Read TRIGGER: A Motorcycle Club Romance Novel Online
Authors: Meg Jackson
TRIGGER: A Motorcycle Club Romance Novel
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REIGN
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Flip the page to start Prologue.
“What’s on your mind, Trig?”
Reign asked, eyes narrowed to slits, mouth screwed up in worry.
“
Nothin
’,
boss,” Trigger said, spitting out his mouth guard, eyes averted. His jaw moved
in small circles. His eyes were set heavy as lead weights on the man across the
cardboard ring. Sweat trickled down the side of his face, but his chest rose
even. Too damn even to make Reign happy.
“You never lied to me yet,
Trig,” Reign reminded him. “I wouldn’t recommend starting now.”
Trigger glanced at his
President, a wincing pain in his heart. In that glance, Reign saw everything he
needed to know to make his heart fall. Whatever was going on in Trigger’s head,
it wasn’t what needed to be going on in his head. It was something that could
get him – and Reign, and the whole damn club – in a hell of a lot of trouble.
But he swallowed his words. That was the thing about Trig; he was trustworthy
in ways that transcended lying and cheating. Reign knew Trig would never do him
wrong if it wasn’t for a damn good reason.
“I’m
thinkin
’
of how to take the fall,” Trigger said, his eyes focusing once more on the man
across the ring. All around, other men stood with grimaces painted on their
faces, stone-cold and red-eyed. Smoke drifted upwards, around, the tendrils
beautiful when seen on their own but, when taken all together, forming a dirty
grey smog. Three men in particular caught Reign’s eye as he squinted through
the smoke. They’d been catching his eye all night. They were the men he was
most afraid of – which said a hell of a lot, considering how few men actually
managed to put fear in Reign’s callous heart. They were dressed almost goofily
like members of the Rat Pack, fedoras and suits and old-timey patterns on their
ties. But they weren’t goofy. Not in the least damn bit. The low muttering hum
of male voices was as thick as the smoke.
Trigger was staring at his
opponent, a big burly man with yellow teeth and a scar over his left eye that
looked somewhat like a crucifix. But he wasn’t seeing the man, so much as he
was seeing Cass, her lips parted, her body plump and yielding, her flesh like
sweet licorice under his tongue. He was seeing her, tasting her, smelling her.
And each sense, heightened by pulsing adrenaline (and a bit of whatever was in
that pill Reign had slipped him to help dull the pain), drove deep scarring
grooves through his heart. He didn’t want to remember her like that, her warm
thighs wrapped around him, her blue eyes watery with tears of pain and
pleasure, her voice like a church bell calling him to God. Yet this man across
from him did nothing – nothing – but remind him of her, even though they
couldn’t be more different. Where she had soft, rolling flesh, he had solid
muscle. He had brown eyes, brown hair. He was tall, she was short. His cheeks
were high, the bones popped out from his face like a cartoon character.
Cass’
cheeks had a constant natural blush, a trickle of
freckles, kissable, so kissable…
“Trig,” Reign said, leaning
in now to whisper in his ear. Reign’s eyes were steady on the three men in the
stupid suits. “If you’re
thinkin
’ of something
stupid, you best just tell me now. I mean it, man.”
Trigger looked back at
Reign, saw where his eyes lay, felt his spine stiffen out of instinct. He knew
he was about to do something very, very stupid. He knew he was about to fuck up
– again. He knew he wasn’t just fucking things up for himself, but for Reign
and the whole club. He knew all those things in his brain, they throbbed there,
sharp-edged and bellowing. But he knew something else, too.
He knew how lucky a guy
could be with a good woman.
And how, no matter what,
he’d have to do things for her that belied all sense and logic.
His jaw moved, but he didn’t
respond. And then, a moment later, just as he made his mind up to tell Reign
what he was
gonna
do, his body lurched forward,
another instinct. The bell had rung. It was too late now.
End
of
Prologue.
If you’re enjoying this story,
please take a minute to sign up for my mailing list! I do giveaways, cover
reveals, and advanced reader copies.
Click here to sign up!
And stick around after the epilogue
to read Part 1 of
REIGN
for free!
Flip the page to start Part 1.
Part
One:
Ten Years Earlier
“Cassidy?”
Oh, holy
crap, she thought. Suddenly, her messenger bag seemed too heavy. Her armful of
books and folders, haphazardly stuffed with papers and notes, was embarrassing.
As were her ill-fitting flare jeans with the torn-up bottoms billowing out
around her dirty tennis shoes, her too-big, worn-out blue hoodie, and her
sloppy ponytail.
“Um, just
Cass,” she said, nearly throwing the pile of books onto the cold wooden
tabletop, etched with graffiti and covered in unidentifiable black smudges. She
unwrapped herself and draped her bag around the top of the chair opposite her
new pupil. Even the chairs in the library were cold, and wobbly, with hard
wooden seats that left you feeling flat-assed if you sat in them too long.
“Thomas,”
the boy said, offering his hand. She took it, praying her palms weren’t
sweating. She hadn’t expected the boy, one year older than her, to be so
good-looking. With long red hair pulled back into a bun and a wry smile, he was
the sort of boy you’d expect to see in the headlines of some student-teacher
romance scandal.
Cass
scolded herself for her reaction; she’d long trained herself to ignore her
classmate’s looks, knowing that even the homeliest boy would consider her below
his league. It was better, then, to be blind altogether, than to have to notice
all the boys who’d never want her.
“Nice to
meet you. Do you go by…”
“Tom? No,
that’s my Dad’s name. I prefer Thomas. Thanks, by the way, for this. But just
so you know, it’s probably a waste of everyone’s time. I’m no good at school. Mad
attention issues, I guess. Only doing this ‘cause my brother says he wants to
see me graduate,” the boy said, almost seeming sheepish.
“Oh, well,
uh…yeah, no problem. I mean, I’m not, like, a professional or anything. Just
good at history. So…this unit is on the rise and fall of the USSR, right? We
covered that last month in my AP class,” Cass said, lowering her head and
shuffling through the textbooks and folders for her notes.
“Must be
nice,” Thomas said, leaning on his elbows on the desk. “Being smart.”
Cass
blushed, kept her eyes down, finding her notes but continuing to shuffle
through papers just to have something to do with her hands.
“I’m not
that smart,” she said. “I just study a lot…”
“Fuck
studying,” Thomas said with a laugh. “I’d rather be sleeping. But, so yeah.
USSR. Like the Beatles song. That’s
….that’s
about all
I know about it.”
Cass
laughed, daring to look at him. She noticed, wondering how she’d missed it in
the first place, the tattoos that peeked under his short sleeves. Her eyebrows
raised slightly, and his own eyes followed hers.
“
Wanna
see?” he asked. Before she answered, he pulled his
sleeves up slightly, revealing the slapdash collection of tattoos on both his
biceps. Skulls and dice and sloppy-looking daggers.
“Cool,” Cass
said, thinking that this guy must be the coolest guy she’d ever talked to.
Brooklyn was full of tatted-up men, but her own tiny social circle limited her
exposure to such people. She’d always had an interest in ink, though, wondering
how it would feel to have someone etch their drawings into your skin forever,
admiring the ability to withstand the pain. “What do they mean?”
He laughed,
and it sounded like a stream bubbling over rocks. Cool and fluid and easy.
“Not a
fucking thing,” he said. “Just stupid shit.” His smile dropped slightly, and he
straightened up a bit, cheeks reddening. “Oh, man, sorry about the language.”
“No, it’s
totally fine, trust me,” Cass said, somewhat thrilled that this guy, who
clearly didn’t need to worry about what she thought of him, still cared enough
to want to have some decorum. “I hear worse from my Dad on the regular.”
He smiled
again, and lowered himself, relaxing.
“So…Stalin,
yeah? And uh…
Trotskin
?”
“Trotsky,”
Cass said with a smile. “But let’s start with the basics, right?”
She slid
one copy of her note sheet, prepared that day during lunch, with the general
tenants and history of Communism in Eastern Europe, across the desk. He took it
and held it up, eyes scanning the words.
“So, it all
kind of starts in 1825, with the Decembrist Revolution…”
“Trigger, you’re
gonna
be more than an asset to this club than your brother,
if you keep
impressin
’ me like this,” Steel said,
looking at me slant-eyed. He only had one eye that worked, so every way he
looked was pretty slant-eyed. The other eye was sewn shut, almost caved in,
repulsive, in fact. But it gave him an air of
unfuckability
:
no one wanted to mess with him.
What he’d said was a
compliment, for sure, but it came with a lot of bad feelings. My brother had
given his life for the Bleeding Deacons – I couldn’t see how I could top a
sacrifice like that.
The road bumped underneath
us. I wished we were on our bikes. But you couldn’t exactly haul ten pounds of
dope, forty pounds of high-grade speed, and a couple bushels of the best
cheeba
this side of Brooklyn across the George Washington
Bridge on a couple of hogs.
Instead, we got ourselves a
bona fide FedEx truck; “Relax, It’s FedEx”, indeed. Clean tags and a dirty
registration, and a good amount of NYPD on our payroll, and we were about as
worried as a tiger in a seafood market. Life was good.
Except for my brother being
dead, of course.
That, and my no-good father
and my run-off mother and my failed attempt at getting an education and this
strange sick feeling inside my stomach that never seemed to go away, unless I
was drinking with the boys or speeding on my hog or rolling my face off at an
underground rave. Those were the kinds of things some kids did for fun. I did
them because they were the only way I could get around life without smashing
myself up against a brick wall.
But Steel didn’t know, or
didn’t care, about any of that. Probably the latter. He’d taken quite the
liking to me, which made sense considering that he’d liked Riker a lot, too. He
respected that my brother gave his life for the club, and treating me right was
as good a way as any of honoring his memory.
I respected him for it,
appreciated the fact that I was such a rookie but already had as much trust as
any of the guys who had ten years on me. I was picked for plum jobs, where the
rest of the guys my age
were
stuck licking shit off
the stripper poles after a rough night and delivering bloody messages to guys
who wronged the club.
I’d have felt guilty, but I
also knew I had something in me that a lot of other guys my age didn’t have. I
had a pretty good head on my shoulders. I did make it all the way up to junior
year of high school.
More than that, I had a nice
sense of fear that kept my eyes weathered and my shoulders hunched. I knew what
could happen to a man who let his guard down. And Steel appreciated that I
wasn’t the type to go running head-first into a situation without looking every
which way first.
He especially appreciated it
because it meant he could take it a little bit easy; with me looking around all
the time, he only had to do it
half
the
time. Already, I’d saved his ass once or twice by seeing something that didn’t
look right and pointing it out. That’s why I got to do jobs like these, where
brute strength or a steady hand just wasn’t as important as a strong sense of
my own mortality. When it came to high-volume drug deals, how fast you pulled
your piece was a lot less important than knowing you might
have
to pull your piece in the first place.
As we rattled on through
Fort Lee, leaving the fair isle of Manhattan behind us for the moment, I put my
guard on extra-high. We didn’t have nearly as many friends in New Jersey,
either on the police force or just in general. We only had five more miles before
the pick-up location, but anything could happen in one mile, never mind five.
The guys we were going to deal with, we’d dealt with three times in the past –
not enough to really make me comfortable. Most of the time, our rep was enough
to keep us safe.
But not always.
We were a big club in New
York, with two hundred and some members, and some satellite groups in the
surrounding states. The core of the Bleeding Deacons was based in Sunset Park,
a neighborhood in Brooklyn, where we operated a few strip clubs and owned some
waterfront warehouses. We mostly dealt in the drug trade and prostitution, but
Steel had his fingers in some high-profile gambling rings, too.
As we pulled up to the
vacant lot that would serve as the exchange point – a large, weedy parking lot
next to the water, where a few banged-up dinghies bobbed pathetically and high
sloping marshland obscured the view from the bridge or highway – I leaned
forward, squinting my eyes to better see what we were up against. Two guys –
that’s what we were expecting, what we’d been told to expect. And, from the
looks of it, it
was
two guys.
That is, until we got a
little closer. I squinted harder.
“Slow down a bit, Steel,” I
said out of the side of my mouth. There was something off about the scene – it
could have been the angle of the light, or a reflection off the murky waves
but…
That shadow…
Steel looked at me steadily as the truck slowed to a
crawl. There was something about the shadows under the truck. And then that
something moved.
“There’s a guy behind
there,” I said, blurting it out. I turned to Steel; he narrowed his eyes,
stopping the truck entirely and leaning forward in his seat, trying to see with
his one good eye.
“I don’t see…”
And then we heard it. A
zipping sound through the air, and then a nauseating canter as the truck
suddenly groaned over to one side.
“Fuck! Fuck!” Steel said,
and I realized that one of the men was shooting at us – he began to move
forward, gun held at chest-level, while the second man disappeared behind the truck.
Steel and I ducked through three more shots fired. The truck leveled into a
kneeling position as one bullet took out the other front tire; a second bullet
showered us in glass from the windshield; the third hit the side view mirror
and it clattered to the ground.
“Goddam guinea
sons-a-bitches,” Steel shouted, raising his own gun and firing out the broken
window; I raised my own head, gun held in two sweaty hands, finger curling
around the trigger. The man who’d been advancing now lay on the ground, a pool
of blood blossoming outward from his limp figure. The two other men – if there
were
two – were still behind the truck,
apparently unaware that their comrade had been felled.
“What do we do?” I asked,
knowing the answer before I could even finish the question. The Bleeding
Deacons were a lot of things – but we weren’t cowards. If
Tweedledee
and
Tweedledum
weren’t
gonna
come to us, we were
gonna
come to then. I kicked open
the door on my side of the truck just moments before Steel did the same.
“We kill their sorry asses,
son,” Steel said as our boots hit the ground. I felt like a SWAT guy, from the
movies, running up all crouched-down, gun still held in two hands, pointed at
the ground. A flutter, that shadow under the truck…just as the man appeared
around the back end of the hulking machine, I felt my arms rise on their own,
my finger squeezing before I could think about it, the sound of the bullet
leaving the barrel like some awful soundtrack to this awful movie.
The man yowled and fell to
the ground, clutching one knee, his pistol abandoned on the ground and then
kicked underneath the truck as he sprawled himself out, surely blind to
anything but the pain. I’d gotten him square in the kneecap, one hell of a
place to take a bullet. To my left, I heard another gunshot, then another, and
then a third. Looking over, bright red blood stained Steel’s shirt on the
shoulder, but the third man lay unmoving on the ground. Steel’s eyes met mine.
“Just a flesh wound,” he
said thickly, his face red. Before I even registered what he was doing, he
lifted the gun and fired once more, in the opposite direction of the fallen
man. I followed the bullet’s trajectory; the man I’d shot, who’d been
blubbering and crawling away from us as slow as a slug doused in salt, now
collapsed onto his chest.
Three bodies.
And I was 19.
Steel grumbled slightly as
he brushed past my shell-shocked body. The smell of blood woke my mind up in a
hurry and I trotted after him, rushing to beat him to the back of the truck. I
knew what he was hoping; that they’d brought the goods, even if they’d planned
to take the money and run.
That’s when we found the
fourth body, and things suddenly made sense. Steel turned to me with a grin
that made my stomach turn.
“I don’t reckon you shot this
one?” he said, pointing to the limp form. I shook my head no. If there were
four bodies, and we’d only shot three….
Steel tried to pull up the
lift gates, but his wounded shoulder made him wince. I rushed in to assist him;
the smile on his face as the bounty was revealed was so big it looked like a
damn banana. Just as we’d expected, the cargo was there.
And now, it was free.
Steel flipped open his
switchblade, made a tiny incision at the top of the bag of dope. Taking in a
long sniff, he threw his head back and laughed. When he looked back at me, his
eyes were glassy, drugged. He offered me a bump but I shook my head; heroin
wasn’t my bag. Speed, though…
As though reading my mind,
Steel did the same to one of the bags of white powder, and I gratefully dipped
my nose down, treating myself to a nice, long shot of high-octane amphetamine.
“Shit!” I exclaimed as I
came up from air, my eyelids wide open, feeling like I’d never be able to close
them again.
“Shit, indeed,” Steel said,
leaning backwards slightly as the opiates started to dig in. “Can you drive
back?”
“I can drive to fuckin’
Florida,” I said, hearing the extra volume in my voice and liking it. My body
felt numb and amazing at the same time. Even better than my body feeling numb
was my brain feeling numb. Suddenly, the four corpses baking on the blacktop
meant nothing to me.
Shit; it didn’t take a
genius to figure out what had happened. The two men who were meant to complete
the deal had been hijacked somehow, a rival gang taking advantage of the
situation and meaning to take the drugs
and
the money. They’d already taken care of one of the other guys by the time
we rolled up. Hell, if we hadn’t dispatched the two hijackers, they would have
killed the third guy, anyway.
Of course, to a sober and
sane mind, that didn’t justify jack shit. But right then, feeling like nothing
could be better than the way I was feeling, everything was justified. From the
corpses to the birds in the sky and everything in between. Every atom and every
molecule, it was all good, baby.
I hopped into the bed of the
truck, and we rode off, leaving the Federal Express truck kneeling forward like
a penitent at church. If we weren’t
gonna
be kneeling
down to say any prayers for our own souls, maybe that big
ol
’
rig would do it for us.
