Cary Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Rights

  Family Tree

  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

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  CARY

  Henchmen MC - Next Gen #5

  —

  Jessica Gadziala

  Copyright © 2022 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 design: Jessica Gadziala

  Cover image credit: Shutterstock .com/ Cara-Foto

  Family Tree

  Valen and Violet(Vi) - Adler and Lou’s kids

  Layna - Edison and Lenny’s daughter

  Louana (Lou) - Luce and Evan’s daughter

  Seth - Repo and Maze’s son

  Willa (Wills, Willow) - Paine and Elsie’s daughter

  Billie - Sugar and Peyton’s daughter

  Finn - Reign and Summer’s son

  Hope - Renny and Mina’s daughter

  CHAPTER ONE

  Abigail

  Sweat mingled with the dirt that had gotten kicked up on my chest and arms as I knelt so low to run that my thighs screamed in objection.

  Being as small as possible was the most important thing right then. Small meant harder to see. Harder to see meant I might actually be able to get away.

  A part of me was in disbelief I’d gotten as far as I had already.

  I wanted to say it was all part of the plan, that I’d worked things out down to the most minute detail. But the fact of the matter was, there was a lot of dumb luck involved. Sure, I had all my plans in place. The thing was, I wasn’t supposed to act on it for another two weeks. I had the hour set and everything.

  When life threw you an opportunity, though, you had to grab it with both hands.

  I didn’t get a lot of those.

  Opportunities.

  So I couldn’t look away from this one when there was some sort of commotion in the foyer of the house followed by a rushed meeting behind closed doors in the study. A closed-door meeting that had all but the very bare minimum members of the guard abandoning their posts.

  I knew better than to think there would be no one watching. There was always someone watching. Especially to keep an eye on me.

  You’re a flight risk, pequeña ave.

  Little bird.

  That was what he called me.

  A little bird with clipped wings in her gilded cage.

  So he made sure all the possible exits were locked down tight, and there was someone always keeping an eye in case I tried to escape.

  I’d just been lucky in that the guard who was closest to me was young and dumb, answering a call from a girl while on-duty and watching her as she, it sounded like, pleasured herself for him.

  He would pay for the mistake with his life.

  The part of me that was still good and moral and caring wanted to feel bad about that.

  The part of me that had been kept as a prisoner in a mansion in a foreign country for actual years while these men looked on and said and did nothing, well, she wasn’t quite as magnanimous.

  He could die.

  They could all die for all I cared.

  So long as I got away before that.

  A hiss escaped me as a branch from one of the shrubs I was squat-running along sliced down the skin of my bare arm. It would match the other ones up and down my arms, legs, neck, and the side of my face.

  It would have been easier to run across the lush green grounds. But the cameras were sure to see me if I dared. The longer I went without detection, the more chance of getting away I had.

  No.

  Not chance.

  There was no option.

  I had to get away.

  Because if I didn’t...

  Well, let’s just say that the consequences would be swift, fierce, and very painful.

  Much more painful than some slices up and down my body.

  I pulled to a stop at the side of the estate, taking slow, deep breaths to calm my frantic heartbeat before I craned my neck out to look into the driveway.

  Sleek black cars lined the circle drive at almost all times, day and night. Because Raúl’s operation never slept. So his men rarely got a chance to either.

  My original plan had involved grocery delivery day and the careful theft of the grocery store van.

  But it was in the middle of the night.

  There wouldn’t be any deliveries for days.

  I was going to need to steal one of their cars.

  There was one perk to being the unwilling kept woman of a cartel drug lord—I got a lot of time to observe things. Like how the organization worked. Like how the men behaved.

  Which was how I knew that every one of those cars would have the keys or key fobs inside of them. Because no one would dare walk onto Raúl’s property and attempt to take from him. Not if they wanted to live anyway.

  Rushing toward the cars would mean a much higher likelihood of someone seeing me. The cameras absolutely would. Even if no one was watching them currently, when they rewound them back, they would see me taking one of the cars.

  It didn’t matter, though.

  I wasn’t going to keep the car.

  I just needed it to get as far as fast as I could.

  Then I was going to ditch it, then take steps to get out of Mexico, and back to the United States.

  Then I had to search for the only person in the world I thought could help me.

  A man who probably forgot I existed, one who might not be happy with me showing up at his doorstep with all the problems chasing behind me.

  But there was no other choice.

  There was nowhere else to go.

  Decision made, I crushed one arm to the backpack I had slung across my chest to keep it from bouncing against my body and making any sort of noise. I’d already kicked off my shoes on the back porch. If I was careful, I could get into the car without making a sound until I turned over the engine.

  And with that, before I could let myself think myself out of it, I flew forward over the pea gravel that lined the flowerbeds to keep the weeds down, then across a few yards of lush lawn, the soft blades a nice break for my sore soles, then onto the warm paver driveway.

  I threw myself into the car, ducking low, and locking the doors.

  I hadn’t driven a car in six years.

  Or was it longer?

  Time was getting harder and harder to hold onto, just sand sliding through my hand as I desperately tried to hold onto it.

  But I’d at least been in one of these cars before, so as soon as I saw the fob sitting in one of the cupholders, I knew all I had to do was press the break and then the pus
h-to-start button.

  And just like that, the car purred to life.

  I didn’t hesitate.

  I threw it into drive and drove off.

  Not flooring it, not until I was out of the driveway anyway. Because, amazingly, no one came out to stop me.

  Oh, they would be coming. I had no doubt about that. Raúl would never let me get away. Or get away with making a fool of him. So they would come. In force. Combing every neighborhood and city until they found me.

  Which was why my first stop involved grabbing hair dye, makeup, and scissors.

  But I didn’t dare stop for long enough to put them to use yet. I drove for another two hours before I abandoned the car behind a busy restaurant, then took off on foot, not knowing if the cars had trackers, and not wanting to risk them getting to me faster than I could at least drastically change my appearance.

  I locked myself into a filthy gas station bathroom where I stood in front of the mirror, looking at the me I’d always known for the last time, with my wavy strawberry blonde hair, and my freckled face, and my big gray eyes, all of which made me look younger than I was.

  Raúl liked the innocent look. I’d been so naive about what a red flag that was.

  It was why he’d never let me dye my hair or wear makeup. And I was allowed to cut my hair, but only under his supervision, and the hairdresser was threatened with the loss of her hands if she took more off than he said she could.

  On a disgusted sigh, I reached back to part my hair up the back, pulling the strands forward, quickly twisting each side into braids, then reaching for the scissors I’d picked up.

  It didn’t matter if it wasn’t even.

  I wasn’t going for perfect.

  I was going for drastically different.

  Exhaling hard, I snipped the long locks into a long bob that skirted my shoulder. Then, since there was no going back, I did the same on the other side.

  I gathered up the hair and tossed it before going for the box of dark brown dye, mixing, and pouring it all over my head.

  I’d never dyed my hair before.

  And I hadn’t been prepared for how different I would look, how strange it would feel to look in the mirror and see someone who was not quite me looking back.

  By the time I was done, I had dark dye staining my arms, neck, and a couple of dots on my face since washing all that out under a bathroom sink with just an empty bottle to use as a shower head had been a lot more complicated than I’d anticipated.

  But it was done. That was all that mattered.

  I set to work on the makeup with clumsy fingers and only a cursory knowledge of how to use any of it.

  In my childhood home, makeup had been considered prideful and, therefore, sinful. In my ex-husband’s home, he’d seen it as “whorish.”

  And then Raúl had been too controlling to let me experiment.

  So I was working off of random snippets I’d caught on commercials or TV shows. Which meant that my mascara had smudged all over my eyelids, my liner was a lot more raccoonish than I’d set out to do, and my dark lipstick looked like it was bleeding outward off my lips. We weren’t even going to talk about how lopsided my brows looked.

  But it was different.

  Different was all that mattered, not good.

  I lifted the liner one last time, pressing a beauty mark up on one cheek, masking a distinguishing dimple I had there.

  By the time I changed into a pair of linen shorts and a tank—clothes Raúl would never let me be caught in outside of the confines of the master suite—I wasn’t sure I would even recognize myself if I saw me on the street.

  I looked, I don’t know, harder, than a woman I would have recognized.

  I guessed that was fitting, though.

  I was harder.

  Years of being browbeaten and abused would do that to a woman.

  “You can do this,” I told myself, grabbing the sides of the sink as I leaned in closer, willing that niggling little negative voice inside to believe me.

  I just had to find a bus and take it to the next town.

  And then the town after that.

  And after that.

  By my rough estimate, I was about twenty hours away from the US border. That didn’t factor in transfers and possible routes that didn’t go straight in the direction I needed to go. But it would be maybe two, three days, tops, until I could get out of Mexico and, hopefully, out of the grips of Raúl.

  I wasn’t stupid.

  He had contacts all over the States, but it wouldn’t be like it was in Mexico, where he had people watching all over the place.

  I figured that, by morning, everyone in the country who was even loosely employed by the cartel would know I was missing, would be on the lookout for me.

  Once I was on US soil, I at least knew that, worst case, I could seek out police for help. Years of living with Raúl taught me that there weren’t a whole lot of forces in either Mexico or the US that weren’t corrupted by criminals. And the cartel had a pretty good hold on most of them.

  Which was why the police weren’t my first line of defense.

  No.

  I needed someone who could operate around the law.

  Someone who could help me untangle myself from the vines of the cartel for good.

  Someone who was a criminal himself.

  I didn’t even know how to begin to go about finding him. The last time I’d heard anything about him, he’d been in prison. But he should have been released a while ago, barring any new charges. And I really hoped he didn’t have any of those, because he would be useless to me if he was still behind bars.

  I couldn’t imagine it would be too hard to find him, though.

  He was a lifelong biker.

  I doubted he was going to change career paths late in life.

  He would have gotten out, and gone back to what was comfortable and familiar.

  So I just had to figure out which of the biker, you know, organizations—or whatever they called themselves—he belonged to.

  I knew that there were a lot of those, but I also knew that Cary had always belonged to the, you know, one-percent ones. Which meant that ninety-nine percent of the biker clubs could be marked off my list. I just had to look for the criminal ones.

  I also knew that Cary said he preferred to have “all the seasons.” So he wouldn’t move too south or out to California.

  It was a start.

  I just had to cross my fingers that he even remembered who I was, let alone was fond enough of that memory to want to get involved in my mess.

  I mean, it wasn’t like I was going to have him and his biker friends try to murder an entire cartel or anything. I just needed someone “in the lifestyle” to advise me on what I needed to do to get and stay safe, to be free after so long.

  God, I wasn’t even sure I fully grasped the concept of free anymore.

  After so many years living under such strict control, just being able to choose the color of my nails seemed like a luxurious amount of freedom. I couldn’t fathom choosing my own home, my clothes, my furniture, what I got to eat, or what experiences I wanted to have.

  With a wistful sigh, I cleaned up as much of my mess as I could, then made my way out of the bathroom, walking toward a future that was uncertain, yes, but for the first time in maybe my entire life, it was mine.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cary

  “It’s not natural. That’s all I’m saying,” Dezi griped as he slouched in the passenger seat of the SUV we needed to take because he claimed it was impossible for a man to balance on a motorcycle before seven in the morning.

  “And don’t come at me with all that logic shit about how through the course of human history, waking up with the sun was how we always functioned and blah blah blah,” he went on, stealing my argument from me. “‘Cause the way I see it, those poor saps didn’t have two-for-one shot deals at the gentleman’s club.”

  “Don’t blame me, Dez, you were the one who wanted me to drag you with me
to the gym,” I reminded him.

  Dezi got on kicks when it came to his fitness. Which was good since, with his lifestyle habits, if he didn’t occasionally knuckle-down and work at it, he would probably be seven-hundred-pounds and need to be fork-lifted out of the clubhouse.

  He would go for a few months, eating endless amounts of shit, drinking too much, and never moving his body. He’d get a little doughy. And maybe someone said something about it and got him determined to lose the extra couple of pounds.

  Which was where I came in.

  Hey, Zaddy, I want to be ripped like you.

  Or some variation of that phrase.

  “Well, that version of me didn’t have a brain soaked in booze and memories of lap dances from some pretty ladies.”

  When it came to biker stereotypes, Dezi proudly sported most of them. He liked to do it all hard. Party, drink, eat, fight, fuck, and fuck up. Which meant that when he set his mind to putting in some effort at the gym, he actually made a lot of progress in a small amount of time. The guy made me feel like I was slacking when he was in the right headspace to make shit happen.

  Clearly, though, his mind was on girls and parties. And, to be fair, that was where my mind had been when I was young and carefree as he was.

  I mean, I wasn’t old. But when you get to a certain age, shit starts to creak and fall apart if you don’t set your mind to taking care of it. So, I’d dedicated a lot of my life to keeping fit and eating right. To slow down the years that felt like they kept coming faster and faster.

  Days were still slow for guys like Dezi.

  And he liked to spend that extra time on his hands having fun.

  I couldn’t blame him, but I was a pretty dedicated physical trainer when he demanded it of me. So, despite all the bitching and moaning, he was going to go to the gym with me and sweat out all the shit he’d put in his system the night before.

  “This might be that last round of L.I.T.s talking,” Dezi said, leaning his head against the window. “But you seem to be heading in the wrong direction, man.”