“How are they?” King said. “Especially Tex?”
“Let me start with the easy cases,” Sam said. “Ms. Potts and Mr. Taylor are fine, for people who have been shot. In Ms. Potts’ case, her kevlar stopped any major damage to her kidneys, though she definitely had the wind knocked out of her and she was thrown head-first into the vehicle, hard enough to render her unconscious. She’ll have significant bruising on her head, abdomen and ribs for about four weeks.”
Everyone nodded.
“Mr. Taylor wasn’t quite so lucky, since he was actually shot. The three bullets lodged in his left shoulder and upper arm, and had to be removed. He lost a massive amount of blood, and frankly, he was in more danger from that than any kind of internal damage. He’ll need time and physio, but he’ll make what I hope is a full recovery.”
Sam paused, removed his glasses.
“Now… Mr. Sinclair.”
The room fell silent.
“Is Tex bad?” Val asked. “Is he –”
“He’s not dead, ma’am, though he’s bad enough,” Sam said gravely. “I’ve put him in a medically-induced coma for now.”
“What?” Knox said. “Why?”
“Because of the trauma to his head. It’s safer.” Sam looked around at the tense shoulders, the intense eyes, slid his glasses back on. “Mr. Sinclair was shot in the face, and it’s nothing but a miracle that the bullet lodged in his cheekbone. It was also a miracle that when he went into shock and began to seize, Mr. Cuddy knew how to perform CPR correctly. That’s what saved Mr. Sinclair, for damn sure, and that’s why he’s got any chance to walk away from this at all.”
At the mention of Ace’s name, Spider gave a strangled sob. Despite King’s reassurances, he was beside himself with terror for Ace, and all he could think about was what was happening right now to the man that he loved. Whatever it was, it was brutal and monstrous and it was only just beginning.
“Hey, Spider, it's OK,” Val said gently, startling everyone with her rare show of kindness. Then again, she’d been quiet and withdrawn ever since arriving at the waiting room directly from finding Lilly’s body using the GPS tracker on Lilly’s car. Val hadn’t said much about it yet, but she had told King that Lilly had died holding a dead man’s hand – a man that Val assumed had meant something to Lilly. He’d meant so much, clearly, that she’d turned her back on her brothers- and sisters-in-arms, turned in a client to the enemy. Val had had to leave the two bodies there to be dealt with later, and a part of her had died at that; a hardness had been replaced by softness. “It's going to be fine.”
He nodded, then shook his head.
“Anyway,” Sam said. “I suggest that you all go now.” His eyes sharpened behind his glasses, and he met King’s burning gaze. “From what I’ve heard, you’re going to need to get ready for what’s coming.”
“Sorry?” King said, puzzled. “You’ve heard –”
“The person that you talked to an hour ago just called me,” Sam said. “Said that you asked him a huge favor.”
Realization dawned in King’s eyes. “You know him?”
“Very well. I’m his younger brother.”
“Of course,” King said, thinking of Sam’s last name. “God, I had no idea.”
Sam smiled. “Nobody really does.”
“So…” King said to him. “You heard back?”
“I did.”
“They said yes? Said they’d contact their man?”
“King,” Sam said quietly. “From what my brother just told me on the phone, they couldn’t say yes fast enough.”
King whistled. “Holy Lord. Never thought I’d see the day.”
“Uhhhh,” Tank said. “You wanna tell us what’s goin’ on, boss-man? It’s like a secret code between you and the docteur here.”
Just then, the elevator next to the waiting room pinged, and the doors slid open. Off stepped two large men, both wearing leather cuts and jeans and motorcycle boots. Everyone except King and Sam stared in shock as the men strode into the room, the devil insignias on their backs as large as life.
“Hey, King,” Wolf Connor, President of the Road Devils MC greeted him. “Sam.”
“Hi,” Sam responded, the nodded at the man behind Wolf with a teasing grin “Vic.”
Victor ‘Scars’ Innis rolled his eyes, but it was an affectionate gesture. Nobody called him ‘Vic’ but his kid brother, and as much as it annoyed him for everyone in the room to know his birth name, he’d take it off Sam. He thought the sun rose and set on his brother, so he got away with shit that nobody else could.
“Wolf? Scars?” Tank was stunned. “What –”
“Hey, Tank,” Wolf drawled. “Looking puny, man. You been skipping work-outs at the gym?”
“Fermer-la-bouche, Connor,” Tank growled good-naturedly, staring down at the other man from him immense height. “Or I’ll show you just how puny I am.”
“Uh-huh.” Wolf’s gray eyes met King’s. “Sorry about your people, Kingston.”
“They’re gonna be fine,” King said, hoping that he was right about Tex. “They’re tough as hell.”
Wolf nodded. “We did as you asked.”
“You called your man on the inside?”
“I did.”
“So you know where the Fallen Angels are?”
At his words, everything in the room stopped. Nobody breathed, blinked, moved.
“Oh, yeah.” Wolf narrowed his eyes. “We know where they went. Our man is with them, of course. It’s a command performance, ‘spending time’ with the ex-Prez.”
“Holy shit,” Spider said. “Ace…”
“Damn right, Ace,” Wolf said. “His former MC brothers are good and pissed at him, and everyone’s there, and from what our man says, everyone’s taking turns making sure that he knows just how pissed they are.”
Spider blanched, and King shot Wolf a warning look which he correctly intercepted and interpreted.
“Ah.” Wolf regarded Spider. “You’d be – you’re – ummm…”
“Ace’s boyfriend,” Spider spat at the words. “Yes.”
“Right.” Wolf looked a bit weirded out. “Still can’t believe it, man. Ace Cuddy has a boyfriend.”
“So you got a man on the inside of the Fallen Angels?” Tank asked, totally not believing it. “How long, Connor?”
“About a year,” Wolf said. “It’s come in handy more than once, I can tell you, even if he does cost a bomb to keep on our side. Hits my bottom line every month, I tell you.”
“Can we get to the important stuff?” Spider snapped. Normally he wouldn’t even dream of spitting and snapping at Wolf Connor, whose reputation was nothing but worrying, but Spider was beyond all of that. “Where is Ace? Tell me, so I can go get him!”
“Hold up there, grasshopper,” Knox said, earning him a withering look of death from Spider. “You’re not going anywhere near this clusterfuck.”
“No?”
“No,” King said. “You’re going with Knox to the safe house where Dallas and his team can keep an eye on you.”
“What? No!”
“Yes,” King said, his voice gravel. “And you do realize that by standing here and arguing with us, you’re wasting time? Time that we could be spending going to get your man?”
That stopped Spider, stopped him dead. Yeah, he wanted to be there when the Men and these two MC thugs-who-may-actually-be-decent-guys found Ace – but in his heart, Spider knew that he was a liability. Someone was going to have to take care of him and keep him whole and in one piece, and it’s not like he even knew how to take the safety off a gun, wherever the hell the safety was. He couldn’t help, he couldn’t take part… so he had to step down.
“Goddammit,” he muttered. “OK. Go. Just go.”
Everyone nodded, headed as one for the stairs, Wolf pulling out his cell to call his
man inside the Fallen Angels to give him a heads-up that shit was going down. King paused.
“You come straight back here after,” he said to Knox. “Wait for news about Tex and Honey and Jack.”
“Gotcha,” Knox said, feigning nonchalance despite nothing but deep anxiety for his friends and colleagues. “See you after the dust settles, man.”
King nodded, stared hard at Spider. “I will get to him, Liam… I can’t promise you that he’ll be OK – but I will bring him back to you.”
Spider’s eyes filled with tears. “I know. Just – just do what you can.” He gulped. “I know that it may already be too late.”
“It’s not,” King said gently, thinking that there was no way that the Fallen Angels were going to rush this; they wanted their pound of flesh, and they were going to take it, over and over. Not that he was breaking his neck to share that with this man. “He’s alive. Ace is alive. You hang onto that, you let Naomi and Sarah and Mirrie and all the others help you through this, alright? You just hang in there, and you keep breathing. I’ll go get him. I promise you.”
Spider wiped his eyes, watched King stride out of the room. He turned to Knox.
“King’s sure that he’s alive because they’re going to make him suffer, right? They’re going to drag it out, make him pay, take their time. Right?”
Knox ran a hand over his head, feeling the stubble there, wishing that he didn’t have to tell the truth. “Yes.”
“Shit.”
“I know,” Knox said, hating every single thing about this fucking disaster. “Now let’s go… we need to get you to the new safe location.”
“I know.” Spider stared at his hands, still unable to believe that Ace had been literally ripped from them just a few hours earlier. “Let’s go… I’ll wait until King brings Ace to me. I know that I’ll be getting him back, though I don’t know if I’ll be planning the rest of our lives together – or a funeral.”
**
King burst out onto the street in front of the hospital, and almost walked smack into Scars.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “Just had a few things to finish up upstairs.”
Everyone nodded, alert and waiting for their instructions. They all imagined that they were going in shooting and all shock and awe, but with King, you never really knew what the plan of attack was. It was possible that he was going to be more slow and subtle, though seeing as Ace was quite probably half-dead already, that wasn’t the smartest way to go.
“What’s the move, King?” Val asked him. “Hot or cold?”
King looked around at his team, at the group of people that he trusted more than anyone else on the planet to have his back when the shit hit the fan. He took a deep breath.
“These assholes have never wanted anything but trouble. They’ve gone out of their way to cause hurt and pain. They’ve done their damnedest to start a war.” King narrowed his eyes. “Look, this isn’t just about Ace anymore, though I feel personally responsible for him and am committed to getting him out alive, if I can. But now, this is also about taking down as many of these MC fuckers as we can, so that it ends, as close as we can get it to ending, anyway. This is about breaking the club, breaking it hard and deep, and in all the right places. Not just breaking its spine, though, or breaking its chain of command. This is about ripping out its fucking spine, tearing out its goddamn heart, and I mean with our bare hands if we have to. When the sun rises tomorrow, I want a charred corpse on the ground wearing the Fallen Angels cut. I want it done, and down, and never getting up again.”
He paused, looked around again. On every face, he saw understanding and acceptance: they knew what they were doing that night, and every one of them was ready to die to make it happen, if that’s what it took.
“They wanted trouble?” King said harshly. “They wanted hurt and pain? They wanted a war?” He grinned, but it was a hard, merciless grin with no heart and no humor. “Well. They fucking got it. They got it all. Let’s take it to them.”
**
In the end, it didn’t take much to end the bloody MC-driven war that had grown, swelled, and destroyed lives for more than twenty years.
Just a perfect alchemy of twenty brutal minutes, seven highly-trained King’s Men, two hardcore Road Devils who hated the rival MC members like poison, and one inside man whose cover was promptly blown for good and straight to hell. Oh, and a shit-ton of weapons, used without remorse or restraint or fear of reprisal, and no worries about what might happen tomorrow.
It simply took a group of armed, trained killers with no interest in negotiation, and a fully-loaded ‘give zero fucks’ mentality. People who were perfectly prepared to spare nobody at long last, if that’s what it took, even if that meant damning their eternal souls to hell.
People who really got that some things were worth the risk. Taking down the most monstrous MC that any of them had ever come across, with the added bonus of a number of Kirk Fucking Jensen’s crew, was a textbook example of one of those things.
They approached the abandoned factory without even the slightest attempt at stealth or secrecy. In fact, they each picked a different door and hit the gas of their respective vehicles as hard as they could, and just burst on in and through. This meant that five SUV’s exploded into the building simultaneously and without warning, shattering glass, splintering wood, buckling metal.
Before the drivers had even slowed down, the shooting from the passenger sides and backseats had already begun. Hell, it had actually begun outside the building, and now six armed guards lay bloody and lifeless at their posts, easily taken out by Val and Quinn, King’s sharpest sharp-shooters, both former snipers in wars that had been waged in faraway lands. To nothing but the shock of the Fallen Angels, one of their own – Hammer Dixon – had started to shoot as soon as the first door had caved in… but he was aiming at his fellow MC brothers. In the chaos and confusion, he managed to bring down seven of them before they figured out that Hammer was, actually, not on their side.
The MC and Jensen’s people were stunned, naturally, but not for very long. They’d lived their lives under attack and gunfire, and nothing about any of this was unfamiliar or unexpected. Their own weapons came out, places were found to hide and cover, and fire was returned.
King squinted through the madness, looking for Ace. His task – his only task – was to find the man. Everyone else was instructed to clear King’s way, and even though he was happy to take down anyone in his way, his focus was on ‘seek. Everyone else could handle ‘destroy’.
He scanned the massive room, ducked as a bullet shattered the window next to him.
“Fuck!” he growled as glass rained down on his head and shoulders. “Goddamn these assholes.”
He stayed down, popped off a few shots in the general direction of where he thought the bullet had come from, and that was when his eyes fell on the man slumped over in a chair, almost in the exact center of the room. King couldn’t make out the guy’s face, and not just because of the bodies and bullets flying everywhere. The real issue was that the man had no face that King could see. It was nothing but blood and gore… and his gut clenched. That could only be one person, and King was already very, very afraid that they were too late after all.
“Wolf!” he shouted at the man closest to him.
Wolf glanced over at King, followed his pointing finger. When he saw Ace, his mouth tightened in grim understanding. He nodded at King, indicated that he should go. King nodded back, and then contemplated possible routes.
The middle of the room was a fucking disaster area to get across, since most of the bad guys were gathered there in a tight little circle that was slowly but surely falling apart as men fell injured, dying, dead. They’d clearly been grouped together around Ace when the attack had come, and that was actually great: having them bunched up like that was a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. A few men were hanging around the wal
ls, but they were being picked off one by one as they were surrounded and overpowered.
But the problem was that right now, the group of men was smack between King and Ace, so that meant hugging the fucking walls as best he could, and slowly making his way around the room as the walls were cleared. That was taking time though, too much time from the looks of Ace, but options were limited here. Running break-neck speed directly to his target – while the fastest way through the mess, and King’s preferred route in all aspects of his life – was out of the question.
Patience was what was needed here. If Ace was gone, he was gone, and King getting himself killed to verify that wasn’t going to help the situation.
He sucked in a few deep, steadying breaths, and moved. Waited for the path to clear, moved a few steps. Shot one of Jensen’s guys, moved again. Did it again. Then Quinn took someone out for him from about sixty feet away, and King gained a good six feet, ducked behind a stack of crates to reload.
Inch by inch, slowly and carefully, King circled the room that way. It took almost twenty minutes, but finally, finally, he was within ten feet of Ace, though still jammed up against the wall and hiding behind a piece of machinery. King lay flat on his stomach, peered under the equipment, trying to get a better look at Ace now.
What he saw did not reassure him. Not in the slightest.
Ace was tied to the chair, shirtless. He’d been severely beaten, and King winced when he saw the shiny glint of bone sticking through his left shin; clearly, someone had broken it badly enough to actually force the jagged edge of bone through the skin.
Skin. Fuck, his skin…
King had seen lots of bad shit in his life, but this. This was something that went well beyond inhumanity. It was… well. It was beyond any words that King knew, too. He wanted to gag at the sight in front of him, to just turn away from what was so damn hard to look at, but that was pure self-indulgence. Ace needed him to hold it together, and get to him. Ace was counting on him.
Extreme Curves (Dangerous Curves Book 7) Page 17