“They’re never in the same place at the same time. Surprisingly, I saw Darren last night, and he was never alone. No sign of Elijah, though,” Abel explained.
Jett jumped to his feet. “I say we take out as many as we can at once. No sense in just sitting here when we know where a lot of them are hiding out.”
“Sit your jumpy ass down and shut up,” Hawk howled at Jett.
Doing as he was told, Jett slumped back into his seat.
“Do what you want with the underling soldiers. I don’t give a shit about those bastards, but get me Darren and take him to the woods,” I instructed Abel and Rave. “I’ll meet you there with a surprise for our guest of honor. Jett, Reese, you’re with me. The rest of you, we’re in lockdown. Dad, I need you to go get Piper and Emerson. Bring them here. I don’t want them to be alone right now.”
“You got it, son.” My old man stood. “You heard the man. Let’s get to it.”
Chapter 5
Maccon
It didn’t take long for us to make it out to the cabin we had tucked away deep in the Arkansas woods. The crickets were chirping under a cloudless, star-cloaked sky as we parked our motorcycles around back.
“What’s the plan, brother?” Reese asked, following me around to the side of the house.
I popped open the shed door. “Fight fire with fire.” Grabbing the fine-tipped soldering iron off of the shelf, I grinned at my number two. “It’s poetic, isn’t it?” I chuckled before grabbing a few boxes of ammunition for his revolver. “Can’t be too careful.”
“You always were the brains of the operation,” he remarked before we headed back up to the front porch of the cabin. “Now we wait.”
After we went through a pack of smokes and a fifth of Jack Daniels, Abel and Ravage finally joined us. Pulling up in a blacked-out van, they hopped out quickly.
“We have a present for you,” Abel hollered up to us with a sinister simper crawling over his lips.
“About damn time. I was beginning to think y’all weren’t going to pull this off.” I made my way down the steps to join them.
“We’d never let you down, brother,” Rave stated as he opened the back doors. The hogtied man inside screamed through his gag at the top of his lungs.
“Shut up.” I spit in his face as Reese and Jett pulled him out of the back.
“Basement?” Reese looked up at me.
“Yep.” I felt like a damn kid on Christmas. It was the weirdest feeling in the world. The excitement of the torture I was about to inflict on the man responsible for Allie’s death was so intense.
We dragged him into the dimly lit, plastic-covered basement and tied him to a rickety wooden chair in the middle of the room.
“Take his shoes off,” I demanded, plugging my tool into an orange extension cord.
I let the soldering iron heat up to its maximum nine hundred degrees and began with the bottom of his right foot. Abel and Jett held his leg steady while Reese held his shoulders down.
Darren tried to thrash as wails of pain leapt from his chest.
“This is nothing compared to what you did to my wife,” I screamed, setting the instrument down for a second. “Other foot,” I barked.
Abel and Jett shifted, pulling his leg up. Darren tried to knee Abel in the face, barely missing him.
“Not today, fuckface,” Abel growled, pulling his Glock 26 from its ankle holster. Firing off one round into Darren’s knee, Abel shot me a quick wink.
“You picked the wrong motherfuckers to mess with,” Rave bellowed from behind me as he watched the show while chain-smoking.
Once both of the bottoms of Darren’s feet were medium rare, I cut open his shirt. Darren’s head nodded from side to side, barely able to stay awake through the pain.
“Wakey, wakey,” I snickered as I splashed water in his face.
His eyes shot open as he screamed out. “Please,” he muttered over and over. “Please don’t.”