Axle's Brand (Death Chasers MC 3)

“Betrayal is cut and dried to you. Never mind what you do to all the people you step on to sit on your throne,” he growls.

The pain in my scalp is borderline excruciating, and I struggle harder to free his hand from its death grip.

“I didn’t step on anyone! Everyone knows what they sign on for!”

He snorts. “Unless their father is my father. Then you get a doormat for the queen and act like you’re happy to do all the hard work, while she takes all the glory.” He pauses and stops walking. “What the hell is that sound? Is that a golf cart?”

“No glory for the anonymous, you stupid son-of-a—”

A loud shot silences my words, and the hand on my hair slowly releases its grip. Troy drops to the ground beside me, or at least I think so. Everything is still so blurry.

I heave, retching as the nausea and dizziness finally win, and someone gingerly pulls my hair away from my face, running a soothing hand up and down my back.

“Easy,” Sarah says, causing my entire body to relax when I hear her voice. “Couldn’t have been easy to make it this far. Just take a few deep breaths. I’ve got us a battery-powered, quiet golf cart less than fifty feet away.”

I snort, sob, and laugh all at once, creating a terrible sound, but relief continues to pour through me.

“I’ve already picked off all the ones who were still following you. Come on,” she says when I stop shaking and the retching ends.

“If I could walk, I wouldn’t have been flopping around on the ground as he dragged me around by my hair,” I mumble as she helps me to my feet, grunting under my weight as I struggle to keep my legs from becoming jelly.

“On second thought,” she grumbles, putting me back down gently. “I’ll drive the cart to you.”

Again, I make that weird combination of sounds, every emotion determined to come out at once as she kneels in front of me, pushing my hair out of my face again.

“Stay here,” she jokes, then winks as she darts off into the night.

I glance over at the still body of a boy I used to play video games with. The boy was my brother. The man was far less impressive.

Smitty will be devastated.

“At least tell me I shot him somewhere good,” I say as Sarah pulls up beside me, the golf cart parked directly in front of me.

I see the blur of her rustling around, pushing his body from side to side, and I ignore the sick feeling in my gut as I look away from a man I once called a friend.

“Looks like you got him in the ass.”

I groan, cursing the fact the first time I finally shot someone, it was in the ass. Bad girl problems.

“You okay?” she asks as she helps me into the seat.

“As long as I pretend this is all one really twisted punchline for an ongoing joke, I won’t fall apart. It’s a coping mechanism. So start making really morbid jokes while my tears dry, because no one can see me broken.”

My voice cracks on that last line, and she blows out a heavy breath. She knows the score better than anyone. Weak girls in our business get dead real quick. The weaker you look, the more people think they can kill you.

CHAPTER 40

AXLE

The second we figured out Maya had made a run for it—made obvious by the amount of people scouring the land and shouting that they hadn’t found her—we started blowing shit to hell.

Now Lathan is on his knees before me, blood smeared all over his face from the multitude of dead bodies piled up around him.

His jaw stays tight, but his lip trembles as I kneel in front of him, cocking my head to the side.

“You’re going to start a war if you kill me,” he snarls. “Phillip Jenkins will come after you. He will destroy you and your little fucking club.”

I gesture around at his employees who are still being dragged in—all of them dead, or mostly dead, as they get dropped to random places. Couch. Chair. Dining room chairs.

“It’ll be suspicious but not tied to us,” Sledge whispers to me, his back facing Lathan.

I look up from my crouched position.

“Did you hear that?” I ask Lathan. “We can’t cover up all these bullet holes. We’d be here for weeks with rotting corpses,” I go on. “But junkies die all the time from meth labs exploding. Now, anyone wise enough would notice the bullet holes if any body parts survive such an explosion. But let’s face it, no one would immediately consider us. Certainly not Phillip.”

He narrows his eyes, knowing how right I am.

“Besides, you Family people think we’re just brute strength and rough finesse,” I say with a dark smile, parroting Maya’s words from so long ago. “Why would we bother blowing the place up to cover our trail?”