Page 1 of Cold Fury

1

FURY

“Let me out of here! Goddamnit!” the prisoner shouts.

Panic sharpens Spanner’s voice like a knife. He strains against the ropes holding his wrists, which are tightly bound above his head. The hook he’s attached to pulls him upright so that he’s almost suspended in mid-air. The balls of his feet scrabble to stay connected to the ground.

A sheen of sweat slicks his bare chest. His eyes bulge. He stinks of fear.

It’s a scent I know well.

“No can do, motherfucker.” My words are casual, but there’s an undercurrent of tension in my voice. It betrays the anger that I keep on a tight leash. “You know better than that. You done fucked up, son.”

“I didn’t do anything!” Spanner insists, still grappling for purchase on the ground.

I gotta hand it to him, he’s dumb, but he’s holding onto the lie. Too bad it won’t do him a damn bit of good.

Looking over to one side, I make eye contact with Venom and Voodoo. They’re the President and the Sergeant at Arms of the Ankeny, Iowa chapter of the Royal Bastards MC. This isn’t my chapter. Mine’s up in Minneapolis. I’m down here on the orders of Magnus, my own President, to oversee the punishment of a former prospect for the Minneapolis club.

I’m the Sergeant at Arms of the Minneapolis chapter. As such, I’m here to make sure that this son of a bitch pays for what he’s done. And to make goddamn sure he’ll never have the chance to do it again.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Spanner yells, still trying to convince me. “Fury, come on, man! This is a mistake! Youknowme, man! I didn’t do anything!” He locks eyes with me, hoping I’ll buy his bullshit. But I know better. The way his lips flick over his lips when he’s lying is one of his tells.

Besides, we have proof.

Spanner came to us as a hang-around. He moved up to prospect about a year later. The dude was eager. Ambitious for sure — a little too ambitious, as it turns out. We’ll never know whether he made the decision to prospect because he genuinely wanted to be a Royal Bastard, or for some other ulterior motive. Either way, a few months after he got his prospect patch, one of our rival clubs started making moves that made us suspicious that we had a rat in our midst. Based on the intel the rival club seemed to be acting on, we knew it wasn’t someone high up in our ranks. But it was clear there was someone on the inside, selling secrets to our enemies. And we had our suspicions that Spanner was the traitor.

We caught the motherfucker by setting him up to eavesdrop on a conversation between our prez and VP, Magnus and Norse. They fed him false info about the location of a storehouse that supposedly held a shipment of guns we were set to transport up north to Canada. When the storehouse was broken into and ransacked a couple days later, we knew for sure Spanner was the one who had sold us out.

He figured out we were on to him, and fled south across the Minnesota border before we could nab him.

But stupid fuckers do stupid shit. And Spanner forgot one crucial thing. The Royal Bastards are everywhere.

“Iowa is Royal Bastards territory, you dumb asshole,” I rasp. “Running down here wasn’t gonna get you anywhere. You shoulda known you were gonna get caught.”

“I didn’t do anything!” he insists again. Christ, it’s getting goddamn old. I swear to fucking God, it’s a compulsion with some people, to keep lying in a desperate attempt to save their own skin even when it’s obvious the game’s over. It’s almost comical. Like he thinks we’re just gonna say,“Oh, you didn’t? Well, mercy me, our mistake! We’ll just let you go, then. Please accept our apologies!”

“Shut up, you piece of shit traitor,” Angel, the Enforcer for the Ankeny crew, barks. Lightning-fast, a blade appears in his hand. Before I have a chance to register the movement, he’s sliced a shallow trench across Spanner’s naked stomach. Blood beads on his skin and begins to drip downwards, mingling with his fear-putrid sweat in thin, pathetic rivulets.

“Lying to our faces is just gonna make this worse for you,” I snarl. “Besides, it’s too fucking late. There ain’t a single thing you can say to save your sorry ass now.”

Fury is my road name. Vengeance is my drug. Hurting people who need to be hurt gives me a hard-on. And no one needs to be hurt more than someone who has betrayed the Royal Bastards MC.

The Ankeny chapter of the Royal Bastards has a couple of legit enterprises. One of them is a biological cleaning business. The other one is a hog farm, which is where we are right now. We’re standing in the yard, only a couple dozen feet from the outdoor hog enclosure. The hogs are milling around, snuffling and making excited noises. Seems to me that the smell of Spanner’s blood has caught their attention.

The Ankeny club’s two legit businesses have some other, less legit applications as well. Both of them can help with cleanup of some less than legal biological messes.

Because these hogs? They’ve developed a taste for meat.

I step closer to the traitor. “You were an ambitious dude. You had promise, I won’t lie,” I say. He flinches at my use of the past tense. His chest is heaving in and out with fear. I take out a pack of smokes and shake one out, lighting it. “But ambition is a dangerous thing. Ambition without loyalty? Well, that can get you in some serious fucking trouble. Course, it’s really too late to be giving you advice. You ain’t gonna need it any longer. You’re done, Spanner.”

I take a long drag of the cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs. Then exhaling, I take a moment to contemplate the orange ember on the end. Reaching out, I extinguish the cigarette on the bare skin of his chest.

Spanner throws his head back and lets out a howl of pain that mingles with the squealing of the hogs in the pen. His body jerks back, straining and writhing.

“Oh, shit,” I chuckle. “If you think that hurts, you’re about to be in for a bad damn time, son.”

Still straining away from me, Spanner’s scream dies as he stares at me in terror, the whites of his eyes showing. He starts to babble, incoherent pleading noises that I cut off with a wave of the now-dead cigarette.

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