Bounty: Fury Riders MC (25 page)

Then it was over. He went still, eyes bulging out, tongue swollen. I took the chain from his neck—after the fire, the police would think he died in the explosion. I hoped. Either way, I didn’t wanna leave any evidence.

I took one more look at him before turning away.

There were seven minutes left.

I raced back out to Erica. She had slumped forward in the chair—had somebody…? No. When I gently slapped her cheeks, she roused. It would have been just like York to have her murdered while we were talking in his office.

I pulled the gag from her mouth. “Are you all right? Did they hurt you?” I stroked her face, looking into her eyes to see if they had drugged her. It didn’t look that way. She was just woozy.

“I’m gonna get you out of here, but we have less than seven minutes to do it. Stay with me, baby.” I worked on the ropes around her wrists, which wasn’t easy since her blood had soaked through them. I knew her wrists were torn up. I wanted to kill York all over again.

“Why seven minutes?” Her voice was thick, groggy.

“Less than that now,” I said in a tight voice. “Because we’re blowing this place.”

“Like, leaving?”

“Like, leaving, then blowing it up.” She gasped loudly, and I put a hand over her mouth. “Shh. Don’t wanna let them know you’re awake in here. It’s better if they think you’re unconscious.” Not that they would hear her over the sound of the radio blaring from the main room, just outside.

Just then, as I was close to having Erica’s wrists free, the door opened. I ducked behind her, hoping I would blend in with the shadows in the dimly lit room.

“Why the hell is your gag off?” I didn’t know the voice, but he closed the door behind him. Good thing. I didn’t want anyone else to see what I was gonna do. I wished to God I had my fucking gun.

I leaped out from behind Erica, trying to use the element of surprise to my advantage. It worked—he was totally thrown off, and stumbled back. I landed on top of him on the floor.

I landed one punch to his face, but I couldn’t tell where it landed since his fingers clawed at my eyes. He bucked me off, and I landed on my back. When he lunged for me, I rolled to the side and scrambled to my feet. He went low, driving his head into my midsection. He slammed me against the wall, and every bone in my body rattled.

I glanced at Erica, getting a quick look at her as she struggled with the ropes at her ankles.
She must have gotten her hands free
, I thought before the Wolf I was fighting landed a blow on my temple. I staggered, seeing stars. He swung at me again, but this time, I ducked. His fist hit the wall instead. I threw a few jabs to his ribs, doubling him over. I pushed down on his shoulders, bending him lower, then drove my knee into his face. He staggered back, blood pouring from his nose.

I didn’t have time to keep fighting him, and I looked around in desperation for something to use as a weapon. Every second that ticked by put us one second closer to the explosion.

Then, Erica was out of the chair, the ropes around her ankles untied. She slumped to the floor, rubbing her legs. I took the chair and swung it high, slamming it over the head of the Wolf. He crumbled to the floor in a heap.

“Oh, my God!” Erica gasped through the tears pouring down her cheeks. “I thought he would kill you!”

“No chance,” I murmured, helping her to her feet. “Can you walk?”

She took a tentative step. “I think so. My feet are asleep, a little, but I’m okay.”

I looked around, hoping for a door beside the ones to the office and the main room. No luck. Those were our only two options.

“What about Alexander?” Erica whispered.

I only glanced at her and looked away. I didn’t need to say what happened. She understood.

“We don’t have a choice. We have to go through the room outside to get to the door.” I wished right then that I’d let the guys cover us after all. We’d be stepping out into a shooting gallery—all of them would be armed, and from what I remembered seeing, every member was out there.

“How long do we have?”

I checked my watch. “Four and a half minutes.” I looked at the door, then at her. “This is what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna open the door and go out, and I want you to run. Just fucking run as fast as you can. Go and don’t look back. Got it?”

“Where will you be?”

“I’ll be right behind you. I’ll be shielding you.” I looked at the man on the floor. He had a gun his waistband. Why the hell hadn’t he pulled it? He might have thought he was saving me for York. The joke was on him. I took it. It was loaded.

“Scratch that. I’ll cover you. The important thing to me is that you get out safe. Keep running. The guys are at the end of the lot, on the street. We drove here in black SUVs. They’ll be waiting. All right? Just run and don’t look back. Please promise you won’t look back or even slow down for a second until you reach the cars.”

“I promise.” She was still softly crying.

I kissed her, hard. I hoped it wasn’t for the last time.

“All right. Let’s go.” Just as we turned to the door, it opened. I pushed Erica behind me, leveling the gun at the person coming through.

It was Onyx.

Seeing him there knocked the breath from my body. I knew he worked with York. I knew he kidnapped Erica. But seeing him made it really real.

I shook myself. There was no time to think about that. I looked at my watch. Four minutes to go. Ralph’s C-4 would blow us all to pieces. Leave it to Onyx to get in the way now. I looked at him, hoping he was together enough to remember our friendship. I would need him to remember that if we had a chance of getting out alive.

“Onyx. Let us go.” I held Erica behind me, shielding her. “York’s dead. It’s over, man.”

“I know.” He stared at me, his voice flat. Was he thinking about killing us where we stood?

I kept my voice tight, controlled. “I don’t wanna have to hurt you, but I will if you don’t let us go.”

He laughed harshly. “What difference does it make if you kill me or not? I’m a fucking dead man either way.” He looked over my shoulder at Erica. “You’re right. I have nothing now.”

I wondered how much they’d been talking about before I got there. It didn’t make a difference. I was desperate, knowing the clock was ticking. But I couldn’t leave him behind. My conscience would kill me every day for the rest of my life, no matter what he did to the club and me.

“You have to come with us,” I said. “And we have to hurry. Let’s go.”

“For what? So you can kill me?” He shook his head.

I could have screamed with frustration. Why was he being so difficult? My heart raced, my body shook with the need to run. I couldn’t run without him. “Nobody has to die. Shit, you don’t even have to come with me. You can leave, run away. I won’t tell them, and neither will Erica.”

“I swear,” she whispered from behind me.

“I don’t deserve it. I turned by back on everything. I let him use me.”

“We can talk about it later. We have to go, now!” I heard Erica whimpering behind me. I knew that if it came down to the choice, I would choose her. I’d run. But I had to give Onyx a chance to live, too. I didn’t want him dead after everything.

He still shook his head. I looked at my watch again. Three and a half minutes left.

“Onyx…” I hesitated, wondering if I should tell him. I didn’t wanna give him time to alert the rest of the Wolves, but I had to give us all time to leave. Would he tell them? Could I trust him?

I felt Erica’s hand squeezing mine. Reminding me we had to leave.

“Ralph rigged the place with explosives. We only have a little over three minutes before it blows.”

He didn’t even look surprised. “I knew you would do something,” he said. “You couldn’t just walk in here and take her. I would be disappointed if you did.”

“Come with us,” I said. “Just run, you know? You don’t have to go to the clubhouse. You can go anywhere, do anything. Nobody has to know. They’ll think you died here. We won’t tell them.”

“Like Lance? Living on the run? Shit, the club is the only life I know. I couldn’t live like a normal person. I don’t blend in either.” He motioned to his face. “It’s better this way. I don’t have anything anymore. I don’t even have self-respect. Let me go, brother.”

Two minutes. Time was slipping by too fast. “I can’t.”

“Even after what I did?” His voice was almost a whisper.

“Yes. You’re still my best friend. I can’t let go of that just because you fucked up. Come with us, please.”

It looked like he was thinking it over. We had a minute and a half to get out of the building and far enough from it to avoid the blast. “It’s now or never, man. Come on. We’ve gotta go, now.”

“No, I won’t go with you. But I’ll cover you.” He pulled his gun.

“It’s suicide,” I whispered. I was horrified.

He smiled grimly. “I know. Better to go this way than put a bullet in my head. You don’t know how many times I thought about doing that tonight when I knew I had nowhere to go after this.”

Erica squeezed my hand again. I knew we had to do it, though my chest ached when I thought of my best friend giving up his life like this.

He sounded very tired when he said, “You would do it for me. Or you would have before I fucked it all up. Let me make it right, a little.”

I couldn’t spend any more time trying to convince him. I felt the clock ticking away the last seconds of his life, and maybe of mine if we didn’t run soon.

I nodded, crossing the room. “I love you, brother,” I said, hugging him briefly.

“Same here. I’m sorry.” He looked at Erica, standing to my side. “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” she said. She was crying.

He looked at the door. “Let’s do this. Stay low behind me.”

I checked my watch. Thirty seconds.

So much happened at all once. He opened the door quickly but quietly—not that it mattered, since the music from the radio was blaring so loudly. It was still a celebration as far as they were concerned. At first, nobody even looked up.

Onyx walked out in front of us, shielding us with his big body. He waved us on.

“Come on,” I whispered, taking Erica’s hand and pushing her out first. I wanted to be behind her on the way to the door. If shooting started, I wanted to be between her and them. We dashed for the door.

“Hey! Wait!” Chairs overturning, bottles breaking. Shots fired. Erica screamed, but I pushed her on, screaming back for her to keep moving. I didn’t dare turn around. I could only hope Onyx had got a few of them before they took him out. The door was just in front of us.

We ran out the door, flying past the long row of bikes along the front wall. “Run!” I screamed. I took her hand again, pulling her along this time. “Keep going! Don’t look back!”

We almost reached the end of the block of warehouses before the explosion rocked us. We fell to the ground from the force of the blast. I threw myself over Erica, protecting her from the burning bits of wood which fell around us. Windows shattered, car alarms went off for blocks all around.

I saw feet running toward us. I couldn’t hear anything but a low roaring. Somebody pulled me to my feet. Axel. He was screaming at me. I couldn’t hear anything but the roaring in my ears and a faint sound from him. Like there was something over his mouth. I saw Frankie and Ralph dragging Erica to her feet. She looked all right—in one piece. They threw us into the back of one of the SUVs and we sped away.

It was over. I couldn’t believe we made it out. I held Erica tight, looking out the window at the inferno behind us. Ralph had done the job and then some. The building was gone, a pile of burning rubble.

I looked down at Erica, who looked up at me. Her face was dirty and streaked with tears. We couldn’t have spoken to each other if we tried—her ears had to be ringing as badly as mine were. We didn’t need to speak, though. I saw everything in her eyes.

***

“He covered us. He gave us the chance to escape. He was sorry for what he did, and he told me this was his way of making it right. He wanted you to all know how sorry he was for everything.”

I looked over the room, everyone gathered on the sofas and chairs in the lounge. It had been a few hours since we got back, but my hearing had only started to return. Nobody could wait any longer to find out what happened.

I knew I had to tell them about Onyx. He wouldn’t have wanted me to, but I couldn’t let him die as a traitor in their eyes. They had to know he cared enough about me, and them, in the end to do what he did.

I took a swig from my beer, thinking it over. “I honestly don’t think he had any idea how big it would get. I think York told him what he wanted to hear, just like he did to Lance. Probably like he did to all the guys in his club. He was a master at manipulating people. Probably a psycho, or a sociopath. He didn’t care about anybody but himself.” I shrugged. “It’s over now.”

Brett’s eyes overflowed with tears. “He sacrificed himself for you guys.”

I nodded. My throat was too tight to speak. The girls cried, comforting each other. I smiled to myself, knowing Onyx would have laughed if he knew they saw him as a tragic hero.

“How is she?” Brett asked, and we all knew who she meant.

“Fine, I think. They didn’t do anything to her. Onyx made sure they didn’t.” As soon as we arrived at the clubhouse, Erica had collapsed into bed. I didn’t blame her. The shock was finally wearing off, and she was exhausted. “She might need her wrists bandaged, but I didn’t get a good look at them. They had her tied pretty tight.”

“Poor thing,” she murmured, shaking her head. I was proud of her for taking Erica under her wing the way she had. It meant more to me than I could say that everybody accepted her.

I was proud of all of them. My guys had stepped up in more ways than one. They’d shown me how far they were willing to go to keep our club safe and running the way it always had. We were a family.

“I have one more thing I wanna say to all of you, and I want you to take this to heart.” It wasn’t easy for me, but I had to do it. “If any of you don’t agree with the club pulling out of the drug business, I understand. If any of you disagree with me on anything, I want you to tell me. This isn’t a dictatorship. I’d rather have you come to me so we could work it out. I don’t want this happening again.”

Everyone nodded. Frankie looked around the room, then spoke. “I think we all proved tonight that you’re our guy. We don’t want anything else but this.”

“You can count on us,” Axel added. “The others…they were stupid and greedy. They believed that bastard when he told them what they wanted to hear. He used them. We get it. It won’t happen again.”

I believed them, and it filled my heart.

It was almost dawn, and everybody broke up to go to bed. It would be a late morning for us, but for the first time in over a week, we would all wake up feeling more positive. I’d mourn Onyx quietly, privately. Otherwise, there was nothing on the horizon but hope.

And Erica. If she wanted to be.

The thought of her leaving crossed my mind while I sat on a bar stool, watching everybody else go upstairs to bed. I was holding an icepack to my bruised temple on Brett’s orders. She came over and asked to take a look.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked, lifting the pack from my skin.

“Why do you ask? Maybe I’m not thinking about anything.”

She smirked. “Please. Like I don’t know your thinking face.”

“I have one of those?”

“Definitely. So what is it?” She looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Erica?”

“When did you become a mind reader?”

She chuckled. “You spend enough time with a person, you start to know the way they think. Besides, it’s normal for you to think about her. What’s she gonna do now?” She peered at me again. “What are you gonna do?”

I shrugged and looked away while she put some ointment on a gauze pad and taped it to my temple. “I don’t know. I guess it’s up to her. We didn’t give her the best impression of this life, did we?”

“I guess you’re right. She’s seen a lot of bad shit. But there’ve been good things, too. She played poker with us while you were gone.”

“She did?”

“Yeah, she fit right in. She could have been a snob about it, you know? Like she thought she was better than us since she comes from another world. It wasn’t like that at all. She offered to help. She wanted to be part of things. That’s probably pretty rare, don’t you think?”

I mulled it over. What she said made sense.

“That leaves you. What are you gonna do?”