Page 1 of Crush's Fall

CHAPTER ONE

Crush

Tiger shifter Meredith ‘Crush’ Welles wasn’t the president of the Tiger’s Claw MC, a female motorcycle club out of Warden’s Pass, Michigan, because she was sweet and caring. Okay, she was, but she just didn’t let many people know that. She hid that behind a wall of steel-covered brick. The fact of the matter was she cared too much about people, but she also thought people lacked fucking common sense and decision-making skills. On the other hand, she was pretty sure that her friend, Axle Weber, would say the same about her. As the president of the Howlers MC, the male motorcycle club the Claws were allied with, he often had to keep her from throat-chopping stupid people. Not only were they allies, but their clubs also shared businesses and spent most of their time together. They were a family.

Growing up as an independent woman in a culture of alpha males, Crush had to learn how to hold her own. She could admit that she took that to the extreme more often than not, but only when it felt necessary. If she didn’t remind them often that she could stand on her own two feet, the alpha males around her would think they could run her over with their decisions and personalities. She wouldn’t and couldn’t let that happen.

When you combine her temper and sometimes violent nature with her dislike for idiots, it could be a dangerous situation, since in her opinion, men were idiots more often than they weren’t. Her vice president, Pinky, was a lot calmer than she was and was known to be the buffer between her and others. If Pinky wasn’t around, it was Axle or her brother, Bullet, another member of the Howlers.

Honestly, she owed the three of them more than she would ever admit. If it wasn’t for them, she would be dead or locked up in some jail.

She wasn’t sure if it was the tiger in her that made her volatile or just her intolerance for stupidity, but it didn’t matter. It was who she was and how she was, and most likely, wouldn’t change.

Most of the time, she listened to Axle when he made a suggestion about plans, but this time, he wasn’t ordering her around this town. Frankly, he did that too often. No, this time, she was doing what her gut told her to do. Shewasgoing to Indiana, and she was going to do what was necessary to protect her club, whether Axle approved or not.

The Hell’s Dogs MC had fucked with her family too many times in too many ways, but she would do it for her club sister, Pumps, alone. What they did to her club sister when she was too young to know any better was unthinkable. When she was a teenager, she had dated one of them. He had emotionally, physically, and sexually abused her while she was too young to know how to protect herself. And when those fuckers showed up to force Pumps to return to them where they thoughtshe belonged, they did things to people Crush cared about that earned them destruction.

Over several months, the Hell’s Dogs MC had plotted to kill the Howlers, had kidnapped their family, and had raped a family member. The Howlers and the Claws had taken out quite a few of them during the last battle between them and the Hell’s Dogs MC when they came to the area with the intent of taking Pumps back with them. In Crush’s opinion, they were the scum of the earth.

The goal of the mission wasn’t to destroy, rather to gather information, but she would be lying if she said she wouldn’t be looking for a chance to end any Hell’s Dog member that might still be alive.

And she wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over it.

She was bringing her vice president, Pinky, and Nails, another member of the Claws, with her. Along with Pinky and Nails, three of the Howlers were making the trip — Dragon, Ranger, and Pike. The six of them would back each other up. Everything would be fine, but if shit went off the rails, she had faith in them to handle it and get home relatively unscathed. This wasn’t their first rodeo.

With the exception of Ranger, they were all shifters with heightened senses and healing abilities that made them hard to kill. Ranger may not have those same abilities, but he had skills he learned in the armed forces that made him a force to be reckoned with in his own right.

When facing an enemy of their family, blood or not, the Howlers and the Claws would use every weapon in their arsenal to end the threat.

After days of reconnaissance of the Hell’s Dogs MC in Indiana, Crush and the others had learned everything they possibly could from the second-floor room they had rented in an inn near the entrance to the Hell’s Dogs compound for the sole purpose of watching them. They took shifts where a couple members would keep watch, while the others rested in their actual hotel rooms across town. Once they arrived at the point where nothing new had been presented to them in hours, they had collectively decided they needed to get closer to the Hell’s Dogs clubhouse. They still had unanswered questions and unaddressed concerns about the status of the Hell’s Dogs, their plans, and the exact number of surviving members.

Crush and her fellow Howlers and Claws made a plan to get closer and see what they could find out from looking in windows and such. Just like Crush suspected would happen, they didn’t end up only watching. The six bikers stormed the place, a two-story house, with guns up and ready to take out anyone in their path the Hell’s Dogs were using as a clubhouse.

After taking out everyone on the first floor, with Pike getting shot in the melee, Crush headed for the second floor with Dragon and Ranger on her heels. They had tried to get her to follow them, but she ignored them and darted up the stairs.

The stairs were creaky, so she didn’t bother trying to ease her way up them. When she got to the landing at the top, she paused, letting Dragon and Ranger catch up. With her back to the wall, the men doing the same thing on the preceding steps, Crush took a deep breath and released it slowly, preparing herself to round the edge of the doorjamb and enter an unknown room.

She heard an unfamiliar voice yell from in the room, “We know you’re fucking there, assholes!”

With no reason to wait, Crush stepped around the end of the wall and into the room, gun raised. She locked onto her target, the older, long-haired member. “Don’t you fucking move,” she growled. She sensed Dragon and Ranger flank her and saw their guns in her peripheral vision, prepared to use them.

“Who the fuck?” the long-haired member shouted, locking his gun on her the same way she aimed at him. He was crouched at the end of the table, with the length of it between them.

The room was a lot like the first floor. It had warped wood-paneling on the walls and stained, rotted flooring, with missing boards and several holes. The table wasn’t even a proper church table. It was one of those foldable tables you pull out when you have extra people show up to a holiday meal. At least the chairs were wooden, even if they were mismatched and looked to be curb-side quality.

Leaning against the middle of the wall to the right with his arms crossed over his chest, like his clubhouse wasn’t getting ambushed, was someone she recognized from the photos Dragon had printed, but she hadn’t seen him in person until that moment.

When the man turned his head and locked eyes with her, her heart fluttered and then sank. The moment that dark-as-night gaze met hers, her tiger woke up and started prowling, wanting out. Her tiger responded to that man in a way Crush didn’t think was ever possible. She heard Axle talk about how his wolf demanded he claim Ashlyn, but she usually rolled her eyes when he started talking like that. She figured he was exaggerating, but as she stared into the eyes of one of her enemies, she realized quickly that Axle was telling the one hundred perfect truth.Shit.

The man cocked an eyebrow and had the audacity to smirk at her like he didn’t have three handguns pointed in his fucking direction.Idiot!

“On the floor,” Dragon ordered.

Crush pulled her gaze away from the idiot just in time to see the long-haired man raise up the gun a bit more to aim. She fired off a shot at the man at the same time someone else did, Ranger maybe. One shot hit him in the hand, forcing his hand to release the gun. The other shot hit him directly between the eyes.

Without missing a beat, Crush turned her gun on the remaining man. He was still leaning against the wall, arms crossed, but he was staring at his friend dead on the floor. That’s when Crush noticed that his cut no longer had prospect patches. On the left side of his cut was a patch that saidmemberand another that saidLucifer. Sometime in the last twenty-four hours, he had become a full-patched member.

“Fuck,” Dragon said as he stepped further into the room. “You the last member?”

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