“Come on, Fang, stop trying to delay the inevitable, man,” I called out into the darkness.
I pressed myself against the hood of the car and started to creep slowly back around.
“Guys,” I called out to my men, “I think Sasha’s still in the car. Someone get her out, but be careful. I think she’s armed.”
“On it, boss,” someone called out behind me. I could hear footsteps on the car as someone climbed up to get her.
I crept around the front end of the car until I stood on the interstate side of the wreck again.
“I’m not delaying anything,” Fang said as I came around the car. We stood face to face for the first time since our little feud began.
He had been able to elude me for years, and we were finally standing right next to each other. I almost wanted to put my gun away and shake his hand. Someone as successful as Fang—and successful in as many different areas as he was—almost demanded respect. And I would have been willing to admit that he had earned it if he hadn’t been stealing business from us. At the same time, though, that was how competition worked. He stole some of our business, forcing us to do a better job in order to earn that business back or pick up new clients to replace the old ones.
At first, I wondered if Fang was even a real person or just the name of his gang. He had been that elusive. No one had seen him, even though everyone knew his name from his prostitutes and call girls. He was well known among the gambling rings as well, and a few of those guys had claimed to see him on a regular basis.
I wasn’t entirely sure how it happened, but it came to pass that a lot of his gambling associates had gone out of business over the years, robbing him of gambling business the way he had robbed us of weapons and security deals, but none of that could be traced back to us. A lot of those gambling rings were broken up by police. It seemed like anyone who admitted to knowing Fang had become a target.
As we turned up the heat on his clientele, he turned up the heat on us, stealing more of our business, and eventually resorting to stealing my product so he could cut into my drug money. I still wasn’t sure exactly how he expected to grow a sustainable drug business if all he was doing was stealing from me to sell what he’d stolen, unless he was working on getting to my supplier.
None of that would matter in a few moments. None of our history would matter any longer. None of the petty bullshit either of us had done to piss off the other would matter. This feud was about to be over, and once his body lay lifeless on the ground in front of me, I was going to send my guys out to infiltrate every aspect of Fang’s business.
Hell’s Overlords were going to take over everything Fang had put his hands in, from the gambling to the prostitution, and from the call girls to his weapons supplier. That was one thing I hadn’t mentioned to Sasha yet. As far as she knew, I was just pissed about the drugs. No, I wanted to take his ass over. I wanted to put Hell’s Overlords on top of every game in town.
Once we owned this city, I was going to leave Dante in charge while I went from chapter to chapter, helping them achieve the same status we had. By the end of it all, wherever we were, we were going to run it. And we were going to have people in place to shut down anyone who tried to move in on our business. We weren’t going to have any more Fangs operating as thorns in our side.
As I stared into his dark eyes surrounded by his dark features, I could see the future of Hell’s Overlords. I could see that with one bullet to his head, I was going to set the fate of my MC into motion.
He narrowed his eyes, and I started to think that maybe he was reading my mind. Suddenly, it felt like he could see my thoughts.
“Are you going to do it?” he asked. He raised his empty hands. He’d put his gun away. “Go ahead,” he encouraged me.
He pressed himself against my gun.
“Pull the trigger, Cole,” he growled.
I couldn’t. The gun was in my hand. My finger was on the trigger. I was just paralyzed. It wasn’t fear that had me unable to make my move. It was the magnitude of the situation. It was knowing that in one split second I could unceremoniously end this conflict.
“You can’t do it, can you?” he taunted me.
I just stared blankly at him. I really couldn’t. I tried to flex my finger, to squeeze the trigger, but nothing happened. He grabbed my hand and pressed my gun harder against himself. He smiled at me, his lips curling up in an unnatural grimace.
Then, it became about fear. Fang had obviously embraced his reputation for seeming very otherworldly to the people on the street. He had worked to make himself as creepy as possible so that he lived up to people’s expectations.