Cole rose to meet him. The rest of us rose with our respective presidents, fully aware that the other side was not going to let their leader get his ass beaten.Here we go…
“I’ve suffered more casualties in the last month than I have the year before, and you want me to make a list and check it twice? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I’ve been asking the same question my entire life, Lane,” Cole said. “It will literally take you five minutes to be contrite and say what you did wrong. I’m not asking you to make penance for five years.”
“Your focus is in all the wrong places!”
“I’m not here for a temporary solution!”
“You’re not here for anything but to make me grovel, are you?”
“Not any different than how you’ve made me grovel for years on end.”
And that’s when the first punch came.
With Cole, Lane, myself, and Butch so close together, it was hard to know who threw first. I only knew it wasn’t me. But who threw first paled in comparison to the fact that with the false pretenses of civility off the table, I unleashed the vengeful animal in me, one driven by the adrenaline of an ugly morning, an ugly month, and an ugly life.
I didn’t so much punch as I drove my fist through peopled, like a bullet going through crumpled paper. I didn’t want to kill; I wanted to maim. I heard people shouting, and I heard Owen and Axle trying to break it up, but what I heard could do nothing in comparison to what I wanted to do. I wanted the blood of Butch and Lane literally on my hands, just as they had the blood of my father on theirs.
It didn’t fucking matter what my father was to the Black Reapers. Old feelings died hard, and my feelings for my old man were still conflicted at worst and still loving at best.
BOOM!
Everyone froze.Explosion…
What the fuck?
“Shit!” someone yelled from outside. “It’s the Fallen Saints!”
In an instant, the four of us, warring combatants fighting to the death, had found our common enemy. No longer were we fighting each other. Fists were dropped, shirt collars were released, and distance was given. Butch was the first to leave, grabbing a gun just outside the church doors.
Lane and Axle followed immediately. Owen, perhaps on instinct, raced with them. Cole looked at me for half a second before he followed his brother out.Goddamnit,I thought to myself as I followed Cole, having made a vow to protect him at all costs—even if what he did, I thought, was stupid and self-supplicating to his brother.
But any and all thoughts I had vanished the second we got outside.
The battle, if you could even call it that, had ended.
There was no enemy in sight. No Fallen Saint. No bike of theirs.
Just a single car on fire and two Black Reapers lying about five feet from the car. If they weren’t dead, it would be nothing short of a miracle.
The Black Reaper officers stood behind a flank of men who had their guns pointed forward into the darkness, but even I could see there was no immediate danger. The Fallen Saints had somehow rigged a bomb in the car, detonating it when two Reapers got near it. The details didn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that two more of us—them, the Black Reapers—were dead. Fucking dead.
The war was not just on paper anymore. I was seeing it with my own eyes.
“Clear!” one of the Reapers yelled, a man whose voice I didn’t recognize—probably a new prospect they’d had to rush in due to lowering numbers.
Butch and Lane headed straight for the bodies. Cole and Owen moved to the side, distant from the rest of the Black Reapers. The heat of the fire was intense, but it paled in comparison to the heat I still felt between the two Reapers.
Lane looked down at the bodies, raised his shoulders in a sigh, and slowly walked back to Cole.
“You want to be our friend?” he said, followed by a harsh spit to the side. “Or do you want to be the friend of our enemy? This, right here? This is the norm now. They aren’t afraid of us anymore. We’re...”
He didn’t finish, but I knew what he was going to say.They’re afraid of the Fallen Saints.
And that scares me.
Though a small part of me might have taken a bit of egotistical pride in the Black Reapers’ dismantling, that reality scared the shit out of me. For as long as I had known each side, the Black Reapers MC was the grizzly bear of the forest, and the Fallen Saints MC was the annoying fox that just couldn’t leave the bear alone.
