Raiden (Satan’s Angels MC #2)

Chapter 16

Raiden

B ursts of gunfire light up the dingy warehouse.

Bullets glance off crates, bury themselves in the walls, and hit with sharp metallic clunks into vehicles.

We voted on this in church a few hours ago. Total and utter carnage, no holds barred.

We knew who our enemy was, and we knew where they were. Gray pressed hard on the men he’d hired. They were already close, but finally one of them had intel for us.

My club brothers voted for action. Gray led them. It wasn’t a surprise. He’d try for peace any other time, but these small-time dealers and thugs trying to make a move on our territory hunted down Gray’s woman, our MC queen. They’d shot at my woman too. If she wasn’t highly trained and skilled, she might not be alive now. Her quick reflexes and her impeccable aim stood between her and death.

These bastards scared every other old lady who came back here. Our kids too.

They burned our warehouses and our club downtown.

We all want vengeance, and we want it in a big way.

People think bikers are stupid, but we weren’t dumb enough to come here with our engines roaring, the wind in our hair, the lull of freedom’s road song in our ears. We waited until the full cover of dark and came in two cages, ditching them a mile or so from the building.

We needed a good shot, so we brought Bullet. His experience in special ops before he joined the club made him invaluable in planning how to hit their warehouse.

It’s a small place, located not far from one of our burned-out shells.

These fuckers have been hiding out in plain sight all along.

Crow, as club enforcer, wouldn’t let us leave him behind. Reckless and Gunner, who have both acted as VP in the past, also insisted that they be included. Odin threatened to follow us if we made him stay at the club. Despite his one eye, he’s a good shot and deadly with a blade.

We needed to ensure that no matter what happened, our women and children and our base was protected, so we left Scythe heading up the rest of the men and our prospects. Reaper, who shares the enforcer position with Crow, also is back at the clubhouse, helping Wizard monitor security.

Gray led us in through the warehouse’s side door. Nothing was unlocked, but we shot and kicked down the door and spilled inside.

We’ve put a lot of faith in the information Gray’s man gave us. He said there would be roughly twenty-five men here. That means we’re outnumbered, but as we charge into the main part of the warehouse, covering Gray as he pours bullets from a semi-automatic rifle, there aren’t many scurrying shapes.

The shouts of the dead, the panicked, and dying reach us quickly, as soon as we opened fire.

I duck behind a stack of boxes while Crow and Gunner cover the doors, cutting off any potential escape.

I catch a blur of motion and whip out from behind my cover, shooting as it tracks past me.

Other shots ring out, bursts and singles. Something goes whizzing past my head. Not a bullet, but shrapnel shot off the side of a wooden crate.

Crow and Gunner do an excellent job of covering Gray. We took the main part while Odin branched off before we got to the main section of the warehouse, hunting any rooms that might have men in them. We moved quickly and thoroughly, watching our backs as we crept from the side door we busted into. In the flurry of gunshots and shadows, I catch sight of the big, one-eyed man pouring into the action.

It happens so fast, flashes of fire, the glint of a knife, shouts and cries, metal, smoke, and gunpowder, and then it’s over. I’ve never heard a silence so deafening.

The adrenaline is pumping through all of us and won’t fade out for hours yet, but as I step out fully into the open and sweep my eyes over the carnage and havoc we just wrought, the bloody justice we rained down, it hits me what we’ve done.

In a way, it’s self-defense. Us or them, just like I told Widow.

But in a very real way, it’s murder.

We slaughtered these men.

They might have been drugged up addicts run by a lunatic who left Seattle because he thought the market in smaller cities was ripe, moving in as Widow said, to fill the vacuum that we created when we got rid of all the dealers who were selling the hard stuff, wrecking lives in Hart, but they were still men and now they’re dead.

A scuffling sound and a croak behind me makes me spin around fast. The action was all in front that I’m aware, but maybe Bullet found someone in the back or side rooms.

No, he’s here. I just saw him.

I whip around so fast that a glancing pain shoots up my neck. It’s dingy in here, the lights creating more murk than they do clarity. We came in wearing all black, leaving our cuts behind at the clubhouse, so I’m careful not to shoot blindly. We’re all wearing body armor, but I’m not taking any chances and accidentally shooting one of my club brothers because I couldn’t see clearly.

It’s the huge glinting knife pressed to Gunner’s throat that stands out immediately when I turn.

“You wanna see him live, drop your guns.” The junkie rasps and presses the knife in harder, drawing blood that runs down Gunner’s thick neck. Despite the pain and that blade pressing right against his jugular, Gunner’s face is blank. Impassive. Calm. He looks like he’s sitting on a bench in the middle of a park on a beautiful summer day, just enjoying the sunshine, not ruminating on any cares.

I take one step closer, lifting my gun in the air with my hands and then make sure I lower it slowly. There are other men in here right behind me. They’ll see what’s going on. They’re better shots than I am. I wouldn’t trust myself to hit the bastard and not clip Gunner or worse. Kevlar might offer good protection in a gun fight, but close range I’m not risking my brother’s life—unless either of our lives depend on it.

Widow wanted to come. There was no fucking way anyone was going to let her do that. Gray was the one to tell her no, so that I didn’t have to. As prez, he got the final decision. Bullet made the case for her being a great shot, but I argued that her skills were better served protecting our women and children at the clubhouse.

I didn’t want her to have more blood on her hands, especially so soon after she was so traumatized.

I feel that over-pressurized adrenaline blasting through me. It makes me as jittery as the tall, skin and bones bag of rotted teeth and slurring words behind Gunner.

“You want to talk? We can do that. I’ll call the rest of my brothers off,” I go for firm and get it, despite the tremors starting to dig in like an electric current under my skin.

“You’ll call them off or I cut his head clean off his body,” the tweaker shoots back.

“It would take more than that,” Gunner points out, his throat jumping into the blade, spilling more of his blood. Does he even feel it? His face and the rest of his body, loose and languid instead of tense and afraid, says otherwise. “You’d have to cut through bone, you stupid fucker.”

“I can still slice your throat. Don’t have to go through no bones in order to kill you.”

“You want to do that, you go ahead. I can guarantee you’re dead either way. Might as well take me with you.”

“Gunner!” I don’t make any sudden movements. I glance over my shoulder, I can see the shadows behind me edging forward, silently getting closer.

Gunner’s the one who moves fast, grabbing the tweaker’s wrist and twisting. The snap of bone breaking booms through the warehouse sickeningly. I don’t know what Gunner’s story is. Not sure Gray knows what the guy was doing before he got to Hart. It was Zale’s decision to let him patch into the club. The way he disarms the man behind him, grasps the knife in a blink, and sinks it into the guy’s chest, hints at skills that aren’t obtained working a nine to motherfucking five.

I can’t see someone like Gunner enjoying being in the army, but he could have been special ops or something even more covert, like Bullet. It’s more likely that he was involved in shit a whole lot seedier and far less disciplined.

There are jobs for men like him. Men who don’t feel remorse, who might even take pleasure in killing.

He told us himself that he slashed that guy’s throat outside the range but seeing him grab that knife handle and twist it before yanking it down, practically cleaving the guy in half, is so brutal and so violent, it rocks something inside of me, obliterating me like a natural disaster.

“Gunner!”

Gray’s voice slams me back into my body, jerking me clean from the detachment. He’s standing at my side, a huge, welcome presence that gives me a sense of history, of grounding calm like always.

Gunner touches the spot on his neck where he was cut and holds his bloody hands out to Gray silently, like that justifies gutting a man.

My stomach roils as the body finally hits the floor, face first.

“Don’t train a man to kill, turn him into a machine, make him good at it, feed him on blood and gore, and blame him for what he becomes.”

That bit of wisdom comes from Bullet. He and Gunner have no friendship like Gray and I did before we were ever patched in, our roots going back to kindergarten, but Gunner is part of this club. He’s our brother. He’s not here to be put on trial.

“We don’t have time for anything other than cleanup,” Bullet reminds us.

If we have something to say to Gunner, we’re going to have to save it for back at the clubhouse.

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.