Then again, letting him live in any capacity would have been worse for us as well.
“Do you have anything else you would like to say, Fang?” I asked him.
“Fuck you,” he spat at me. “I’ll see you in hell, Cole.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “On behalf of everyone present and the MC as a whole, I’d like to tell you we’ll be waiting for you when you get there.”
I squeezed the trigger and shot him right there in the grass on the side of the interstate, just as the sun began to rise above the horizon. The new day had begun, not just for us standing on the side of the highway, but for the MC as well.
Fang was gone. It should have felt better to watch his body fall over, limp and lifeless, at my feet, but I was tired, and pulling the trigger like that, so purposefully, seemed to take a little extra energy out of me unexpectedly.
Sasha put her thin hand on my shoulder. I looked at her, standing there with a gun at her side like some vigilante, and I wanted to kiss her. I also wanted to tell her to get the hell on for causing so much trouble. But I figured she’d made a pretty big sacrifice in defending me against her boss. It was obvious that she had some pretty intense feelings for him, so to watch her choose me over him felt pretty damn special.
“Come on, we need to go,” she said, pulling me with her.
“Has Dante already called the cleaner?” I asked.
“He has. You guys were taking so damn long, we thought we were going to have to leave you both here to deal with him yourselves,” she teased.
“Hey, let’s grab some of these weapons real quick,” I told her.
“Yeah, let’s do it.” She waved Dante out of the SUV that Fang’s backup had arrived in, and he quickly climbed out.
“Guys, we probably only have a few minutes before he’s here, so let’s be quick,” he said.
“That’s why all three of us are doing it,” I told him.
We grabbed only what we could carry in one trip. I made sure to get both of the fully automatic guns Fang’s men had brought with them. We hurried back into the SUV just as a couple of cars rode past. I was sure the car on its side with the bodies lying all around it was going to attract some attention.
“Well, there’s some good news,” Dante said as he pulled onto the road.
“What’s that?” I asked him wearily.
“At least we’re in Fang’s SUV, so if anyone sees us and the plates bring anything up in the system, they’ll go back to him,” he joked.
I laughed and sighed at the same time, sinking down into the backseat.
“That’s pretty optimistic of you, brother. Thanks.” I closed my eyes and listened to the car itself on the ride back to headquarters.
No one said anything for the whole ride back. We were all too tired, too stunned, and possibly even too traumatized to say anything. We all needed to process what had just happened the night before. We were leaving a pretty gruesome scene on the side of the road. We lost a lot of men over the course of the whole day. It was the end of a chapter for Hell’s Overlords.
It was the kind of thing that made some MC presidents step down. I’d seen it happen in other clubs, where a major event like that just carried too much weight for the president to handle, and he was almost forced to step down to get away from the stress.
I wasn’t planning on going anywhere. Having Fang out of the way meant we could really unleash our potential. I wanted to tell Dante we needed to start investigating Fang’s weapons connection so we could get the weapons business back, but I knew the ride back wasn’t the time for that. I wanted to thank Sasha for saving my ass back there, but it wouldn’t have been appropriate. She was probably processing the loss of her mentor.
As we rode into the sunrise, I knew a new day was dawning for Hell’s Overlords. I had an old lady at my side. I was excited for the first time in years to go in and announce a meeting, when the time was right of course. Our number one rival was out of the way, and there was no one in his organization ready to take his place. That had been so short-sighted of him. A good leader always had someone ready to step into their place.
My replacement was driving the car. If anything ever happened to me, I knew he’d have my back with the MC. Dante would slide right into the leadership role without a problem.
“We need to ditch this thing after we get back,” I blurted out as soon as I had the thought. I felt the silence in the car shatter as I spoke. No one else was probably thinking about work. Dante was probably thinking about beer and a hot shower, maybe finding a girl later today. Sasha was probably thinking about the image of her boss’s body falling over at my feet. She was probably running through her decisions all over again, everything that led us to this moment together.