1
King
Some say the art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. I didn’t buy that shit for a second. I’ve always said show the fuck up with the biggest army you can amass and crush the motherfuckers with brute fucking force.
I was here to crush Tony Romano’s empire with the kind of force that would tell the world never to fuck with Storm again.
We’d arrived in Melbourne just after 8:00 p.m. and had staked out both his home and his business headquarters for the past two hours. Biding our time. Something I wasn’t good at, but Axe had convinced me this was the best course of action to ensure we were running on good information that left little room for surprises when we did attack. I’d left a skeleton crew back in Sydney and brought just over forty men with me. Zane and Griff were in charge of surveillance, pulling intel on how many men we were dealing with inside. Last week, they’d found the floor plans for each building and had mapped out different scenarios for how to infiltrate and attack. The thing I wanted to make sure of before we went in, guns fucking blazing, was that there were no women or children who’d be caught in the crossfire. The intel so far led us to believe there weren’t, but Zane was making sure that information was accurate.
Hyde approached me as I watched the entrance to Romano’s headquarters. A van had just arrived and five more men were about to enter the building. “You sure you don’t wanna just burn the joint down and be done with it, brother?”
I turned to him. We’d been going back and forth over this question for about an hour, and disagreed on it. As far as we knew, there were about thirty guys in the building. Hyde held concerns that was too many for us to deal with. “I want to look these motherfuckers in the eye and see them bleed. And I want to make sure every last fucking one of them dies. There will be no survivors here today.”
“Okay, we do this your way, but if shit gets out of hand, I’m torching the place and getting us the fuck out of there.”
I clenched my jaw, pissed that he kept arguing over this. “No.” No fucking way was I not getting my hands dirty with these cunts. If they wanted to come at me the way they had, they would feel the full extent of my wrath.
He returned my scowl. “King, you’re running on emotion, and we both know that’s a dangerous headspace to be in with this kind of shit. I don’t wanna see our club wiped out because you couldn’t fucking think straight.”
“I fucking said no, so drop it. And if you can’t, you can stay the fuck out of this entire operation,” I barked before turning back to continue watching the building.
“Fuck,” he fired back before stalking away from me, muttering some other shit under his breath I couldn’t work out, nor had any fucking interest in trying to.
As he left, Zane made his way to me. “Best we can figure, there won’t be any collateral damage if we go in now.”
“You’re sure?”
He gave a quick nod. “Yes.”
I glanced at Axe who’d also joined us. “You agree we’re good to go?” My brother was the only person whose opinion I ever gave this much weight to. He’d proven his skill in this kind of situation a long time ago, and while it sometimes killed me to take his suggestions on board, I almost always did.
“I do. There may not be a better time than right now. Most of the guys inside are concentrated in the back corner of the building. That neutralises a lot of the risk associated with this. And there’s no one at Romano’s home, so it’s good timing there, too.”
I texted Nitro who was at Romano’s home and told him to proceed. I then spoke into my handheld radio that connected me to Kick and Devil who were at various points around this building. “Go!”
We moved fast and silently towards the perimeter, entering the building as Zane and Griff had planned. That was after Axe and I slit the throats of the two guys guarding this side of the building. Griff had shut down the video surveillance, allowing us to enter with ease. That I finally had some of Romano’s men’s blood on my hands lit my fucking mind up.
I needed more.
I fucking hungered for it.