Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Rights
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- EPILOGUE
- DON'T FORGET
- ALSO BY JESSICA GADZIALA
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- STALK HER!
Renny
A Henchmen MC Novel
--
Jessica Gadziala
DEDICATION:
This one goes out to you gals who have trusted me enough to know I would show you the method to my madness. I don't even know most of you, but I know that, for that, you're the bees knees.
Copyright © 2016 Jessica Gadziala
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for brief quotations used in a book review.
"This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental."
Cover image credit: Shutterstock.com/ Olena Yakochuk
ONE
Mina
"It's not the Grassis."
Really, what were they even thinking in suspecting them? I mean, it was easy to jump to conclusions when you had an eye-witness who made a positive ID. You know, especially when you are a bunch of headstrong, testosterone-filled bikers running on fumes after a devastating blow to their organization and the rage of not being able to pin it on anyone.
But that, in my humble opinion, was no excuse for going balls to the wall on a completely crazy, asinine theory.
That, however, did not stop the men from ranting and raving and making plans on taking out what I knew to be a mostly-unthreatening mob family that they had had a peace with since well before Reign even came into power.
I was leaning back against the wall, arms crossed over my chest, letting myself be ignored. I was pretty sure no one had even heard me about it not being the Grassis. But they were on a tear and I was an outsider, so they weren't going to listen to me until they calmed down anyway.
I wasn't sure what Lo was thinking when she pulled me away from another job I was on, a job I was doing really well at, and brought me back to Navesink Bank to oversee the damn improvements of The Henchmen compound and see what I could do about helping them create a profile for the people that were after them.
Really, she knew better.
It wasn't that I wasn't good at my job; I was. There weren't many profilers, working outside of law enforcement, who were better than me. But that being said, she knew I had preferences. She knew I liked to work from a distance. I liked to watch over the situation and get a bird's eye view of the whole thing. It helped me to stay objective. It kept me from being fed the bullshit lies most people would feed me one way or another. And, in the end, it saved me a lot of frustration.
But there I was amid the chaos in the common room of their compound, all of it recently redone because, well, everything had been covered in blood. I hadn't seen that part myself seeing as the guys had cleaned it up, but I could only imagine it was a complete and utter bloodbath given how many men they had lost the night of the ambush.
It wasn't that I shied away from blood. To be perfectly honest, the stuff I had seen in pictures of brutal rapes, tortures, and murders, yeah, it was enough to turn anyone half-crazy. But, it was always in that sterile form- I always saw it in pictures.
Again, giving me my distance.
I liked my life, as much as possible, to be clean and compartmentalized.
It was something, in the past, Lo had always accepted and accommodated. While the rest of the team were heavy into dark stuff a lot of the time, I got to watch from a distance.
How I preferred it.
It wasn't because I didn't play well with others; I just focused better on work when I didn't have a bunch of strong personalities breathing down my neck or questioning my every theory.
"It's not the Grassis, huh?" a voice asked beside me, bringing with it the faintest hint of smoke and the perfect amount of cologne.
Of course he would be the only one of them to have heard me, to be listening to me. Then again, he was always listening to me.
It should have been flattering. Really, were it anyone else, it probably would have been. But Renny was not someone I wanted listening to me all the time. Because Renny, like me, never just listened to the words. Renny picked up the inflection, theorized on the motives behind the words, picked pieces of your soul out of the things that came out of your mouth.
Renny profiled.
And just like doctors make bad patients, profilers make bad profiling subjects.
I didn't like that he could read more into what I said than what I meant to put out there. Which was hypocritical of me, I know, being in the field I was, but it was how it was.
So Renny's borderline obsessive flirting with me for the past few weeks, while charming, sweet, and at times, very tempting, was going to get him nowhere.
Because, come on let's face it, it was hard enough for someone who profiled people to be in a relationship with just an average person. Two profilers getting hot and sweaty or getting serious? Yeah, no.
It would be explosive in both good and bad ways.
But mostly bad.
If I wanted to see shit blow up, I would let Lo ship me overseas again.
Besides, like my professional life, I liked my personal life clean and compartmentalized as well.
So Renny was not going to be a part of my life.
Case closed.
"It's not the Grassis," I repeated, nodding, looking away from Duke and Penny, finding myself a bit too invested in their little love story. You know, from a professional standpoint. Or, at least, I was telling myself that lie.
"What makes you say that?" he pressed, making me have to turn and look at him, finding him much closer than I expected, his shoulder almost brushing mine.
Alright, so, I had never actually been into redheads before. Yes, that was a bit prejudiced of me, but what can I say, politically correct to admit it or not, it had just never been my thing. I liked darker features- dark hair, dark eyes, tanned skin. That was just my personal preference.
That being said, Renny was entirely too good looking for his, or any woman within twenty feet of him, good.
He was tall and a lithe kind of strong. You might even say skinny as a descriptor if you hadn't seen him shirtless. I had. On multiple occasions. And, well, sometimes a lean strong was just as hot as a thick strong. Because he had an eight-pack. Yes, eight. And he had the deepest Adonis belt I had ever seen in my life. Given that I lived half my life at Hailstorm around a ton of fit and often shirtless men, that was saying something. He was also covered in tattoos. They were across his chest, his back, his arms, his hands.
Then of course, there was the money maker.
He had a fantastic face. I was a sucker for some good bone structure and he had it in spades. He had a somewhat thin, but strong face with proportionate features, high and str
ong cheekbones, inviting lips, and striking light blue eyes.
He was whatever the male equivalent of gorgeous was.
So, despite it being my first time being into his particular brand of copper hotness, I was into it.
As such, I tried to keep as much distance as possible between us at all times. It was no easy task given how he was dead set on getting in my pants. So whenever possible, he scooted in beside me, he found reasons to be alone with me, he casually touched me.
Just like he was doing right then, scooting in close when there was no reason to be almost touching me.
"Because it doesn't fit. If they would stop ranting and raving for five seconds and think about it, they would come to the same conclusions. The Grassis are into some dark stuff, but they don't beat up women. They don't wage war on other organizations around here. For all intents and purposes, they are a peaceful little criminal enterprise. The only people they put their hands on are people who screw them over or threaten them. They do imports. You guys are no threat to them. Hell, they even import the freaking guns for you at times. Why would they step to you now? Why would they break a three-generation pattern of not involving families, in not hurting women, now?"
"They wouldn't," he said with a shrug. "But there's no talking to the rest of them until they burn through this. We lost a lot of fucking men; they're angry and they've been sitting on their hands. They need to burn through this for a few before you try to reason with them."
"You're sure it was the Grassis you all saw?" I pressed, it finally being the chance to get a calm, rational response out of someone.
"Oh, it was the fucking Grassis, alright. Luca and Antony. Matteo wasn't there. Thing is, when Penny told the story, she didn't say shit about any of them being older, graying like Antony. Luca could maybe fit the description. But aside from knowing they just aren't the type to beat women for no fucking reason or even if they had a reason, her eyewitness account from the attack was off because she was either too traumatized or wasn't seeing right, or her ID today was just off. We were in a moving car. She couldn't have gotten a great look."
"Why didn't you..."
"We did," he cut me off.
"But by the time you circled back," I started.
"They were already gone."
The finishing each other's sentences thing was only cute in movies and TV. In real life, it was annoying. Just in case you were wondering about that. Annoying.
I exhaled a breath and looked back toward the group- what was left of The Henchmen- Reign, Cash, Repo, Duke, and Renny beside me. And Wolf in the hospital.
I couldn't imagine having your numbers decimated like that.
Hailstorm was a massive operation. But when we lost someone, there was a noticeable shift in energy for a good couple of weeks. There was a solemnness to the walls. Everyone was more on-edge. I think only twice had we ever lost more than one person at a time.
Losing over a dozen, I couldn't imagine what they were all going through.
They all coped in their own ways. Reign, most noticeably, took the only action he could given the situation. He secured the compound. He made it impenetrable so he could protect what was left of his men and their families.
Cash lost a little of his easy, carefree, flirtatious charm and clung a little tighter to Lo, was a bit more over-protective than ever before.
Repo was a mostly silent ticking time bomb. His life was the club. True, he had Maze and his son and the baby on the way now and that had given him something outside of his brotherhood to cling to, but that didn't change the fact that for many, many years, all he had was brotherhood and loyalty. He dedicated everything to the club. He was weighted and he was ready to shed blood.
Duke was Duke. He was silent and in-control. But he was fuming too. He was ready to take action, to even the score. Especially because his woman was the recipient of a nasty beating then disposed of like garbage.
Renny was, well, that depended.
See, the thing with Renny was, you could tell there were scars there. Not the physical kind, though he did have those and I found them oddly sexy, but he had emotional ones. The ones from childhood. The kind that never really healed. The thing was, I didn't know what they were. Because while I had files on every single other member of The Henchmen MC, I didn't have one for Renny.
Whether Lo had one at all was beyond my pay grade.
All I knew was- I didn't have one for him.
So I had no idea what those scars were, but judging from what I had seen over the past few weeks, they were deep.
Because Renny could be a completely different person at the drop of a dime.
It wasn't that he was schizophrenic or anything like that.
But if I had to put my money on anything, I'd say there was some definite borderline personality issues going on there.
He was too up and down, too hot and cold, too severe in his swings to just say he was a moody guy.
Because, as a whole, he was light, upbeat, funny, charming, and rational. But when he hit a low, he was low. He was dark. He was obsessive and cold and even occasionally, cruel. He didn't think clearly. He reacted on impulse and he did things that he knew were not normal.
The vast majority of the time, he was his light self. He joked around, tried to keep the spirits up around the compound after all the darkness. He played ball with the boys and he let the girls do his hair or even, once when Ferryn was particularly insistent, his makeup. He seemed to be handling things well.
But there were times when he and Duke when at it or he and Repo had words that almost went to blows, there were even a few times when he and Cash got into it and Cash was almost impossible to rile, but those times were when you could see that he was still coping. Fact of the matter was, he was the one to charge into the clubhouse and find the men dead and dying. And he was the one to make Duke get Penny out of there and safe while he stayed behind, surrounded by death, sitting next to a man he loved as a brother as he took his last breath.
Then when the bodies were removed, he had been there with the bucket and the bleach, cleaning up the blood of his fallen brothers.
True, they were one-percenters and were perhaps a bit more used to blood and death than the average citizen, but he was still human. He still had to have been dealing with the aftermath of that experience.
And the fact that he was spending most of his time trying to keep everyone else from falling apart tended to point to the fact that he himself was going to blow apart one day.
I didn't want to imagine the wreckage from that.
I reached for my phone as the argument slowly started to fizzle out, as Reign got control and demanded the others do as well so they could talk about it rationally.
I went through my files and brought up two pictures, moving away from Renny without saying anything, but I could feel his eyes on me the whole way across the room where I sat down next to Penny and put my phone in her hands.
"Who are they?" she asked, looking up at me, brows drawn together.
That had Duke's attention, stopping mid-sentence, making everyone else look toward us as well.
"Baby, those are the Grassis," he told her, his voice guarded. "That was who was on the street today."
"Ah, no," she said, shaking her head. She glanced back down at my phone then handed it back to me. "I mean, maybe they were there too, but this isn't who I was talking about."
For reasons I didn't want to analyze, my head lifted and my gaze found Renny's across the room. He watched me for a second before a slow smile lifted one side of his lips. And if I wasn't entirely mistaken, which what were the chances of that, he almost seemed... proud.
But that was ridiculous.
"Who the fuck else were the Grassis with then?" Reign demanded, looking between Duke and Renny.
Renny held up his hands, "All I saw was Luca and Anthony and the backs of other men. I thought they were just standing there too. Didn't realize they were with the Grassis."
"So back to fucking groun
d one?" Repo growled.
"Not exactly," I reasoned. "If one or two of you can calm down a bit and maybe pay the Grassi family a visit and ask who they were with this afternoon that Penny fingered as her attackers, you can get an answer. They're decent men. They will want to help."
"Well," Cash said, smile toying at his lips that I didn't trust, "that kind of sounded like you just volunteered for the task. Didn't it sound like that, Reign?" he asked as Reign's mouth spread into a nearly identical little smile.
"Did sort-of sound that way to me," he agreed.
I huffed out my breath, shaking my head. "I'm not a Henchmen, guys. I can't show up there and say I am speaking for you. They won't have any respect for that."
"Which is why Renny should tag along," Cash added, looking downright giddy at the idea.
"You can't..." I started.
"Sounds like a plan," Reign cut me off. "Famiglia should be opening in a couple of hours so Antony and Luca at least should already be around. You guys can head out now and we can finally get some answers."
"Really, I think this would be better coming from you, Reign," I insisted. "No offense to Renny, but he's not the president or vice, or even road captain. Why would they want to talk to him instead of you?"
"Because they're smart men and when shit goes down in their own business, they get themselves safe. That's what leaders do. They can't do shit for their people if they're dead. They will understand why I need to stay here. And Cash too for that matter and since Wolf is clinging to life in a fucking hospital bed, they will have to accept that Renny is who is showing up."
"Fine then," I sighed, understanding that logic. "But why am I being ordered to go?"
I didn't work for them in the traditional sense.
I worked for Lo. I worked for Hailstorm.
But so long as my assignment from my higher-ups had me at The Henchmen compound, Reign was, in a way, in charge of me.
"Honestly, babe," Reign said, lips twitching, "just for fucking fun."
Renny (The Henchmen MC #6) Page 1