Contents
TITLE
RIGHTS
Dedication
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
EPILOGUE
ALSO BY JESSICA GADZIALA
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STALK HER
COLSON
A Henchmen MC Novel
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Jessica Gadziala
Copyright © 2020 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/ Jacob Lund
Dedication
To all of my mother's patients when I was a kid.
Who taught me a lot.
And inspired me to write Eva's mother.
PROLOGUE
Reign
The supply chain was unsteady.
After a couple decades of this shit, I'd like to think I could tell when the market was hitting a normal lull, and when something else was going on.
I'd bet my savings on it being the latter.
Something was fucked.
Or someone was fucking with us.
The question was who.
Who the hell would fuck with us now, of all times? When things were stable? When the wars had been waged? When we had secured the market in the area.
Yeah, there would always be competition. There would always be someone trying to take what was yours. But, generally speaking, you went for the lowest men on the totem pole first. You didn't go right up to the top and try to take out the most successful player in the game in the area. And from what I could tell, all the lesser gun runners were doing fine. Not thriving like we had been for a long time, but not hurting, either. And if we were hurting they damn well should have been. If it was a market thing.
So it wasn't.
We were being targeted.
Someone was trying to take what was ours.
This was personal.
The problem was—who the fuck was holding a grudge now? Or maybe it wasn't about old grievances. Maybe it was about balls. They wanted the bragging rights they'd get by cutting the supply chain to the longest-running arms-dealing operation in the tristate area?
Yeah, I could see it being that.
No one else was stupid enough to fuck with an established organization.
"Fuck," I sighed, pulling off my helmet, raking a hand down my face, feeling the stubble scratch my fingers.
I'd been suspecting things for weeks, but as one of my oldest contacts suddenly stopped responding to me, it was time to bring the others into the fold.
We were having church.
The bikes were all lined up. The wet dirt and gleaming chrome implying that someone had been fucking with the prospects for the past couple of hours.
A tired smile tugged at my lips as I climbed off my bike. It was nice to have things back to normal, to have the patched guys forcing pointless busy work on the new ones. Even if two of those new ones were my sons. They got no special treatment because of their relation. If anything, they got dragged even more than any other prospective members did.
Which was just as well. Fallon needed some humility. Finn needed some toughening up. It built character to scrub the toilet with a toothbrush and wash and rewash twenty-something bikes multiple times a day.
If I knew the prospects—and I did seeing as they all grew up in the club, save for two—then I knew how they were handling it.
Fallon was cursing under his breath, but doing his damndest to make sure that everything was done perfectly. The oldest son of the president had a lot to prove.
Finn was doing the bare minimum, rolling his eyes at his brother when he ragged on him for his lack of work ethic. Malc was seeking out any job that involved being outside. All of them were likely having a rough time adjusting to living together in the barracks-style bedroom, never having a chance to get away from each other, always having to tolerate one another's bullshit.
They'd been raised as siblings, as cousins, but becoming brothers in this way required more of them.
They were learning the toll that took on them.
"Yo, you," I called to Brooks—one of the two non-legacy prospects—a kid all of nineteen with dark skin, light brown eyes, and the build of a high school linebacker. Finn had brought him around to one of the barbecues. And after a couple weeks of listening to my son bitch about thinking he would be a good addition to the club, I let him join the prospects.
He was humbler than Fallon, a better worker than Finn, and more communicative than Malc. As it turned out, Finn was right. He was a balance they needed. Someone young and hungry, but more hardened by life, someone who wanted this for a reason that had nothing to do with legacy.
"Yeah, Pres?" he asked, jogging over.
"I need you to round up the other prospects. Then I need you all to check every inch of the perimeter fence for breaks." It was a big yard. It would keep them busy well beyond church being over. And judging by the small tug at Brooks's lips, he knew that as well, and was looking forward to being the one to give the bad news to the others.
"Got it, Pres."
"Oh, and tell my son that my bike needs cleaning too," I added, feeling my own lips curve up.
"Which one?"
"Whichever one wants to prove himself more today."
They'd fight over it. Fallon and Finn. While Fallon was the more ambitious of the two, Finn had always been hungry for approval from me.
My bike would never be as clean as it would be when they were done with it.
With that, he ran inside. Once the other prospects were out and walking the grounds, shoulders hunched forward against the cool fall air, I made my way inside, the chorus of voices quieting down as eyes found me.
"What's this all about, Daddy Reign?" West asked, his light-hearted grin falling when he saw the ticking of my jaw.
"We have a problem," I told them before launching into it.
There was a mixed reaction from my men, as I had come to expect. Resignation from the older men, the men I had grown up with, who had seen so much drama already at my side. Then the anger and indignation, the thirst for blood in the younger guys, the ones who hadn't seen as much action, and were craving something new to focus on.
It was good to have both.
Age and wisdom mixed with youth and impulsiveness.
That was how we were all going to get through this, figure out who it was, and take them out.
The weight on my shoulders felt a little less heavy as I rode my bike out of the yard a few hours later, in no rush to get home, knowing Summer was off shooting all kinds of guns I didn't want to know about up at Hailstorm with some of the girls, so I was on my own.
It wasn't until I was already on the long stretch of deserted road on the way to my house
that I realized something was wrong.
It wasn't long after that when my bike stopped moving.
And before I could even pull out my phone to call one of the guys to come get me and the bike, headlights were pulling up behind me.
My hand went for the gun hidden under my seat.
But the prongs of the taser were faster than I was. And the volts of electricity stole anything resembling muscle control from me as I slammed down on the pavement, pain ricocheting off every nerve ending.
"Well, well, well, look who we have here," a voice said, coming up beside the man holding the taser. "You two, load up the bike. You," he called, gesturing toward someone else walking out of the shadows. "You know what to do."
I thought we were going to bring the war to their door.
But now the war was here.
And my men were going into it without me leading them.
Fuck.
ONE
Colson
Church had gone later than any of us planned, leaving me making my way home well after midnight, my eyes scratchy, but the caffeine buzzing through my system as I cringed at the rumble of my bike as I drove into our quiet neighborhood.
I'd moved Jelly and me out of an apartment a couple of years before, buying up a townhouse in a nice area of town back when they were nothing but plots of lands and blueprints and promises.
They were each set in three-home blocks, each house going from blue, to green, to tan. We lived in a blue corner that gave us a bit more yard space to the side, something that came in handy when Jelly was younger and still played outside. Now it was all electronics and hangouts on the couch with friends.
She was asleep now, or she should be. She'd likely gone to bed pissed at me. She hadn't exactly been pleased when the babysitter had shown up five minutes before I left.
"I'm not a baby anymore, Dad," she had snapped at me, one hand on her hip, the other waving out in the air, frustrated.
To be fair, she was twelve, and had been for a whole five months. She was legally allowed to stay home alone if I had to run out.
"It's not about you, Jelly," I had reminded her. "It's about my job."
And then we were off.
She made several valid points about how I had chosen my job, that if she was in danger, that was because of my decisions, and then went ahead and wondered if the twenty-year-old babysitter was aware that she was supposed to defend her against possible gun-wielding bad guys.
Needless to say, I had to pull the Dad-card. She, on the verge of being a teenager, had to pull the resentment card, and both of our evenings were a bit more unpleasant for the whole ordeal.
I had the kid thing down after some hiccups when she was a baby, and she seemed so small and breakable and utterly dependent on me for everything. But the kid phase? That was great. Games and reading and adoring eyes when I took her to get ice cream or showed up at all her school events.
This pre-teen shit, though?
No one prepared me for this.
Sure, I remembered my sister being a bit of a pain in the ass when she was a teenager. But I had chalked that up to Freddie being a younger sister, and therefore always a little annoying.
I naively thought Jelena's adoring eyes and belief that I was always right and her closest friend would simply continue. At least until she was in high school.
This having her own mind and the confidence to speak it shit? I was equal parts proud and frustrated about it.
I had to concede, though, that if I was going to continue to have someone at the house when I was away—and I was—then maybe I should try to work out something with Lo and Hailstorm to have someone professional and armed hanging out.
I didn't anticipate there being an issue. Even if Reign was right and there was some new competition in town, I didn't imagine Jelly was in danger.
In fact, things had been calm.
It still surprised me at times.
I had hemmed and hawed the decision to join up for so long. I didn't want to expose my daughter to a criminal lifestyle. I didn't want her to be in danger. And I didn't want to get involved with anything that might take me away from my little girl, either.
But then life had beaten me down just enough to make me take the leap.
I had prepared myself for beatings and shootouts and raids by the cops.
And then... nothing.
I mean there were dramas. There was some action here and there. But most of the time, it was little personal dramas, not ones that involved the entire club.
Jelena had grown up as safe as any other kid in the area. Hell, safer, since she had the force of the club as well as Hailstorm behind her.
On top of that safety, I was able to provide for her in a way I never would have been able to working my old janitorial type jobs.
She had all the latest electronics. She could take all the after-school activities I wanted her to be able to explore. And as for the school itself, I even managed to get her into a smaller private one in the area, wanting her to have the best chance at a great future as possible. Even if she threw a fit about the uniforms at least once a week.
Some day, I had to remind myself, when she was a doctor or a lawyer or the owner of her own company, she would look back and realize it had all been with her best interest at heart. If we made it through the teenage years, that is.
It seemed like the chances were fifty-fifty at this point.
"Hey Colson," Amy, the babysitter I had been using for the past year greeted me, giving me a weak smile.
"She still pissed at me?"
"Well, she cranked up some very loud, very moody music for about an hour after you left. But when I called her down for pizza, she seemed to be over it. She's a good kid. She really never has anything nasty to say about you. Even after you fight. She just isn't fond of having a babysitter. And at her age, I wouldn't have been either."
"It's just late, you know?" I said, shrugging.
"I know. You're a good dad. She will get over it. Let me know if you need me again," she added, taking the cash I passed to her.
"Drive safe."
"I will. Make her those famous Rainy Day pancakes of yours in the morning. I bet all will be forgiven," she told me, dipping into her car, giving me a smile, then pulling off. Rainy Day pancakes started out as that—something we did on rainy days because Jelly had been an outdoorsy type kid and rainy days made her sad. As she got older, Rainy Day pancakes became the remedy for every sort of bad day. When she broke her leg the day before her birthday, when she fell down during her ballet recital, when her favorite band broke up. Rainy Day pancakes fixed everything.
I guess maybe it could fix this as well.
Maybe if I knew things were going to go late at the clubhouse, I would send Jelly over to stay with her Aunt Freddie or Uncle Thad. She would be less resentful about that, even if it would screw with the morning schedule to get off to school.
It would be worth it if we could avoid the 'I am too old for this' argument.
With a sigh, I moved inside, grabbed a beer out of the fridge, standing for a second in the living room to make sure I didn't hear any moving around in Jelena's room, then moved out onto the front porch.
I should have been in bed.
That six a.m. alarm was going to go off sooner than later, and I was going to be dragging ass all day. But the uproar in the clubhouse had me more wired than I'd expected; there was no way I was going to sleep yet.
I liked our neighborhood at night. In the daytime, it was active, people coming and going, work being done, lawns being mowed. At night it was predictably quiet. Front porch lights were lit, solar garden lights let off a soft glow, but there was nothing to drown out the sounds of the crickets and, in the river behind the next street over, the frogs.
I had been living in apartments for so much of my life after moving out of my aunt's house that I had all but forgotten what it was like to hear nature, to know actual quiet.
There were no arguments heard one floor up,
no music blaring from some late-night party, no slamming doors.
Just quiet.
It gave you space to think shit through. That was what I was doing, trying to find a plausible reason for our supply chain to be screwed up, when I heard the creak of the door to the neighbor's house open.
They were new neighbors.
One day, the house was empty, the next there was a car in the drive.
They must have moved in while Jelly was at school and I was at the clubhouse. I'd gotten a far away look at a woman and some guy with the gangly-limbed body that only belonged to a teenaged boy, once but had never met them personally.
I only realized my screw-up when Jelly had informed me that I was rude for not introducing myself to the neighbors. And, by then, it was too late.
The car in the driveway was gone as it always seemed to be at night, returning around the time I got up in the morning.
The mom worked the graveyard shift.
And as someone who used to do it, I sympathized with her, even if we'd never met.
"Don't imagine your mother knows you are leaving the house after midnight, does she?" I asked.
No, it wasn't my business. I didn't know the kid. But having Jelena had changed my view on a lot of things. I liked to think that if a neighbor caught Jelly trying to sneak out, that they would try to put a stop to it too. Nothing good came of kids slinking off after midnight. Especially not in a town as unstable as Navesink Bank could be at times.
Besides, I hadn't seen a man around the house.
I figured us single parents had to stick together.
"Mind your business, man," he snapped back, closing the door so carefully that I figured someone had to be inside, even if there wasn't a car in the driveway. Maybe a babysitter too. Even though this kid was at least thirteen or fourteen.
Up close, he looked even skinnier than from afar, his arms and legs all out of proportion.
Colson (The Henchmen MC Book 20) Page 1