Music drifts out of the house, but it is the only noise in an otherwise quiet night. Rasputin puts a booted foot against the railing, his fat beer belly pushing through his Iron Fury cut as he stares into the darkness and enjoys his cigar. They are Crowned Heads, ripped off from a warehouse heist two weeks ago. Oh yeah, I know what he’s had been up to. I know everything about him. More than I fucking care to.
Rasputin isn’t an educated man. Grew up poor. Had his first kid before he could legally drive. Joined a motorcycle gang because it was either that or work the mines or die in prison because he had a rap sheet a mile long. We could be brothers. Except, we are fucking worlds apart.
I think about Cooper, about what my brother would be doing now if the piece of shit enjoying his cigar hadn’t ordered the hit on me. The familiar sickly rage takes up inside me, the heat of it polluting my veins and staining my vision. My hands fist at my sides. Enjoy that cigar, motherfucker, because it’s the last one you’re ever going to have.
I’m going to make him pay for what he did.
I’ve saved the two men I hold most responsible for Cooper’s murder for last.
Rasputin and Ghost.
The latter has proven elusive. Blinded by my grief, I’d gone after him first because he was the trigger man, but he’d disappeared like an apparition, just like his namesake.
So I’d gone after every single one of the motherfuckers in the small club of bootleggers who called themselves the Iron Fury, and I had broken the club apart, piece by piece, man by man. Some are in jail. Some are dead. And after tonight, all but one will remain free.
I am a bad man.
Fueled by hate and darkness.
Driven by tragedy.
But if I’m honest, it isn’t just about Cooper’s death anymore. My lust for revenge has grown into a living, breathing thing. A creature of its own. It’s who I am, and it is my reason for living.
The man who’d held his dying brother in his arms is gone. The man who’d lived inside a bottle of whiskey and let his marriage die a slow, painful death, is gone. In his place is an entity of merciless vengeance and fury made from blood and bone. With little care or thought for what I am doing, I eat, I drink, I fuck, and I exist.
But I live and breathe retaliation.
It’s what keeps me alive.
That and the ferocious determination to keep my other children safe from the scum who’d preyed on our family.
By day, I am the president of the Kings of Mayhem, Tennessee Chapter. By night, I hunt my prey alone, moving in and out of the shadows with ease, stalking, waiting, watching for the right moment, then pouncing at precisely the right second.
Tonight, is one of those moments.
It is time for retribution.
My target is alone on the porch while two of his friends party in the old weather-beaten house behind him. They won’t hear what is about to happen. They won’t know anything about it until someone wonders where he is and comes looking for him.
By then, it’ll be too late.
I reach for the sheathed blade tucked into the back of my jeans.
It’s time.
I start to move toward the house but just as I’m about to leave the shadows, a pair of headlights cut into the darkness, and a car pulls up in front of the house. Sheathed in darkness, I watch as two men climb out while a third drags a girl from the back seat. I can hear her whimpers over the gag in her mouth and the amusement of the men who hold her captive. They laugh at her, their cold, callous chuckles floating across the darkness and igniting a match to the dry kindling already smoldering inside of me.
My eyes shift to Rasputin. He takes a final suck on his cigar before discarding it in the dead flowerbed in front of the house. He moves like a man made of size, thick heavy steps clomping across the porch. He chuckles when he sees the girl, and it’s a deep, throaty sound born from years of heavy smoking. When he reaches her, he grabs her by the chin and yanks her face toward him. She whimpers again, and in the dim light I can see the fear in her eyes.
“Pretty,” he growls, followed by a nefarious groan. “Take her to my room. I’ll have her first.”
Fuck.
The men do as he commands and disappear inside the house with the girl. But before he moves to follow them, Rasputin pauses and looks around him in the dark as if he can sense me, and every cell in my body wills him to walk toward the shadows where I’m waiting for him. My hand grips the steel handle of my knife with anticipation, itching to run the blade across his throat and to smell the metallic tang of his blood as it runs from his body. But after a moment of checking his gut instinct, he turns back toward the house and vanishes inside.