by Zoey Parker
He pressed himself against my gun.
“Pull the trigger, Cole,” he growled.
I couldn’t. The gun was in my hand. My finger was on the trigger. I was just paralyzed. It wasn’t fear that had me unable to make my move. It was the magnitude of the situation. It was knowing that in one split second I could unceremoniously end this conflict.
“You can’t do it, can you?” he taunted me.
I just stared blankly at him. I really couldn’t. I tried to flex my finger, to squeeze the trigger, but nothing happened. He grabbed my hand and pressed my gun harder against himself. He smiled at me, his lips curling up in an unnatural grimace.
Then, it became about fear. Fang had obviously embraced his reputation for seeming very otherworldly to the people on the street. He had worked to make himself as creepy as possible so that he lived up to people’s expectations.
There was nothing special about this guy outside of his ability to read people, but we all had to be able to do that to be successful in this business we were in. Still, staring into his eyes with that creepy, maniacal smile spreading across his face, I couldn’t stop the chills that spread through my veins.
I was in trouble here. I was in big trouble if I couldn’t pull the trigger on this creep and stop him. If I didn’t kill him, he was probably going to kill me. And if he killed me, I was afraid the MC would fall apart shortly thereafter.
I tried to pull the trigger again, but I couldn’t make my finger squeeze it. I began to wonder if he hadn’t cast some kind of spell on me. Did he actually have the powers that people on the street thought he had? There was no way. That shit wasn’t real. He was just really creepy.
“I’m waiting on you, Cole,” he said. “Everyone is. If you do this, Sasha goes free, you get your drugs and weapons businesses back, and you can take over anything of mine that you want. I will no longer be in your way.”
He pulled the gun slowly out of my hand.
“Of course, if you can’t, then I will, and you won’t live long enough to see me dismantle your MC.” He held my gun up in my face to show me that he’d pulled it out of my hand without a fight.
Chapter 25
Sasha
Gunshots rang out again, but they were irregular. Sitting in the car in the dark, I had no idea what was going on outside. There would be gunshots for a moment, and then complete silence. I wondered if they were just playing with each other at this point. It seemed very odd that they didn’t just finish each other off, but they were dealing with Fang. The normal rules didn’t seem to apply when Fang was involved. He made his own rules, even when someone else was calling the shots.
After his goon fell off the car, I heard people moving around outside. I waited with one of the guns in my hand. I had no idea who was going to show up next. I didn’t know if it was going to be one of the Overlords or even Fang himself.
“Dammit, Cole, if you get me out of this, I promise you, I will never betray your trust again,” I said with my eyes closed.
Someone appeared in the window above me. I didn’t recognize who it was but it wasn’t the goon. It looked like one of Cole’s Overlords. From what I could see, he dressed like the other guys in his plain t-shirt and vest covered in patches.
“Come on,” he urged me. “Jump up!” He held his hands down to catch me, and I did the best I could.
I shoved the handgun behind the belt on my jeans and jumped up to grab his hands. He grabbed the rope tied around my wrists and started to pull me up. I couldn’t really help him from that point because there wasn’t enough room for me to try to get a good footing to push up with my feet.
He pulled me out of the car and cut my wrists free with a knife he pulled from his pocket. Then he pulled me out the rest of the way and cut my feet free as well. He jumped down from the car and held his arms out for me to jump into them.
I laughed and shook my head as I jumped down next to him.
“Is that it?” I asked. “Is it over?”
“Cole and Fang are on the other side of the car. I didn’t see where the other guy went,” the Overlord said, shaking his head.
In the moonlight, I could see there were other Overlords standing around with guns drawn, watching out for Fang or his goon to come back and start shooting again. That was when we saw headlights, and they turned towards the car. The bikers gestured for me to get down as they all ducked and ran back up to the car.
I heard a couple of car doors slam as it sounded like someone was getting out. Then, in the dead silence of the night, I heard guns cock. My blood turned to ice. After all that had happened so far, it seemed that Fang had called for backup after all.
I could feel the men around me tense up. The air filled with their anxiety as we listened to the men approaching the car. An arm shot out in front of me, holding me back against the roof of the car. I looked around. I recognized Dante, but I didn’t know who any of the other guys were, and I didn’t see Cole. Where the hell was Cole?
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I heard Fang as he taunted everyone.
Then rapid gunfire erupted.
The guys all jumped when they heard the fully automatic machine guns rip the night open around them.
“I don’t have a gun,” I heard someone say. I looked up, and it was Cole, talking to Dante. Dante pulled the assault rifle off his shoulder and handed it to him.
“Get down,” my rescuer told me.
“There are only two of them,” Cole said.
“So that makes four including Fang and the other guy,” Dante added.
“Right. We’ve got four shooters. From what I can tell, only two of them have automatic weapons. Fang and the other guy might be going back to the SUV that pulled up, so let’s get these two guys out of the way,” Cole said.
“Piece of cake,” said Dante.
“Yep, piece of cake. Give ’em hell, boys,” Cole said, and the night erupted around me.
I crouched down against the roof of the car, wishing I’d stayed inside it. Gunfire blasted all around me. There was the rapid fire of Fang’s backup gunmen. Then there was the pulsing gunfire of Cole and his men shooting back.
My rescuer fell to the ground in front of me. He’d been shot by one of Fang’s men. I quickly grabbed the rifle from his hands.
“No offense,” I told his dead body as I grabbed the weapon and held it against my chest. I knelt back down against the car and listened to the gunshots all around me.
The gunfire started to thin out. I heard a couple of cheers as one of the automatic weapons was silenced. Then I heard a couple more assault rifles go out. The Overlords were down to just Dante and Cole.
They closed in on either side of me, pressing against the car.
“We’ve got the one guy out there, and it looks like Fang and his other shooter are in the car,” Cole told him.
“I’ll get this guy. You start heading over there,” Dante said.
“You sure?” Cole asked.
“Oh yeah, I’ve got him.” Dante turned around to face the car and started stepping to the side, walking to the back of the car until he cleared it.
I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see Dante get taken out by one of Fang’s men. I heard both of their guns go off—Dante’s and Cole’s. I didn’t look to see where Cole was shooting.
“Alright,” Dante cheered.
“Yeah, now it’s just me and Fang,” Cole said.
“I’ll cover you,” Dante told him as he started to walk away.
The night went silent again. I hated the silence. At least with the gunfire, I knew what was going on. I could hear the action and tell where everything was. In the silence, the only thing I could hear was the hum of the SUV’s engine, the car Fang’s other two shooters had pulled up in.
I wanted to run out in front and grab the automatic weapons that were lying next to his two dead shooters, but I didn’t know who or what else was out there waiting on us to make a move like that. For all I knew, as soon as I ran out to grab one of t
hose guns, someone would have opened up on me, taking me out.
“The tension is killing me,” I said out loud, unable to hold it in any longer.
“Me, too, Sasha,” Dante said. “Me, too, but Cole’s got this. They were literally face to face a little while ago, and they didn’t do shit. I don’t know what the deal is with those two, unless they’re waiting for some special main event style fight. Wait, he’s trying to say something.”
I stood up and turned around to face Dante, to see if I could catch what Cole was trying to tell him.
“He’s not here,” I heard him shout over the SUV.
“What do you mean, he’s not there?” Dante asked, lowering his gun.
“Uh, Dante,” I said, feeling an arm wrap around my neck and the barrel of a gun press against my temple.
“Oh shit, Cole. We found him,” Dante said as he turned around to see Fang with me in his grasp.
“Tonight just keeps getting more and more interesting, don’t you think?” Fang asked Dante as he started to pull me away from him.
“Hey, man, just let her go,” Dante urged him. “This beef is between you and Cole. Leave her out of it.”
“Oh, she’s going to be left out of it. Where’s Cole?” he demanded. “I want him to witness this.”
“Witness what?” Dante asked. “What are you planning on doing, Fang?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I’m going to kill this traitor, and then I’m going to kill the two of you.”
For some unexplainable reason, I wasn’t afraid he was going to shoot me. Maybe it was because I’d been through so much already, but it felt like he was bluffing. It felt like Fang was just trying to use me as a distraction so he could buy some time to find an escape. I could almost hear it in his voice. He wasn’t about to kill anybody. He was about to try to run like the coward he was.
“Put your weapon down, Dante,” Fang told him, and I was surprised to see Dante comply.
He raised his hands and lowered the rifle he had to the ground, slowly, carefully. He stood back up without taking his eyes off of Fang with an arm around me and the gun to my head.
“Good, now where the hell is Cole?” he hissed.
“I’m right behind you,” Cole said, and I felt Fang’s body tense up against mine. I figured Cole must have had his gun drawn on Fang the way Fang had his drawn on me.
“You idiot, put your gun down. See, unlike you, I can pull the trigger, and when I do, your precious little girlfriend bites the dust,” Fang snapped.
“Fair enough, but you have to ask yourself one thing first, Fang. Am I holding one of my assault rifles to your head, or is this one of the automatic weapons your boys brought in to play with a little while ago?”
I felt his grip on me loosen, and his gun shifted back from my head.
I took the opportunity to turn away from Fang, draw my weapon, and back myself towards Dante, who was also pulling his gun back up from the ground.
“Okay, you got me, Cole,” Fang said, raising his gun above his head. “Maybe we can talk now and work something out that will benefit both of us.”
“Can you believe this guy?” I asked Dante under my breath.
“Yeah, wanting to cut a deal. Just like a damn coward. He wants to be all big and bad until he’s caught. Then he just wants to be a snake,” Dante said.
Fang had something up his sleeve, though. Even in the nearly complete darkness around us, I could see his eyes smiling back at us. He was about to try to pull something at the last minute to get himself out of trouble. Classic Fang.
“Why doesn’t Cole just shoot him?” I asked, growing frustrated at the little game these two were playing.
“I think he wants a fight. This has built up long enough between the two of them. Cole isn’t going to want to shoot him at this point,” Dante explained.
“But he’s got him,” I argued.
“Oh yeah. I think he’s had numerous opportunities to drop him right then and there tonight, but he wants a fight. He wants the satisfaction of actually punching Fang, I think,” Dante continued. “You have to remember, Cole was brought into the MC by a bunch of old school guys. Bar fights were their thing. They used to start fights just for the hell of it. No reason. They’d get bored, have a few drinks, and start knocking the hell out of folks.”
“You’re kidding, right?” I asked, but from his laughter behind me, I knew he wasn’t. Maybe that was the reason for Fang’s unsettling smile. He knew Cole wasn’t about to shoot him. He knew he had an opportunity to still get the upper hand.
“I could shoot him from right here,” I told Dante. “I’ve got the perfect shot. Even I couldn’t miss it.”
“Cole would hate you forever if you did that. Don’t rob him of this,” Dante warned me.
That was when it happened. Cole was getting his fight after all. Fang dropped his gun and spun around. He grabbed Cole’s rifle and the two of them struggled for the firearm.
Dante and I relaxed. It was just the four of us now, and I got the feeling that Dante’s opinion of the fight was to let it take its course. He didn’t seem too worried about who the winner would be.
Maybe he was just too confident in Cole’s abilities as a brawler.
Chapter 26
Cole
“Still too afraid to shoot me, huh?” Fang taunted me as he grabbed my rifle and used it to push me back.
“Why would I settle for shooting you, Fang? That’s like cheating. It’s far too easy to just take someone out with a gun. We need to have a real fight,” I told him.
“Then stop running your mouth and fight.” He pushed harder.
I realized I had been mistaken about Fang all this time. He was a smooth talker, and a smooth dresser. He almost always wore suits, usually a black suit with a dark red shirt and a black tie. He always wore that damn necklace with the fang hanging from it. He wasn’t built like the guys in the MC. He had a pretty narrow frame, and he kept himself very pretty by comparison to the people I was usually around. He didn’t seem like much of a fighter. He seemed like the kind of guy who would rather shoot his enemies than engage them in an actual fight.
Honestly, I didn’t even expect him to use a gun. He struck me as someone who would rather have all his dirty work handled by someone else, keeping his pretty little hands clean. He was a bitch in my book. He may have been creepy up close with his evil clown smile and the serpentine way he moved, but that was just how he manipulated everyone into doing his dirty work for him.
He was proving me wrong tonight, and it was a damn shame to think that all of his talent was about to be put to waste when I finally got the chance to take his ass out. One of the reasons I wanted to force him to actually fight me was so that I could actually see who he really was underneath that creepy show he put on for everyone.
Fang was starting to drop his front, but I could see him fighting to keep the mask on as long as he could. The creepy clown smile was gone, replaced by an angry man gritting his teeth as he pushed his opponent back.
“You can’t fight me,” he taunted. “You’ve had so many chances tonight to take me out, Cole, and I think I know why you haven’t taken a single one.”
“Why’s that, Fang?” I asked.
“I define you,” he said, pushing me away. He let go of me and stood his ground as I tumbled backwards. He adjusted his tie while he waited for me to respond or come back.
“You don’t know me,” I growled.
“Sure I do,” he said confidently. “You are so hell-bent on taking me out that you can’t actually do it, because you know that as soon as I’m out of the picture, you won’t have anything else to work towards, and I think that scares you.”
“Nothing about you scares me, Fang,” I told him.
He just laughed.
“Then come on,” he challenged me. “I’m right here. I’m unarmed. Let’s do this. One of us isn’t walking away tonight. Let’s go ahead and figure out who that is so I can go home and get some sleep.”
I still wa
sn’t sure if I wanted to shoot him or just kick his ass and then shoot him, so I charged at him with the gun in my hands still. I grabbed the barrel and swung it at him like a baseball bat.
He dodged it beautifully, contorting his body so that there was no way I could have hit him.
“Is that all you’ve got, Cole?” he asked. “I figured by your reputation that this was your thing. I heard you were one hell of a fighter, not just some punk who relied on guns to handle his business. So far tonight, though, I’ve only seen you shoot a couple of guys. I haven’t seen you actually fight. Put the gun down.”