GRIFFIN

by Paula Cox

  She knew all MCs wore something like this, be it leather or denim. She knew Griffin had one and could remember the look of his arms while he wore it. The vests were usually decorated with patches and pins, and this one was no different. Something was off though. The vest looked a little too familiar, but then again what exactly was her frame of reference? It was not as though she was familiar with any other club, and yet there was a sinking feeling in her stomach about this one.

  Holding her breath, she knelt down beside him. She had to roll him over and see for herself once and for all. Forcing herself to ignore the fact that she was definitely touching a dead man, Natasha rolled the man onto his stomach. Dead weight was a lot harder to move than she originally thought, but after a few moments she managed to do it.

  She was both surprised and not surprised at what she saw. She knew that every club had their own symbol. Her father had worn one proudly up until the day he died, and as she looked down at the large patch that took up the entire back of the leather vest, she knew she would have recognized it anywhere.

  A large, embroidered devil’s face growled up at her, baring its sharp, pointed teeth in a macabre grin. Its horns were sharp as well, and the entire thing was done up in a garish blood red. Griffin had that patch on the back of his vest, and so had her father. She had seen that devilish face staring at her at her father’s funeral.

  Her would-be assassin was a member of the Lost Disciples.

  Chapter 23

  The Disciples unloaded their guns into the house. Being made out of cheap stucco, large chunks of the house were ripped off of the sides, showing the gray of the concrete beneath. Windows were shot out, the broken glass littering the sandy lawn like glitter. He could hear some yelling inside, but not nearly as much as he thought that there should be. There were dozens of bikes parked outside, where was everyone?

  Julian whooped as he aimed his gun and shot again, Griffin could also see Bombay and Big Mack in the fray, happily firing into the clubhouse. Griffin wondered if Natasha was safe and waiting for him, and he wondered if she was worried. From what he could see everything seemed pretty cut and dry here, and all he wanted to really do was go back to that motel.

  Finally, shots were beginning to fire back, and he could hear the rapid fire of the Los Diablos calling to each other inside the house. He heard the yell of someone as they were hit, and suddenly heard the whisper a bullet as it flew past his ear. The closeness of getting shot exhilarated him, and he grinned that teeth baring grin that came from the excitement of the kill. Griffin made a movement for them to fall back in order to draw some of the enemy out. Any minute now the second group would come to back them up. Either way though, Griffin was getting a little antsy.

  “Let’s go in!” he called to Julian, who nodded and moved into position beside Griffin. Running forward, Griffin kicked in the door to reveal the inside of the clubhouse. The bullets had destroyed the inside of the house, and he could see one of the men scurrying through the house to go out the back. Griffin went in pursuit, running him down and shooting him in the back. The man scream and fell in the dirt, and Griffin turned back to see if there was anyone else in the house.

  It was almost empty, and Griffin could hear the shooting still going on outside. Something was wrong. Something was incredibly wrong.

  Griffin eased the walkie-talkie out of his pocket again and clicked it on. The static greeted him.

  “Damon?” Griffin asked. His voice belied his worry a little too much for his liking. “You guys there? We need wave two.”

  He caught a glimpse of another member of the Los Diablos and shot, only to see the man continue to run. As the enemy turned around to shoot at Griffin, Griffin realized with a growing sense of horror that he was wearing a bulletproof vest.

  “Holy shit…Damon! Come in!”

  The Los Diablos had been warned.

  But by whom?

  “Damon!” He almost crushed the walkie-talkie in his hands they were shaking so badly. They were betrayed, and he had a growing feeling that he knew who had done it.

  Suddenly, the shooting outside grew louder, more frenzied. He could hear the horrified screams of the men outside and immediately ran. Stopping in the doorway of the Los Diablos’ clubhouse, he saw with a terrific sense of horror that they were now being attacked from behind. A large group of Los Diablos members began to shoot. Whooping and yelling with the joy of the ambush, they drove the Disciples back against the shot out shell of their old clubhouse. Griffin was already there, and he knew in that terrible moment that they were beaten.

  The rival club stared everyone down with amused looks on their faces, and Griffin could barely contain his rage.

  To make matters worse, however, Griffin saw that the person standing in the front of all of this, his mouth twisted into a triumphant grin, was Damon.

  The Los Diablos looked to Damon for instruction, as the Disciples stood there with looks of confusion on their faces. Damon broke the line he had made with his new men, walking up and down and studying the bleeding and ragged Disciples. Narrowing his eyes, he peered into the face of the skinny biker named Dex. Dex look back at him with a defiance that filled Griffin with pride. Damon was unimpressed, he took a step back, pointed, and said, “Kill him.”

  One of the Los Diablos lifted his gun and fired. Griffin bit back a cry of rage as Dex crumbled to the ground.

  Julian was nowhere to be seen, and maybe that was for the best. Griffin hoped that he had noticed what happened and hid. This was no time to be foolhardy or brave; this was a time for survival. Damon looked down at the still body of Dex and nodded with satisfaction, before looking pointing out five other men to be executed in the same fashion. Bombay went next.

  “Good,” Damon said after the killing was done. He made his way down the line until he stood in front of Griffin, who stared back at him and refused to blink.

  “Do you surrender?” Damon asked, his voice touched with that annoying sense of reasonableness.

  So many emotions warred in Griffin’s heart, especially as he remembered the dead bodies of his friends littering the ground only a few feet away from him. Damon’ betrayal… he should have seen it coming, right? God, he hoped that Natasha was okay.

  His silence seemed to annoy Damon as his smile grew wider to cover it.

  “If you don’t surrender, I will kill more of you.”

  Griffin knew that he was not lying, and in spite of his growing, terrible annoyance, in spite of how much he wished that he did not have to give this asshole the satisfaction, he nodded slowly and said, “I surrender.”

  Damon grinned. “Good, I like it when you are reasonable.”

  Chapter 24

  With a wave of his gun, Damon ushered Griffin into the shot out remains of the Los Diablos’ clubhouse, leaving the others behind. Under duress, he sat down on the couch, staring down the barrel of the gun. Griffin felt nearly numb from rage and horror.

  Now that he had time to actually look at it, the inside of the Los Diablos’ clubhouse was nearly exactly like the Disciples’ clubhouse. They did not have a pool table, but instead had a dart board. Couches and chairs were crammed into the area, next to a mini-fridge that once was stocked with beer. The beer was now littered across the ground, some cans had already popped open, spilling their contents all over the floor and mixing with the shattered glass and chips of stucco.

  Damon looked remarkably pleased with himself, and Griffin was surprised that he was surprised by this. Pacing like the villain in an action movie, Griffin was half expecting him to gloat about his evil scheme.

  “So,” Griffin began, trying to remain unflappable in spite of the gun pointed at him. “I guess you and the Los Diablos are tight now?”

  “You are thinking way too small,” Damon replied. “Emanuel and the rest of the Disciples were always so wrapped up in the idea of having a rival they never stopped to even think for one goddamn moment that maybe it would be better to just join forces.”

  “So have them
kill the president; that will definitely bridge the gap.”

  Damon laughed a little bit. “You figured it out, huh?”

  “It is not too hard to figure out, Damon. I mean, look at you.”

  Damon began to pace again, keeping his gun trained directly on Griffin just in case any funny business happened. He was jittery and excited, clearly riding the high of his own deception, and Griffin wished that he could smack that smarmy self-satisfied look right off of his stupid face.

  “Yeah, because I can see the big picture, Griffin. You guys are all wrapped up in your own territorial nonsense, all obsessed with the Los Diablos versus the Disciples. That was Emanuel’s problem all along. You never noticed that we could be ten times more powerful together than apart, so I had the Los Diablos take him out. It was for the good of the club, Griffin. You have to know that.”

  “No.”

  Damon laughed. “That was always your problem, Griffin. You were always so goddamn angry you never took the time to think. It is people like you that I need to cull from the Disciples. No one thinks rationally anymore; they’re all just snot-nosed little kids who wouldn’t even get into community college so they decided to become outlaws.”

  Griffin almost jumped off the couch to attack Damon, but Damon clearly anticipated it and shook his head, waving the gun to remind Griffin that it was there. Griffin did not even care about the gun anymore; all he wanted to do was throw one punch into that face.

  “So you betrayed Emanuel, just like that? You set him up to be killed because you did not like his business model?”

  “Sometimes these things must be done, but luckily my plan is finally coming to its grand finale.”

  “Oh? And what’s the finale?”

  Damon laughed. “I am tying up loose ends, of course! First, there is you. There are the guys just like you. And then, of course, there is the girl.”

  Griffin’s heart froze over.

  “You know, Emanuel’s daughter? It is just like when kings were overthrown in the old days, you had to kill all of their kids, too, just in case one of them got the idea in the future to get some revenge on the person who killed them. Sure, Natasha’s a woman, but stranger things have happened.”

  “Don’t you say her name,” Griffin growled.

  “Ah, yes, that tragedy. Of course, the big bad Griffin who never was able to get pinned down falls for Emanuel Morrison’s daughter. It would have been perfect were it not for this, of course. But hey, better to have loved and lost, right?”

  Griffin did not say anything, but that only caused Damon to continue.

  “Well, don’t worry about it, because I know for a fact that poor little Natasha will not be for long in this world. I sent one of my best guys over there to tie that loose end up personally. She’s probably already waiting for you in Hell as we speak.”

  Damon cocked the hammer of the gun back, seriousness overtaking his face.

  “But now it is time for me to do my part.”

  Griffin knew that he should say something, anything in order to buy some time. For a heartbeat of a moment, he tried to stand, tried to rush him, tried to do anything that could potentially save his life at that moment, but everything went dark as Damon pulled the trigger.

  Fire ripped through Griffin’s chest painfully, as the bullet was fired into his chest. His heart raced in terror, as he could feel the warm blood spread through him, and darkness swam around the edges of his eyes.

  Natasha, he thought miserably. Please be okay.

  Damon knelt before Griffin as he began to cough up blood, studying his face and shaking his head in mock pity.

  “It is a shame, you know,” Damon said. “If Emanuel took a firmer hand with you, with any of these guys, things might have turned out differently.”

  As darkness began to overtake him, Griffin watched helplessly as Damon turned on his heel and walked out of the room, leaving him alone. All he could hear was the wild and unsteady beating of his heart through the pain until finally—and almost thankfully—everything went black.

  Chapter 25

  Natasha tried to keep her hands from shaking as she rifled through the clothing that happened to also be on a dead man’s body. The act of killing him had not bothered her nearly as much as she had originally thought that it would: she was already relatively okay with that situation. There was something that bothered her about the act of touching the dead man’s clothes, however, and maybe it was just the sheer disgust of touching dead flesh that got to her. She wasn’t sure. She had never touched a dead body before this moment, and honestly had never considered the handling of it up until this point.

  She knew that the actual act of killing should feel wrong, that she should feel tainted and ruined and no longer able to live in polite society, but instead she just felt vindicated. It served him right, she decided. She probably had even decided that particular mindset the moment she pulled the trigger. If he didn’t want to die, he shouldn’t have tried to kill her. The thought would have shocked her on any other day. If she had been just sitting in class, working on her finals, she knew that it would have never come to her mind.

  Of course it wouldn’t, she thought and almost laughed. Why would it have? Back at the University of Texas it wasn’t as though she was public enemy number one. She had been a normal person.

  Or maybe I was just pretending to be a normal person.

  For some reason, that thought bothered her a lot more than the act of killing had, which was its own special kind of insane. Natasha thought of her other self, the person she had been so sure she would become someday. That part of her life seemed very far away at that moment. Yet, in spite of that fact, she didn’t mourn it nearly as much as she expected to. That was something that completely surprised her. In fact, the thought that she was okay with murder almost made her want to run back to Austin and forget that she had ever seen the town of Brazos.

  She couldn’t do that though, not while Griffin was still out there—probably putting himself in some horrible danger. The thought made her queasy, but another made her even queasier: What if he had been in on it?

  The idea was ridiculous, but now, every member of the Lost Disciples was suspect to Natasha. Every Disciple except for Griffin that was. There was no way he would have saved her life so many times only to have some stranger from his club murder her. That didn’t add up. Of course there was that sad, girlish thought that she kept close to her: the simple thought that Griffin clearly couldn’t have wanted her dead because they were sleeping together. She was sleeping with a member of a dangerous biker club and she was worried about that kind of loyalty? How pathetic. Yet, there was something about the way he looked at her, the way he held her once they were finished having sex as though she were a port in the storm. It was the simple things that made her trust him, even though that might be the most foolish thing she could have done.

  Something had to have gone wrong with the mission, or else Griffin would have been back by now. At least he would have called her. The thought was worse than the slow understanding that she was now a killer. She decided that no matter what happened, she could live with this newfound knowledge about herself so long as it meant that Griffin was still alive.

  She would call him. That was the best thing that she could do at that moment, but first, she definitely had to get out of the motel room.

  For the first time, she looked around the place and gauged the damage. For some reason, she had vaguely deluded herself into thinking that nothing would seem out of the ordinary if it weren’t for the dead body, but she was sorely mistaken. The struggle had knocked over a lamp or two. Broken shards of lightbulb glass littered the ground, the milky shards just waiting to sink into a foot. There was a smear of blood in the bathroom from where Natasha’s head had hit the tile, and she reached up to touch the back of her head to see how bad it was. It isn’t so bad, she thought. Although Natasha’s nerves were so on fire that she wasn’t fully sure how true that was. The bathroom door was a wreck of broken wood
, and of course there was the corpse.

  The dead man had yet to stiffen, but his dead weight was hard to move around. After a bit of struggle, she managed to get the man’s leather vest off him. Part of it was still stiff with blood, and it felt gummy and strange in her hand. She was not the biggest fan of the texture at that moment. Natasha could hear a distant jingle coming from one of the pockets of the vest, and she prayed that it wasn’t just loose change.

  Absentmindedly, she slipped the vest on, digging through the pockets as quick as she could. At first, she thought that wearing the vest wasn’t the best idea. Wasn’t it a little macabre to put on a dead man’s clothes? But there was something about how she felt when wearing it that made her feel proud, as though she had won the vest in some sort of contest of wills—when all she had really done was shoot someone. Triumph coursed through her veins, as her fingers touched familiar metal shapes and she pulled out some keys.