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

by Cassandra Bloom

  But I reached him before either his gun or his mouth could finish.

  I came upon him like a missile, barreling him back. He managed to keep his feet on the ground, but what this kept in balance he lost in control; his legs forced to pump him ever further back just to keep us both upright. Then, exhausting the open space, we crashed into the wall—Mack’s back and shoulders making a loud WHOOMP!-sound as we did. His hot, stinking breath was knocked from his lungs and into my face, and visions of cramming my head in a gas stove swam on my thoughts. I was screaming, this I knew, but I couldn’t be sure when I’d started or how long it went on. My fists pummeled—left, right, left, right; an ever-constant rhythm—into the soft, tender meat just below either side of Mack’s ribs. He barked and coughed under the weight of each impact, showed all the tell-tale signs of pain, but never seemed to truly be worn down by it.

  I got the horrifying impression that I was beating up something that was too used to being beaten to benefit from it any longer; a slab of meat too tender to yield to the hammer.

  And, all the while, his erection never went down.

  Still I worked, punching and screaming and, once or twice, throwing a knee into his groin, hoping to see him finally buckle and fold.

  Then, realizing too late that only one of us—me—had dropped his gun in the start of the tussle, he brought his weapon up in a moon-like arc, cracking me along the side of my head with the long, flat silver of his pistol.

  The world corkscrewed to one side. I worked to counterbalance this sudden shift. Then I discovered the world hadn’t moved at all; my aggressive lean became an all-out fall.

  The sound of the floor slamming into my ear was louder than the cries of my name from Mia’s mouth, but I heard both; received both with the same sense of confusion.

  Then there was a cold that seemed to drape over me. It seemed strange to me—that a blanket should seem so cold—but I accepted it as I felt I had to accept all things in that instant of dizzy confusion; I was a child being covered by a sympathetic mother…

  And mother knows best.

  But, when I looked up, there was no mother. Just Mack, leering, aiming two very different yet very similar weapons down at me.

  So lost in my confusion, I was having a hard time discerning between the barrel of his gun and the tent of his erection. I could only be certain that both were quite terrible and dangerous in their own ways.

  A very distant part of me said, Fuck.

  That felt right.

  BANG.

  The sound of the gunshot, something that the past few minutes had made me very familiar with, felt like a harsh length of rope that, at that instant, yanked me back from my daze.

  I’d been aware of a gun aimed at me.

  And I’d even, in some airy, very distant sense, been aware of what that could mean.

  But it was the sound—that sound—that made the possibility that I’d just been shot jolt me back into awareness.

  Except…

  Except that I didn’t feel shot.

  And, yeah, I knew what that felt like. Absently, my hand traced up to my left shoulder, just above my heart, and it occurred to me that it was very stupid to wonder if I’d been shot in the same place twice.

  Then how come that’s the only part of me that hurts right now?

  Because that would be your heart, stupid.

  A pair of thuds, hard and unforgiving—like the legs of some strange furniture crashing down—resonated beside me. There was a momentary warmth, and I remembered Mack’s breath on my face a moment earlier.

  Then it was raining blood.

  It poured like it had earlier, hot and thick and awful.

  I thought, No way I can ride in all this.

  And then Mack’s body slumped over me, dead as dead could be.

  Still eleven, Logic sighed.

  Damn… Defense groaned.

  She’s sexy, Neutral offered.

  And I, the amalgamation of all Jaces and, at the same time, some new, recently blossomed Jace, was uncertain what all these fractal-perspectives meant at first.

  Then, all at once, I knew.

  And I fell in love with Mia all over again.

  I shoved the dead waste off of me. Mack thumped to the floor, alone and forgotten as easy as that, and I was distracted with the suddenly tolling chore of standing. Mia let the spent weapon drop from her hand. My gun clattered to the floor, and, like Mack, was forgotten as easy as that.

  Finally—finally!—we were holding one another. Once more it felt more necessary than desired; we needed one another just to keep upright.

  “At least this time the house isn’t on fire,” she said with an exhausted smile.

  “Wouldn’t it be funny,” I said with a groan, “if you saying that made it happen?”

  She studied me for a moment, smiled sympathetically, and shook her head. “No,” she said, “that wouldn’t be funny at all.”

  “Right,” I nodded, pointing to what I was sure looked like a sizable head injury. “Sorry. Just a little concuss at the moment.”

  She giggled a little, but it seemed more for my benefit than out of any actual humor. “Come on,” she said, “let’s get out of here.”

  ****

  It wasn’t the first time, and it sure-as-shit wasn’t going to be the last time, but I was wrong. I was not concuss. The doctor practically made fun of me for even thinking it, in fact. What I did have, he’d informed me, was a very ugly bruise on my temple. I was given four aspirin, a drink of cold water from a paper cone, and a look that promised no end to the ball-busting.

  I could practically hear Danny and Candy busily starting and comparing lists to tease me with.

  Mia, my guardian angel—the one who’d come around and saved my life while I’d been in the midst of saving hers—offered a far greater medicine: a kiss to the temple. Then, confessing to her it was the best sort of healing I’d even received, she offered another, then another to my other temple, and, finally, another to my lips.

  I’d say that I felt all better from that alone…

  But that would be crazy.

  ****

  ~TWO DAYS LATER~

  Candy was seated in what was normally my office with Danny and two other prostitutes. They were going over paperwork, finalizing agreements, and casually discussing prices. I walked in somewhere in the middle of a debate about whether or not a rimjob should be bundled with a blowjob as a form of oral sex and, therefore, lumped within a single price or, as it existed as a completely different form of oral stimulation, not only be considered separate, but also offered at a different price.

  One of the prostitutes—the one to Candy’s left—said that using the mouth was using the mouth and what did it matter if it was a cock, a nipple, or an asshole that was getting the attention.

  The other—the one seated at Candy’s right—argued that if she was going to be using her mouth on a John’s asshole that, first, she wanted to be made aware of it from the get-go and, second, she wanted to be getting something extra for the effort.

  Danny seemed to be trying very hard to maintain a straight face through all of this.

  Candy, whose back was to me at that moment, stayed silent. She was leaning back in her chair, letting the two monopolize the conversation, and, despite my limited view, seemed generally pleased with things.

  Progress is progress, I thought to myself, and tried to keep quiet as I slipped across the room towards the filing cabinet.

  If I could just get that address and slip out before—

  “Jace?” Danny called, announcing my presence to everyone else and making me flinch.

  Three other pairs of eyes turned to face me.

  “Didn’t think ya were comin’ in today? Thought ya an’ Mia were headin’ out on a date, weren’t’cha?”

  I groaned and nodded, motioning towards the filing cabinet. “I was just here for my address book,” I confessed, pointing to the little black Moleskin set atop the four-tier cabinet. “I made a note o
f a place I wanted to take Mia to and—”

  “Care to weigh in on this rimjob debate?” Candy offered, seeming more entertained by the idea of my response than actually interested in the nature of it.

  “There’s very little else in this world I want to do less than weigh in on this rimjob debate, Candy,” I said outright and flat-out.

  “Ye’re right to want to duck out,” Danny offered, but was all the same reaching into the desk as he said it. “But, long as ye’re here, I was hoping ye’d be willin’ to take a gander at this?”

  He held out a rather thick-looking folder to me.

  I had to awkwardly maneuver between Candy and the hooker who was okay with lumping ass-licking in the same place as cock-sucking. Though I wasn’t about to say so, I thought that, while she was a real go-getter and an undeniably adventurous girl, her business savvy left a lot of room for improvement.

  “Long as I can ‘gander’ at it over dinner with Mia,” I said, tucking the bundle under my arm.

  “Ya can gander at it however ya like, so long’s as ya gander,” Danny said, seeming to lay on his Southern drawl a little heavier as he did.

  ****

  As promised, I gandered over the papers over dinner with Mia.

  Feeling a renewed sense of involvement with all this Crow-related, she was almost more interested in what it all had to say than I was.

  Okay, so she was a lot more interested than I was.

  “It’s really tough to read this when you’re kissing my neck, you know,” she chastised.

  I grinned, nodded, and kissed her neck again. “Yes, I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m doing it.”

  She giggled at this, tried to pull away—trying, in fact, to pretend she didn’t love it—only to have her giggles slip into laughs. Betrayed by her own response, she let herself fall against me and craned her neck to accept a few more kisses before turning her head to catch the next “attack” on her lips. We both moaned, satisfied by this turn of events, and explored its possibilities a bit further.

  Then the wine came.

  We parted—our eyes seeming to agree it was a temporary shift, at best—and, as the waiter shuffled off, embarrassed, we each took a sip. As we partook, our eyes, by no real fault or intrigue—solely, it seemed, by chance—fell upon the paperwork. I sighed, feeling a sense of entrapment by the authority of the printed pages, and I shuffled a bit through the stack, hoping that doing so would transfer the content into my brain through the skin of my palms by some new form of desperate osmosis.

  This did not happen.

  Instead, Mia’s free hand came down with a sudden-yet-not-harsh abruptness, stopping me on one of the pages, and she pointed to a line.

  “Who is this?” she asked.

  The page, what appeared to be a printout of an email, depicted a scene as it had been followed by one of Danny’s informants. This, however, was not what Mia was asking about.

  Her finger tapped specifically over a name:

  Papa Raven.

  “Him?” I asked, then, to clarify, I said aloud: “Papa Raven?”

  Mia nodded.

  Then, sighing, I set down my glass of wine and told her a story—the story of my father, his dream for the city, and a man who, long ago, had lied to his face, called himself a “partner”…

  And then taken everything, including my father’s life.

  “And that,” I finished with a sigh, “is how Papa Raven fractured the Crow Gang, started the Carrion Crew, and murdered my father in one single act.”

  A moment of silence passed then, Mia, saddened by my story, considering it and mulling it along with whatever it was that had motivated her to ask about him in the first place. Knowing she’d tell me her end soon enough, I read through the rest of the printed page.

  By the time Mia was ready to talk, I’d come to the conclusion that our work—both my work with the Crows and my work with ending the looming threat of the Carrion Crew against Mia—was far from done.

  Our entrees came soon after, and we teased at our plates for the first few minutes as we finished talking about Papa Raven and, in the long run, finished talking about business in general.

  We were, after all, on a date. We would go on to appreciate our meal, attend a double-feature—a horror movie for her and an action-comedy for me—and then, finally, we’d go back to my condo, with all its fancy new security add-ons, and have toe-curling, headboard-cracking sex. The hardest decision that we needed to concern ourselves with at that moment was which hole that sex would focus on, not matters of the Carrion Crew or Papa Raven.

  That was just crazy.

  PART 5

  Quoth the Raven…

  EPILOGUE

  ~PAPA RAVEN~

  Papa Raven sat at one corner of the triangular table. The other two corners were occupied by two other Carrion Crew “heads.” There were other heads to the Crew, yes, but only two of them were in attendance at that moment. With the three corners occupied, the three remaining sides, each long enough to comfortably occupy five chairs, found themselves occupied with fifteen of what the Carrion Crew heads considered to be their best men. Like the heads, these fifteen did not encapsulate the whole of what was considered to be their best men, it was just the fifteen that were presently in attendance. Of the fifteen, each Carrion head present had summoned five of their best to come to this gathering; each line of five sat to the left of the Carrion head that had invited them. Had the group been larger—had there been more Carrion heads present and, therefore, another group of five summoned on their behalf—the shape of the table would have been adjusted to accommodate for just that number.

  A square for four heads and twenty best.

  An octagon for eight heads and forty best.

  And so on and so forth.

  Papa Raven was meticulous in that way. He was also not above sharing roles—“head,” in this case—and he took no steps to set himself above any other. Whether it was three corners, four corners, eight, ten, or ten-thousand—and he most certainly aspired to see the day when the Carrion Crew could boast ten-thousand heads, preferably with each one overseeing well over five “best”—he had no interest in crude displays of power or authority.

  However…

  However!

  However, as the Carrion Crew—all of the Carrion Crew—were his, as he was in essence the founder, the CEO… hell, the fucking father of the Carrion Crew, it was his right to assume some sense of superiority.

  Even if he chose not to boast one.

  It was simply in their place to know.

  And, should there be a Crew member who did not know, or one who forgot themselves and should think themselves bold enough to challenge, it was not much of a challenge to handle such things.

  No more than clipping a young bird’s wings, Papa Raven imagined.

  And so, though his chair was no different and his corner was no more angled or widened than any other corner of the table, there was no challenge when he addressed the triangle and its eighteen occupants.

  His voice was low, kept rigidly monotonous, and a poetic mind might travel far enough as a listener to wonder if he intentionally spoke in iambic pentameter. This was not how he typically spoke—nobody could truly say how Papa Raven spoke; his tone, his rhythms, and even his vocabulary seemed to change as randomly and as quickly as the path of a flock of birds; just like a pack of birds, too, was the bizarre grace and beauty that it took regardless of all elements—but this, like everything else, was just how he was.

  He referred to them as “gentlemen,” but there was a hint of playfulness here; as if he were sampling a joke that none found funny. And if he’d been insulted by that fact—if truly he had been aiming for humor and that aim had been misfired—every soul at that triangle, head and best alike, would undoubtedly fall into a forced and panicked scream of laughter.

  As would the group were they only half that number.

  As would the group were they only half that yet again.

  And so on and so
forth.

  None laughed when Papa Raven addressed them as “gentlemen,” but, having not been aiming for humor, he spoke on without pause, unoffended and, therefore, unprovoked.

  He asked for numbers.

  Firstly, the number of dead Carrions in the attack on the cul-de-sac that they had acquired. Papa Raven had liked this cul-de-sac, had boasted one of the houses as his own, even, and had been forced to sacrifice both a lovely piece of business property as well as a personal home when it was attacked.

  One of the best men, this one summoned by the head seated to Papa Raven’s right, cleared his throat and stood. He announced that seventy-three members of the Carrion Crew had died. He went on to explain that, of those seventy-three, only sixty-one were actually dead; that, of the eight remaining, four were wounded badly enough to no longer serve a purpose, two were beyond repair and no longer worth the cost of keeping them alive, and another two had decided to flee from both the cul-de-sac, the city in general, and, by extension, the Carrion Crew.

  Papa Raven ordered that the eight still living be sent off with the other sixty-one. Then he asked how many Crows—the vile sons-of-whores!—were killed during their attack.

  The same man, still standing, said the number seemed to be roughly in the twenties. He explained that it was hard to say, as many of the wounded were escorted away when the attack was over; if any but those left behind had perished after the fact there was no way of knowing.

  Frowning at this, Papa Raven produced a semi-automatic pistol with an extended magazine jutting from its polished handle like an angry phallus aiming to fuck its way straight into Hell. Before any, the standing best especially, could react to this motion, the trigger was pulled and a bullet was delivered into his head.

  The body of this man, who’d only done as he was asked and delivered the news of numbers, fell dead; sprawled and leaving a growing pool of blood roughly in the center of one of the triangular table’s sides.

  Papa Raven, seeming no more flustered by this turn of events than if he’d simply rubbed an itch from his nose, set the semi-automatic pistol with its extended magazine in front of him, letting the barrel aim lazily back—a bored and yawning, gunmetal mouth—back towards the now-dead best man.