The Fall of V

by Jessica Gadziala

  Contents

  DEDICATION

  - ONE

  - TWO

  - THREE

  - FOUR

  - FIVE

  - SIX

  - SEVEN

  - EIGHT

  - NINE

  - TEN

  - DON'T FORGET

  - ALSO BY JESSICA GADZIALA

  - ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  - STALK HER

  THE

  FALL

  OF

  V

  --

  A Henchmen MC Story

  --

  Jessica Gadziala

  Copyright © 2018 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/ PopTika

  DEDICATION:

  To my grandfather -

  who also has a knack for storytelling.

  THE FALL OF V

  ONE

  Ferryn

  Have you ever made a mistake, and knew the second it was happening how badly you had messed up?

  This was what happened that day.

  That day when my rebellious streak finally caught up with me.

  I guess I had gotten away with too much over the years, had been let off too lightly because there was some ingrained parental fear of being called a hypocrite.

  And make no mistake, that was exactly what I would have said, too. Even when Dad got his serious-face on, even when he crossed his arms, and slitted his eyes, and his voice did that growling thing.

  I could practically hear the silent conversation between him and my mother - those two always being able to say with looks more than I could with words... and I had a lot of words.

  See, this is why no one should have been telling old war stories around the kids.

  She meant that figuratively, of course. She meant the stories about how his own old man let him drink beer with his "friends" when he was nothing more than thirteen, how he'd never been scolded for fighting, for being caught with girls, for cursing, for being, well, a horrible kid.

  Keep in mind, when Dad said his father's "friends," he meant his father's men. He meant his father's brothers. He meant the fellow bikers.

  Surely they knew I knew that by now.

  Even Fallon was getting an idea. And, in my humble opinion, he wasn't the brightest of kids. I mean, he watched other kids play Minecraft on Youtube all day instead of playing it himself. That'd be like me watching people my age on Youtube reading books.

  But, yeah, he occasionally would get this keen look at times, watching our parents and their friends with a quiet sort of intensity that was actually very much like Dad.

  He was finally catching onto something that I had known since I was hardly more than seven.

  Namely, Daddy was a criminal.

  Daddy and all of his friends were criminals.

  And, by extension, so was Mom. And Aunt Lo and Aunt Janie. Even the ones who didn't spend all their time at some military survivalist camp were too. If not by profession, then by association. Even the seemingly normal ones like Aunt Penny, and the charmingly out of place Rey who Uncle Reeve had finally found a little happiness with.

  In case this wasn't clear, too, not a single one of these people were my actual aunts or uncles. Except, technically, Aunt Lo. Through marriage to my Uncle Cash who I was trying to get up the nerve to tell that he was getting a little old for his haircut.

  They were all my father's men and their wives. Though, to be fair, they certainly all acted like one giant family.

  For outlaw bikers.

  It was easy for them to fool me when I was little and easily distracted, when Daddy could take me on his bike, and make me forget all about asking what the giant vault in the basement was for.

  I clearly remembered sometime in maybe third grade when we had been working on percentages at school, and I came home to Dad in his leather cut - worn and soft from decades of wearing that exact same one - and had asked him what he was one-percent of, running my finger over that badge on his chest.

  He'd looked taken aback for a moment before he declared he was one percent devil, then snarled and grabbed at me, making me run and screech.

  I had no idea that there was some truth in his words at the time.

  One-percent devil.

  They were raising me in the wrong age if they didn't want me to look into things when I was curious about them.

  Like a one-percent badge.

  That meant he was a one-percent biker.

  Meaning that ninety-nine percent of all biker clubs were a simple brotherhood, men bonding over their love of bikes.

  But one-percent were outlaws.

  Criminals.

  Bad guys.

  That was what they were.

  Bad guys.

  Good men, by any definition of the word.

  But bad guys.

  Everything started to make sense after that computer search when I was ten.

  The tension that seemed to come out of nowhere, the nights Mom and Dad were sitting at the table until the wee hours of the morning, hands cradling cups of coffee, tension creasing their foreheads, jaws clenched tight, the dozens of times Dad would get called out of the house at all hours, not coming home for days on end, leaving Mom to clean compulsively, force false joy to keep us from picking up on the tension.

  And, well, the seemingly random trips up to Hailstorm for supposed campouts and vacations, little lies we all bought into for more years than we probably should have. Myself included.

  I remembered long days in those windowless rooms, trying to make the best of it, playing when I found the motivation, going stir crazy when I couldn't.

  There was no real rhyme or reason to the visits - or so it seemed back then. Sometimes it was just for a few nights. Others, weeks. The present spell? Yeah, they were going on months. I didn't know how the kids - or their moms for that matter- were handling it.

  See, that is where my story starts.

  I didn't realize it at the time, of course. All I knew when I put my foot down was I was bored. And missing out on things that the other kids weren't. Because they were younger. Because they weren't in a pivotal point of their growing-up-hood.

  If anything, they were happy to be put on home instruction, or, in a few cases, pulled out and put on homeschooling. They were glad not to sit in airless classrooms, going zombie-brained as the teachers hammered information into their little heads that they would remember only to spew out on test days, then Etch-a-sketch right out of their brains again to make room for the next lesson.

  But that wasn't the case for me.

  First, because I liked school. I know, I'm a freak. But I had always been a sponge for things that interested me, grilling the adults around me who might have had more information than even my textbooks could tell me. That meant for history, I could grill Uncle Renny who was a bottomless pit of facts. Or if I wanted to know more about literature, my Aunt Janie had an endless list of books that could help shape my life, the way my brain worked, that would make me see things differently. Aunt Lo was a big reader too, though her taste ran toward sweet - and dirt
y - stories. She'd started slipping them to me under my mom's nose a few months before when she sensed it was maybe something I was interested in - sex. She hadn't been wrong either. And the books had given me more information than any health class I had ever taken.

  But it wasn't just the classes I missed. I could - and always had been able to - learn anywhere.

  It was the experiences.

  And, let's face it, time spent with some people my own age.

  I liked the kids, I did.

  But there was only so much I could take.

  I mean, I could only listen to Katy Perry music so much before I was sure my brain was going to turn to mush.

  I wanted to be around my friends from school. The ones I had been getting a record-store-education with for months before we were whisked away to Hailstorm at a moment's notice, falling deep into tracks by The Doors and Tom Petty and Zepplin and Hendrix and Joplin and Sabbath, back when music had something to say, not just records to sell and charts to climb.

  I missed hanging out at She's Bean Around, drinking coffee Mom said I couldn't have yet, talking about politics we were still too young to weigh in on in an official capacity, but had strong opinions on.

  I was losing out on Friday nights at the movies or football games. Saturdays doing sleepovers or hanging out at the beach.

  I mean, for God's sake, I was missing just fresh air whenever I wanted it, seeing things other than the inside of shipping container rooms and the heavily guarded grounds that Aunt Lo loved so much.

  So, I had done something I guess I had always been good at. I got stubborn. Unbending. Absolutely relentless in my pursuit for freedom.

  Until, finally, Mom and Dad caved.

  And let me go back to school.

  There was some kind of meeting with my teachers and principals that I was not allowed to know about, and I was assigned two of Aunt Lo's men or women from Hailstorm to bring me to and from school, had very strict rules about when and where I would meet them. If I was so much as two minutes late because the contents of my locker attacked me or something, they would come charging down the halls. And while the guns weren't out, I knew there were just barely concealed and ready to use.

  Weird, a bit embarrassing? Yeah.

  But if that was all I needed to put up with to be able to be back at school with my friends, well, I was willing to deal with some sideways glances.

  Those were nothing new anyway.

  It seemed that everyone else knew what I had figured out about my family as well.

  Which was both uncomfortable but also freeing. I was left alone. No one messed with me. Everyone seemed to be careful around me.

  I mean, not that I needed my father's reputation to protect me, of course. I had been trained in martial arts since before I could even talk without a baby lisp.

  I could handle myself against roving, unwelcome adolescent boy hands. I could shut down a bully with one hand behind my back and both feet in cement.

  But it was nice in a way to be given a wide berth at school since I didn't get one at home.

  Which brings us to my mistake.

  My epic, world-changing mistake.

  Because it was my birthday, darn it.

  The big one.

  Sixteen.

  The one that meant something still, even if all that cheesy 'sweet sixteen and never been kissed' thing was the stuff of history. And my parents had put their feet down about it.

  No party.

  No night out.

  No nothing except a cake at freaking Hailstorm.

  And while I normally understood - and respected - the fact that they did things that they thought were for my best interest, I could not understand why they couldn't give me one of their armed details that would make the offspring of a president or diplomat raise their brows... just so I could go and have fun with a few of my girlfriends.

  Which was something I had even suggested, even if the idea of a bunch of my parents' friends trailing behind me and listening to everything I said to my friends filled me with dread, at least it wasn't a lame sweet sixteen stuck on a hill behind electrified fences and metal walls being suckered into playing Barbies for the third night in a row.

  So, I came up with a plan.

  I got two of my closest friends in on it.

  We wouldn't get away with it for long, we knew, with who I had for parents and extended family, but at least it would be something.

  At promptly one-fifty, we would excuse ourselves from class to use the bathroom, walk down the hall by the music room because that was an empty period for the teacher who took a nap behind a locked door and would not notice the three of us moving down a hall we were not meant to if we were, indeed, on the way to the lavatory.

  We would skate down the hall of lockers to the side entrance to the stage for the auditorium, then climb down the stairs that would lead us into the abandoned locker rooms, the kids who had a class needing to run the mile that day on the side field. Which meant we could each sneak out that unlocked door to the back field, slide down the side of the building to a line of pine trees that led to the woods. Where we could be completely hidden from the eyes of any teachers, and take off for our outing.

  Iggy had an older brother who was a year out of high school and drove this amazing vintage T-bird that would have made Uncle Repo weep who had agreed to pick us up and drive us out of town since anyone who saw us out of school and unaccompanied in Navesink Bank would likely call my dad on me.

  Vance, Iggy's brother, was someone who always went through with helping his little sister accomplish her plans for little rebellions, having grown up in the same oppressively strict family. He had rebelled young and hard, and encouraged his sister to do the same so she didn't, in his words, Become some fucking Stepford Wife with no brain and ten kids shackling her to a man who had never fucked her right in twenty years and expected her to bow and kowtow to his will like some king.

  Okay, so I maybe had a little crush on Vance.

  And by little, I meant huge, mushy, stupid, can't-think-straight-in-his-presence-because-I-was-thinking-about-what-it-would-be-like-to-have-his-guitar-playing-hands-on-me kind of crush.

  He had that thing going for him, something I didn't quite have a word for, something that old musicians did. Like Jim Morrison, like Prince, like countless others did - a cocky, confident, sexually-charged aura about them like a cloud of smoke. In Vance's case, literally. He smoked. And, sure, smoking was bad for you, but he rolled his own cigarettes that he claimed were much better for you because they weren't full of all that 'big tobacco crap' that could give you cancer just from secondhand breathing it in.

  The Indigenous have been using tobacco for generations, after all.

  He was also gorgeous, of course.

  Too gorgeous, really.

  So much so that girls were always flocking around him, putting their hands on his chest or stomach, giving him come-hither looks, whispering in his ear.

  I couldn't help it. I knew it was weak and petty and beneath me, but I hated each and every one of them, stared daggers at their bodies that had the time to round out better than mine had yet, at their clear sexual confidence that likely came from experience which I was still lacking in.

  But he was tall, and a lithe kind of strong. I knew the latter part because Iggy's parents had a pool. And while we girls were required to wear tankinis if we wanted to swim, he could go in just in his swim shorts. Even when he was just seventeen instead of nineteen like he currently was, he had nice etches of muscles. And, yeah, that trail of hair that... well, you know.

  His face was all hard angles, hair that was the darkest shade of brown possible that was always slightly in need of a cut, making the strands fall into his brilliant blue eyes, and these lips that were not prone to smiling, but they did every once in a while, sometimes even my way, stealing all the air out of my chest.

  His voice was raspy, too. That was the only way to describe it, low and raspy, like he had a perpetual sore throat.


  He worked a half dozen odd jobs and played with his bands on nights and weekends.

  Which was where he was bringing us.

  To one of his shows.

  He was going to drop us at the strip mall a few minutes away because it was too early, let us shop and eat and hang out, then he would pick us up on his way in to set up.

  I was excited.

  To hang out with my friends, sure. There was even a really cool indie bookstore to check out.

  But more so to spend time with Vance.

  I wasn't stupid. Or naive. By any stretch of the words.

  I knew he didn't see me that way, that all he saw when he looked at me was this giant, permanent-marker stain across my forehead that spelled out Jailbait.

  I didn't stack up to the girls who could only be called groupies who came to his shows with their short skirts, bared midriffs, and low-cut tops, showing off boobs I might never have. Girls who gyrated their hips in a way that would give him all kinds of ideas. Girls who he would throw an arm around, then disappear with outside.

  And not to discuss music or society or great spoken word artists like he did with me.

  No.

  For blowjobs or sex.

  I knew how the world worked, how guys like him operated, how the girls would use their bodies to try to get their hooks in him.

  Stupid girls, I couldn't help but think as I would watch it all go down. My aunts would have my head for even thinking something like that about my fellow women. But, really, it was stupid, y'know? He's not screwing you for your mind. Which is why he will forget you exist five minutes after your clothes are back on.

  I was working the long game on Vance.

  I already knew he liked how my mind worked, that he enjoyed my company, that he didn't just tolerate me because I was his little sister's friend, and he had to put up with me.