Cary

by Jessica Gadziala

  “Wish I could say you were wrong, but I don’t think you are. Seems to be that way with a lot of the organized crime syndicates. They like absolute control. And appearances are important to them. They can’t show any sign of weakness. Losing your woman would be a sign of weakness to them. As asinine as that is.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I could feel it within hours of getting out of there. Eyes everywhere. I know that sounds like paranoia, but…”

  “But cartel leaders really do have eyes everywhere,” Cary filled in.

  “Exactly,” I agreed, nodding. “I’d always known his reach was far, but I think I underestimated how far. I managed to fly under the radar thanks to the hair change and all the makeup, but no matter how far I got from Raúl’s house, I could see the eyes scanning the crowd. At the border crossing, there were actually a couple guys flashing my picture around on their phones.”

  “That must have been terrifying.”

  If there was a word that meant something worse than terrifying, that was exactly what it had been.

  I managed to take my full deep breath a state or two after I got over the border, but it wasn’t until I tracked down Cary that I felt like there was a chance I was going to get away with it.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I know I have no place coming here,” I started, sucking in a steadying breath. “I just… I had nowhere else to go,” I admitted. “You’re the only person I know that is, you know…”

  “A criminal,” he filled in for me, making my guilty gaze rise, feeling like scum for thinking of him that way, even if it was true. “It’s okay, love, you can say it. I’ve been a criminal since I was hardly more than a kid. It doesn’t offend me that you’d call me that. It’s what I am.”

  “It sounds judgmental.”

  “It depends on who is saying it. I’m not taking offense from you. If you don’t mind me asking, how did you find me?”

  “Well, I knew that when you got out, you would go back to what was familiar. Bike clubs. I used some logic, location-wise. And then I just… watched a couple clubs, trying to find you.”

  “You watched bike clubs? Outlaw bike clubs?”

  “I, ah, yeah. I realize how dangerous that seems,” I admitted. “But, honestly, it was a hell of a lot safer than not finding someone to help me, and risking Raúl finding me.”

  “Fair enough,” he agreed.

  “I lucked out here in Navesink Bank. I asked a couple questions at the local coffee shop about the club members, saying I was looking for an old friend. The girls working there told me there was someone named Cary at the club. I figured there wasn’t much of a chance that there were multiple guys named Cary in one-percent bike clubs. So I showed up. And Mr. Congeniality told me he would go get you.”

  At that, Cary let out a little dry laugh.

  “Yeah, Voss is, well, practically feral. I’m glad you found me Abigail.”

  “I’m not asking for much,” I rushed to say, not wanting him to think I was going to ask for cash or something based on some silly mail relationship we’d had ages ago. “Just some, you know, advice would be really appreciated.”

  “Advice,” he repeated, reaching up to run a hand through that salt and pepper beard that had no right to be as appealing as it was.

  “Yeah, just, I don’t know. Like how I could maybe disappear or whatever. I don’t know where to go, or what to do when I get there. Like how not to leave a paper trail, so I can stay under the radar.”

  God, I sounded ridiculous, didn’t I?

  “Or, I don’t know. Like where I might be able to get a fake ID and passport or something. I guess the further I get, the harder I would be to find. I mean, I don’t have any money right now. But I will find some little jobs or something to earn what I will need. I will do anything,” I added, desperation slipping into my voice.

  To that, Cary took a slow, deep breath that widened his strong chest. And, yes, despite myself—and the crazy situation—I noticed that somehow.

  “Okay,” he said, flattening his hand on the table. “Maybe I can do better than making you disappear to some foreign country,” he said, getting to his feet. “But I need to talk to my president first to clear it with him.”

  “I, ah, okay. Yeah. I’d really appreciate anything you could help me with, Cary, really. Anything. I know you don’t owe me because of some silly little correspondence years ago.”

  “Love, there was nothing silly about that. Those letters kept me going during one of the roughest periods of my life,” he told me, voice so deep, eyes so intense, that I felt my belly flutter at his words, at the sincerity there was to them. “So, no, I don’t owe you. But I do owe you. Let me work some shit out. You hang out around the main area or my room while I figure it out.”

  He was gone before I could agree.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Cary

  My head was still spinning as I got back out to my bike, sitting down on the seat, and taking a minute to get my thoughts in order before I took off to try to find Fallon.

  Abigail was back.

  And the reason those letters that I’d clung to like a lifeline stopped coming was because she literally couldn’t send them anymore.

  I hadn’t been exaggerating when I told her that her letters meant something to me, that they’d found me right when I needed them most.

  It wasn’t like being locked up was anything new to me. But, in general, my sentences had been relatively short. I tended to spend time in jail, getting my sentence cut down to time served by the time I even made it to court.

  And maybe the longer sentence wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d been locked up with some of my men. Or if any one of them came to visit.

  It wasn’t long after I got locked up, though, that the club fell apart. Everyone left was likely scrambling to find a new club, a new life. Which meant there was no one left to come see me.

  I was alone.

  I was unaffiliated.

  And if there is one thing you want to be when you’re locked up, it was affiliated. With someone, anyone. If you weren’t, shit got rough.

  Unfortunately for me, most of the bikers who I was locked up with were fucking white supremacists. That was not something I was ever going to be associated with.

  So I was as alone as a man could be.

  When you didn’t have a crew inside, your only choice was to keep to yourself, keep your head low, and stay away from all the other organizations.

  I’d always considered myself pretty self-sustaining. The fact of the matter was, though, that I’d always reaped the benefits of a club and brotherhood. I never had to go through something alone if I didn’t want to.

  Not only was prison life just a minefield to navigate to begin with, but going in without a buddy to help point out possible danger up ahead. Or to simply distract you from it, that shit was not easy.

  Sure, I filled my days with cell workouts, focusing on fitness. Eventually, I got a job in the kitchen, which put me with the Italian mob, who pretty much left me alone. I read. I kept my head on right.

  Slowly but surely, though, the loneliness began to creep in. Eventually, it brought with it something I’d never experienced before.

  Depression.

  It was something new and foreign to me. It took work to get out of bed. If I wasn’t forced to do it, I probably wouldn’t have. I’d have just slept the days and nights and weeks and months away.

  I’d never experienced anything like it before. It was like this shadow behind me, leaning on my shoulder, a weight that made every footstep heavy, made each movement feel like actual effort.

  Even when I finally recognized it for what it was, there wasn’t much I could do. What? Tell one of the C.O.s that I was depressed? So I could get tossed in segregation with the other crazies? So I could listen to them talk to themselves and scream all day and night?

  Nah, I was going to pass on that.

  Which meant I just had to deal with it in silence.

  It got harder and harder as each
day passed.

  Then, like a goddamn miracle, one day I got a letter.

  In this soft, curly, feminine handwriting.

  Christ, just the look of something feminine was welcome after so long away from women.

  The paper even smelled like a woman. Soft and sweet. A little floral, a bit vanilla.

  Whatever it was, it was fucking intoxicating.

  I didn’t even give a shit that the only reason I was getting a letter was because some woman in some church somewhere felt it was her duty to try to convert me from my evil ways.

  All that mattered was that it was someone to talk to, even if I’d never really communicated with anyone with letters before.

  They came infrequently at first. Those first several stunted, forced notes where neither of us really knew what to say. But I held my breath each time the mail came regardless, needing that little hint of the “outside.”

  It wasn’t long, though, before personal details started to come out.

  Like the fact that she was a lot younger than I first thought. Very recently married, in fact.

  I remember being jealous of that man. The one who got to be in the presence of all her soft and sweet, who got to be in possession of her big heart, who got to smell her floral and vanilla scent whenever he wanted to.

  It wasn’t long before I realized the bastard had no right to be with her to begin with.

  But, well, Abigail had been raised to shovel the shit a man left for her, and do it with a goddamn smile to boot.

  So she didn’t really even see how shitty he was treating her. Or if she did, she placed the blame on herself.

  Especially when she couldn’t get pregnant, when her body wouldn’t do the one thing she thought could fix her miserable marriage.

  Slowly, over the months and years, she helped dissolve my depression. So I was painfully aware of it when she started to show signs of it herself. I poured myself into trying to boost her up, trying to give her even a hint of the soft and sweet she’d selflessly offered me for years.

  Then I got the letter.

  As it would turn out, the last letter.

  Her husband was divorcing her. As if that wasn’t bad enough, her fucking parents were on his side about it.

  The letter I’d sent back had been four pages, front and back, full of everything I could think to tell her at that low point in her life.

  I sent it.

  Then I waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  But nothing ever came.

  I won’t lie. I’d been hurt. Probably more than was healthy seeing as she’d been writing to me out of the goodness of her heart, not because we had any actual connection.

  It was always going to end.

  I guess a part of me just hadn’t wanted to think that.

  Fuck, if I were being completely honest, I’d even fantasized at times about getting out one day, tracking her down, and getting her out of that unhappy life of hers.

  Was that insane? Almost certifiably.

  But it was something I thought of more than was healthy, something a part of me genuinely wanted to happen.

  Until, of course, she’d snatched that fantasy away from me.

  Or so I’d thought at the time.

  Eventually, you know, life went on. She stopped being a dominant thought in my head. Especially after I got out, and had to get my life back on track.

  She was always there, though. She’d sneak in at quiet moments, like when I was falling asleep, or when someone was asking me about my time inside.

  Over time, it was less and less frequent. I had a new life, after all. I had new brothers. I had a new family to get to know. I had actual women I could reach for.

  Then there she was.

  Telling me that she’d never chosen to cut off all communication with me, that she’d had no choice, that she’d been locked in her own kind of prison. Without someone to reach out to, like she’d been to me. And enduring a lot more torment than I’d ever been made to endure. With no end in sight.

  I couldn’t imagine how much grit and determination and bravery it must have taken for her to finally get herself free.

  No, technically, I didn’t owe her.

  But at the same time, I absolutely did.

  I was going to do whatever I could to make sure she never had to go through anything like that ever again.

  The thing was, it wasn’t like I was just some Average Joe who could do whatever the fuck he wanted.

  If I was, the woman would be in my place for as long as she wanted, guarded by me, and wanting for nothing as she healed and built a new life.

  But I wasn’t.

  I was a biker.

  That meant that every decision I made outside of small personal choices had to be run by my president and signed off on.

  So that was what I had to do.

  Find Fallon and see what he would be okay with me doing.

  He could be a hard guy to track down at times. He was all over the place. At his house, at the bar his woman owned, at meetings, with his parents, or doing work meet-ups. But given the time of day, I was placing my bets on him being at the diner that he owned with one of our other brothers, Malc.

  Sure enough, his bike was in the lot. I pulled up next to it before making my way inside, getting a smile from one of the waitresses as she put a filter in the coffee pot.

  “He in the office?” I asked.

  She gave me a nod even as I heard a slam from the back.

  “He in a mood?” I asked her, getting a smirk from her that confirmed I’d chosen a bad time to talk to him.

  It was too late to turn back now, though.

  I took a deep breath and moved into the office, finding Fallon walking from a filing cabinet toward his desk.

  Seeing me, his shoulders fell, anticipating a problem.

  “What is it? And if it is about Dezi and fucking Voss growling at each other again, I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Nah, it’s not that. Well, it is always that. But this is different.”

  “Okay,” he said, exhaling hard. “Shoot.”

  “I’ve got a problem. There’s this woman—“

  “Of fucking course there is,” he grumbled, shaking his head as he moved behind his desk. “You know, I kind of always thought my old man was being dramatic when he said ninety percent of the club’s problems came on the heels of a beautiful woman. Un-fucking-fortuantely, though, that seems to be a multiple-generation curse we got going on. Who’s the woman?”

  “She was a pen-pal while I was in prison,” I told him.

  “Like an ex?” he asked, brows pinching.

  “No, I never actually met her before today.”

  “Okay…”

  “Long story short, those letters helped me get through my time with my head on right,” I told him, shrugging. I was too old to pretend that I was made of stone. We all had our ups and downs. I was doing no one any favors by trying to pretend that shit never touched me.

  “I can understand that,” he agreed, nodding. “Why is she showing up now, though?”

  “That’s another long story.”

  “CliffsNotes,” he demanded.

  “She never meant to stop communicating with me. She went on a mission—“

  “Like a military mission?” he cut me off.

  “Like a religious one,” I clarified. If that surprised him, his face was impassive. “And while she was down there, she got herself attached to the wrong kind of guy.”

  “Down there,” Fallon repeated, exhaling hard. “Let me guess. The wrong kind of man has cartel connections.”

  “Don’t know much about the cartel, but from the sounds of it, he’s not just connected.”

  “Shit. Seriously, the fuck with these women? It can never be a normal problem, can it? No. It’s got to be some fucking international organized crime problem.”

  “Yeah, well, she fell for the wrong guy. Who ended up making it impossible for her to leave.”

&nb
sp; “Until she did.”

  “Until she did,” I agreed.

  “And she came right to you?”

  “She lived a really cloistered life. I was the only person she’d ever been in contact with who was outside of her weird culty upbringing. She needs help.”

  “I bet she does,” he agreed.

  Fallon bit the inside of his cheek as his gaze slipped away toward the picture on the wall.

  The family.

  His family.

  Full of strong-ass women who’d made sure they’d raised him right, that they made him acutely aware of his responsibility to help a woman when she needed it. Women who would whip his fucking grown ass if they found out he stood in the way of a woman in need being left to suffer on her own.

  “I need to know what kind of help I’m going to be able to offer her,” I told him, shrugging.

  His hands flattened on his desk as his head dipped.

  He let out a small laugh before his gaze lifted.

  “Well, I gotta say, Cary, I’m impressed that you would even come to me first. Most of the others would act first, and ask later.”

  “Not my first club,” I reminded him, shrugging. “I get this is your call.”

  “But if it was yours?” he asked.

  “I’d do whatever it takes to make sure she doesn’t have to worry about that fuck ever again.”

  “Alright,” he said, nodding. “I get it. Do what you gotta do. But I have one request.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Take her out of the club. That’s not me saying we don’t have your back if you need us, but get her somewhere else that is safe. You can even ask some of your brothers if they want to help do a guard shift if you are needed at the club. But I don’t want to invite any kind of ambush. Heard the horror stories about how that happened with my old man. I don’t want to have that be the future for us.”

  “I understand that completely,” I agreed, nodding. “Thank you.”

  To that, he snorted.

  “Cary, man, don’t thank me. You might find yourself with such a headache that you will be wishing I’d told you no.”

  “Don’t see that happening,” I said, shaking my head.