Mason

 

“I’m going to end you, Mason,” Skull growled, renewing his grip on his gun and on the rifle at my throat.

 

“Yeah, okay,” I said, yawning. “You better get on that. I’m willing to bet Mick has already called the cleaner, and what you want to do isn’t going to matter once he shows up. If we’re all still here then, we’re all dead, but you know how that goes,” I told him. Really, I was just hoping Mick had the foresight to go head and get the cleaner on his way out before law enforcement showed up.

 

Then, I caught a glimpse of Clara standing over Skull’s shoulder. She held one of our assault rifles in her hands, and she was creeping up on Skull. It was good to see her up on her feet and okay. She had cuts and dirt on her face and arms, and there was blood on her that probably came from the other guy in the car.

 

Something else looked different about her, though. The cuts weren’t all. It wasn’t that the beautiful, thin blonde with blue eyes who usually kept herself immaculate was actually dirty for once. No, there was something in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. Something had changed inside her.

 

For one, she was holding a gun, and she wasn’t holding it daintily either. She gripped it like she meant business with it. She was on the offensive now with that gun. She wasn’t waiting for trouble to come her way this time. This time, she was bringing trouble to someone else, and judging by the way she kept eyeing Skull, it looked like she was bringing it to him, though it could have been argued very easily that he’d brought all of his troubles upon himself. And they were about to get a lot worse.

 

Clara attacking Skull was like Mick attacking me. It represented a huge change in dynamics. That was a total shift for her. I knew what it meant, though. I knew it meant she’d finally made her decision. She had finally made her choice between the two of us, and I was glad to see it. And not just because I knew it was me.

 

I watched her while Skull kept spewing his drivel about how he was going to kill me and demolish the Storm’s Angels. I wasn’t nervous anymore about it, though, because I knew if he were going to shoot me, he would have done it when he pulled out the gun. He couldn’t do it, because he knew he would be shot immediately afterwards, putting an end to all of it for him.

 

While he talked, distracting himself from what was really going on in front of him, I moved my hands into position so once Clara fired her gun, I’d be able to knock Skull’s handgun away and get myself out of harm’s way so I could finally end this.

 

It was almost daylight. This little game had gone on long enough, but I felt satisfied now that I would be able to have closure by putting one through his brain. If I had allowed it to happen too quickly, it wouldn’t have been satisfying at all.

 

With my hands in place, I nodded ever so slightly to Clara.

 

“What? What are you looking at?” Skull snapped.

 

He turned his face, and I shoved the gun out of my face at the same time she pulled the trigger. I felt the bullet shred Skull’s leg next to mine. It was like getting to feel a gunshot without the pain, and it was the most disgusting thing I’d ever felt in my life. I felt every single detail of the bullet’s entry.

 

He cried out and fired his handgun wildly to the side before I caught him in the jaw with the butt of my rifle, sending him sprawling out on the ground. He dropped his 9mm and grabbed his wounded leg. I stood up over him and put the barrel of my rifle against his head.

 

“Do it,” he said. “Pull the trigger. You’ve earned it, Mason Crawley. You and your old lady have defeated me fair and square.”

 

I stood with the gun pressed right against his forehead, watching him grip his wounded leg and hold back the cries of agony. For a brief moment, for just a split second, I considered letting him live and keeping him as a permanent prisoner of the MC, until the day came when we grew tired of keeping him around. I figured letting him live like that could have been far worse than letting him off the hook by putting him down.

 

Then again, letting him live in any capacity would have been worse for us.

 

“Do you have anything else you would like to say, Skull?” I asked him.

 

“Fuck you,” he spat at me. “I’ll see you in hell, Mason.”

 

“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.

 

Skull 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.

 

Clara 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 fuck off for causing so much trouble. But I figured she’d made a pretty big sacrifice in defending me against her boss. It was obvious she had some 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 Mick 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 Mick out of the SUV that Skull’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 Skull’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,” Mick said as he pulled onto the road.

 

“What’s that?” I asked him wearily.

 

“At least we’re in Skull’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 Storm’s Angels.

 

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 Skull out of the way meant we could really unleash our potential. I wanted to tell Mick we needed to start investigating Skull’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 Clara 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 Storm’s Angels. 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. Mick 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. Mick was probably thinking about beer and a hot shower, maybe finding a girl later today. Clara 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.

 

“I don’t know. It’s pretty nice,” Mick said. “I wouldn’t mind having one.”

 

“Well, then let’s send it over to Cortez and let him make sure it can’t be identified,” I told him. “But we can’t keep it hanging around the way it is.”

 

“Definitely. I already texted him,” Mick said.

 

“Has he said anything back?”

 

“Man, you know he just went to bed probably an hour ago.” He laughed.

 

“Yeah, probably, but we need to handle it as soon as we can,” I urged.

 

“Hey, boss.” Mick looked at me in the rearview. “Relax, man. We just went through a lot of shit yesterday, and we all need to chill out right now. That includes you,” he said. “So relax.”

 

I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to shut work off. I was always working. If I weren’t at HQ or any of our chapters, I was on the phone or texting someone about work. If I weren’t doing that, I was running through plans and actions in my head. Yes, we’d been through a lot. Yes, we had a lot to handle over the next week or two from fallout, but we had to be prepared to deal with all of the changes that were about to occur.

 

As the president of Storm’s Angels, it was my duty to make sure we were prepared, so I let them have their peaceful silence. I looked out the window at the beautiful trees passing us by on the sides of the road. In my head, I was preparing checklists of what we needed to do to move forward.

 

At the top of my list was taking Clara to her apartment tonight so we could start sorting her things out for the move. I was going to ask her to move in with me later, once we had some time alone, and I was pretty sure she was going to say yes.