Riding On Fumes: Bad Boy Motorcycle Club Romance (The Crow's MC Book 2)

by Cassandra Bloom

  No…

  Not Crow, but probably not Carrion, either.

  But who the fuck did that leave?

  “I’m guessing you’re Jason,” a voice that was trying very, very hard not to sound terrified chimed behind me, accompanied by three gentle taps on my shoulder.

  I worked to keep my motions slow and threatening as I dipped my head back in the mystery sender’s—now the mystery speaker’s—direction. “Somebody who knows me would know that touching me is a good way to never touch anything ever again,” I said.

  “Wonder what that says for my sister’s future,” the now-mystery speaker said, sounding a bit more bold this time.

  Sister…?

  Back on our first outing—it hadn’t been so much a date as it had been a ‘thank you’ meal for helping my dumb ass slip free from a Carrion Crew “fundraiser” with my skull intact—Mia had explained that her brother had been indirectly responsible for her predicament. Though the details were vague, it seemed that he’d gone and gotten himself in a hefty amount of debt with the Carrion Crew and, after getting himself arrested and imprisoned, was issued an ultimatum: find a way to pay what was owed or meet a painful end. Given that either option had to take place behind bars, this obviously set the degree of difficulty in both raising funds and being murdered a great deal higher than usual. I imagined the only thing harder than making decent money in jail was dying a decent death in jail. Though the “how” from that point to the next was a bit skewed—I wondered if even Mia knew the details regarding that part—the Carrion Crew decided that Mia would be the best means to pay off the debt. Needless to say, while Mia might have viewed her hellish “employment” as a noble means of keeping her brother alive, I wasn’t particularly keen on the man.

  And here we’d only just met.

  Seeing red and hearing only a shrill, high-pitched whine that I knew to exist only in my head, I lost track of a few seconds after that. I remembered being on my bike, turning my head to face the mystery speaker, now known to be Mia’s brother, and then there was a slideshow of still-shot views. Nervous face, panicked face, terrified face, pleading face, pained face. Then…

  Click!

  “Welcome back to the present, Mister Presley. We hope you enjoy your stay.”

  The man squirming in my grip was all wire and sinew. I might have been disgusted if I weren’t so damned pissed. It was like someone had aimed to make a man-shaped thing out of pipe cleaners, realized the dumb thing couldn’t stand on its own, and started patching up the weak points with strips of chicken gristle. His clothes hung on his scrawny frame like melting candle wax. Cropped blond hair and too-pale skin only reinforced my theory that this thing was more built than born. It was his eyes, bright blue eyes that regarded me as a child might regard the monster under the bed when he finally decides to make his grand appearance, that had me convinced he was even remotely human. He and Mia had the same eyes.

  “You’d better have a very good fucking reason for me not to rip you apart right here and now!” I snarled in his face.

  My hands had him by the collar, partially choking him as I held him, pinned, against the wall of the nearest building. Because of this, his voice was strained as he said, “I can… give you… three… excellent… r-r-rea-sons…”

  The last word of this started to break as his face began to turn blue, so I let him go. Ignoring the small crowd that my violent outburst had earned, I said, “Start listing, asshole.”

  He panted, sucking in a few hearty gulps of air, seeming, in my opinion, to stall for time. Then, moments before I was about to bring my hands back into play, this time outright around his throat, he croaked out, “First:” he punctuated this with a raised index finger from his left hand, “it wouldn’t be worth it to commit an act of assault on a waste of skin like me. It’d just be unnecessary trouble for you. While I’m certain you’ve got ways of making it an in-and-out process with the local authorities, I’m sure you’d agree that it wouldn’t be worth your time. You’re an important man—a king!—and why should a great and powerful king waste his precious time wiping his hands of a peasant’s blood?”

  I sneered at that, knowing a blowhard’s pandering drivel when I heard it. “You’re other two reasons better be a lot better and a lot less soaked in bullshit,” I warned.

  He nodded, seeming to understand that I wasn’t buying his self-deprecating routine for a moment. “Second:” his middle finger rose to meet the still-raised index, “I believe that you care about my sister, and while I’ll get back around to that fact I feel it’s worth pointing out that it’d only hurt yourself in the long run if she found out that you beat up the brother she’s already endured so much to protect.”

  My sneer deepened into an outright scowl, but I wasn’t about to call “bullshit” on that as much as I would have liked to.

  “Sounds like he was quite the charmer,” I’d said after hearing about her predicament regarding him. “And you’re still doing all this for him?”

  Her response was as noble as it was irritating: “Like I said: he’s family.”

  “And the third reason,” I demanded through clenched teeth.

  He nodded, seeming eager to get to that. So eager, in fact, that he outright dropped his hand, raised fingers and all, and followed it shortly after with his head, which dipped downward in a solemn, almost apologetic bow. “It’s… well, it’s like I said: I believe you care about my sister. Now, you seem like a smart guy—and that’s not me just soaking things in bullshit like you said; I’m being genuine here—and smart guys don’t typically go around liking girls and buying them all sorts of nice things if they don’t believe that the girl in question likes them back. I mean, guys go to great lengths to impress girls who wouldn’t give them the time of day all the time, but I don’t think either of us would call a guy like that ‘smart,’ right? ‘Desperate’ and ‘love-struck,’ sure, maybe even just cut to the chase and call them ‘horny,’ but still not ‘smart.’ I don’t think you’re doing all this for my sister because you’re desperate or love-struck, and, horny or not, I don’t think you snatched up Carrion Crew property just so you could fuck her.”

  I felt myself tremble with rage at his words and began to advance, my right fist raised and hungry for a crunch to sound under its knuckles.

  “WHOA! WHOA! WHOA!” he held up his hands, palms out, and I just barely managed to hold myself back. Satisfied that I wasn’t about to start swinging, he said, “I’m not trying to piss you off here, Jaso—er, Mister Presley. Whichever. I’m here for you, remember that. I’m just saying that if this was just about sex… well, she was working a street corner, right? It would’ve been a lot easier to get your rocks off with her without all this gang war business if that’s all it was about. That’s all I’m saying, right?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Right?” he pressed further.

  “Get to the fucking point,” I said, my voice barely even a whisper at that point.

  “Right…” he said again, this time in resignation, with a sigh. “The point’s this: I think you care for Mia. Whether that means you have a decent enough crush to trouble yourself this far for her or if you’re head-over-heels in… well, you know—it’s none of my business one way or the other.”

  “You got that right,” I said.

  “But that all means that you’re probably thinking she likes you, too. Again, whether you’re under the assumption that she’s returning your crush or if you think that she, too, is head-over-heels, it stands to reason that you believe she cares for you, too.” He sighed and shook his head, “And I only thought it would be fair to warn you in advance that, if you’re looking for… that, that you’re looking in the wrong place. Not to get your blood pressure up all over again, but you are dealing with a girl whose entire livelihood has revolved around selling herself.”

  “And now she’s out of that life,” I pointed out.

  “Says who? You? The Carrions? Think about it, Mister Presley! When she was on the s
treets it was a quick sale! Money changes hands and then they get to put themselves in one of three orifices. Wham, bam, thank you, Mia. Transaction over. Simple enough, sure, but how many of those guys do you think walked off thinking they’d found love? How many likely fantasized about freeing her from that life? Or, at the very least, how many were at least smitten enough to come back again and throw down some more money? I’d imagine a great many, right? Sort of goes hand-in-hand with salesmanship to work for repeat business, and there’s no denying that Mia’s great at selling. Always has been. Twist the details of a story here, embellish there, and suddenly she’s the poor little girl who was trapped in a basement with a corpse. Next thing you know the whole city’s pouting beside her and chastising the big, bad brother for putting her in that horrible, horrible situation. But nobody ever caught wind of the detail that she was the one that wanted to go to that house in the first place—that it was her idea to find out what was in that locked basement—and that I was the one tagging along to help her do it. When she wanted to see a new movie but didn’t have the dough or a ride to the theater, some pouty lips aimed at the right jock were just the ticket. And, if you ask me, those same lips probably did a little more than just pout to make sure the deal was sealed. And that was well before she was fifteen, Mister Presley. But nobody ever thought to stop her; she was too good at selling herself as either the good girl or the victim every step of the way. Good girls and victims get public handouts, and what she couldn’t get being a good girl or a victim she was sure to get by being a slut behind closed doors.”

  “I swear to Christ,” I said, seething, “I am a red cunt hair from bashing your teeth straight down your fucking throat!”

  “Can’t you step back far enough from the situation to consider the bigger picture?” he demanded, suddenly sounding bolder once again. “This is a girl who has made a career her entire life of using any and all means to get her way. Yes, I got myself into some deep shit with the Carrion Crew. And, yes, Mia was kind enough to put herself out there to help me out while I was in a bind. I’m not proud of any of that—that I got into trouble in the first place or that she took it upon herself to help me the way she did. Obviously neither of us knew what sort of hell she was getting herself into. So, imagine if you will, that our cunning, manipulative Mia finds herself in an absolutely shitty situation, right? And it’s way too dangerous to just try to up-and-bail. We both met that T-Built asshole at some time or another; guy was out of his mind. Mia would know better than to try to give a guy like that the slip. She’d be signing her own death certificate. So what does she do? She does what she does best! She does a bit of research, finds the best target for the situation at hand. See,” he leaned in as though he were sharing a coveted secret, “the jocks she pursed her lips at in high school weren’t random guys with sports jackets, Mister Presley. They were the seniors with the nice cars and enough dough to buy a second ticket and all the popcorn a teen girl could gobble. Fast forward a few years, multiply that cunning, manipulative wit alongside them, and it’s not impossible to see her setting her sights on you, Mister Presley. Not only are you loaded-as-hell, but you’re a part of the only possible threat to the people who she was working for at the time. Nevermind part of the threat, you’re the Crow’s goddamned leader! And, what’s more, you have history—direct history!—with the sadistic psychopath holding Mia’s leash. And, as luck would have it, you just happened to cross paths, right? Now let me ask you this, Mister Presley, and bear in mind the only way a person could possibly know this is if they’d seen Mia do exactly this sort of thing before, because nobody but you and Mia truly knows how you came to meet one another.”

  I stared coldly at him, not daring to invite his question; knowing he’d offer it up soon enough.

  Sure enough: “How difficult would it have been for Mia to stage whatever sequence of events went down to get you to take notice of her in the first place?”

  I blinked at that, forced despite all my efforts to think back on it.

  I remembered following after T-Built through the crowded Carrion Crew event.

  I remembered losing track of him in the crowd and hurrying to keep him in my sights.

  I remembered Mia appearing out of nowhere, drink in hand, and colliding with me.

  And then I remembered her calling me out, saying all the right things to get me paranoid; saying all the right things to convince me to get out of there.

  But you asked her to leave with you; it was your idea to use her as cover to—

  But what if you hadn’t? Would she have just volunteered?

  Were circumstances already perfect for her to be certain she’d get to leave with you?

  “I’m guessing she said all the right things, right? Just the right amount of sass to seem disinterested while offering up just enough sex appeal to keep you on the line,” he went on.

  I remembered sardonic wit, passive disinterest, but an ongoing threat to reveal me to the crowd of murderous Carrions if I…

  No panties. She’d practically advertised from the get-go that she wasn’t wearing any underwear.

  “And I’m also guessing it didn’t take long to get her talking, right? Total strangers, but I’d put down money I don’t have to bet that she provided you with a decent enough line to get you interested, right?” he cocked his head, seeming genuinely interested. “She opened up to you, the poor, mistreated prostitute—down on her luck and just hoping for a better tomorrow—and, when she knew the hook was good and deep in the fish’s gullet, she pulled the line tight. Get the rich, powerful biker bad boy to take her on a couple of dates, sell herself real good to the big score, and finally find an opportunity to get you to swoop in and save her from all of it.”

  “She… no,” I shook my head and looked away, trying to think of something to punch a hole in his logic. “She was attacked. Showed up bloody and beaten; some guy—some asshole—hurt her; hurt her bad, and—”

  “And she had a knight in shining army to call on when it happened,” he injected. “It could have been anything, Mister Presley,” he went on. “If it hadn’t been that violent encounter it would’ve been another. Maybe something worse, maybe something not-so-bad. But isn’t that just the life she was trapped in? A whore on the streets? How long before somebody tries to rob her or hurts her or does something—anything!—to give her an excuse to call you. Then you, with all your resources and connections, take her off the streets, bring her to your fancy house or wherever you live, and just start pouring the lavish lifestyle all over her. ‘Poor Mia, here’s some pearls,’ ‘poor Mia, here’s a brand new wardrobe,’ ‘poor Mia, here’s a new car!’ And she gets to live a lush, protected life of luxury, knowing she’s got the best possible protection from those Carrion cocksuckers, and all she has to do for it is the exact same thing she was doing before: take a dick into one of three orifices. Except now she’s only got to take one dick, she’s getting a lot more in exchange for it, and she doesn’t have to share the profits or squat in a rotting drug den with a bunch of other whores.”

  “No…” I heard myself whisper. “That’s not…”

  “Meanwhile,” his words trailed on, “there’s a war brewing, one that’s been in a slow boil for a long time from the sounds of it but is most certainly in full heat with all this happening, and she’s got a safe place to watch the fireworks fly. Now let me ask you this, Mister Presley: do you truly believe that, if the Crow Gang begins to slip into the losing side of this war—if Mia started to see the safety net that you represent right now starting to tear—that she might not find herself somebody else who she might be able to convince to save her from you? What sort of sob story do you think she’d need to cook up to make you the monster in some fantasy story fed to the next knight in shining armor? Maybe she’d track down some honest cop and offer up the promise of exposing your whole operation to not-so-forgiving authorities. Can you imagine what sort of opportunity that would represent for some do-gooder lawperson, Mister Presley? The bust of a lifet
ime and a girl like Mia sucking their dick the whole time.” He groaned, sounding like he was disappointed in the whole situation. And maybe, just maybe, he really was. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, Mister Presley, but my sister is a parasite. She always has been. I don’t think she’s ever cared for another human being in her entire life, but I can rattle off a list of names as thick as your average phonebook of guys who believed with all their hearts—as you seem to believe now—that she cared for them even half as much as they found themselves caring for her.”

  I had no words left to say at that moment.

  “I wanted to get you out here to warn you, Mister Presley,” he finally said after an extended silence. “If you want to go to war with the Carrion Crew, be my guest. Lord knows you’d be getting me out of a shit-ton of trouble if you took them out of the picture. But if you’re about to escalate things with them solely because of this business with my sister then there’s a strong possibility that you’ll be going into battle half-cocked and over a matter that, in all likelihood, will have run off with all your belongings before you get back. Assuming, of course, you don’t wind up getting yourself killed in the process.”

  “Wh-why…?” I finally managed to stammer out. “Why tell me all this? What do you get out of this?”

  He shrugged. “Honestly, not much. I already said that it’d be nice if you did manage to take them out, but I think you and I both know that’s a pretty big ‘if.’ Quite frankly, I’m just sick of life stabbing me in the eye with the shit-stick while she gets to manipulate and fuck her way in and out of every little thing. For once it’d just be nice to see things not work out for her. That, and,” he shrugged innocently, “you don’t seem like you deserve much more shit in your life. I looked into you, Mister Presley—if my sister can manage a background check on a guy like you it shouldn’t be a surprise that I can, too—and I just figured you’d dealt with enough to not add a lying, manipulative whore to the list of tragedies. Guys like us—guys who the universe just seems to love stomping on at every turn—gotta watch out for one another, right?”