by Sophia Gray
Gunshots started ringing out pretty steadily. Honestly, it felt like a hopeful sound. The sound of guns meant Mason and his Angels were still out there, and they were coming for me. I couldn’t imagine Mason leaving without me, or without at least checking to make sure if I was all right.
“Mason!” I called out, sure I couldn’t be heard over the gunshots, but I wasn’t about to stop. I called for him a few more times.
I slumped back down against the backseat and waited as the gunfire seemed to get closer and completely encircle the car. While I listened and waited, my mind wandered.
What had Skull and his other goon been up to while it had been so silent outside? Surely, they had been doing something. Had they simply been working out a plan of action? Had Skull called for backup?
I didn’t know much about the cabin hideout. I didn’t know if he had people in the area he could call for backup or if all of his goons were back in the city. I didn’t know if it was really just a cabin or a compound that he just referred to as a cabin. I really hoped it was the former. I wasn’t sure how close we were, but we felt a lot closer to the cabin than we did to the city. If he had people coming down from the cabin, Mason and I were in big trouble.
“Mason,” I shouted again, straining my voice against the night.
“Shut her up,” I heard Skull yell at his goon.
“Want me to shoot her, boss?” he asked.
“I don’t care what you do, just shut her up,” Skull answered. “You know what? Fuck it. Shoot her if you have to. We’re going to do that when we get up to the cabin anyway. Might as well handle it now.”
My heart stopped. If Mason or one of his Angels didn’t show up, and fast, I was a goner. This was it.
“No, no, no,” I repeated as I looked around the car for either a way out, a weapon, or a way to cut myself free.
Both Skull and the other guy sounded like the bikers were keeping them busy, though, so I had that working for me.
The corpse! The body of Skull’s other goon was still in the back seat with me. He’d been carrying a gun when they put me in the car. I started digging through his pockets.
“Sorry, man,” I told him. “It’s nothing personal, but you’ve got something I need right now.”
My hands wrapped around a pistol in his jacket pocket and I pulled it out.
“Hey, little lady,” a voice said above me, and it was the living goon, poking his head in the window.
I tried to point the gun at him and pulled the trigger. He ducked to the side. I missed, but I was close enough to stall him. However, my hands were so damn awkward, the recoil kicked the gun out of my hand and it fell into the darkness beneath me.
“Shit.” I knelt down and tried to find it. I reached around on what was now the floor, but I couldn’t find it. I just ended up scratching my hands up with the shards of glass that had fallen at my feet.
“Need some help?” the voice returned.
“Smartass. If you’re going to shoot me, just go ahead and fucking do it. Spare me the bullshit,” I told him. I stopped searching for the gun and stood up. I tilted my head up to face him. I wasn’t even going to try to avoid it or fight it anymore. I was ready to accept my fate, but something told me this guy was too chicken shit to pull the trigger at such close range.
He scrambled to get into position above me so he could get his gun inside the car and aim it at me. As he worked to steady himself, he waved the pistol in his hand back and forth in front of me.
As soon as he looked away, I grabbed his wrist and bent his arm the wrong way against the door, jumping as I did so I would jerk his arm down as I landed. The gun went off, shooting the dead man in front of me, but then he released it.
“You bitch!” He grabbed his wounded arm and rolled off the car.
I was now stuck in the car with at least two guns and a dead man with two people outside who wanted me dead, and countless people shooting at them who seemed to have no idea I was inside, alive.
Chapter 24
Mason
We could see our targets now. We spotted them by the muzzle flare as they shot back at us. From what I could tell, there were two of them—Skull and one of his goons. They’d ducked behind the car, using it as cover while they shot at us at intervals.
“All right, guys,” I shouted at my men over the gunfire, “surround the car. We’ve got to take them down. Leave Skull for me if you can. Someone find Clara. She may still be in the car.”
I didn’t check to see if anyone nodded, flipped me off, or otherwise acknowledged what I was saying to them. I started walking to the car with my gun in front of me. I saw Skull duck around the front of it, and I didn’t care what else happened, I was going to shoot his ass. Before everything was said and done, I was going to eliminate him. The other guys were more than able to handle the other shooter and get Clara to safety.
We’d started shooting again when we saw a phone screen light up. The night had been silent and almost pitch black for some time after Skull’s car had come to rest on the side of the highway, but we heard voices from inside the car.
Then, there had been a light from within the car, as one of them had probably turned on a flashlight or a light app on their phones. We stood back even then and waited. We wanted to see how many people, if any, came out of the car.
Only two emerged, which meant we’d definitely taken out the other goon. It also meant Clara was likely still inside the car. I’d still told the guys to hold their fire and stand down while we watched what the two men were up to.
One of them tapped his phone screen, and I could see Skull’s face illuminated perfectly from underneath. I could see his dark eyes staring down the phone, and I watched his mouth move as he was saying something to the man standing next to him.
I cocked my gun and waited. I couldn’t tell what they were doing. It looked like Skull was about to call for backup or for someone to come pick him up, but I wasn’t about to allow that. I took a shot, but he quickly moved out of the way.
The man had quick reflexes. Watching him in action made it easy to see why so many people on the street compared him to a snake. The way he moved seemed almost unnatural, as did his dark eyes. They were quite possibly contacts, but I didn’t know anyone who’d spent enough time around him to know. I certainly wasn’t going to ask Clara about it.
That was when everyone else began unloading on the two men. They fired a few rounds back at us, but for the most part we had them cornered behind the car. We advanced on the car. The gunfire calmed as Skull and his goon seemed to be regrouping and my guys were circling the car. They were so cornered and so screwed. I was surprised they hadn’t given up yet. It occurred to me that they could have just texted someone to come for backup, and that would have been a good reason for them to hold out as long as they could.
That wasn’t going to fly with me. We were going to end this now.
“Skull,” I called out. “I know it was you behind the thefts, man. Your girl told me everything.”
I stood with my back to the underside of the front end of the car. I could still feel the heat from the engine. It hadn’t cooled off completely yet, reminding me of how quickly everything was happening even though time felt like it was almost standing still for us. The night certainly felt still enough. The gunshots cracked through the darkness, echoing in the woods along the side of the road.
The interstate was dead, adding to the timeless feeling of the scene in front of us. The moon didn’t even seem to be moving in the sky above. Everything was still. Even we became still as we stood and waited for someone to make the first move.
I had seen Skull duck around the front of the car, so I crept slowly around, expecting to find him, but he wasn’t there.
I heard him shouting at the other gunman, and I stood back to watch what they were doing. I heard a gunshot from inside the car, alerting us to Clara’s presence. Then, I saw the other gunman scrambling atop the car before rolling off.
“Skull!” My voice ra
ng out in the night like a gunshot.
In the near perfect darkness, I saw his face snap in my direction. I saw those dark eyes focus on me. He raised his gun, but he didn’t shoot. Instead, he ducked around behind the car, leaving his man on the ground holding his arm. I couldn’t tell if he’d been shot or if something else had happened to him.
“Dammit,” I cursed under my breath. “Where the hell is everybody?”
It suddenly felt like the world had come down to just myself and Skull. Everyone else, everything else, had faded into the darkness of the night surrounding us.
“Come on, Skull, stop trying to delay the inevitable, man,” I called out into the darkness.
I pressed myself against the hood of the car and started to creep slowly back around.
“Guys,” I called out to my men, “I think Clara’s still in the car. Someone get her out, but be careful. I think she’s armed.”
“On it, boss,” someone called out behind me. I could hear footsteps on the car as someone climbed up to get her.
I crept around the front end of the car until I stood on the interstate side of the wreck again.
“I’m not delaying anything,” Skull said as I came around the car. We stood face to face for the first time since our little feud began.
He had been able to elude me for years, and we were finally standing right next to each other. I almost wanted to put my gun away and shake his hand. Someone as successful as Skull—and successful in as many different areas as he was—almost demanded respect. And I would have been willing to admit he had earned it if he hadn’t been stealing business from us. But that was how competition worked. He stole some of our business, forcing us to do a better job in order to earn that business back or pick up new clients to replace the old ones.
At first, I wondered if Skull was even a real person or just the name of his gang. He had been that elusive. No one had seen him, even though everyone knew his name from his prostitutes and call girls. He was well known among the gambling rings, too, and a few of those guys had claimed to see him on a regular basis.
I wasn’t entirely sure how it happened, but it came to pass that a lot of his gambling associates had gone out of business over the years, robbing him of gambling business the way he had robbed us of weapons and security deals, but none of that could be traced back to us. A lot of those gambling rings were broken up by police. It seemed like anyone who admitted to knowing Skull had become a target.
As we turned up the heat on his clientele, he turned up the heat on us, stealing more of our business, and eventually resorting to stealing my product so he could cut into my drug money. I still wasn’t sure exactly how he expected to grow a sustainable drug business if all he was doing was stealing from me to sell what he’d stolen, unless he was working on getting to my supplier.
None of that would matter in a few moments. None of our history would matter any longer. None of the petty bullshit either of us had done to piss off the other would matter. This feud was about to be over, and once his body lay lifeless on the ground in front of me, I was going to send my guys out to infiltrate every aspect of Skull’s business.
We were going to take over everything Skull had put his hands in, from the gambling to the prostitution, and from the call girls to his weapons supplier. That was one thing I hadn’t mentioned to Clara yet. As far as she knew, I was just pissed about the drugs. No, I wanted to take his ass over. I wanted to put Storm’s Angels on top of every game in town.
Once we owned this city, I was going to leave Mick in charge while I went from chapter to chapter, helping them achieve the same status we had. By the end of it all, wherever we were, we were going to run it. And we were going to have people in place to shut down anyone who tried to move in on our business. We weren’t going to have any more Skulls operating as thorns in our side.
As I stared into his dark eyes surrounded by his dark features, I could see the future of Storm’s Angels. I could see that with one bullet to his head, I was going to set the fate of my MC into motion.
He narrowed his eyes, and I started to think that maybe he was reading my mind. Suddenly, it felt like he could see my thoughts.
“Are you going to do it?” he asked. He raised his empty hands. He’d put his gun away. “Go ahead,” he encouraged me. He pressed himself against my gun. “Pull the trigger, Mason,” 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. Skull 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 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 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, Mason,” he said. “Everyone is. If you do this, Clara 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
Clara
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 Skull. The normal rules didn’t seem to apply when Skull 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 Storm’s Angels or even Skull himself.
“Dammit, Mason, 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 Mason’s guys. 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, too. 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?”
“Mason and Skull are on the other side of the car. I didn’t see where the other guy went,” the Angel said, shaking his head.
In the moonlight, I could see there were other Angels standing around with guns drawn, watching out for Skull 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 Skull had called for backup after all.