by Jadyn Chase
Los Diablos
A Dragon Shifter MC Romance
Jadyn Chase
Copyright © 2019 by Jadyn Chase
In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.
* * *
Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.
Contents
Unraveled
1. Roman
2. Maya
3. Roman
4. Maya
5. Roman
6. Maya
7. Roman
8. Maya
9. Roman
10. Maya
11. Roman
12. Roman
13. Maya
14. Roman
15. Maya
16. Epilogue
Scorched
1. Isabel
2. Francisco
3. Isabel
4. Francisco
5. Isabel
6. Francisco
7. Isabel
8. Francisco
9. Isabel
10. Francisco
11. Isabel
12. Francisco
13. Isabel
14. Epilogue
Chaotic
1. Eli
2. Eli
3. Ruby
4. Eli
5. Ruby
6. Eli
7. Eli
8. Ruby
9. Eli
10. Eli
11. Eli
12. Eli
13. Eli
14. Ruby
15. Eli
16. Epilogue
Snatched
1. Brayden
2. Brayden
3. Morgan
4. Brayden
5. Morgan
6. Brayden
7. Morgan
8. Brayden
9. Brayden
10. Morgan
11. Morgan
12. Brayden
13. Morgan
14. Brayden
15. Epilogue
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Unraveled
1
Roman
I squinted through the sunlight at a long line of gleaming motorcycles. They veered off the main road into my cul-de-sac. One by one, they parked at the curb, but only two riders dismounted.
They glanced right and left while approaching my house. The other riders scanned the barrio all around for any sign of danger.
I jerked my chin at the first, biggest bruiser. A thick black mustache curved down on either side of his mouth to hide his pinched, tense lips. A long, braided rope of jet black hair hung down his back, and a red bandana tied in a two-inch band held his hair off his forehead. A patch on his upper chest read El Capitán.
His comrade wore the same uniform, but he wasn’t so big in the shoulders. His name tag read El Brujo. He remained standing on the sidewalk while El Capitán climbed up the steps to meet me.
“What have you got?” I barked.
He cast a flinty gaze over his shoulder at the crew parked by the curb. “No trouble yet. They kept to the highway going all the way through. Only one stopped for gas. We straightened him out and sent him on his way with a broken arm, but as far as our scouts can tell, he rejoined the pack without incident. He must have run dry on the way, but none of the others stopped or looked sideways. We followed them all the way through to their own boundary. They’re all safely tucked into bed now.”
“Good,” I replied. “Keep an eye on it. Two hundred Longtails can’t drive through our territory without some reason for it.”
He shrugged. “I still can’t figure out what that would be if it isn’t just a show of strength.”
“That’s reason enough,” I fired back. “Did you figure out where they went in the first place?”
A crooked grin spread across his mouth. “They went to Vegas.”
“That’s bullshit,” I snapped. “It’s a ploy to fuck with our heads. They want to show us they can come and go as they please and we don’t have the cajones to stop them.”
“Marcos followed them up there. The whole familia had a big conference at the Palms.”
“That was just a pretext. I’m certain of it.” I turned away. I’d heard enough for one night. “Keep an eye on it. From now on, we’ll assume they’re arming for war. Put all your patrols back on their usual rotations—no exceptions. Double all the allotments of ammo and weapons and start preparing Logan and Zander for initiation.”
I took hold of the doorknob to shut myself in, but he dived after me. “You can’t be serious, Ese! You can’t rush initiation, and those two haven’t come anywhere near proving themselves.”
“They’ve done enough,” I told him. “If we go to war against the Longtails, we’ll need every hombre on a bike. You can double their practice time at the shooting range if it makes you feel better.”
He dropped his voice a register and narrowed his eyes. “It’s not me who needs to feel better. If anything happens to them because they aren’t ready, their blood will be on your hands, not mine.”
I swiveled around to fix him with my harshest glare. “You have your orders, Ese. I don’t want to hear from any of you again until morning. I have more important business right now.”
I slammed the door in his face and waited until the tell-tale thump of a dozen engines died away down the street. El Capitán was my cousin Carlos and I would never talk to him like that if we were alone, but I had to keep up appearances in front of El Brujo. I had to keep up appearances in front of all of them, no matter how I felt about them personally.
Only after silence returned did I let myself relax. Without that ground-shaking drumbeat vibrating the floor, I could trick myself into believing I wasn’t in charge of one of the most dangerous motorcycle clubs in LA. I was just a normal guy, living in a normal house, on a normal street, in a normal city.
I passed the kitchen with the normal dirty dishes piled in the sink. I entered the hallway lined with normal photographs of a normal family and normal relatives with normal smiles on their faces. Nothing in this house gave any clue that we were anything but regular, boring, normal people.
I came to the last room on the left. From the threshold, I gazed in at my seven-year-old daughter Anna playing on the floor. She sat cross-legged on a blanket and her stuffed animals surrounded her in a semi-circle facing her. She picked up the china teapot and held the lid in place while she poured the imaginary liquid into a teacup.
She handed the cup and saucer to one of her bears. “Do you take sugar in your tea, Mrs. Pennyfeather? One lump or two? And would you care for milk? There you go. Have a piece of cake. Oh, yes? Thank you. I don’t mind if I do.”
I couldn’t help smiling. I couldn’t imagine where she picked this stuff up. Maybe one of her classmates at school taught it to her, and now she was repeating it at home.
My heart twisted watching her. I hoped I can give her some semblance of a normal life, but she couldn’t have missed the sound of the bikes outside. They’re a normal feature of her daily routine—at least, they’re a regular feature of her daily routine. They’ll never be normal.
When my Laura got pregnant, something clicked in my head. I made up my mind to get out of the club so my children could grow up free of all the violence and crime. I didn’t want them around it. Somehow it didn’t exactly work out that way, though.
Now I saw Anna doing something so….
.so normal. I knew she didn’t learn anything like that from me or any of the other members of our club. Only two of my brothers in the club had kids of their own. One way or another, we all kinda made an unspoken pact not to bring our kids around each other. None of us wanted our lifestyle to influence our kids.
Anna served tea with milk and sugar and cake to a stuffed giraffe. When she turned to the next bear in line, she caught sight of me in the door. Her eyes lit up. “Papa! Come and have tea with me and the Ladies Club.”
She didn’t wait for me to agree before she started rearranging her guests on the blanket to make room for me. Part of me wanted to cringe away from this childish domestic scene, but I couldn’t resist. I wouldn’t get another chance to give her the joy and connection she really needed from me.
I entered the room and folded my legs under me to sit down. She poured me a cup full of nothing and handed it to me beaming with pride. I took it like a dutiful father and balanced it on my fingertips. I even raised my pinky finger to hold the tiny cup handle in the correct position. Jesus, I felt like a chump! How could this shit come so naturally to me, of all people?
She made a meticulous effort to serve the rest of the party with the utmost decorum before she came back to grinning up at me. She raised her own saucer and took an imaginary sip out of the cup. “And how was your day at work today, Papa? How did your meeting go with Uncle Carlos?”
The expression on her face told me she didn’t want an honest answer to that. She was just making polite small-talk and I wouldn’t tell her the truth anyway. I raised my teacup to my lips and slurped extra loud. “The meeting went very well sweetie. My day at work was not as stimulating as this tea party, I can assure you. My goodness, this is excellent cake! You must give me the recipe.”
Her face burst with pleasure. “Mrs. Pennyfeather is having a dinner party next Saturday. She says she plans to use this cake recipe for that, too. Isn’t it delicious? I love the poppyseeds. Don’t you?”
She picked up an empty plate and made a show of cutting a piece of the cake that wasn’t there. I mimicked her movements, right down to putting a forkful of cake into my mouth and chewing it.
“The poppyseeds really add a certain je-ne-sais-quoi to it.” I wasn’t sure I pronounced that right, but who the hell cared, right? It was a child’s tea party, for God’s sake.
The longer this went on, the happier she got. I really needed to make an effort to do this more often. I sacrificed a lot to raise her on my own after Laura died. What did I bother to do that for if not for moments like this?
She turned to say something charming and polite to one of the bears—Councilman Frederickson, I think it was, but I could have been mistaken.
All at once, I had a great idea. “Anna, I just thought of something that would go so well with this cake.”
Her eyes widened. “What, Papa?”
“Wait here,” I told her. “I’ll be right back.”
I jumped to my feet as best I could since my knees locked up from sitting cross-legged so long. I limped to the kitchen and dug a tub of ice cream out of the freezer. I shut it and didn’t look twice at the normal fridge magnets of alphabet letters and numbers scattered across the surface. I was having too normal a time with my beloved daughter.
I cared too much about Anna’s welfare to let her have ice cream very often. One set of teeth had to last her a lifetime. I could just picture how delighted she would be when I showed up at the tea party with ice cream.
I made my way back to the bedroom, but when I got to the doorway, the ice cream carton fell out of my hand when I spotted Anna. She lay on her side on the floor twitching and jerking all over. Frothy vomit dribbled out of her mouth and bubbled between her clenched teeth. Her eyes rolled back in her skull so nothing but two white orbs stared out at me.
I lunged for her screaming her name. “Anna! Wake up! Please wake up! Anna!”
Her tiny form quivered in my arms. Between spasms, she sagged and didn’t respond. This couldn’t be happening! I couldn’t let anything happen to her. My whole world revolved around her since Laura died. Now Anna was all I had left in the world. Without her, I was nothing. My life would be meaningless.
I kept calling, “Anna! Please wake up!” long after I knew in my rational mind that she wouldn’t. I kept petting her cheek and praying to God Almighty she would be open her eyes and look at me, but she didn’t.
She kept jerking and twitching for a few minutes. Then she collapsed in my arms. The tension evaporated from her muscles. Her breath rasped between her locked teeth. She didn’t open her eyes.
I couldn’t stand the strain anymore. Somewhere in the terror and confusion, I found the brainpower to take out my phone and call 911.
When the paramedics arrived and took her away, I kept thinking, No, please, no. Not again. Don’t let this happen again—not to her. It can’t happen to her, I won’t let it.
I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I could only feel stricken and hopeless, while they loaded her on the stretcher and rushed her away from me.
The house never felt so hollow and lifeless, not even when Laura died. I got through that catastrophe by focusing on Anna. She needed me. She pulled me out of the dark and forced me to live even when I didn’t want to.
Now I had nothing. No one would pull me out of it now. For a fleeting second, I stared over the edge into a bottomless pit of despair. If I fell down that hole, I would never come out. I knew that to the core of my being. If anything happened to Anna, I would never come back.
2
Maya
I read the chart before I entered the room in the Pediatrics ward. Seven-year-old female, no allergies, brought in with unexplained seizures. The contact sheet listed her father’s name: Roman Santiago. The slot for the mother’s name was left blank. That was strange. In this part of Los Angeles, it usually went the other way around—mother with no father.
The emergency contact name listed another man: Carlos Garcia. Relationship: uncle. That was doubly strange. I flipped the chart closed and pushed the door open, but I stopped in my tracks when I walked into the room.
Four huge men surrounded the bed so I couldn’t see the patient. They all wore black Levi’s with sturdy black leather boots and wide leather belts and red bandanas tied around their foreheads. The shirts stretching over their massive shoulders and backs varied from red cotton t-shirts to black wife-beater tank tops, but they all sported identical leather vests with glaring patches splayed across the backs.
The instant I walked in, all four of them rounded on me and leveled me with glittering black eyes. Three of them kept their hair perfectly braided in long cables down their backs, but the fourth had his hair cut a lot closer to the scalp. It made him look even more venomous and lethal than the rest.
Between their powerful, tattooed arms and bull necks, I glimpsed a frail speck of a form lying on the pillow. The little girl had her eyes closed. She looked like she was asleep with no knowledge that these hulking monsters surrounded her bed.
The next instant, the big one with the short hair strode up to me. A small badge on his vest read The Boss. I would just bet he was. He looked like the boss of the whole world.
He thrust out his hand. “Are you the doctor in charge of my daughter?”
I snapped myself out of my shocked stupor. I didn’t want to shake that hand. I didn’t want to be within a hundred miles of this brutish criminal. I’d seen the worst humanity had to offer in my short career in hospitals.
I shook his hand anyway. “I’m sorry. I’m not a doctor. I’m just the nurse on duty. I can get the doctor for you, though, if there’s anything wrong with…..” I cast a quick glance at the chart. “With Anna.”
“Why won’t she wake up?” He immediately turned his back on me. In the blink of an eye, all four men trained their unwavering focus on the girl. She consumed their attention to the exclusion of everything else. “She’s been out cold for over three hours. Something’s wrong.”
I made a mo
re detailed study of the chart. “It says here the seizure started at approximately five o’clock this evening and lasted five minutes. Is that true?”
“It’s true. I was standing right there,” he told me. “I saw the whole thing. It was the longest five minutes of my life.”
“Then it’s not unusual for her to be unresponsive for this long afterward. It’s called a post-ictal state. It happens when people have seizures and it can last longer in children. It takes time for their brains to recover from the seizure.”
“She never had anything like this before.” He lowered his voice to a reverential murmur. He didn’t see me. He lost all awareness that I was even in the room. “She’s always been so healthy. How could this happen?”
“The doctors are working on figuring that out, but sometimes kids have stuff happen to them, and there’s no logical explanation.”
My words bounced right off him. He was deaf and blind to everything but his child.
