Dark Horse Read online

  Table of Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  Dedication

  - 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!

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  Dedication

  - 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!

  Copyright © 2017 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/coka

  DARK HORSE

  Jessica Gadziala

  DEDICATION:

  To Mark Yaros, my attorney, who will never read this, but who put an end to two-month's worth of stress, so I could focus and finally get this book written.

  Not all heroes wear capes, but sometimes they can recite hundreds of pages of mortgage paperwork verbatim time and time and time again and then give you keys to your new house.

  Definition

  Dark horse:

  därk hôrs : noun : a candidate about whom little is known but who unexpectedly wins or succeeds.

  ONE

  Enzo

  Fresh start.

  That was what he had to keep in mind as he spent a weekend packing up everything he owned. Well, everything except furniture, and the guns, knives, burner phones, and clothing with emblems that represented the life he was leaving behind.

  To not mince words, Enzo had been a drug dealer, pimp, and gang leader.

  Was it a glorious job? No.

  Was it what he had planned for his life? Of course not.

  What he planned was a sports scholarship to college where he could make something of himself, get out of the low income, unstable life he had been raised in.

  But then a freak injury ripped all that away from him.

  He hadn't given in right at first. He had a loving mother who brought him up right, even if the circumstances were less than ideal. He did the right thing. He got out, got a soul-sucking job, worked his ass off to try to make ends meet.

  They never did quite meet.

  And then his mother died.

  And, with nothing else to live the right way for, he went ahead and joined his half-brother in the Third Street gang back in Navesink Bank, New Jersey.

  For a long, long time, there was no looking back, no thinking things through, no regretting his decisions. He didn't second-guess the violence that needed to be utilized to keep the men in line when he eventually rose to power. He didn't stop to think that maybe the prostitutes would have found better employment if the opportunity to sell themselves wasn't so easy to find. He didn't even really think twice about the addicts his heroin was creating, the inevitable overdoses, the gang turf wars.

  All he knew was that the struggle was over.

  And sometimes, that was enough to make you turn a blind eye to all the evil around you.

  But that was in the past, he reminded himself as he hefted boxes into his arms and took off toward the elevator to his new apartment building.

  New York City.

  If there was ever a place people went to start over, to build a new life, that was it.

  You could be anyone.

  He was counting on that.

  Because the man he had been for the past decade was not the man he wanted to be anymore, the man he wanted his family to see when they looked at him.

  The apartment building was actually pretty similar to the one he had in Navesink Bank. Whereas he used to live in a shitty area because he kind of had to be near his gang, in the city, it was simply the best he could afford until he started working full time again.

  That was the whole reason he was in the city to begin with.

  He had a job opportunity.

  To be a private investigator.

  Was he qualified?

  Nope.

  Did he even have a license?

  Again, no.

  But, apparently, that didn't seem to be a factor.

  Or, at least, that was the bull his brother was feeding him. He wouldn't exactly put it past Paine to pull that on him - tell him the job was guaranteed just to get him out of Navesink Bank and away from all his old contacts.

  Because, unlike Paine who had decided one day that he just didn't want in the life anymore and had gotten out, Enzo hadn't chosen anything. He had been pushed out. He had his organization taken from him.

  Was it maybe the best thing for him? Well, only time would tell.

  It had been a long ass time since he was a normal person who made money on the books, and paid taxes, and didn't keep a gun in his waistband, and wasn't always on the lookout for cops or backstabbers in his operation.

  He wasn't entirely convinced he was going to acclimate as well to civilian life as his half-brother and half-sisters were hoping he would.

  But, for them, those people he had worried sick for years, who had all but given up hope in him, he was willing to give it his best shot.

  So he was willing to overlook the fact that the lock on the front door was busted and that the fake wood linoleum in the lobby was ugly as fuck to begin with, but also peeling and worn. He was also ignoring the way the elevator made an ominous clicking sound as it moved up floors, and the decades-worth of dirt staining the carpets in the hall that led to his apartment in the far corner, right in front of the stairway exit and the window out the side that overlooked the lovely view of the back dumpsters.

  Living large, he was.

  But it was just a pitstop on the way to a better life.

  Or so he was trying to believe.

  So he had to believe.

  Otherwise, he wouldn't have been too happy with the one bedroom apartment with peeling godawful brown and red wallpaper, stained and ripped carpets which he assumed had, at one time, been some shade of white, the small galley kitchen with hideous red-topped counters, oven straight out of the fifties, and a minuscule apartment-sized fridge, the chipped black and white tile in the bathroom, the inch-thick grime in the shower stall, or the cracked windows and only half-working radiator.

  As it was, he was making do.

  Well, after a complete week of cleaning.

  See, he had a need for things to be in order.

  It was something he had long-sinc
e learned to blame on feeling out of control most of his life, so he controlled the only thing he could - the environment around him. Everything had a place, was in its place, and was dusted, swept, and bleached.

  If it wasn't, well, that simply wasn't an option.

  It had to be.

  So this new apartment was his absolute worst nightmare.

  He piled the box on the counter which he had already scrubbed with bleach, then cracked his neck, grabbed the rest of the cleaning supplies, and set to work.

  "Fuck," he growled several hours later after the bathroom and bedroom had been cleaned to an acceptable level.

  The carpets were proving... difficult.

  Impossible might have been a better descriptor.

  He knew there were rules and shit about changing anything in your apartment, but about half an hour before, he had made up his mind to fuck his security deposit and start making some changes. First, the carpet had to go. Then the wallpaper that was stained with nicotine despite the fact that smoking wasn't allowed in the building. After that, well, he was personally offended by the countertops in the kitchen, and wasn't exactly a fan of getting the soles of his feet torn up after a shower thanks to the jagged tile edges.

  He hadn't exactly left Navesink Bank penniless, but he only had so much money to live off, and he knew the job wasn't a guarantee. He would need to prove himself. If he didn't, he was out of a job, and wasting through his savings trying to find another one.

  He had no business forking out money to redecorate some other man's building, but if he did all the work himself, and got everything on the cheap, well, no one would blame him for wanting to make a few alterations.

  And he would be able to sleep at night knowing everything was fresh.

  That was a bit OCD of him, but fuck, it was just how he was wired.

  But he needed to try at least to sleep in his disgusting apartment that night to be somewhat rested for his first day at work the next day if he wanted to make a good first impression. He wasn't sure how much Paine had told this Xander Rhodes guy about him and his past, so he wasn't sure how much he needed to prove himself. If he knew his whole past and was cool with it, then he figured he didn't have that much to worry about. But if he only got bits and pieces of said past and was going to need to slowly divulge the whole truth in dribs and drabs over time then, well, he really needed to stack his deck in his favor before any of that went down.

  Besides, from what he could tell from his research, this Xander Rhodes guy wasn't exactly the poster boy for legality either. He had grown up on the streets, fighting, and squatting in abandoned buildings. Then he had opened his PI place without a license of any kind, known for using his fists perhaps more than his head in the early days. He had always been the guy you went to when no one else would take your case, when it seemed hopeless, or maybe too dangerous.

  Granted, rumor was, he had settled down over the past few years, had taken on new men to do the more dangerous work. This was likely due to his woman, Ellie, who had softened him a bit.

  A good woman did that; they smoothed out your rough edges. Not all the way, just enough so you didn't cut everyone who tried to get close.

  And, hell, if he wanted a man who was willing to do what it took, willing to walk into a lion's den waving around a piece of meat, well, Enzo was pretty sure he was the man for the job.

  He was hungry, plain and simple.

  To prove himself.

  To prove to those around him that he could do it. He could reform. He could rebuild his life. He could be something more.

  True, he had not a lick of fucking experience.

  But he was a fast learner.

  How hard was it to take pictures of people fucking anyway? To sit in a car for hours on end, waiting to catch sight of someone, to do some trolling around online?

  Chances were, most of the jobs would actually be that boring. Who hired private investigators more than someone trying to prove their spouse was cheating, right?

  Granted, Enzo knew that Xander was pretty well known for getting missing kids back off of the streets, and into the arms of their loving families.

  Who better to help with that than someone who used to run the streets? Who knew how dealers and junkies operated, where they were likely to hide, what kind of protection they might have, how to stop an overdose before it took the client - and the paycheck - away?

  The fact of the matter was, there were just some jobs criminals had better experience for. Tracking down skips, seeing as they had likely jumped bail at some point as well. Finding jail breakers, seeing as anyone who had ever been in the penn had thought about what they would do if they got free, where they would hide so they wouldn't get caught. Trudging through the filth of the streets, well when you were raised in the gutters, you knew all about the dirt therein.

  He might not have been qualified on paper, but that didn't mean he wasn't the best candidate for the job.

  Enzo dropped down in bed, staring at the ceiling of his apartment, suddenly realizing why he should have gone for the top floor, even though it wasn't the one that was close to the elevators and stairs.

  Because one floor above him, a couple were turning in for the night too, but they were fucking so hard that the bed sounded like it was about to drop through the fucking ceiling.

  Enzo scraped his hands down his face, trying to ignore the slight stirring of desire in his system at the sounds of the woman's moaning.

  Fucking hadn't exactly been high priority for him in a while.

  His gang, Third Street, had been going to shit, falling on rough times, dealing with dissent in the ranks thanks to an unsteady supply, and therefore, not quite so steady payouts. You didn't take time to go to the bar and find a dime to take home and give a tour of your bedsheets to when your operation was one bad move, one supply shortage, or one whispered rumor from fucking splintering apart.

  And tits and ass weren't exactly on your mind when that organization that had been your life for years, that had cost you your relationship with your step-brother, with a woman you saw as a mother, with your little step-sisters who meant the world to you, got ripped away from you.

  You couldn't think about pussy when the men you had commanded for years, men you literally trusted with your life, turned on you. When they gave you a beat-out that you could still feel in your busted - but mending - ribs weeks later, that would always be in your reflection when you looked in the mirror because you had a scar down your face to remind you.

  Moans, whimpers, nails scraping down your back as she came wasn't top priority when your step-brother came charging into your apartment with a gun... for the second time.

  And after-sex-talking and laughing weren't high priority when you finally see your family again, and they look at you with a mix of heartbreak, fear, and hope.

  He simply had too much shit going on to waste time finding some one-night-stand. And seeing as he had no time for anything more than that - if he even wanted such a thing - his sex drive had just been depressed under all the uncertainty, the stress, the more-than-mild self-loathing.

  But he was only a man after all.

  No red-blooded, healthy man could hear a fuckfest going on one floor above and not feel his cock start to get hard.

  He had a feeling, too, with how hard they were going at it, with how much enthusiasm they seemed to be putting into it, with the declarations of love during it, that this wasn't going to be a one-night thing. They would be keeping the building up every night for the foreseeable future.

  And since work was his main priority for a good long while, until he gained Xander's trust, until he proved himself, until he was stable, then, well, he was just going to have to deal with the real-life porn - and accompanying half-hard cock - every night for a while.

  It was a small price to pay for a new life.

  Hell, maybe if he could get his shit together, get a steady paycheck, rebuild his nest egg, maybe then he could consider finding himself a woman.

 
; Not for a one-night thing.

  Quite frankly, he was getting way too fucking old to be doing bed hopping every week.

  Maybe it was his step-brother, Paine, and his woman Elsie who softened his stance on relationships. He had watched that man go through hell to get his woman back when shit went down, and she got taken. He had looked completely and utterly torn up at the idea of anything happening to her.

  Enzo, a lifelong fan of casual sex, could see the merit of that, in caring about someone that much, in wanting to protect them more than your own self-interests, in wanting to settle the fuck down and lay foundations.

  It was something to aspire to at least.

  Some day.

  When he was far enough removed from his past to be able to consider that.

  As it stood, what was he supposed to say to a woman who asked him about his past?

  Oh, you know, I had a normal, soul-crushing nine-to-five in the hopes of keeping my mother proud of me. But then she died, taking what fight was left in me, and I joined a gang. Then, when the old leader - who was also my brother - wanted out, he shot me for standing in the way, and I took over. Then I spent several years selling drugs to junkies, prostituting women, and beating the ever-loving shit out of people who threatened my operation.

  Yeah, like that was ever going to work.

  Any decent woman would run screaming from that reality.

  Also, quite frankly, he didn't want to have to be put in that embarrassing position. And it was embarrassing to him. He wasn't one of those men who was proud of his criminal background, of running a small-scale empire. He simply wasn't raised that way. He was raised with a mother who wanted nothing but the best for him, who worked her ass off to try to keep him on the straight-and-narrow. He'd been on the right track. He could see the sun, could feel the rays warming his skin.

  Then he got dropped down into a fucking hole.