Page 88 of Colt
I caught it. A crack, just for a second. “Your wife is dead, son. Been dead seven years.”
“No,” I said. “She isn’t.”
The silence that followed was different from the one before it. The VP’s eyes cut to the old man. Doc French went very still.
“That’s not possible.” The fucker’s voice had lost a note of its certainty.
“I checked her.” Doc French’s voice came out thin. “She wasn’t—there was no pulse—”
I turned to Doc French. “You did her ultrasound. You knew she was eight weeks pregnant when you declared her dead, and then fucking lied to me about it.”
The color drained out of his face.
Nobody spoke.
“She survived.” I watched the bastard’s face. “Graham was your cleanup crew. You sent him to dispose of the bodies and he found her still breathing, so he took her somewhere safe instead.” I let that land. “Remember Graham? Prospect? Turns out he had more conscience than every officer in this club put together. She spent a month in a coma. Woke up with no memory of any of it. Not the club, not the beating, not me.” I let that sit. “I know everything.”
The old man recovered faster than the others. His jaw tightened, and the cold came back into his eyes. “Doesn’t change anything. She was collateral damage. I had an episode. I was drugged by the motherfucking Tigers. The brothers cleaned it up. Protected me. Protected the club.”
“You’ve been at war with the Tigers for years.” I watched the old man’s face. “Thought they poisoned you. Had evidence—traces of the compound, communications, a Tiger inside man who couldn’t account for himself. You weren’t wrong that there was a Tiger inside your club.” I glanced at Scar. “You were wrong about what he was used for.”
I let that land.
“Scar found him first. Before you did. Used him—his access, his channels, his contacts—to source the drug and make sure the trail led back to the Tigers. Every piece of evidence that pointed at them? Scar put it there.” I kept my voice even. “You’ve spent seven years killing the wrong men. Men who’ve been telling you they didn’t do it. Men who never touched you—who were telling you the truth every single time. Men dead on both sides of a war that Scar manufactured to cover his own ass.”
The old man went very still.
“The plan was for you to overdose quietly. Scar steps up as president. Clean transition.” I watched his face. “Except you didn’t overdose. You went on a rampage instead. Two prospects. A club girl. Three men who’d just come in off the road for a drink. And my wife.” I paused. “After that, they couldn’t come clean without the police figuring out the rest. So they covered up the rampage to cover up the plot, and kept you pointed at the Tigers so you’d never look closer to home. Seven years of your men dying in a war Scar started.”
The old man’s eyes moved to Scar. Slow. Deliberate.
What happened next was fast—faster than I would have expected from a man his age. He came across the table with his hands going for Scar’s throat. Scar caught his wrists and drove him back hard, and for three seconds it was chaos—the secretary scrambling for his piece, Holden moving, the table scattering papers and cash—
I shot the secretary in the shoulder before his hand reached his gun. The sound snapped the room still.
“Everyone sits.” My voice came out flat. “This ends my way.”
The old man was breathing hard, Scar’s hands still on his wrists. Scar released him and stepped back, eyes on my gun, expression giving nothing away.
Slowly, the old man straightened. “Well.” His voice came out quiet. “How about that.” He looked back at me. The arrogance had gone out of his face. Not replaced by fear or regret. Just bleak recognition.
“We did what we had to do.” The old man straightened, the arrogance settling back in. “Couldn’t let word get out about what happened, whatever caused it. So we made it go away. The bodies, the witnesses, the evidence—all of it.”
“Including Lilac.”
“She should have died with the others.” Doc French finally spoke, his voice thin and reedy. “I checked her myself. She wasn’t breathing. The prospect was supposed to dispose of her with the rest.”
“But he didn’t.” I took a step closer. “He saved her. And she survived. And now you’re all going to answer for what you did.”
The old man laughed again. “Answer to who? You? You’re one man with a grudge and a couple of—”
I shot him in the shoulder. The laughter cut off in a scream.
“I’m the man whose wife you nearly murdered. Whose sons grew up without a father because of your lies. Who spent seven years believing the woman he loved had betrayed him.” I stood over him, watching the blood spread across his shirt. “You took everything from me. And now I’m going to take everything from you.”
What followed wasn’t pretty.
Scar and Doc French had tried to murder their own president. Instead they’d triggered a bloodbath and spent seven years covering up the rampage and the plot that caused it. The old man had accepted their protection, asked no hard questions, and gone along with burying eight bodies and one marriage to keep his club out of a courtroom. Coin, the club secretary, had kept the books clean and his mouth shut. They’d all made their choices. They’d had seven years to make different ones.
