Drew wasn’t torturing Owen anymore. He was just crouched by the body; his bloody hands hanging between his legs while he braced his arms on his knees. I moved quietly, dropping the box by the door before I turned to study the man I loved who was watching his unlikely enemy struggling to pull in his last breath.
“It’s time,” was all Drew said, the killer waiting to drop his ax. “Did you find any guns of his?” he asked me, eerily calm and in control as he stared at Owen.
I thought about the question and shook my head.Suddenly finding it odd that I hadn’t. “Not one. Give me five seconds.”
I darted back through the house and made my way into Owen’s bedroom again. One thing I‘d learned when I’d been cleaning The Hut was that every single one of the men slept with a weapon within reaching distance. I pulled all the sheets and blankets from Owen’s bed and pushed the mattress from the box spring, stepping forward to flip it on its side.
There was nothing under the bed, but I felt the weakness under my feet and immediately knew where I would find the weaponry I hadn’t thought to look for.
Dropping to my knees, I clawed at the edges, pressing down in random places until one end popped up. As I’d thought, there were three guns, as well as a hunting knife, a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills, and another laptop.
I grabbed it all and headed back to the front of the house, handing Drew the .45 before dropping the rest of my haul into the boxes.
Drew made light work of rolling Owen over with his one free hand, placing him on his back with his face busted and twisted to the side. He could no longer open his eyes, and as soon as I saw the harsh reality of his chest, I knew what had been going on while I’d been busy. Owen was going to die, but Drew had made sure there wasn’t a patch of Hound-related ink on his skin when he went to his next life. He was cut up like a butchered animal—only Owen was still somehow managing to draw in his jagged breaths.
He didn’t even look like himself anymore.
Opening up Owen’s hand, Drew placed the gun into his palm and wrapped Owen’s fingers around it as tightly as they would go. Then he pressed it against his head, making surethat Owen’s fingers were in place, just where they needed to be before he leaned over his former brother and sighed heavily.
“You don’t deserve this, but I’m giving it to you anyway,” Drew whispered. “I never liked you, Sinclair, but that didn’t mean I didn’t love you. You were a brother, which meant you were family, and I would die for family. I would die for the patch on my chest. I would die for anyone who’d ever ridden by my side or behind me. But you… you betrayed us in a way that will go down in club history. You’ll be a lesson we’ll never forget. You’re a dirty mark on our memories, and you deserve to die in the cruelest of ways. I want to gut you, Owen. I want to spend hours tearing out your organs, ripping your spleen out, and stamping on your heart becauseIdecided when it would take its last beat.” Drew exhaled heavily again, the obvious betrayal weighing heavy on his already burdened, strong shoulders. “But I’ve already made an example of you. I feel at peace knowing you won’t see another day. Now, it’s up to you how you go out. Your final choice. You have two minutes to pull the trigger and end your own life. Once those two minutes are up, if you’re still breathing, I take you out the way the rest of the men would want me to take you out.”
Owen’s breathing was a rasping sound, and he was struggling to drag in every breath he took, but the bastard smiled, revealing a chipped front tooth and missing bottom teeth. The hand of his holding the gun twitched, as though he was doing his best to find the strength to lift it and take Drew out with him, but he had nothing left, just a trembling of his finger.
“They’ll... kill... you,” Owen choked, blood spilling from the twisted corner of his mouth. “Dead.”
“They’ll try,” Drew answered smoothly.
Owen’s eyes found mine, his nostrils expanding to drag in air. “You became... what you... hated.”
I felt my lips twitch, not in humor, but cynicism. The one man in the club who hadn’t tried to get to know me… and he really didn’t know me at all.
“You don’t know the first thing about what I love and hate.”
“One minute,” Drew whispered, not biting at Owen’s remark. “Make it count, Sinclair.”
Owen dragged his eyes from me, the slow roll indicating he wasn’t as in control as he’d like to think he was. His life was literally draining away from him, seeping into the fancy floors he’d spent shining and perfecting in the home he’d built from lies and betrayal. He didn’t look human lying there, half of him an open wound, half of him too bust up to recognize.
When he managed to look at Drew through two swollen cracks, his body sagged, his chest deflating as all the air left him in a rush.
“Fuck you, Tucker.”
“Maybe in the afterlife, brother.”
Owen took a breath as though he was going to speak, but the only sound was the booming shot of the gun as it emptied the bullet into his head. There was a tinkle of the bullet hitting the floor, the whisper of his body releasing the last of its tension then… silence.
Eerie, impenetrable silence.
The silence was so stark it felt as though the world had just frozen over.
Neither of us drew in a breath for a moment.
I counted one heartbeat, two, then three, and we seemedto inhale at the same time.
I felt… nothing.
I looked at Drew. The flecks of crimson had multiplied with him being so close to Owen’s body.
Still, neither of us said a word. But we couldn’t stay here forever.