Camden

  Contents

  TITLE

  RIGHTS

  DEDICATION

  - ONE

  - TWO

  - THREE

  - FOUR

  - FIVE

  - SIX

  - SEVEN

  - EIGHT

  - NINE

  - TEN

  - ELEVEN

  - TWELVE

  - EPILOGUE

  - DON'T FORGET!

  - IMPORTANT NOTE

  - ALSO BY JESSICA GADZIALA

  - ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  - STALK HER

  CAMDEN

  A Henchmen MC Novel

  -

  Jessica Gadziala

  Copyright © 2019 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/ Anatol Misnikou

  DEDICATION

  To Will Smith.

  For the entire "Big Willie Style" album

  that got me through the final push to finish this book while

  half-delirious at two in the morning trying to meet my deadline.

  #YouCanCallMe'Candy'Anyday

  #NotReally,IRespectJadaTooMuch

  #ButYouNeedToMakeNewMusic

  #LostAndFoundWas14YearsAgo

  #GetOnThat

  #KThanks

  ONE

  Camden

  I moved out of the clubhouse.

  I still spent a lot of time there, of course. That was what you did. What I did. Since Liv was off raising babies and Astrid was off chasing chickens around.

  I wouldn't claim it wasn't an adjustment, a big one. I went from being surrounded by women, by their shoes scattered around, their makeup piled on the counters, their blankets everywhere, their music blasting, the high, musical sound of their laughter or late-night conversations.

  Then, suddenly, I was in a clubhouse full of men. Men things, men sounds, men music.

  They were two completely different worlds.

  And, while I tried for a long time, it never quite felt like home to me.

  They accepted me, yet I couldn't shake the feeling that they didn't feel the connection with me as they did with one another. Because I didn't sit around and bullshit with them, commiserate about our paths, wonder about the future of the club as things changed over the years. I could sit there, yeah, but I couldn't engage as they could.

  Maybe couldn't wasn't the right word.

  I didn't.

  But after a lifetime of being exactly who I was, hiding away a part of myself that was shrouded in so much pain and insecurity, I wasn't sure I was capable of being any other way, letting them in that capacity, opening myself up, being that vulnerable.

  I would live and die by the club.

  That was the code.

  But that didn't mean I had to live at the club.

  Most of the guys didn't anymore anyway.

  People crashed, or spent a night or two there when they were pulling guard shifts, but now that even the elusive Roan was shacked up with his woman, the only full-time residents were West and Vance. Both young, eager to prove themselves, bursting with bravado, they single-handedly made up for the lack of other single club members. Liquor flowed, girls flocked in and out. It was a party place most nights of the week.

  The days and weekends were a bit more child-friendly. The club offspring ran in and out, laughing and screaming, the older kids hanging out in the yard, checking out the bikes, helping their uncles fix them up, clearly enjoying being a part of the club in a small way, dreaming about getting a cut and patch eventually. Sooner than their fathers or uncles seemed to realize, seeing their sons through the narrow scope of parenthood, seeing them as little boys with wiggling teeth instead of the young men they actually were. I didn't figure it would be long before they started sneaking drinks at the bar, coming home after curfew, getting into scuffles, puffing their chests.

  I wasn't against the kids being around. I liked kids. As much as I could considering I had never really spent time around them. My life had never been the kind of place you found children. It was rough and ugly and dangerous. I didn't always have a lot of faith in humanity, but the fact that I didn't often see children while trading arms was one of the few ways in which I thought we weren't completely doomed.

  Even the Henchmen kids were kept far away from the guns, from the drops, from anything at all that involved business.

  Maybe it was because I came into Navesink Bank so late in the game, compared to everyone else, that I found it hard to feel like I fit in quite as well.

  So I got myself an apartment.

  It wasn't the nicest of my options, but it was the closest, and that had been Reign's only real concern - that I was nearby in case I was needed. The building itself was a four-floor brick structure with rickety balconies whose railings were rusted and wiggling, usually only used to store plants or hang out blankets too big to fit in the dryer. Definitely not safe enough for an actual human being to stand on, or even one of those yippy ankle-biting type dogs like the half a dozen that lived in the apartment above me, all of them suffering from separation anxiety when their owner went to work each day. I wasn't even going to talk about the state of the fire escape. I was pretty sure that in an emergency type situation, it would be safer to jump.

  It wasn't that the place was neglected by a slumlord per se, it was old, a little unkempt. And the residents were just scraping by as it was. If rent had to be raised to cover updates, they wouldn't be able to afford it. So everyone dealt with the balcony situation, avoided the elevator that let out a high-pitched metallic shriek when you tried to use it. They put thick carpeting down and hung shit on the walls to try to quiet the sounds that easily cut through the paper-thin walls and floors.

  I could afford better. I could even throw some money into the place to update it. But I had lived in worse places in my time. Much worse. So none of the little everyday annoyances bothered me enough to do anything about it. Despite Liv's weekly drop-ins telling me that I didn't have to live like this.

  She'd been the one to buy and have furniture delivered when, after more than a month of living there, all I had gone out of my way to get was a headboard-free bed, a recliner, and a TV. If it weren't for her, there would be no small sectional in my living room - a deep brown material that matched the recliner I'd bought - no cabinet under my TV, nightstands, lamps, a two-seater dining table, window treatments, or a couple rugs. If it weren't for Astrid, the walls would be bare. And while I couldn't claim to share her interest in chickens, I didn't exactly hate the black and white dramatic canvas she had made up for me of her silkie chickens. In a way, it felt like there was still a small piece of her around by having it there to look at.

  After years of living with them, I had found it surprisingly hard to let them go. Even though I knew they had moved on to better things, and started to build bigger lives.

  Maybe a part of me missed what we'd all had together - a makeshift family of misfits who didn't have anyone else but one another. Maybe I missed having them around, having all those years of history to allow me to feel completely comfortable around them, to be understood without having
to work at it at all.

  I'd never really had anyone steady in my life until Liv showed up, until she needed me, until she decided to keep me around, then keep Astrid around as well. They became good friends, then something like sisters to me after a while.

  Just as suddenly as they came flitting into my life, they both went off on their own.

  I had to give it time, I knew.

  To really connect with my fellow brothers.

  It took a long time with Liv and Astrid as well. The lack of communication thing just made it all move at a glacial pace. Some of the guys caught on faster than others, communicating with me via text; Reign, Cash, Laz, Reeve, Roderick, Roan. They just made that effort without making a big deal about it. As such, I felt closer to them than some of the others.

  Though, to be fair, many of the others were just wrapped up in their wives and their kids and their general life shit. Reign's kids were all but grown; Cash's adopted daughter was as well but they had a different dynamic because of what she had been through which gave him more free time; Reeve only had the one kid; Laz was just the type who was likely to put extra effort in when he saw a need for it; Roan didn't have kids, so when he wasn't busy with Mack, he found the time to connect with me. And Roderick, well, Liv had likely nudged him in the texting direction since that was how we connected most of the time anymore, too.

  It would happen with the others eventually as their lives calmed down a bit.

  Until then, I was happy to have a little time to myself, to not have eyes feel like they were watching me, trying to figure me out. There was a certain comfort in solitude it was hard to find in company.

  It was also a substantial fucking weight off to know Liv and Astrid were, for all intents and purposes, retired from arms trading. No more worrying myself to ulcers about their safety, about how to try to protect them single-handedly. There was protection in numbers, in old connections like Reign had gotten for himself ages ago. No more uncertainty. No more suicide missions we'd tempted fate by going out on time and time again.

  This was stable.

  As stable as the arms trade could be anyway.

  There were always risks.

  But there was less to lose here.

  I don't remember a time in my life where I wasn't literally on the verge of losing my life. For a myriad of reasons. All I could recall from later elementary school and up was survival. Sometimes by the skin of my teeth.

  It was hard for someone whose entire life was a tightrope walk between perfect health and almost dying to accept calm, comfortable, easy.

  But that was what this life was for me.

  Comparatively speaking.

  Any Average Joe would think dropping off a shipment of guns to a notoriously mercurial group of Russian mob guys was, well, a bit dangerous.

  But for me, for us, that was just any other Tuesday.

  The slam of a door across the hall was what broke through my morning musings, my brows drawing low as I climbed out of my chair, made my way across my apartment.

  The place across the hall from me was vacant, since the old man living there died of a stroke a few weeks before.

  It wasn't exactly sad to me that he died, that I had been the one to call the super, to stand by and watch the stretcher roll him out. Death was a part of life. Besides, eighty was more years than many people got. And dying alone, well, most of us do that too.

  What was sad to me was the fact that he didn't have a soul in his life to come and clear out his shit after he passed.

  Which meant the place sat for a while before the state came through, tried to locate some next of kin. Finding none, they cleared out his personal papers, took whatever was worth anything since when you didn't have anyone who gave a shit about you, the state got your stuff, and left the place furnished with the halfway decent crap the old man had there since the eighties.

  When the ad went up for the open apartment, it was listed as a furnished rental.

  From what I knew, there hadn't exactly been any interest. For obvious reasons.

  There had been no U-Haul parked out front, no endless grumbling trips up and down the halls, a parade of friends who secretly wished they had a halfway decent excuse to get them out of having to pitch in on the moving thing.

  I hadn't been doing shit all morning. I would have heard or seen something.

  But the door slammed.

  And when I got to the door to look out, I caught the back of a woman rounding the corner that led to the staircase.

  Petite, blonde, dressed in an oddly ill-fitting black hoodie and gray yoga pants.

  Who wore a black hoodie in the middle of the fucking summer?

  She was gone before I could get a closer look, but when I went downstairs and ran into the super, he informed me - without me asking, obviously - that I had a new neighbor.

  "Fucking cute as shit too. Envy you living right across the hall from that." My brows must have drawn together, because he went on to explain. "Just saying, she hears a noise at night, finds a spider in a corner or some shit, you're the closest door. Things, you know... go from there."

  Right.

  Because my first response to a scared woman would be how quickly I could get her to agree to have my dick inside her.

  The only response he got to that was a sigh and head shake.

  My super had never been a fan of mine, not liking that I didn't share in his chronic need to comment on the female residents' bodies whenever he was around me, and as I walked away, I could hear him mumbling under his breath.

  Fucking weirdo mute bastard.

  It wasn't inventive. Or particularly biting. And aside from hitting the asshole, there wasn't much I could do about it.

  It was on the fourth day that I finally caught a good look at her.

  We were both leaving our apartments at the same time, her yanking an almost comically large red purse over her shoulder as she reached for her keys, missing me for a beat while I got to take a look at her without being noticed.

  As much as the super was a dick, he was also right.

  Cute as shit seemed to sum it up. Not striking or gorgeous or sexy as fuck. Cute. Which, in my opinion, was harder to come across than the former three.

  She was all of five-two with blond hair that just brushed her shoulders, light blue eyes, pouty, slightly oversize lips, and a gently squared chin. Young. She seemed young to me. Twenty-five, maybe. Or possibly just graced with one of those faces that would have her carded well into her forties. Who knew.

  What I did know was that she had her body shrouded in a disproportionately giant black t-shirt that fit her like a dress, obscuring any figure that was beneath it.

  "Oh, hey. Didn't see you there," she said, giving me a harried smile, reaching up to brush her hair out of her face, a simple silver bracelet sliding up her arm as she did so. "I guess we're neighbors, huh? I'm Annie," she told me, reaching out her hand almost as an afterthought.

  As a whole, I didn't have a hard time with people. In this day and age, they tended to be a bit more sensitive to people who didn't act or weren't as able as they were in some way or another. They might watch you with pinched-together brows for a minute, trying to suss out what was going on, but then they would give you a polite smile and move on.

  It wasn't like how it was when I was a kid.

  I placed my hand in hers, finding it delicate, almost childlike in a way, giving it a careful shake.

  "I'm sorry, what was your... oh. Oh," she said, lips parting a little, eyes going wide, like she'd made a big mistake, like she somehow felt guilty for not realizing I didn't speak just by looking at me. "I'm sorry... do you not hear?" she asked, pointing to her own ear. "That was probably rude," she added, shaking her head at herself. "I'm sorry. I, ah, I'm so awkward. Well, yeah, um. It was nice meeting you," she told me, saying the words slowly, carefully, like she was assuming I was reading her lips. "I have to run to the store," she added, giving me one of those polite smiles I had expected, then rushing off.

/>   It was probably rude of me not to correct her, to tell her I wasn't deaf. That was likely insensitive of me. To her, to the deaf community as a whole. But how the fuck was I supposed to correct her when I didn't speak in the first place? Sometimes, you just let them assume.

  It was easier.

  And it made me less vulnerable too.

  Vulnerability, that shit was never comfortable.

  I avoided it as much as humanly possible, save for maybe a handful of instances when I opened up to Liv, spoke to Liv. And once to Astrid who needed to get her head out of her ass over something she had going on with someone up at Hailstorm. Then once with Roan because, well, apparently everyone around me needed a kick in the ass every once in a while.

  But that was special shit. Opening up. Letting people in.

  You didn't do that every single day for every single person you came across.

  So I let people make their assumptions, didn't correct them.

  Luckily, I was a creature of habit, so there wasn't a whole lot of guesswork for anyone in our somewhat close-knit town. All it seemed to take was a note passed across a counter with my order at She's Bean Around or the pizza place or the Chinese food place, and they just went with it. Remembered it. No questions. No awkwardness. No having to open up old wounds for them.

  As for women, well, I didn't get around as much as West or Vance or - from the old war stories - the other guys at the club did before they all settled down. But I never had an issue getting someone to come home with me, or getting invited home.

  Women liked being listened to. They liked opening up to someone who didn't dispute everything they said, who didn't make them feel small for doing so. They often - not always, but often - liked being vulnerable with someone. I was a good sounding board. It all shook out in the end. They got to get three month's worth of bad dates off their soul, got a few orgasms, I got a night of stress relief, and we were both happier at the end.