Counterfeit Love Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Dedication

  A Note to Readers

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Writing Playlist

  Also By Jessica Gadziala

  About the Author

  Stalk Her!

  Counterfeit Love

  A novel by

  Jessica Gadziala

  Dedication

  This one goes out to my baby chicks

  who really tried their best to distract me from writing it.

  A Note to Readers

  This book is a completey standalone novel.

  But once upon a time, a town called Navesink Bank was founded. It was full of outlaw bikers, loan sharks, fixers, hired muscle, and the mob.

  All those people do have books.

  But you do not need to read them to enjoy Counterfeit Love. If you read this book, and then decide you want to read those other stories, there is a list of titles at the back of this book.

  *Sensitive readers please be aware of a trigger warning for sexual assault in the heroine's past *

  Alrighty.

  With all that said -

  Welcome (back) to Navesink Bank.

  I hope you love it as much as I do.

 
  Prologue

  PAST

  Chris

  I hated the sound of footsteps.

  It was such a common, normal sound, something that acted as background noise most of the time.

  Except, maybe, if you were walking down an abandoned street at night, if you were supposed to be alone in your apartment, if the sound of footsteps harbingered other things. Things not so innocuous. Things that made fear course through your system--twist your stomach, tingle up your spine, make a chill wash over your skin, causing goosebumps to prickle up.

  These footsteps were ever panic-inducing.

  Because these footsteps, the steady thunk of boots on stairs, they never brought anything good to me.

  They brought pain and abuse and humiliation.

  They brought injuries that lasted for days.

  They brought the need to escape into my own mind, to go somewhere that wasn't filled with cruelty and brutality.

  I could go to Christmas. The ones before my mother died. The ones that had a twinkling tree I would slide under to stare up at. I would close my eyes and take a deep breath and smell brown sugar and oats as we baked oatmeal cookies together that we'd found in a recipe book I had picked up at a Scholastic book fair at school when I was nine, because I knew my mom loved to bake, that we liked to do it together.

  Sometimes, though, Christmas memories were hard, didn't work to help me escape.

  Because there was one Christmas in a foster home where there was an artificial tree in a corner only half put together, light-less, with no presents to pile on the skirt, with no cookies on the counter for "Santa" even though we all stopped believing many years before.

  There was just leftover, dried-out macaroni and cheese with watered down Hawaiian Punch, and the vague hum of A Christmas Story playing on a marathon in the living room.

  And when you were trying to escape grabbing hands, probing fingers, other things... a depressing orphaned Christmas in a rickety bed in a room shared with two other system-hardened teenagers simply wasn't going to cut it.

  So sometimes I went to the beach.

  Some years, when we were really frugal, when we cut back on manicures and eating out and buying clothes for the changes of season, we managed to take a holiday at the end of Summer. After most of the families had abandoned the warm sand to go back to their lives and start early sleep schedules to get on track for the upcoming school year, to buy bottomless supplies of notebooks and pencils and tissues. We practically had the shoreline to ourselves, the town itself entirely ours for the taking.

  I would be woken up to my mother dropping down on my bed, waking me up with strands of my own hair tickling my nose. She'd drag me out of bed, down the street, and onto the beach, cool sand between our toes as we walked, welcoming the waking sun.

  Those memories were soft and warm, comforting enough to keep the chill away.

  But the footsteps came hard and fast and without warning.

  I must have drifted off without realizing it, lost time, lost the ability to get ahead of what was coming, to slip away.

  Because, I learned, once you let the panic pulse through your body, there was no stopping it. There were no memories strong enough to bank out what was going to happen.

  A hand grasped my ankle.

  Unfastening the shackle that had long since eaten away far too many layers of skin, leaving me constantly raw and aching.

  The weight, something familiar and, in its own way comforting, falling away.

  Hands sank into my hips, crushing into bone--since the healthy layer of flesh had been starved away--yanking hard, pulling up, dropping me on my feet that refused to work, refused to be active participants in my own torture.

  Lips cursed me, told me I would pay for being so difficult.

  Those were lies.

  I would pay either way.

  Good or bad, the same outcome would befall me.

  There was no reason to believe anything resembling kindness or leniency existed in my world anymore.

  I took short, fast, shallow breaths, having found that if I did so long enough, things got hazy, I got to see, hear, feel, think a little less.

  But I was hauled upward, body curling over a shoulder, ribs painfully pressed against an angular shoulder bone.

  Then more footsteps.

  Up up up those stairs.

  Clomping across the floors of the house above.

  Pausing in front of the door.

  The door to a room.

  A room with a bed.

  A bed with a metal headboard.

  A headboard that sometimes had handcuffs or rope.

  Handcuffs or rope that would slip around my wrists, clasped or tied too tightly, biting into soft, delicate flesh by someone's hard hands.

  Hands that would do other damage.

  Sometimes, when I was particularly unlucky, multiple sets of hands. Of teeth. Of other things.

  Of men who all meant to gain satisfaction

  By inflicting pain on me.

  This was the part where I was supposed to wake up.

  Nightmares ended right before the worst came, right?

  I was supposed to wake up.

  But I couldn't wake up.

  Because this wasn't a dream.

  This was my life.

  Day in and day out.

  For more months than I cared to remember.

  I didn't wake up.

  No matter how much I wished I would.

  Chapter One

  Chris

  The gasp caught in my throat as I knifed up in bed, a cold sweat soaking the neckline of my t-shirt.

  "It's alright," a voice said, making my stomach clench with knee-jerk fear.

  Even though I was safe here.

  Even though I had worked so hard to make sure no one could hurt me again.

  "I still get the nightmares too," the voice said as the owner's arm moved out to flick on the light, casting the windowless space into stark brightness, making me wince.

  Fe
rryn would have nightmares still.

  Even if she had been luckier than I had.

  Or maybe she wasn't luckier.

  Just better prepared.

  Stronger.

  A fighter.

  It didn't matter how many years of therapy I had gone through after I got out of that hellhole, there were still times I would victim-blame myself.

  That sounded ridiculous. Who victim-blamed others, let alone themselves?

  The short answer was: most victims of any sort of violence.

  What could I have done to make sure it didn't happen to me?

  Could I have been more aware?

  Could I have fought harder?

  Could I have made myself less tempting?

  Could I have been harder to break?

  It didn't matter that I knew there was nothing I could have done, no amount of preparedness that would have made it so I wouldn't get taken. Even if I had fought harder, I was outnumbered. And it wasn't that I was tempting. The men got off on the power, not on my looks.

  And as for the breaking, well, none of us got away with all our pieces intact.

  Not even Ferryn.

  Ferryn, who became the epitome of badass in damn near every way.

  Ferryn with her short crop of dark hair, her long, lean, toned body, honed from years and years of relentless training to make her into someone who could never be hurt again.

  Even she had cracks, bits that never got glued back together quite right.

  Somehow, in a way that made me feel really bad, really small, I found a bit of comfort in that.

  "What are you doing here?" I asked, reaching up to swipe my wavy hair out of my face, trying to take a few deep breaths, something that usually managed to push back the clinging edges of the nightmares. "And I have to remind you that normal people knock instead of picking locks and trespassing."

  "Yes, well, no one would consider me normal people," she said, giving me a small smirk.

  That was fair enough.

  Not even in Navesink Bank, this town of ours overrun with outlaw bikers, loan sharks, the mob, and dozens of other criminals, would someone like Ferryn--a vigilante bent on taking down human traffickers, for what were obvious reasons to the two of us who had spent time in a basement because of those very sorts of people--be considered normal.

  She'd just come back to town a short time before, after eight years away from her friends and family.

  I hadn't seen her in all that time, either.

  But I had been in touch.

  In fact, I had become a sort of benefactor to her. Sending money, phones, anything she might need to continue on with her mission. And when she didn't need anything from me financially, I sent her the other pieces she needed

  The locations of human traffickers.

  Since I had access to that information when she didn't.

  Then she could hunt them down, take them out, continue a mission that we both held near and dear to our hearts.

  A mission I was looking into ways to fund as we moved forward, as we expanded.

  "Why are you here at all? Shouldn't you be playing footsie with Vance?" I asked

  A girlhood crush turned love-of-her-life even after eight years apart, they were the kind of story that made most women--and maybe even a fair number of men--swoon.

  I had no romantic sensibilities to speak of, but I was happy for her regardless.

  Even if a selfish part of me worried about what would happen to this little life mission of ours if she settled down, if she became the wife and mother many women eventually wanted to have be a part of who they were.

  Which was why my plan was to expand, add more people to the team. It also explained the need for funds.

  "Couldn't sleep," she admitted, shrugging her narrow shoulders, reaching down into her boot, pulling out a double-bladed karambit, using the razor-sharp tip to carelessly clean under her nails. "Those couple minutes before sleep. That's when the ugly tends to sneak in," she admitted.

  See, I had been in therapy for the eight years since I left that basement. Ferryn, on the other hand, had not. She'd been in the woods with a reclusive former dark ops guy, learning how to be an even bigger badass than she had once been.

  Which meant she hadn't been able to do all the inward work, hadn't learned to exorcise those demons.

  Her opening up to me about it--even a little bit--was pretty huge for her.

  "For me, it's the clinging moments after waking up. Where things are spacey and it is hard to tell past from present, real from make-believe," I told her.

  "I am going to reconnect with my old best friend from, you know, before the basement. I haven't told her I'm back yet."

  Hence the anxiety level.

  She'd changed.

  We all had.

  And there would always be a part of her that was a sixteen-year-old girl with a best friend who sincerely hoped friendships could span the ages, could be accepting of even the most unacceptable character changes.

  "Life has changed a lot for all of us. She won't be expecting the little girl you used to be. And you can't expect that from her either. But... she's your best friend."

  "Did you have a best friend? You know... before?"

  "I had close friends before my mom died. But once I went into the system, there was just no way to keep in touch with them anymore."

  "Do you wonder if they knew that you went missing?"

  "No."

  Because, as terrible as it was to think, most missing children didn't get any news coverage. Especially those from foster care. That was why girls in the foster system were much more likely to be victims of trafficking than other children in average families.

  "Maybe I would have made the news when I was young and cherub-faced. But most people don't care that much about sixteen-year-olds who don't have any family to miss them."

  "We care," Ferryn insisted, tone fierce.

  "Yes," I agreed, nodding. "We do."

  Because someone had to.

  Because no one had missed me.

  Because no one had been looking for me.

  Because, had Ferryn not mustered her fighting spirit to get us out, had her family and friends not been working night and day to find us and help us get away, I likely would have died in that basement. Or been thrown on a ship and trafficked overseas until my body gave up.

  I wouldn't have gotten away.

  I wouldn't have gone to therapy.

  I wouldn't have found a family--Ferryn's aunt and uncle--to adopt me, to give a damn, to help me heal, to show me love, to give me all the resources I needed to come out with my sanity mostly intact.

  That was a thought that kept me up at night.

  That there were girls--and boys--sitting in basements, in warehouses, in abandoned buildings, on ships, in the backs of businesses; that they were being abused like I had been; that no one was looking for them. Or, even if they were looking, likely would never find them.

  That was where we came in.

  Because Ferryn had the skills to get them out.

  I had the ones to find those bastards, so I could sic her on them.

  "Is Aunt Lo getting more on-board with the mission?" she asked, clearly just wanting someone to sit awake with her for a little while. And since she had Vance, I figured she was coming to me because she knew I was one of the very few people in her life that understood what she was feeling, that wouldn't pity her for it.

  Lo, Ferryn's aunt, my adoptive mother, also happened to technically be my boss.

  Were she not still pretty pissed at me for keeping it a secret where Ferryn had been all those years, she would have been gung-ho to do some good in the world. That was what she did. Mom was a do-gooder at her core.

  Building her empire--a self-sustaining outlaw paramilitary camp by the name of Hailstorm--had been partially about building financial security, and making herself into someone who could never be doubted, would always be respected, if not a bit feared. But, mostly, it had been a place where she
planned to collect people. Lost causes, the world might call them. But, all she saw was potential. Much like she saw in me, even battered and bruised and emotionally eviscerated. She didn't see that damage. She saw who could be forged through and around it.

  Hailstorm had been a second home to me. And there had always been an unspoken understanding that, someday, it would be mine to run. An idea I was worried she might be reconsidering now that she learned I had been working behind her back for several years with Ferryn.

  "Somewhat," I said, shrugging.

  "She'll come around. She might be bitter now, but that has to do with me, with my running away, with my staying away for so long. She's not really mad at you. And once she realizes that, she will see what a power move it was for you to start an operation like that. Without any backup. Without any help from all the other experts at Hailstorm. That's some boss bitch shit. She will respect it once she analyzes it."

  That was true.

  My mother was nothing if not very diplomatic.

  "How did you get Lo to give you a place all to yourself here?" she asked, looking around my mini apartment made entirely of a shipping container, just like the rest of Hailstorm.

  Everyone else who worked--and lived--at Hailstorm slept in one of the giant barracks-style rooms, places that felt comfortable to them because most of them were ex-military.

  "Their PTSD nightmares can trigger mine. Last time, I had a hard time coming out of it. Spent a week in intensive therapy. We both decided it would just be better for me to have my own space."

  I tried not to feel guilty about that. If anyone else asked for a space, my mom would give them one. But the others seemed happy with their accommodations.

  And my nightmares were a lot more tolerable with my own four walls. And a locking door.

  "I am just going to help myself to a cup of coffee," she told me, moving away from my twin-sized bed crushed against a wall to make room for the chair-and-a-half in the other corner of this side of the room--velvet green and draped with a cream blanket, a giant pile of paperwork sitting on the ottoman near it.