Stolen: Hell's Overlords MC (17 page)

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 myself, 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.

As I walked up beside them, I saw that at some point Fang had pulled out a gun. He was still holding Cole’s rifle down against his throat, but he was also holding a 9mm handgun right in Cole’s face. Cole didn’t look like he was going to be doing anything about it any time soon. Why hadn’t Fang already pulled the trigger, though? I couldn’t complain that he hadn’t. It was nice to still have Cole with us, but I was still shocked. There was no telling just how long they’d been sitting that way.

I raised my rifle up and aimed. First, I aimed at his head. It would have taken one simple shot to put him down, but I didn’t want to take the moment away from Cole. Instead, I moved back around behind him and pointed the gun down at his leg. That would have given Cole the opportunity to get back on top of things and end this standoff. This shit was getting old.

I even considered taking the butt of my gun across the back of Fang’s head and just knocking him out so that Cole could get away from him and handle it that way, but I felt that shooting him in the leg would be more satisfying.

My eyes met Cole’s, and part of me melted inside. I could have saved the day right then and there, but I was going to leave it for him to finish.

Fang was talking shit over him, but I wasn’t listening. I waited for my cue from Cole. I held the gun up, aimed it at Fang’s leg, and watched Cole’s eyes. I knew he would tell me when the time was right to shoot. I knew he would have something up his sleeve at that point to help himself get the upper hand with Fang again.

Fang was completely oblivious to my presence. He was so focused on Cole that he didn’t realize I was standing right on top of him. His training was coming in handy yet again. I had learned a lot from him over the last few years, but it was time to let him go. It was time to leave him for someone with a little more dignity and integrity in his work.

I took a deep, quiet breath, steadying my nerves and summoning the strength I needed in order to pull the trigger that one time. Just one shot was all I needed to pull off. The rest was going to be up to Cole.

I looked at the back of Fang’s head. One shot to his head would end it all. Shooting his leg to give Cole the chance to get out from underneath him still left a lot of room for error in my book.

My eyes met Cole’s green eyes again. He nodded slightly. I returned my eyes to the gun and my target. I readied myself for the shot, the single shot to Fang’s leg.

I steadied myself and squeezed.

Cole

“I’m going to end you, Cole,” Fang growled, renewing his grip on his gun and on the rifle at my throat.

“Yeah, okay,” I said, yawning. “You better get on that. I’m willing to bet that Dante has already called the cleaner, and what you
want
to do isn’t going to matter once he shows up. If we’re all still here then, we’re all dead, but you know how that goes,” I told him. Really, I was just hoping Dante had the foresight to go head and get the cleaner on his way out before law enforcement showed up.

Then, I caught a glimpse of Sasha standing over Fang’s shoulder. She held one of our assault rifles in her hands, and she was creeping up on Fang. It was good to see her up on her feet and okay. She had cuts and dirt on her face and arms, and there was blood on her that probably came from the other guy in the car.

Something else looked different about her though. The cuts weren’t all. It wasn’t that the beautiful, thin blonde with blue eyes who usually kept herself immaculate was actually dirty for once. No, there was something in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. Something had changed inside her.

For one, she was holding a gun, and she wasn’t holding it daintily either. She gripped it like she meant business with it. She was on the offensive now with that gun. She wasn’t waiting for trouble to come her way this time. This time, she was bringing trouble to someone else, and judging by the way she kept eyeing Fang, it looked like she was bringing it to him, though it could have been argued very easily that he’d brought all of his troubles upon himself. And they were about to get a lot worse.

Sasha attacking Fang was like Dante attacking me. It represented a huge change in dynamics. That was a total shift for her. I knew what it meant, though. I knew it meant she’d finally made her decision. She had finally made her choice between the two of us, and I was glad to see it. And not just because I knew it was me.

I watched her while Fang kept spewing his drivel about how he was going to kill me and demolish the Hell’s Overlords MC. I wasn’t nervous anymore about it, though, because I knew that if he was going to shoot me, he would have done it when he pulled out the gun. He couldn’t do it, because he knew he would be shot immediately afterwards, putting an end to all of it for him.

While he talked, distracting himself from what was really going on in front of him, I moved my hands into position so that once Sasha fired her gun, I’d be able to knock Fang’s handgun away and get myself out of harm’s way so I could finally end this.

It was almost daylight. This little game had gone on long enough, but I felt satisfied now that I would be able to have closure by putting one through his brain. If I had allowed it to happen too quickly, it wouldn’t have been satisfying at all.

With my hands in place, I nodded ever so slightly to Sasha.

“What? What are you looking at?” Fang snapped.

He turned his face, and I shoved the gun out of my face at the same time that she pulled the trigger. I felt the bullet shred Fang’s leg next to mine. It was like getting to feel a gunshot without the pain, and it was the most disgusting thing I’d ever felt in my life. I felt every single detail of the bullet’s entry.

He cried out and fired his handgun wildly to the side before I caught him in the jaw with the butt of my rifle, sending him sprawling out on the ground. He dropped his 9mm and grabbed his wounded leg. I stood up over him and put the barrel of my rifle against his head.

“Do it,” he said. “Pull the trigger. You’ve earned it, Cole Masterson. You and your old lady have defeated me fair and square.”

I stood with the gun pressed right against his forehead, watching him grip his wounded leg and hold back the cries of agony. For a brief moment, for just a split second, I considered letting him live and keeping him as a permanent prisoner of the MC, until the day came when we grew tired of keeping him around. I figured that letting him live like that could have been far worse than letting him off the hook by putting him down.

Then again, letting him live in any capacity would have been worse for us as well.

“Do you have anything else you would like to say, Fang?” I asked him.

“Fuck you,” he spat at me. “I’ll see you in hell, Cole.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “On behalf of everyone present and the MC as a whole, I’d like to tell you we’ll be waiting for you when you get there.”

I squeezed the trigger and shot him right there in the grass on the side of the interstate, just as the sun began to rise above the horizon. The new day had begun, not just for us standing on the side of the highway, but for the MC as well.

Fang was gone. It should have felt better to watch his body fall over, limp and lifeless, at my feet, but I was tired, and pulling the trigger like that, so purposefully, seemed to take a little extra energy out of me unexpectedly.

Sasha put her thin hand on my shoulder. I looked at her, standing there with a gun at her side like some vigilante, and I wanted to kiss her. I also wanted to tell her to get the hell on for causing so much trouble. But I figured she’d made a pretty big sacrifice in defending me against her boss. It was obvious that she had some pretty intense feelings for him, so to watch her choose me over him felt pretty damn special.

“Come on, we need to go,” she said, pulling me with her.

“Has Dante already called the cleaner?” I asked.

“He has. You guys were taking so damn long, we thought we were going to have to leave you both here to deal with him yourselves,” she teased.

“Hey, let’s grab some of these weapons real quick,” I told her.

“Yeah, let’s do it.” She waved Dante out of the SUV that Fang’s backup had arrived in, and he quickly climbed out.

“Guys, we probably only have a few minutes before he’s here, so let’s be quick,” he said.

“That’s why all three of us are doing it,” I told him.

We grabbed only what we could carry in one trip. I made sure to get both of the fully automatic guns Fang’s men had brought with them. We hurried back into the SUV just as a couple of cars rode past. I was sure the car on its side with the bodies lying all around it was going to attract some attention.

“Well, there’s some good news,” Dante said as he pulled onto the road.

“What’s that?” I asked him wearily.

“At least we’re in Fang’s SUV, so if anyone sees us and the plates bring anything up in the system, they’ll go back to him,” he joked.

I laughed and sighed at the same time, sinking down into the backseat.

“That’s pretty optimistic of you, brother. Thanks.” I closed my eyes and listened to the car itself on the ride back to headquarters.

No one said anything for the whole ride back. We were all too tired, too stunned, and possibly even too traumatized to say anything. We all needed to process what had just happened the night before. We were leaving a pretty gruesome scene on the side of the road. We lost a lot of men over the course of the whole day. It was the end of a chapter for Hell’s Overlords.

It was the kind of thing that made some MC presidents step down. I’d seen it happen in other clubs, where a major event like that just carried too much weight for the president to handle, and he was almost forced to step down to get away from the stress.

I wasn’t planning on going anywhere. Having Fang out of the way meant we could really unleash our potential. I wanted to tell Dante we needed to start investigating Fang’s weapons connection so we could get the weapons business back, but I knew the ride back wasn’t the time for that. I wanted to thank Sasha for saving my ass back there, but it wouldn’t have been appropriate. She was probably processing the loss of her mentor.

As we rode into the sunrise, I knew a new day was dawning for Hell’s Overlords. I had an old lady at my side. I was excited for the first time in years to go in and announce a meeting, when the time was right of course. Our number one rival was out of the way, and there was no one in his organization ready to take his place. That had been so short-sighted of him. A good leader always had someone ready to step into their place.

My replacement was driving the car. If anything ever happened to me, I knew he’d have my back with the MC. Dante would slide right into the leadership role without a problem.

“We need to ditch this thing after we get back,” I blurted out as soon as I had the thought. I felt the silence in the car shatter as I spoke. No one else was probably thinking about work. Dante was probably thinking about beer and a hot shower, maybe finding a girl later today. Sasha was probably thinking about the image of her boss’s body falling over at my feet. She was probably running through her decisions all over again, everything that led us to this moment together.

“I don’t know. It’s pretty nice,” Dante said. “I wouldn’t mind having one.”

“Well, then let’s send it over to Cortez and let him make sure it can’t be identified,” I told him. “But we can’t keep it hanging around the way it is.”

“Definitely. I already texted him,” Dante said.

“Has he said anything back?”

“Man, you know he just went to bed probably an hour ago.” He laughed.

“Yeah, probably, but we need to handle it as soon as we can,” I urged.

“Hey, boss.” Dante looked at me in the rearview.

“Yeah.” I met his gaze.

“Relax, man. We just went through a lot of shit yesterday, and we all need to chill out right now. That includes you,” he said. “So relax.”

I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to shut work off. I was always working. If I wasn’t at HQ or any of our chapters, I was on the phone or texting someone about work. If I wasn’t doing that, I was running through plans and actions in my head. Yes, we’d been through a lot. Yes, we had a lot to handle over the next week or two from fallout, but we had to be prepared to deal with all of the changes that were about to occur.

As the president of Hell’s Overlords, it was my duty to make sure we were prepared, so I let them have their peaceful silence. I looked out the window at the beautiful trees passing us by on the sides of the road. In my head, I was preparing checklists of what we needed to do to move forward.

At the top of my list was taking Sasha to her apartment tonight so we could start sorting her things out for the move. I was going to ask her to move in with me later, once we had some time alone, and I was pretty sure she was going to say yes.