by Hazel Parker
I peeked around the edge that was furthest from the apartment’s center to try and get a better sense of what we were up against. A very hasty check—too hasty to be certain, but slow enough to get a rough estimate—told me there were three floors and about ten windows per floor, with more likely out back. We had to assume that meant they had thirty lines of fire—maybe more since I hadn’t accounted for the front entrance and anything that we’d get in there.
“Do we have anything besides guns?” I shouted.
“Funny you should ask,” BK growled, reaching into his pocket. “These fuckers ain’t got any idea what’s about to hit them.”
I looked over, saw him pulling out a grenade, and yanking on a pin.
“Jesus Christ, BK, what the—”
But as soon as he yanked it and hurled it, we all took cover. I turned my head just a smidge to hear the screams of some Mercs before an explosion rocked the bottom floor.
“Now’s our chance!” I yelled.
I hurried around, listening to the sounds of gunfire, charging straight for the smoke and flames that had erupted as a result of the grenade exploding. I roared as I jumped in, ran through the smoke, and turned my gun into the hallway.
I saw two Mercs. Two quick shots killed them, dropping them to the ground instantly. Splitter came to me, got my back, and fired two rounds, ideally dropping a few more of the assholes.
“Let’s clear this floor quickly,” I said. “Split up and go. Splitter, take Sword, Krispy, and Mafia. I’ll take Sensei and BK.”
“You got it, boss,” he said. “Time to die, motherfuckers!”
I directed the incoming Saints to their respective targets, moving with precision and ease down each door, firing rounds at whatever lay there, even if the bodies were already dead. I wasn’t taking any fucking chances of anyone pulling a move on us, no matter what.
We both cleared out the first floor and reached opposite ends of the apartment complex with stairs on each side. I assumed that Splitter and his crew were heading for the second floor when a terrifying thought occurred to me.
What was to prevent Diablo and his men from killing Jane because of this onslaught? What would stop them from doing that if they thought that this was the end?
“We gotta get to the third floor,” I said. “Jane’s almost certainly up there.”
“You got it, boss,” BK said.
We might also have the element of surprise if we went to the third floor first, given that Diablo almost certainly expected us to go up to the second floor first. That was the idea, at least.
When we reached the third floor, I first had the two of them wait in silence, hoping that we could look into the chaos that was unfolding. I pressed my ear against the beige door, but the only thing that met my ear was some muffled grunts and the sounds of guns being picked up. There was no way to make out coherent dialogue.
Which meant we had to go back to our plan A of going in guns blazing.
I looked to BK, who had the most experience entering a new place and taking it down. In retrospect, I probably should have had him go in first on the first floor, but rage had overtaken me so much that my emotional state wouldn’t let me do anything but blow up everything that I came across. BK had one hand on his gun and one hand on the door handle. With a quick breath, he opened the door, swung the gun out, and fired.
“We gotta move, Sensei!” I said. “Take individual rooms!”
“Acknowledged!”
BK continued to mow down anyone who got in his way in the hallway while Sensei and I took the rooms on the right and the left, respectively. Sensei only ran into a few Mercs, but for my part, I came across more than a few, taking them quickly with the element of surprise. We moved from door to door, taking out the enemy…
But not finding Jane or Diablo anywhere.
“The fuck are they!” I growled.
“Gotta keep moving, boss,” BK said. “Probably moved doors when they heard us.”
“Did you see them?”
“I ain’t.”
“Goddamnit!”
Now was no time to lose control, though, and so we continued our process, going door to door, taking out the enemy, trying to find the room that Diablo had Jane in.
The problem was, while not every room had the same couch as the one in the video, there were multiple rooms with such a couch, and still, there were no signs of Jane and Diablo.
“We must have missed something,” I said when we cleared through all of the rooms on the third floor, with only BK having suffered a gunshot wound that he hardly seemed slowed by. “Where the fuck is he?”
“Second floor, maybe,” Sensei said.
“OK,” I said, taking a deep breath to make sure I said these next words well. “Sensei, you have better control than I do right now. I want to kill anything related to the DMs. What would you do? What would Diablo do right now?”
Sensei didn’t say anything at first, keeping his gun on a swivel, just in case anyone tried to ambush us.
“Best guess I have is we didn’t look in all the rooms closely enough. He’s gotta be—”
Then I heard a muffled scream from outside, just barely above the sounds of flames flickering.
I ran past BK and Sensei, brushing them and their guns as I sprinted to the stairwell, down the steps, and outside the building.
Sure enough, we had missed something.
There, outside, Diablo stood with Jane, sporting swollen cheeks and a bloodied nose, and his hand over her mouth, a pistol pointed to her, and her head close to his. He positioned her in front of him, making a heroic act all but impossible.
“You lose today, Trace!” he roared with laughter.
“Don’t you dare fucking kill her,” I snarled. “I will end your life right now if you do it, you fucking asshole!”
“Kill her?” he said, drawing a mock smile on his face followed by some laughter. “Do you think I would kill this beautiful woman, friend? Not when you and all six of your men could lay waste to me. No, it’s simple. I am taking her with me, and we are going back to the clubhouse. You can try and follow me if you’d like, but you do so at your lover’s expense.”
“I swear to God, Diablo, if you touch her—”
“What are you going to do?” he said, smirking with such an evil expression that I wanted to cut off his face. “I already felt her sensuous skin. Let me tell you, Trace, I do not enjoy having sloppy seconds, but in your—”
I charged forward. Diablo pointed the gun right at her, pressing it into her temple, and I stopped about five feet away.
“Now you’re thinking wisely, friend,” Diablo said. “You recognize that I am serious, that I will do whatever it takes. You see—”
And then Jane did something that I knew right away her father would be proud of.
She bit Diablo’s forearm and ducked just as he fired the gun, causing himself to shoot himself in the arm.
“Fucking bitch!” he roared.
I saw my opportunity. I charged at him, ignoring the gun that he pointed at me, and though I heard the shot being fired, I felt nothing.
I tackled him to the ground, punching Diablo in the face over and over and over again. I wanted every goddamn tooth knocked out of his jaw, every bone broken in his face, his eyes and nose caved in all the way up to his brains until they killed him. I wanted his face to look like a concaved shell, destroyed and with no identifying information.
When he finally gave in, stopped moving, no longer fighting back, I reached over, grabbed his gun, and landed two rounds into his skull.
“Don’t you ever fucking take my girl again!” I roared.
I stood up, kicked him in the face, and yelled some more, throwing his gun into the smoldering building.
“Tracy?”
I turned to see Jane, with tears in her eyes, looking at me. She had the look of someone who had just survived a horror show. She was in shock.
“Did he…?” I said.
She shook her head.
&nb
sp; “You guys showed up just in time,” she said.
And then her eyes widened when she looked at me.
“Jesus, Tracy, you know you’ve been shot, right?”
I looked down at my chest and saw that a bullet had lodged into the left side of my ribs. I sincerely had not felt a thing since the gunfire started—I had run on so much adrenaline and so much willpower that the only thing I could think was to kill Diablo, no matter what it took. I had no illusions that this would suddenly destroy the Devil’s Mercenaries, not when they probably had some officers of their own, but the greatest thorn in our side, the greatest threat of the last several years, was gone.
And now…
I was about to pass out.
“Don’t take me to the hospital,” I said. “Take me to the clubhouse. Treat me there.”
“Jesus, Tracy, you gotta…”
But her voice faded as the blood loss became too intense. In the last of my vision, I saw the members of the club gathering around me.
Chapter 18: Jane
“Tracy!”
I ran up to him, examining his wounds. The bullet had not struck any place fatal but that didn’t mean the blood loss wouldn’t prove lethal. Hell, a paper cut could, in theory, kill someone if they didn’t stop bleeding; blood clotting usually prevented that from being a problem in all but the smallest section of the population.
A gunshot to the ribs, though, was a different story.
“Christ, we gotta get him to a hospital,” I said.
“Jane, he—” Splitter began, but I cut him off.
“He needs medical treatment now!” I snapped. “Green Hills is about, what, where are we? How far?”
“Ten minutes if we speed,” Splitter answered.
“OK, ten minutes. We need to get him there now; we cannot wait.”
But to my horror, none of the Saints seemed all that interested in moving him.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I said as none of them stepped forward.
“Jane, listen to me,” Sensei said. “We had the cops show up earlier today. They are figuring out what we did to the warehouse, and eventually, they’re probably gonna figure out what we did here. We get him to a hospital and the cops will be all over—”
“No,” I said firmly. “No, Sensei. If you’re that worried about it…”
I took a deep breath. We were wasting time, and even though I had already created a tourniquet around Tracy’s wound, he still desperately needed medical attention. Every second spent not giving him treatment was a second that Mr. Reaper came closer to taking hold of him for good, as they liked to say.
“If you’re that worried about it, I will make sure the cops stay away.”
“And how can we know that you will?”
“Jesus, are you serious? Do you know that I’m the fucking daughter of your founder? Then let me act like it.”
Realizing that this wasn’t getting anywhere, I lifted Tracy as best as I could, and tried to drag him to his bike clearly not thinking this through.
“You have two choices,” I said. “You can help me get him to the hospital now. Or I can take his bike and drive him myself.”
“Do you—”
“Know how to drive?” I said. “Who do you think my father was?”
Many of them made moves to look like they were going to stop me, but I knew damn well none of them were. I didn’t like to flaunt my last name, but given it was about the only leverage I had—and, fortunately, it was winning leverage at that—I felt compelled to wield it like a ten-foot sword.
“Goddamnit, Jane,” BK said. “Hope you ain’t wrong.”
* * *
BK, as the largest one in the group, hoisted Tracy on his bike, while I drove Tracy’s bike myself. I knew that the boys had an obsession with their bikes that bordered on codependency, but if anyone was going to let me ride their bike, it was Tracy.
And if he didn’t like it, tough shit. He owed me one anyways after what he had done to me that morning.
We sped down the highway, me barely in the type of clothing that would protect me from the heat and the engine of a motorcycle. But I had adrenaline coursing through me and the rush of being alive after nearly getting raped and killed. I wasn’t about to give two shits if I got a little bit of a burn on my jeans or my calves.
When we pulled up to the hospital’s ER section, I saw Dr. Burns running downstairs. I hurried inside, parking Tracy’s bike illegally as I ordered the rest of the staff to prep for Tracy’s arrival.
“Jane, what happened?” Dr. Burns said.
“The full story is too much to say right now,” I said as I heard the doors opening back up for the first batch of bikers. “Cliff notes. The Devil’s Mercenaries kidnapped me, hurt me, threatened to kill me, almost raped me, and then these guys rescued me. Tracy nearly sacrificed himself to save my life, but I think we can prevent him from dying.”
“Jesus,” Dr. Burns said.
“Also, please keep law enforcement away as best as you can,” I said. “I promise I’ll explain later.”
Any other doctor, any other administrator, any other CMO would have probably either fired me on the spot or threatened to tell my superior. What I had just said wasn’t just insane; it was breaking the law.
But God bless Dr. Burns, who knew as well as anyone not currently with the club that there was a damn good reason not to tell them.
“OK,” she said. “But if law enforcement shows up on their own, Jane, I can’t do anything about it.”
“I know,” I said. “Just make sure they don’t come here on orders.”
I couldn’t wait another second as one of the doctors had a gurney and began pulling Tracy into one of the rooms.
“How is he?” I said, turning and following her. “How are his vitals?”
“He’s suffered a lot of blood loss, but I think he’ll be OK,” the nurse said. “We just sealed up the wound and got the bullet out, he is heading to recovery.”
“Jane.”
The hand of Dr. Burns clamped down on my shoulder and held me close. I turned, ready to smack her arm away, but the compassionate, tender smile she had on kept me from doing anything of such a nature.
“Do you have any idea what kind of a night you’ve had?” she said. “You’re not in any position to do surgery or help someone who just got shot. Stay here and watch over him but take the rest of the night off. OK?”
It wasn’t an order so much as it was about the gentlest suggestion that Dr. Burns gave me. And, with the effect of everything finally wearing off, I felt the reality of everything coming back to me.
Whatever I had said about Tracy, I could not deny that he had truly risked his life to save me. If I had had any doubts about him using me or actually wanting to protect me, that moment proved it to me—he would not have almost sacrificed his life just for some mama of the club. He might have been an idiot, but an affable idiot was someone I could forgive a lot more than a manipulative, intelligent man.
And God, what a fate he had saved me from. Diablo hadn’t just almost raped my body; he might still have managed to rape my mind with the things he said about my mother. How many of them were true? How many of them were things designed to fuck with my head?
There didn’t seem to be many good answers.
“OK,” I said, biting my lip as I tried not to show how heavy a weight the past four hours or so had had on me. “OK. Thanks, Dr. Burns.”
She could have said many things at that moment that could have helped me feel better. But instead, she did the one thing that perhaps best helped me more than anything.
She hugged me.
Admittedly, at first, I didn’t so much resist the hug as I just didn’t embrace her back. But slowly, as I realized that I was in the arms of someone who actually cared about me, someone who was the closest thing I had to a mother, someone who wasn’t there to hurt me but to actually protect me, I all but collapsed into her arms, sniffling back tears.
I was perhaps two minute
s away from suffering from trauma that would stick with me for the rest of my life.
And instead, thanks to the actions of the club, the club that I had so stupidly criticized ten years ago, the club that had supported me all the same, I was alive and unharmed.
What were a couple of slaps to the face when I had escaped the worst?
“Thank you,” I said, sniffling.
“Take a couple of days off,” she said. “We’ll pay you all the same. Call it a leave of absence. You need some time off.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“It’ll be good for you, I promise,” Dr. Burns said. “Can I just ask you one question? You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to.”
“Sure,” I said, pulling back.
I might have been coy in Dr. Burns’ office and beforehand but given that I had just doused her clothing with about a liter worth of my tears, I was not really sure I was in any position to hide anything from her.
“This morning, when you were upset,” she said. “Did it have something to do with Tracy?”
I bit my lip, looked behind me to where Tracy had gone and nodded.
“I just felt like he tried to push me away,” I said. “He said that if I was a part of the lifestyle, he couldn’t protect me. He didn’t want me to get hurt. Frankly, it felt a little insulting. After all, Pops was the founder of his gang. I mean, maybe I reacted too strongly to it—”
I let the words hang, deciding that Dr. Burns didn’t have to know everything that I did. She probably didn’t need to know, for example, how great the sex we’d had the night before was.
Really great…
“But still. I’m not an idiot.”
Dr. Burns put her hand on my back and guided me in the direction of Tracy’s operating room, somehow always knowing just the right gesture, the right words, the right amount of pressure to put on me to make me feel better. I suppose there was a good reason that she had been the mother I never had.
“Perhaps you were right to feel insulted,” she said. “It would be as if Paul had told me not to become a doctor because he worried about how I would react to blood. Of course, the first reaction would be one of dismissal and feeling belittled. You were justified to feel that way. But remember, just as he may have had a failure to empathize where you came from, we owe it to the people in our lives to empathize with them.”