Page 51 of Raiden

There’s one man out there who is going to know what happened. The man Gray paid to give us the intel on this gang. They literally pulled out all the stops and came up here from Seattle. All of them, as far as we know. They were confident that Hart was theirs for the taking and now they’re dead.

It makes me sound like a psychopath myself to say that I hope we got all of them, but if we left anyone out there who comes for vengeance, we could have a real problem. We did discuss all possible repercussions of wiping Hart clean of this filth. Vengeance is always going to be on the table. We wouldn’t have taken this path if these men weren’t extremely far gone. You’d think that being strung out on drugs would make people the least effective they could be, but not always.

These men were reckless, unpredictable, and dangerous.

The drugs made them bold, but it also made them sloppy.

There’s no way we should have been able to walk in here tonight and catch them by surprise like we did.

Gunner holds his hand over the wound on his neck and grins salaciously. Not for the first time, my blood turns to ice. “Let’s get to clean up and burn down.”

It’s the reminder we all need to move. Even Bullet is acting like he doesn’t like the look of this. Back before times of peace, Zale knew a man who owned a pig farm, but we decided that wouldn’t be necessary.

Criminals like this? They wouldn’t need much provocation to kill each other, and in the process, start a fire that burns this place down. Given that it’s full of fuel and enough lethal substances to explode the building on a good day, it’s not a stretch that someone started shooting and the place went up around them.

“There’s literally enough meth, heroin, and cocaine here to keep this city funded for the next fifty years,” Bullet remarks, walking past Gray as he bends to exchange his gun for one of the dead dealers.

We’re outlaw bikers. Very few of our guns are registered or traceable, and those would be Bullet’s at the range or the ones we keep in our homes. The rest won’t be tracked back to us, and as we’re all wearing gloves there’s no need to worry about prints.

I wasn’t sure about any of this. The whole thing gave me a massive amount of anxiety before we even stepped foot out of the clubhouse. The threat of going back to prison, getting locked up in that cage again, gets my pulse hammering.

It’ll take weeks, if not months, before I ever feel safe again. Before any of us feel safe, honestly. The club has a few of Hart’s cops on our payroll. I just hope that it’s enough, should anyone start asking questions.

It takes us almost an hour to exchange guns, arrange the shells how Bullet says they should be, and erase signs of our presence.

My first breath of night air feels cold and delicious in my lungs. September. The chill wind says that the heat of summer is finally over.

I glance up at the stars. Even in Hart, the light obscures them. They aren’t nearly as vibrant. I’m still taken back to the night I spent lost in the woods, frustrated, stiff, sore, hungry and thirsty. I thought Zale Grand was our biggest worry and now I’m just one of a few shadows creeping through the deserted edge of the industrial area. We’re heading out a safe distance before Bullet blows the place to hell.

I don’t like it, but this is the final part of our plan. Gray was given intel on just how much shit was in the place and we confirmed it. Bullet stated back in church that he’d be able to explode it with a few shots and get the hell out. It wouldn’t go up the way you see buildings do in movies. We’re confident that the warehouse is far enough away from others and that the area is fairly deserted right now. That’s part of the reason these guys picked this exact place to hide out and operate from. It wasn’t close enough to anyone else for them to take notice of the shit that’s been happening.

When the place goes up, we’ll use a burner phone to place an anonymous call about a fire. All we can do after that is hope it doesn’t spread to any of the other businesses.

We cluster together, sticking to the shadows of an empty warehouse way down the street until we catch sight of Bullet coming. We hear his heavy breathing and pounding stride before he materializes out of the dark.

“Just wait,” he whispers in his gravelly tone before anyone can say anything.

We do. It feels like an eternity before the muffled whoomph of flames bursts through one of the windows and starts to lick at the side of the metal. There’s no explosion. Yet.

“That’s anticlimactic as fuck,” Gunner complains.

“It won’t be when their main stash goes up. It shouldn’t take out any other buildings, but there was more than we were told. Let’s go before that main stash catches in a big way or before someone sees us out here, standing here gaping at our own handiwork.”

Nothing more needs to be said.

There’s not a single one of us who isn’t eager to get back to the clubhouse, wash away the dirt and blood of tonight—real or imagined—and see our loved ones back there. Tonight was about taking back control of Hart, but it was also about safeguarding this thing that we’ve built against destruction.

Maybe Widow was right. Maybe we were just a rough around the edges bunch of guys pretending at being a club because we loved motorcycles and weren’t big on society, but tonight made us all bikers.

Tonight, every single one of us committed murder so we could stay on the right side of the turf ourselves and so our families could grow up here, safe and free.

I patched in years ago, did half a decade in prison, but tonight, I became a real outlaw.

Chapter 17

Ella

It might seem irreverent, having a party. We’re keeping it lowkey and contained, nothing spilling outside of the clubhouse, but inside, the place is alive. We’re not celebrating the fact that men lost their lives. We’re celebrating our own lives. That we’re not the ones in the dirt, and until that day comes for us, we need to feelalive.

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