Los Angeles, California
Three days later
"Are you sure I'm supposed to be here?" I whispered to Axe as we stood on the steps of Benicio's home. Home wasn't the right word for it. Home was for places like mine. Not places like this. Buildings like this were outrageous. Estates. "I could have stayed with MacKenzie and Maria."
"No, you're staying with me. And Dani will be there, anyway - she's Benicio's daughter," Axe said. "I think Maria wanted some grandmother time with her, especially after all that's happened." Maria had swept in yesterday, surprisingly in control and composed for a woman whose daughter had been murdered, and busied MacKenzie with a flurry of activities. Crunch had told MacKenzie that her mother was sick, and it was only when Mac asked Maria when April was coming back, that I saw Maria's brave front begin to falter.
The bodyguard opened the door, and Crunch, Axe, and I followed him silently down the foyer and the hallway, then through a doorway to an office, flanked by two men in suits, their holstered weapons visible under their jackets.
"Come in." The man who spoke was well-dressed.
Scratch that.
Impeccably dressed, in a tailored suit that had to have cost thousands. But his face, etched with lines, gave him a hard look that said he was definitely not some pampered millionaire. Axe had said he was a crime boss, and that's exactly what he looked like. Like he wouldn't think twice about ordering a hit on your family before he calmly finished dessert.
What the hell have I gotten myself into here?
~ ~ ~
"Do you trust Benicio?" I asked Axe, when he said we'd go back to California, go to their employer. After he'd explained what had been going on with the club. "If your club president was stealing from him, wouldn't he want to kill you, too?"
"Blaze trusts him," Axe said. "His Old Lady is Benicio's daughter."
"What about Blaze?" I'd asked. "Can he be trusted?"
"I've always been able to trust Blaze," Axe said. "I'll stake my life on it."
That's what we were about to do.
~ ~ ~
Then a guy wearing an Inferno Motorcycle Club emblem on his - leather jacket or whatever it was they called it - turned toward us. "Axe. Crunch."
"Blaze," Axe said.
I stood by, awkwardly, while Blaze hugged Cade and Crunch, offered his condolences.
Blaze shook his head. "I'm so sorry," he said. "They'll pay. They will." Behind his eyes was the kind of fire, the same intensity that I had seen in Axe's eyes, and I felt my heart race. I had no doubt that they were going to destroy the men who were responsible for this.
I just hoped that Axe didn't destroy himself in the process.
Or us.
Benicio stepped forward. "I'm sorry that we meet under these tragic circumstances. And for the loss of your father. Your wife."
Cade shook his head and clenched his jaw. Neither he or Crunch said anything. Crunch just kept staring forward, barely blinking. He was the one I was worried about. Cade at least was talking; Crunch had barely said anything, at least to us. I thought that his grip on sanity seemed tenuous at best.
Benicio gestured to chairs, and I sat, beside the only other woman in the room, Dani.
She smiled at me, her mouth tight, and leaned over. "I'm so sorry to meet you like this," she said. "Are you okay?"
I nodded, too numb to say much of anything else.
"Blaze said you brought documentation of Mad Dog's theft," Benicio said.
"I have copies of the paperwork. It's been going on for a while," Crunch said.
Benicio nodded. "Unfortunately, Mad Dog's duplicity was not a surprise. Blaze, you know that you've been like a son to me, and I trust that you are uninvolved in any of this."
"Of course not," Blaze said.
"Mad Dog has never sat well with me," Benicio said.
Before we had left Colorado, Cade had explained the scenario with the club to me, trying to get me to change my mind about coming with him, or at least trying to make me understand the mess I was about to get myself involved in if I decided to join them. If what had happened to April and Stan had not happened, I would have considered staying in Colorado. The outlaw biker world did not sound like the place for me, no matter how much I cared about Cade.
But April and Stan's deaths changed that. I had made a promise to Stan that I would take care of Cade, and I would keep it. And I didn't care anymore if my hands got dirty. I didn't care if my hands had blood on them.
My mind drifted for a while when Benicio and the men talked business, until I heard Benicio say, "Blaze asked us to keep tabs on you, Axe."
Blaze held his hands up. "Not because I thought any of this was going down," he said. "Hell. I had no idea Mad Dog was involved in anything like this. I asked because I thought you were in a bad place, is all."
Benicio nodded. "Which is why my men weren't tracking you very well, just checking on you every so often."
"It was your men who got picked up in West Bend," Cade said.
Benicio nodded. "I instructed them to keep their distance. They were picked up before we knew about the Inferno members in West Bend. My intel did not indicate Mad Dog knew."
"Who - you knew we weren't killed in the warehouse? How?" Cade asked.
"My investigators," Benicio said.
"But the other bodies - " Crunch said.
Benicio shook his head. "There were no other bodies. I suspected this was some type of power play by Mad Dog and I had promised Blaze to keep an eye on you. When we saw that it was members of your own club who were responsible, I needed to buy you some time."
So Benicio faked their deaths.
"How?" Cade asked.
Benicio waved his hand dismissively. "I have warehouses in Vegas, a route through the southwest. It's in my best interest to have certain people on payroll. And journalists aren't difficult to bribe."
I looked at Blaze, whose jaw was set. "Mad Dog was stealing from you, but we obviously want to take care of this ourselves."
"I would expect no less," Benicio said. "But my men are at your disposal. You would be wise to use them."
Axe nodded. "But Crunch and I will be the ones to kill them. It will be our hands that do the deed."
"As is your right," Benicio said.
I looked at Axe, his hands clenched, his jaw set.
Could I do this? Could I follow him into the abyss?
I guess the better question was, how could I not?
Outside Benicio's house, Blaze and Crunch and Cade talked. I caught snippets of the conversation.
"Benicio can provide the muscle, but we need to take it to the club. Take it to the brothers we know are loyal," Blaze said.
Cade shook his head. "None of this goes to the club. We can't trust anyone."
"It was Mad Dog, not the whole club..." Blaze said.
Dani turned to me, her expression grim. "It's not always like this," she said. "All of the...bad things happening."
I nodded, but I wasn't sure I believed her.
Axe
“You’re a hundred percent sure you don’t want to leave?” I asked. “You can still turn around and head back to West Bend, forget about all of this.”
June’s face looked somber, and she smiled wanly. I was afraid she would be eaten alive by this.
“I’m not turning around, Cade,” she said. She said it slowly, deliberately, but her tone was emotionless, detached. She had been that way since my dad and April were killed.
Three days ago.
It felt like a lifetime. I felt like I’d aged a lifetime.
We interacted like a pair of robots, numbly going about the business of what you do when two of the closest people in your life are killed. Jed, the prick, had the balls to actually tell us not to leave town, to call us “persons of interest” in the investigation. If June hadn’t hung on to me, I would have killed him. That was three days ago. That’s the last time I remember actually feeling anything.
Right now, I felt blank.
I only knew I wanted blood.
“Axe. They all call you Axe here.” June’s voice broke me out of my thoughts.
I nodded. “It’s been my name for years, June.”
“Axe,” she said again, her voice flat. I wasn’t sure I liked how it sounded when she said it. “It suits you."
“Things won’t be the same after we do this,” I said. “I won’t be the same.”
“You're not the same now."
“I’ve been down this road before, June.” I needed to warn her. What this did to me, it wasn’t good. It wouldn’t be good. Killing people wasn’t good for me.
She nodded. "Cade. Axe. Things won't be the same again."
My voice cracked. “You might not like who I become.”
“You forget, Axe. I’ve been through dark places.”
“And you chose light.” I said. “You chose to walk the straight and narrow.”
“Not always,” she said. “And not now. I know what I’m choosing. I’m choosing you. Whether it’s to walk in darkness or in light, I’m choosing to do it with you.”
“You might regret that choice,” I said.
“Then it’s mine to regret.”
“This is the place?” Crunch asked. We sat out of sight, in an alley around the corner from the building in one of Benicio’s cars, a dark SUV that branded us immediately as dealers. Not that there were many people around here to notice; this wasn't exactly an area you wanted to be out in, not at night. Benicio's muscle was with us, silent as usual.
“This is it," Blaze said.
“Do we know Tink will show up for the buy?” Crunch asked.
“If you’re a meth-head and the shady dealer you're buying from on the down-low, outside the MC, tells you he has a sweet score, what do you do?" Blaze asked. "You get your little crackhead ass down to your dealer’s shithole of a place. He'll fucking show."
"You ready to do this?" Crunch looked at me, his expression made all the more menacing by the shadows darkening his face.
"Let's go."
Benicio's men were trained well, I thought, watching them work. It wasn't exactly difficult to get inside the dealer's place, since the dealer opened the fucking door up like he didn't have a care in the world. Tink's dealer wasn't the sharpest tool, either, and he'd obviously been sampling his own merchandise. But Benicio's men moved with the kind of precision and bearing that said they were ex- special forces of some kind, not American.
I pressed my nine millimeter to the dealer's temple. He was shaky, pale, sweat beading on his forehead. "You hear anything from Tink yet?"
He put his hands on the air. "Come on, man, you guys said all I had to do was text him and get him over here. I told you he's coming. Why you gotta be all crazy with the guns and shit?"
I patted him down, handed his piece to Crunch. "You got anything else on you?"
The dealer sighed. "My ankle, man."
I nodded toward one of Benicio's man, who finished the pat down, and removed the knife he had strapped to his ankle. "At least you're honest. Sit."
We didn't have to wait long before Tink knocked on the door. "Hey, man." He poked his head just inside. "You didn't answer. You here?"
When he saw the weapons trained on him, a look of realization registered on his face, followed by terror as he looked back and forth at Crunch and I.
I smiled. "Hey, Tink. Remember us? You've been looking for us, haven't you? Well, here we are. It's like a goddamned reunion."
Two of Benicio's men grabbed him roughly, pulled him across the kitchen, and pushed him down into a chair at the filthy table.
Almost immediately, he began whining. "Mad Dog said you betrayed the club. He ordered us to find you. I didn't want to touch your wife! Mud was the one who killed the old man - "
Before I could move toward him, Crunch punched him, square in the face. Tink made a gurgling sound and doubled over, clutching at his neck. I grabbed Tink's hair, pulled his head back.
"Hand me that rag," I said, shoving it down his throat. I didn't want to hear anything else from him.
I heard the dealer say something, protesting. "Shut him up," I ordered. One of Benicio's men put a round in his forehead, the sound muffled by the silencer on his weapon.
I should have been completely enraged in that moment, but instead I felt the same familiar sense of calm descend over me that I had felt when I was a sniper.
That fact alone should have terrified me.
It was the feeling I'd become addicted to over there in the sandbox, the rush of being in the zone, simultaneously detached and completely aware of your surroundings. It was like meditating- my breathing would get deep, my heart rate would slow, and my senses would become hyper-focused. Time would stand still in anticipation of my blotting out a life.
I felt the same thing now. A feeling of calm.
Completely at peace with what I was about to do.
Vengeance was mine.
We took Tink back to the warehouse, a place Benicio used for things like this. There, a side of Crunch emerged that sent a chill down my spine.
I don't think Crunch had ever killed someone like this. Not up close and personal, anyway. Killing someone like this was different than shooting someone. With a gun, you had some distance. Guns were efficient.
This was in no way efficient.
It was messy.
Crunch broke Tink, piece by piece, slowly and methodically. With a hammer, he smashed his fingers, one by one, taking his time. I had never seen Crunch like that. He laughed when Tink cried, said he'd been fantasizing about the sound of his bones breaking. When he took the hammer to Tink's hands, he breathed in deeply, satisfaction written all over his face.
I broke Tink's knees with a crowbar. By then, he'd passed out once already from the pain. No stamina. But we revived him. I wanted him to suffer.
When Tink screamed his apology, it sent Crunch into a frenzy. He grabbed a sledgehammer, and I nearly tried to stop him, to keep him from passing over that cliff, for his own sake. It wouldn't bring April back, what he was about to do.
But I think he'd already passed over the edge, descended into madness.
I watched while he beat Tink into oblivion. The sight of it would never leave me.
When it was over, I should have felt something, but I didn't. Satisfaction eluded me, but once the others were sent to Hell, then maybe I would get what I was looking for.
Then it was Fats' turn to die.
Benicio's men pulled him right off his sofa, right out of his