Unluckily for me that night, I wasn’t the superstitious sort. So I followed the sounds deeper into the woods, sure some personal natural disaster had befallen one of my fellow woods-dwellers.
I’d just broken into the clearing where a fire pit was still flickering pathetically when I heard the gunshot.
Again, my mind went to bear.
Or some other predator.
I guess, in a way, I was right.
Only, these weren’t the four-legged predators I’d been expecting. Oh, no.
These were the two-legged human sort.
And they’d just put a bullet in the head of an unarmed man on his knees near the fire.
No, not even a full-grown man. The guy couldn’t have been any older than myself.
And his life was just… snuffed out. Just like that.
I hadn’t brought a gun with me when I’d left home, despite my parents all but insisting on it. But gun laws were complicated, varying from state to state. If I got myself pulled over or something, it could be ugly for me to have an unregistered gun.
So I had a couple different knives and bear spray and that was about it.
Against a group of half a dozen guys, all fully armed.
They saw me before I could slink back off and try to pretend I didn’t see shit.
“Oh, what do we have here?”
That was the same voice that greeted me when I pulled into the alley.
The leader of this little outlaw gang.
He was tall and the kind of broad that came both from genetics and a lot of hours lifting and putting down heavy shit. His pale skin was a little splotchy across his cheeks, and his light blue eyes almost seemed silver under the moonlight.
Curtis Carver.
The most vile, sadistic mother fucker I’d ever met in my life. Which was saying something.
That night, at gunpoint, I’d been forced to dig a grave and bury a body while they told me how I could never go to the cops because it was only my DNA all over the body now.
And, quite frankly, I’d been young and scared enough that I’d believed them, gone with it.
It wasn’t long until Curtis was demanding other shit from me. Until I was doing jobs for shit pay simply because he had so much dirt on me that I didn’t even have a choice.
It wasn’t until he came to me with the ultimate demand that I finally grew the balls it took to leave.
Because I didn’t give a fuck how much shit he had on me. I wasn’t taking someone’s life who hadn’t fucked me over first.
So while I outwardly agreed, I went ahead and secured some drugs to slip into their drinks the night it was supposed to happen. Then while they were tripping balls or passing out, I was flying the fuck out of town as fast and as far as I could go.
They hadn’t known my full name back then.
I’d been smart enough to make sure they couldn’t ever see my license or shit like that.
But, I guess, at the end of the day, the name Valen wasn’t all that common. And once I settled down some roots back in Navesink Bank, it likely didn’t take that much work for them to put the pieces together, then decided to come and confront me for, in their eyes, fucking them over. For thinking I could pull one over on them.
Curtis was a threat.
I’d be naive to say anything else.
Even if the Henchmen were a relatively big, strong organization, there was a chance that Curtis’s crazy could genuinely fuck with the club.
Because unlike the Henchmen, Curtis didn’t have a code. Or a conscience.
He would happily rape, torture, and murder every single woman and child attached to our organization to get whatever he wanted.
In my mind, by agreeing to do the job with him, I was keeping him away from the club. At least temporarily. Even if I knew that, eventually, he was going to be demanding more and more from me.
At some point, he’d be telling me to take from the club. The guns. The money. Whatever he wanted that he thought he could use to keep building his ragtag empire of degenerates like himself.
I was going to need to deal with him eventually. It was the only way he was going to go away. If I snuffed him out like he snuffed out that kid in the woods all those years ago.
But at least I was buying myself a little time by agreeing to the job.
I’d already been working on figuring out where he and his crew were staying, what their habits were, how I could try to take them out myself. Or, if I had to, bring Voss in on it. Without needing to put the club or their families any more at risk.
That was where I’d been on all those long trips away from the clubhouse, shirking my responsibilities and making Voss and likely Louana pick up my slack.
Gathering intel.
Trying to come up with a plan.
It was just that the job was happening before I could set anything in motion.
Curtis was looking a little rough. The years had matured me, but aged him. Which wasn’t surprising, given that he’d been a good ten or twelve years older than me at the time. He was still big, still strong, things he could control with the gym. But his face was getting lined and redder than before. His blond hair was taking on a lot of white.
And, from the looks of things, someone had tried to stab the fucker in the eye, but missed and gave him a nasty-ass scar right beside it instead.
He probably lived just long enough to regret trying to make a move, to feel more pain than any human being should be forced to endure.
I bet he’d welcomed death.
That was why I had to do this, to play this close to my vest. Because I couldn’t let that kind of shit happen to any of the guys or their families.
This was my mess.
I had to be the one to clean it up.
“You’re late,” Curtis snapped as soon as he saw me.
“I’m exactly on time,” I shot back, not willing to go meek, to cower like I once did before him. When I’d been a kid, as green and weak as could be without having my family and the club to fall back on for strength.
“Watch that fucking attitude, kid,” he growled before spitting on the ground at his side, narrowly missing the shoe of one of his men. “You forget who you’re talking to?”
I didn’t forget.
I’d seen the bodies.
I’d buried the bodies.
All of them marked with the tip of his blade, dying with terror in their open eyes.
I knew exactly who I was talking to.
A bully I was now old enough and strong enough seasoned enough to take on.
Life had come swinging with both fists at me on the road after getting away from Curtis and his bloody reign. It had forced me to grow up and trust my instincts, to learn to fight, even if it meant to the death.
Then I’d joined up with Voss, someone who taught me even more about how strong you needed to be existing alone in the criminal underbelly.
If there was ever a time that I felt confident that I could take Curtis on, it was now.
I just had to find the right time.
Because, lord knew, I was never going to catch him with his guard down again, with uncovered drinks and averted eyes.
“I know exactly who I’m talking to,” I shot back, giving him the kind of eye contact that no one else would, because they knew he would see it as a threat.
That was okay.
He could see me as one.
I was a threat.
He just had no idea how much of one.
He didn’t know about the hotel room I had been renting. The one with a roof that overlooked his current little hangout spot. The one that I’d been funneling guns and rounds of ammunition into for days. The one with the list of members of his crew that I’d need to take out along with him, since faces had change a lot over the years.