pain and had his brain steady, a thought he’d had in the middle of the ambush had risen again: how did the Rats know where to hit them? How had they known they’d be coming back from Nebraska that night?

  Because someone had told them. Someone privy to their plans. Only possible explanation.

  He looked around the room. Every single man in a kutte, patches and prospects alike, he would trust to the ends of the earth and back. Every single one of them. They didn’t always agree, but they always worked it out. They respected the table, the vote, and each other. Nobody here would sell out his brothers for any price, and damn sure not to scum like the Rats.

  He trusted the old ladies, too.

  That left sweetbutts and hangarounds. The regulars got pulled in on lockdowns, but they wouldn’t know details about club work. Still, they’d know enough to get the schedule. The women planned meals around the men, so they knew about when to expect them back. A stray bit overheard about Nebraska might give a smart ear some sense of direction. And there just weren’t that many highways and interstates in Oklahoma. It was conceivably possible, from those few bits of information, to get a general sense of where they might be at any given moment of the run.

  Had the Rats fucking guessed on so little information? They must have.

  “Where’s Chet?” he asked, missing a regular hangaround in his survey of the room.

  Chet had been hanging around for a few years. He’d applied to prospect and been turned down at the beginning of this year. He was a good guy, but not club material: pushing forty, with a heroin habit and a hit or miss history of recovery. Junkies made terrible brothers. Delaney had told him he needed a whole year clean before they’d even consider it.

  Rad had thought he’d been working hard on getting that year done, but he didn’t think that would be enough to sway the whole table.

  “Who’s Chet?” Willa asked.

  “Hangaround—blond, baldin’, missin’ half a finger?”

  “Oh. Yeah. I think he’s here…well, he was working the bar when I got here, but I guess I haven’t noticed him since before Gunner had us locking down. I don’t know. I’ve never really talked to him, and my attention’s been on you.”

  Rad gave her a grin and a quick kiss for that, then groaned himself to his feet and called out, “Anybody seen Chet?”

  Everyone looked around, and no one answered in the affirmative.

  “What’re you thinking, Sarge?” asked Becker, standing as well.

  With Delaney and Dane in Lubbock, Rad had the clubhouse. “Chapel. Now.”

  ~oOo~

  Around one a.m., they found Chet in a Northside dive bar a couple of blocks from Terry’s Billiards. Rad took the lead, fighting like the dickens to stay steady and strong and ignore his throbbing wound and his general fatigue. But when Chet saw him and bolted toward the back, he let Eight Ball and Ox charge forward after him.

  Chet running served as confirmation of Rad’s suspicions. Now they needed a goddamn reason.

  In the alley behind the bar, with Chet on his knees, his arms stretched out and twisted in the powerful grips of the two biggest Bulls, Rad pulled his blade and crouched before him.

  Behind him, Gunner and Simon kept watch. They’d left Apollo and Griffin in charge
of the clubhouse.

  “You got friends in Lubbock, Chet?”

  “I—I don’t know what you mean, Rad. Lived in Tulsa all my life.” His breath had the sweet rot smell of a junkie.

  “Then why’d you run just now?”

  “You look mad. Got scared.”

  Without another word, Rad pushed his blade into Chet’s emaciated thigh. The man shrieked until Ox’s hand clamped down over his mouth, covering most of his face.

  “Now, I’m just in the meat of your leg, Chet. What meat there is. But I’m half an inch from your femoral artery. I cut that just right, and you bleed out right here while we watch. You want that?”

  He shook his head, whimpering so hard that Rad could see bubbles of snot inflating in each nostril with each breath. Poor Ox, getting that all over his hand.

  “Then tell me what I want to know. Who’d you tell where we’d be?”

  Chet shook his head again, and Rad turned the knife—not toward the femoral, but enough to make some bad pain. The kind that was pulsing through his own body right now.

  More screaming, muffled by Ox’s hand, which now dripped with junkie snot. Finally Chet nodded, and Ox took his hand back, shaking it with evident disgust.

  “My-my dealer! My dealer! I owe him and he was gonna cut me off.”

  “I thought you were clean.”

  “I tried, Rad. I did. You weren’t ever gonna give me a patch, though, I know.”

  Rad sighed—that was true, and it was stupid to have given him any hope. But they’d liked him as a hangaround. “Who is he and what’d he want?”

  “He said he’d clear what I owed and give me a cut rate on what I need if I just tell him what I hear in the clubhouse. I never hear nothin’ big, so I thought it couldn’t hurt.”

  “It did. Hurt us good. More’n us.”

  “I know—I didn’t tell him about the Russians, I swear. He just wanted to know about the Bulls, so I just told him Bulls stuff. I didn’t want to hurt you. I just…I needed…”

  And this was why junkies made terrible brothers.

  “His name, Chet.”

  “Levi. Levi Oates.”

  Shit and fuck. Levi Oates was a mover in the Dyson crew, the Northside Tulsa gang that had about as much local pull as the Bulls, and with whom they’d almost beefed over Gunner’s escapade at Terry’s.

  Dyson worked drugs, and the Bulls did not, so they’d never worked together and were not allies. But they’d always had a solid truce, born of a mutual recognition that causing trouble in their own yard was bad for life and business both.

  Rad looked up at Ox and Eight Ball, and back at Simon and Gunner, and knew they all understood the implications. Then he turned back to Chet. “Thank you for tellin’ the truth.”

  Chet nodded. “I’m sorry, Rad. I didn’t mean anybody to get hurt.”

  “I know.” Rad patted Chet’s cheek; he liked the guy, and he believed he’d meant no harm.

  Didn’t matter, though.

  He pulled his blade from Chet’s thigh, flipped it in his hand, and shoved it into the soft meat behind Chet’s chin, pushing the blade to the hilt, straight through the brain, until he felt the tip hit the inside of the top of the man’s skull.

  Chet twitched and jerked in Ox and Eight Ball’s hold. His eyes bugged and turned in opposite directions, staring left and right. Then he gurgled, letting loose a thin stream of blood from the corner of his mouth, and died.

  Rad watched it all and then made his way back to standing, clenching his teeth and his eyelids against the pain. “We need to have the body for Irina. Bring him along.”

  He turned and walked away, leaving his enforcers to deal with the body. Tired to his bones, he had to get to the truck and sit the fuck down.

  ~oOo~

  Willa and Ollie were upstairs, sleeping in ‘their’ room. Rad stood at the foot of the stairs, thinking how very long the trip to his family seemed just then. But he didn’t want to sleep down here again, alone when she was so close.

  He heaved himself up to the second floor and stopped at the closed door behind which he’d find a bed with his old lady in it, and their dog beside it.

  He leaned his forehead against the door, unable to turn the knob. They were making a mistake, having a kid. Weren’t they? Wasn’t Willa making a mistake being with him? Wasn’t she too good for this life? For a man with so much blood on his hands?

  At the thought, he looked down and saw that there was still literally blood on his hands, sunk into the seams around his fingernails. He pushed away from the door and went to the bathroom, grabbed a bar of Lava soap from behind the mirror, and scrubbed his hands under the stream from the hot tap.

  Killing was not something that Rad enjoyed. He didn’t hesitate when it needed doing, and there was satisfaction in ending a man who really deserved it, but he could feel each kill drain something out of him, a little good from his soul each time. How much he lost with each one, he didn’t know. One percent? Five? Ten? Did it vary depending on the target? How much for killing a helpless sad sack like Chet?

  Since the club had gone outlaw and he’d been SAA, he’d killed five men in cold blood, more than that in self-defense, and he’d hurt countless others. How many before there was no good left in him?

  Would the parts of him he struggled with become the only parts of him? What would Willa do then? Willa and their kid? Would he hurt them? Would they leave him? Would he end up just like Jesse Smithers?

  No. Not Willa. He wouldn’t hurt her. He couldn’t. Not Willa. He stared at his reflection in the mirror. He’d leave her before he’d turn into a monster that could hurt her like that. And he’d make no kind of father at all.

  A soft knock at the door. “Rad?”

  At that moment, the sound of her voice was like to break his heart. He turned away from his reflection and opened the door.

  Her fair hair was ruffled about her head, and her eyes blinked against the bright bathroom light. God, look at her. Her breasts and their pert nipples lifted her white beater away from her body, and he could see the silky skim of belly above the folded-over elastic band of her boxers.

  Ollie stood behind her, his tail wagging.

  “Hey, baby.”

  A frown took over her features, and she stepped into the bathroom. “What’s wrong? You’re hurting.” She put her hand on his shoulder, hooking the tip of her finger into the hole in his kutte. “Come to bed, and I’ll get you some Percocet. You shouldn’t have gone out tonight—I told you you weren’t ready.”

  He was the asshole so many women had called him so many times. Because he couldn’t do the right thing. He fucking wanted this. He wanted it so bad. He’d always wanted this—no, that was wrong. He’d never wanted this, because he’d never been able to imagine loving like this, or being loved like this. He’d never thought to have something so good. He couldn’t give it up.

  Maybe Willa made him better. If he could love her right, love their kid right, maybe that would keep the good from draining out.

  Stopping her hand from its fussing around his shoulder, he lifted it to his mouth and kissed it. “I’m okay, Wills. I just need you is all.”

  She smiled and stepped close. “Come to bed and let me take care of you.”

  “Whatever you think’s best.”

  ~oOo~

  He let her strip him and change his dressing, and he withstood her motherly disapproval when she saw that the sutures had been strained a little. But he refused the painkillers.

  “They make my mind fog up, and they make me tired.”

  “It’s three o’clock in the morning, honey. It’s okay to be tired.”

  “I don’t want ‘em, Wills.” He didn’t need an opiate kick to his dreams on this night.

  Relenting, she helped him prop himself up against the headboard, wedging a pillow under his arm for extra support for his shoulder—it hurt too much to lie flat. Then she went to the foot of the bed and climbed on, taking the space against the wall. The room was too small for the bed
to fit anywhere but in the corner. She’d said she liked it that way, that it felt ‘cozy’ sleeping between him and the wall.

  She curled on her side, facing him. “I love you.”

  He smiled down at her. “I love you, too.”

  “Something’s wrong.”

  He’d promised to tell her everything, but he couldn’t tell her about this night. Not now, at least, while it still ransacked his head. “No, baby. Just sore and tired—and no, I’m not gonna take your drugs. Fuckin’ pusher.”