Chapter 19
AXLE
E dge worked the table like a tailor with a very illegal sewing kit. Pistols laid out in two rows. Mags stacked in fours, and suppressors lined up. He tossed me an extra mag pouch without looking up.
“Hydraulics?” Kane asked.
“Don’t kink-shame,” Nitro said mildly, sliding a shaped charge into a padded sleeve. “Besides, these are fucking art.”
“You’ll get to sign it later.” I checked the red dot sight on my sidearm, then snapped it down. “Piston and Fury on the rear. Nitro driving the van. I lead front with Kane on my six. Edge, you hug the panic room once we’re inside.”
Edge’s smile was thin and pleased. He loved a locked door the way I loved a tuned engine. He liked a challenge before catching his prey.
“Jax,” I called without looking, “you’re our eyes.”
He nodded, fingers already moving. “I’ll kill the mains and the backup on your mark.”
Then we rolled into the dark, the sky still lit by the moon even as the rays of dawn were fast approaching. We were cold and focused, but ready to burn shit down. Nitro took the van with his toys. Kane, Edge, Piston, Fury, and I rode. A small, deadly crew.
We killed the lights two miles out and ran black. When the road broke, we split—the van to the tree line Jax had scouted on satellite, our bikes fanned low behind palmetto so the fence line screened us from any eyes.
A fence ringed the safe house—eight feet, topped in angled wire. Nitro handed Piston a hook and line. Piston went up like he’d been born on it, silent and fast, then eased it for the rest of us.
We dropped into the yard like wisps of dark smoke.
“On me,” I murmured.
Two men were puffing on cigarettes under the eaves on the east corner, guns slung wrong and fingers sloppy. What kind of private security were these motherfuckers?
Edge silently took the left while I went for the nearest one. He saw me too late. Mine got his gun halfway up, and I put him down with a suppressed double-tap that made less noise than a dropped wrench. Edge’s blade flashed once, and his man folded sideways.
Nitro flowed from the shadow of the van, set a small charge on the gate latch, practically breathed on it with a micro-det, and the gate sighed inward like it had never wanted to be closed. We were through and moving.
“Jax,” I clipped over comms, “lights out.”
“Copy,” he replied. “Killing mains…and backup. Three, two?—”
The low hum that had been threading under the night cut off. The security floods tried to flare and failed. The little LEDs at the eaves guttered like dying fireflies. Somewhere deep in the house, a generator whined, but Jax knocked it fully out with a pulse that made my teeth sting.
“EMP kiss delivered.” Jax’s voice was almost cheerful.
We entered the structure, already knowing the floor plan with precision. A wide hall, two thick doors on the left, one on the right. Edge’s hand slid across the nearest pane. “Steel core.” He smirked. “The kind of hinges you sell to scared men.”
Footsteps thundered above—someone obviously realizing dark meant danger. Nitro tossed a flash down the hall without breaking stride. The world popped white, but we were already past it, sweeping rooms with the efficiency of men who had practiced clearing spaces more than most.
Two more guards were at the end of the hall. Kane put a hole through one, and the second tried to run for stairs, but Edge tripped him with a slash across the Achilles that turned the sprint into a thud.
We moved toward the center where the panic room door was located. Inside a reinforced office with a built-in bookshelf that wasn’t a bookshelf. It slid aside to reveal a steel door and a keypad. A tiny LCD read: LOCKED.
“Jax,” I said, breath even. “Your turn.”
“Copy. Their system’s throwing a tantrum,” he grunted. “Killed the failover, and”—there was a flurry of clicking in my ear—“it’s trying to lock tighter. Cute. Okay, slight hiccup. Give me thirty seconds before it bricks the damn door shut forever.”
Edge was already unpacking the spreader and setting the shoe under the lip where the frame met wall. Nitro taped a flat directed charge over the main lock, and Kane’s eyes were on me. I nodded once.
“Twenty seconds,” Jax counted down. “Twelve. Seven. Okay—now.”
The keypad went dark. Edge pumped the lever, and the frame bent, hairline shifts that meant the seal would break any minute.
“Breaching,” Nitro announced happily and tapped the lead.
The charge bucked the lock, and it practically melted as smoke curled from it. Kane braced on the opposite side of the spreader and counted with his fingers—three… two… one.
We hauled like the fucking door had insulted our mothers. It tore with a sound so loud and hellish that I might have thought we were breaking the gates of hell.
At the three-inch mark, Edge killed the pump and slid in a steel wedge. Then he reset the spreader and pumped again, until the seal gave up, and the door split wide enough for a man to slide through.
“I’ll go,” Edge said, because he lived for this shit.
I nodded, and he went in low, rolling off his shoulder, gun up, breathing silent. Then his laughter floated back out—dark, delighted, almost manic. “Oh, sweetheart. You really thought this would save you?”
I followed, then Kane slid in next, while Nitro stayed to hold the hall.
The panic room was sparse, with a low couch, and a small desk with a hardwired phone that had been turned into a paperweight fifteen seconds ago. In the far corner stood Bellatrix Creed.
She was shorter than the video made her look, which happens when power becomes fear. Her eyes were wide, her mouth tight, and in her shaking hands was a compact handgun held the stupid way people did after they saw it on TV.
“Drop it,” Kane said, voice flat.
She didn’t. Instead, she smiled, like we were finally at a meeting she chose.
“You’re late,” she said, trying to hide the waver in her voice.
Edge toyed with his knife. “Traffic,” he replied, his tone bored.
Her gaze flicked across us, then settled on my cut.
I watched the realization happen in her eyes—the line from the speedway crash to the clubhouse to the woman in my bed.
She knew exactly where to point her weapon.
Not that it would make a difference in the outcome, but she was stupid enough to think she had the upper hand.
“Elias was an idiot to pick her as the courier. This one was reckless and ignorant. Not much value beyond spreading her legs, right? Maybe she should have used them to run faster.”
I didn’t decide to do it. It happened before I even thought about my next move. My arm was up, and the pop of the suppressor was the only noise in the room.
The bullet hit her just left of center, precisely at the notch where her heart would have been if she’d ever owned one. She blinked at me like she didn’t understand what had just happened. Then her body leaned forward, before falling to the carpet with a soft sound that barely registered.
“You don’t get to brand the woman I love as a disposable set of parts and keep breathing.”
Edge didn’t flinch, and Nitro’s chuckle floated in from the hall like a cold draft.
Kane looked at me like a man who understood that some choices were their own explanations. He tipped his chin toward the door. “They’ve got this. Let’s go home to our families.”
Family.
The first time I’d heard that word applied to my life it had felt like a joke.
Tonight it felt like a clear road under the full moon, the hum of an engine tuned right, the weight of a vest I hadn’t given yet because she’d made me promise I’d come back to put it on her myself.
It was freedom and a shackle I had no desire to take off at the same time.
“Finish it,” I told them as I holstered my gun. Then I turned and left it all behind.
Outside, the horizon had the first thin streaks of dawn painted across it. My bike waited patiently where I’d left her. I swung a leg over, fired up the engine, then rolled.
The trees blurred, the air pummeled, and the world narrowed to the hum of my ride and the knowledge that the woman I loved was waiting in our bed.
The next time her mouth said yes, it would be when I put my vest over her shoulders and told her what I hoped she already knew.
Then she’d be screaming it while I claimed every part of her, inside and out.
The road back to the clubhouse felt shorter than the one here because ahead of me, there was a life that looked nothing like the one I’d planned and everything like something a man would give his last breath protecting.