Chaos Conquers All
Read Chaos Conquers All Online
Authors: A.A. Askevold
Soldiers of Chaos
Chaos Conquers All
Written by A. A. Askevold
Acknowledgements
To my friend Rachael for listening to all my crazy ideas, sudden changes of mind and odd tangents. Your constant encouragement (or is that pressuring, just jokes) has kept me pushing forward even when I wanted to give up.
To all those readers who waited ever so patiently for this one. We finally made it to the end point.
Or have we?
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Chaos Conquers All: Book 3 of the Soldiers of Chaos MC series
Self-Published via Kindle Direct Publishing
First Edition
Copyright © 2015 by A.A. Askevold
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
Contents
Cole was Bridges, Cole was Bridges, Cole was Bridges. The words went round and round Nikki’s brain as she watched the shadows of the three men begin to meld with the shadows of the trees. Somewhere in there a voice was telling her she should pull the trigger but her body wasn’t listening. She could hear the bikes coming. She knew that when they saw her they’d wonder why she was standing in the middle of the lit space with her gun pointed toward the shadows but she couldn’t move.
As she stared into the black forest beyond, the woman in the photo popped into her head and she realised why she’d looked so familiar. She was Cole’s mother which meant Bridges was Cole’s father. Only Cole had killed his father years ago, which meant the man that had been slowly tearing her life apart was in fact Cole. It was him who’d set in motion the events that gave life to the darkness inside her. He was the one who had Sheila murdered and then sat across from her as she talked about it, knowing full well what he'd done, pretending he knew nothing. It was his fault the prospects were dead by her hand.
She'd let him touch her in ways she would never even think about letting anyone else touch her. He was the bastard who was trying to obliterate everything she loved and cared about and she had shown him parts of herself that she was too afraid to show the people she loved. Just when she thought things couldn’t get worse this revelation gets dumped fair on her doorstep. If she thought her father’s death would somehow sate the monster inside her she was beyond wrong. This thing was not going away. This dark need to lay waste those who had wronged her, who had wronged her family it was only getting stronger the deeper she got into the fray. She needed to accept it and not only that she needed to embrace it and work with it.
As the darkness once again rumbled through her body, her mother’s words came to mind, ‘You’re just like him’. She was right, Nikki was just like him but unlike him she would get the revenge she craved. She made a promise to her dead mother, the prospects, her club and herself that Marcus Cole, or whatever his name was, would meet his fate at the end of the barrel of her gun.
Trace rounded the corner at a reckless speed. He had no idea what he would find around that bend. Would it be Nikki or Reaper lying dead in the dirt? The sight that appeared before him both warmed his heart and twisted his gut. Nikki was standing in the middle of the road a pool of light surrounding her. Her gun was raised pointed at the shadows beyond. He couldn’t tell what she was aiming at. It wasn't Reaper. Trace could make out Reaper's body lying on the road on the other side of where Nikki was standing.
"Nikki!" he yelled her name as loudly as he could.
She turned her head towards him but didn't lower her weapon. He braked hard screeching to a stop just outside the circle of light. He barely put the stand down before he was out of the seat with his gun out. He approached her cautiously, the barrel of his weapon pointed in the same direction as Nikki's with Tex right behind him.
"What have you got, Baby Girl?" He asked as his gaze switched from the shadows in front of them to her and back again.
"I'm not sure. I thought I saw movement in the woods," she replied lowering the weapon.
"What do you mean you're not sure?" Tex asked from beside him.
"It’s dark out here it could’ve been a bloody owl for all I know," she said as she turned back toward the scene behind them.
Trace kept one eye on the darkened forest and one eye on her.
"You okay?" He asked her as he took in the scene before him.
"I'm breathing which is more than I can say for some," Nikki replied.
Reaper was lying in a slowly coagulating pool of blood, the back of his head matted with blood soaked hair and other bits of gore. The traitor was dead but the knowledge didn't comfort him. They had one dead brother, two dead prospects, no man-at-arms and an enemy with deep pockets who was clearly intent on destroying them although they had no idea why.
Marcus Cole was not a name he’d ever heard before and he wasn’t even sure that’s who they were looking for. Slick had insisted the guy was nothing more than a Casino mogul but even he couldn’t dispute the strength of the evidence before them. The guy was linked into this somehow and it seemed the list of people between them and Bridges just kept getting longer. They had yet to bring the info to the table with the shit storm of Reaper’s betrayal going on.
They weren’t Trace’s only worries though. He was worried about Nikki. Going after Reaper by herself was reckless and sure as shit the chances of her ending up dead instead of Reaper were high. She had to know that and she went anyway. Trace wasn’t sure if that was dedication to the club or a total lack of self-preservation. The latter motivation disturbed him. Trace couldn’t bear the thought of Nikki lying in Reaper’s place. He wanted her more embedded in the club but this was not the way he wanted it. As he studied her closely, he could see she was in a state of complete emotional shutdown. No anger, no sadness, nothing showed through and that mask was what worried him most.
The roar of the other bikes peaked as they came around the corner. Somewhere in there he detected the note of another vehicle or maybe two. He looked toward the forest and felt Nikki tense next to him. He searched the shadows but caught no movement or flash of headlights. He glanced back at Nikki. Her hand was tightly wrapped around her gun and her eyes were shifting between the forest and them. By the time the brothers had switched off their bikes, the car noise was barely a whisper in the distance. Nikki still didn’t relax.
The brothers dismounted and King went straight to Nikki.
"Are you alright Darlin'?" He repeated Trace's question.
"Fine. It's done," Nikki replied as she moved towards her bike.
She reached in to her saddlebag and pulled out Reaper's folded cut presenting it to King.
"You've earned your vote, kid. Any objections?" King eyeballed the men standing around the circle of light.
No one spoke.
"Vote's yours Ace," he replied as he slapped her on the shoulder.
It was like those words flipped a switch inside her. Her eyes turned that stormy grey and her lips lifted in a slight smile that was neither soft nor sweet. It was a gritty smile filled with determination. He had always thought there were two sides to Nikki: the hard ass biker that was Ace, and the feminine woman that was his Baby Girl. Something about that smile told him that Ace was firmly in the building and his Baby Girl was taking a little vacation for a while.
"What shall we do with the traitorous dog?" Nikki heard Case ask.
"He shot himself," she said as she pulled his gun from her holster and began wiping it down, "let him lie here and rot."
She placed the gun in the dead man's hand and fired off a round to make it look like he'd fired the weapon. Then returning his arm to its original position she placed the gun on the ground not far from his reach.
"No one's gonna believe he shot himself," he replied.
“The man was in the early stages of Parkinson’s and I’m pretty sure he was depressed, drinking heavily and possibly using drugs,” Nikki offered the explanation for Reaper’s untimely, self-inflicted death.
“He what?” King asked in disbelief.
“Yeah apparently his treachery wasn’t the only thing he’d been hiding.”
By the exclamations of disbelief moving through the group, Reaper had been far better at hiding his symptoms than he had been at hiding his evil intentions. Maybe he’d just let her see them in order to suck her in to his little trap. In the end, none of it had done him any good. King had known all about Reaper’s game thanks to Bull. It was a shame he never bothered to share that information with anyone before she went and killed the prospects.
That was another heavy burden on her conscience. Another secret she’d have to hide from the people who loved her and another thing she’d have to lie about. But she wasn’t the only keeper of that secret.
“Did they find Jimmy and Alvarez?” she asked Tex.
“No. Jimmy called Bull while he was on the run from Rez. He told him what went down. Phone went dead. They tried to track him down but he was nowhere to be seen. They didn’t find Rez either.”
That was both a good and a bad thing. If they hadn’t found Alvarez then he hadn’t had a chance to talk. However that meant he was still out there armed with the truth of what happened. Her list of problems just got bigger.
King’s phone rang, breaking through the silence around them.
“Shit, just what I fucking need,” he said as he looked at the screen, “We leave the body here like Ace said. Mount up, I gotta take this call then we go.”
Nikki picked up a freshly fallen branch from a nearby tree and dragged it across the footprints and other tracks in the dirt. A flash of lightening and a distant crack of thunder had her looking toward the sky. Even in the dark she could see the ominous looking clouds rolling their way. The sky was a perfect reflection of what was going on inside her right at that moment.
“That was the broker. Seems our troubles have been filtering back to the chairman and he wants a word and soon,” King explained.
This really was the last thing they needed. They might lose their business despite not actually losing a shipment.
“They’ll be here tomorrow night. You lot do what you need to do and meet me at the clubhouse. Five tomorrow,” he said as he mounted his bike.
The heavens opened up and Nikki gave up on her efforts of clearing the scene knowing the storm would do the work for her. She mounted her bike in silence, ignoring the looks Tex and Trace were shooting her way.
“Roll out,” King yelled through the falling rain.
The simultaneous roar of the bikes around her was echoed by the roar of the monster inside her. She glanced once more at the dark forest into which Cole had retreated, then spun her bike around in an angry spray of gravel and followed her brothers into the stormy night.