by Flora Burgos
Jinx
Mischief Makers MC
Mother Chapter
FLORA BURGOS
Copyright @ 2018 by Flora Burgos
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover Designed by Tracie Douglas at Dark Water Covers
Edited by Julia Goda at Diamond In The Rough Editing
FOREWARD
Because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception, humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise.
Byrd Gibbens
DEDICATION
Shelene,
Thank you for being my sister from another mister. Thank you for always having my back and being there, rather it’s letting me rant about something or breaking the monotony of another long and busy day with random facts or feedback. Thank you for being you. When God was handing out ride or dies, he knew I needed you.
I love you,
Flora
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Abby, my beautiful and supremely talented niece, thank you for taking my brief and rambling description of what I envisioned as the club logo, and not only bringing it to life but making it better than I could have ever imagined. You are amazing, and I cannot wait to see where your art takes you!
Alex(andrea) the Awesome. I love the shit out of you. You’ve been with me through every single book and you are an integral part of my team. You give it to me truthfully and always have my books and their best interests at heart. You are one of the strongest and most beautiful souls that I know and I am never letting you go. You see and understand a part of my soul that very few do and you have no idea how special that is to me. I am so proud of you. You know why. You are a badass, you are amazing and I never want to do this without you. Ever.
Tracie, Tracie, Tracie, what would I do without you? You make me all these crazy amazing covers and are drawing me in with these pre-mades and making story after story flow.
Julia!! The acknowledgements are always the last thing I write before sending you my manuscript, so this is how you know that I’m done tweaking and changing things. I know, I know. Enough is enough. I’m lol’ing right now. You have the patience of a saint!
Cindy, without you I wouldn’t be me and without Tree I wouldn’t have known the first thing about bikers. You gave me a chance and you are a big part of the reason that I have this amazing life I lead. Thank you for being an inspiration, a badass and one of the strongest women I know. You never, not once, did anything in halves for your half-sister. I will never find the words to tell you the difference you made for me. I’m here because of you. I adore you.
Rolando, my gorgeous, supportive, rock of a husband, thank you for being in my corner, encouraging me to chase my dreams, and being the best father and husband your son and I could ever ask for. Were it not for you, this would be nothing but a dream. This has been a crazy year for us Babycakes. You’ve taken this roller coaster ride with me and kept me sane and healthy through it all. You believe in me, support me, and love me through the good days and the bad. When I laid my head down at night before you, my prayer was for someone who loved me unconditionally. When I lay my head down at night now? I thank Him for giving me you and all the blessings you brought into my life.
Hopefully, you never read Mama’s books, but T, thank you. Thank you for being your amazing, happy and caring self. For being like your dad and reminding me to drink water and eat when I’ve been at my computer for hours, and for being like me and still seeing all the good in the world, even for all the tragedy. You are my greatest blessing. You and your daddy are my everything.
Shout out to my tribe for having my back always, for getting me through my first two book signings, for letting me be me, and for doing everything that you do to make my books possible.
Thank you to every reader who picks up this book and gives it a chance. I will never reach a point when I am not grateful for every bit of my ability to weave a story, share it with you all, and have someone somewhere pick it up and fall in love. Having this in my life is more fulfilling and more wonderful that I could have ever hoped for.
Prologue
Roxanne
As if Mother Nature had taken it upon herself to prove a point, the rain was pouring, and the wind was blowing with so much intensity that it whistled eerily and the dilapidated, rundown singlewide groaned in objection to it all. I didn’t know yet that before the end of the day my life would be changing course.
I was late for my morning class at Delaney Community College because I had to run home to my apartment to walk my dog before I could leave him inside all day. Normally, this was the first thing on my to do list in the morning, but I hadn’t spent the night before at my place because I was an idiot. Luckily for me, my boy was a patient one, and waiting on me was way better than the reality he had known not so long ago. So, while this was all an inconvenience and a not so great start to my day, it was nowhere near as bad as it could have been.
The night before, I had just finished up with one of my yoga videos and was attempting to find the Zen feeling you’re supposed to get from doing yoga when my phone rang. Hearing the ringtone, I rolled my eyes.
Of course.
Norman and I had a routine. I would get fed up and have enough of his shit and would tell him we were over, then he would take a couple of days to screw anything that walked and then call me crying and begging for me to take him back.
Last time I had vowed that it was the last time, but then I’d made the stupid, stupid, stupid mistake of answering my phone when I received a call from an unknown number, and there he was. Same song and dance, and same reaction from me.
This time, he was swearing that he couldn’t live without me, this was our longest separation in the three years we had been together—so far, I had made it six weeks—and he threatened to kill himself. I would like to say that I threw my hands in the air and let it go, but really, at the end of the day, who wants someone else’s death on their conscience?
So, of course, I caved and agreed to come over already knowing it was a mistake.
When I walked through the door, my arm was grabbed in a punishing grip and I was roughly pushed against the wall. He was in a hurry to get me inside before I could change my mind and fear and desperation were all over his face. The disgusting, nauseating smell of marijuana mixed with what could only be spoiled food left in the trash for days made bile rear up in my throat.
If I wasn’t there to keep his life ordered for him, his house clean, his laundry done, setting the bills out and reminding him of them so they could be paid, then none of it was taken care of. He looked like he hadn’t showered in days, and I was sure he was coming down from a bender on his latest drug of choice, whatever that was. He had hit all the basics with cocaine and meth and then his favorite: heroine.
Norm was a formidable man, but I had to admit that the thing that had kept me coming back was that he wasn’t physically abusive to a point I couldn’t take, and he needed me. I was an orphan, an unwanted drain on the world whose life had started on the dirty, rotten floor of a derelict, abandoned crack house; according to the police report anyways, and had only bee
n more of the same after. I bounced around the system from foster home to foster home.
Living with people who only wanted free labor and a government paycheck, or worse. Norman, though? He’d made me feel needed and loved. The desperate obsession he had with me had provided comfort in the beginning, a codependency, really, which had eventually started to wear on me until we ended up here.
Tears were streaming from his eyes—him, this man who scared other people, a blight on society who peddled drugs to the high school and college kids in our town, some of them who were or had been my classmates. Here he was on his knees in front of where I sat on the couch, and through the shuddering tears he sobbed, “Roxy, can’t live without you. Ain’t no point. If I can’t be with you, then you might as well take a gun and shoot me dead.” I rolled my eyes at this. He was so dramatic when he was riding a high. He couldn’t handle his drugs any better than he could his alcohol, and he was worse than the girl who drank too much, threw up on the dance floor and then spent the night crying.
Instead of saying anything sarcastic, no matter how strong the urge was, instead I murmured softly, “Hey, it’s okay.” What else could I say? I couldn’t commit to anything. I wanted to be anywhere other than where I sat but not knowing what chemical he had dabbled with this time, that wasn’t a chance I was willing to take. He could react with more tears or snap into anger and rage for hours.
He took this as some kind of confirmation and looked at me, whispering, “Yeah?”
Again, there wasn’t a single thing I could say to convey my true feelings so I faked a smile and fought the roiling pitch of nausea in my gut as I whispered, “Yeah.”
This seemed to open the floodgates for him as even more tears flooded his face and he walked on his knees to me before climbing on the couch and giving me no choice but to lean back and let him curl into me. All I had to offer to this shell of a man were placating sounds with no solid commitments; I couldn’t and wouldn’t make any promises. I had known for a while that I needed a change, and this was further cementing it for me. Not only did I no longer enjoy his desperation for me, I was beginning to hate him for being so weak and stupid. Over and over again, he chose this life, the drugs and the highs and then lows, along with the constant thrill of danger. But I had already had my fill of it all long before meeting him, and there was no way I could spend the rest of my life caught in this pattern.
I knew this, yet still we ended up with me sitting on the couch, his head resting on my breast while he cried like a newborn, gasping for breath on the inhale. I needed to make a break. This had to end for my sanity, no matter how many times he called and begged or what threats were made. I was done. Done. When I got the chance this time, I was out of there and I would never step foot through his door again.
I tried to outwait him. I watched as the second hand circled time and again on the clock hanging on his wall. I doubted it was set to the correct time but still those hands taunted me as time ticked by as slowly as it ever had in my life and I silently cursed myself for not changing my damn number before I nodded off.
I was yanked into awareness when I felt him drop a blanket over me and heard him silence a ringing phone, it wasn’t his normal ringtone so I had to figure it was the one he had called me from that was unknown. Drug line. I continued to feign sleep until I heard him start up the shower—he must have finally come down from his high—and I waited a few more moments just to be sure before I lurched up and ran out the door to my car. I needed a change and it was beginning right now. I needed to get the hell out of Dodge and start over somewhere different with no ties; where no one saw me as the girl who was hooked up to the local drug dealer and loser.
I was almost at my car when my phone rang with a call from that same unknown number, telling me that he hadn’t gotten into the shower yet and instead had been paying attention, anticipating that I would run.
He would expect me to answer, like I always had, but I knew better. I was working on an escape plan, and there was no way he was going to have the chance to draw me back in again. I would realize just how ironic this was a few short hours later, when Norman’s mother, who was surprisingly normal given how disturbed her son was, came beating on my door.
Her, I would open the door for, and did, even though I quickly came to regret it. As the older woman shoved into the door and pushed past me, she was already mid-rant. “Damn conspiracy is what it is. My boy has been getting clean. He’s been goin’ to those meetin’s every week, just like his probation officer told him to. We gotta get him out of there.”
“Wha-what on earth are you talking about?”
“Girl, I’m telling you! The poh-lice showed up and took Norm to jail for possession and intent to distribute. I can’t afford to bail him out, so you gotta get your checkbook so we can get down there and get him out of there.”
I had never been so happy that I was living in a paycheck-to-paycheck world before in my life. “Miss Linda, I can’t do that. I don’t have any money.”
“Well, shit.” She looked up at the ceiling and huffed out a breath. “I don’t know what to tell him, then. I ain’t got it.”
I started to edge her toward the door. I didn’t think that she knew about the dog, but it wouldn’t be good for him to come out now. I needed her out of here as soon as humanly possible.
She was almost there, just a few feet from the door, when she threw her arms around me, a surprising moment of emotion from her on my behalf, “What are you going to do, Roxanne? If he goes down, you won’t have anyone!” The last part was wailed in my ear.
Once more I found myself comforting someone else, but finally I was able to coerce her out the door, and I sighed in relief.
When all was said and done, Norman was going to spend eighteen months in jail, and I was planning to use this to my benefit and get the hell out of there while I could. I had loose ends that I was going to tie up as fast as humanly possible, and graduation was only weeks away. By the time I was supposed to be crossing the stage, Norman would be serving his sentence, and my dog and I would be long gone.
I got a Post Office box to forward my mail to, talked to my professors and managed to fast track my work and finish my finals before the due dates and sold and gave away everything that I didn’t absolutely have to have. There was nothing left for me here and no reason to carry my second and third-hand belongings to wherever I ended up. Better to pack light and only keep the necessities.
By the time Norman was set free and able to begin his life once more, I had found myself in a whole other state on the opposite side of the country, in a completely different kind of trouble, with far deadlier repercussions.
I had a talent for that.
Jumping from the frying pan to the fire.
Chapter One
Roxanne
Sixteen months later
I had just crossed over the bridge onto Galveston Island when my car gave a couple of coughs and the engine died. Luckily, I was able to pull to the side of the road from the momentum alone, and as I pulled on the e-brake on the shoulder of a mostly abandoned road at an ungodly hour of the morning, I knew that my time as a gypsy had come at an end. I couldn’t justify going any further when I had reached the opposite end of the country.
I grabbed my cell from my bag and checked, but I had no battery; it was completely dead, as usual. Not that I knew anybody I could call anyway. In frustration, I bumped my head against the steering wheel and muttered a mantra of “Fuck, fuck, fuck” every time my forehead connected with the wheel under my hands. Zeus, my Pitbull, whined and licked my cheek, distracting me from braining myself on the wheel.
Before getting out of the car, I popped the hood lever under my steering wheel, then quickly shut the door, leaving my window cracked. Lifting the hood didn’t do me any good because I had no clue what I was looking at or for.
I knew that somewhere in there was a thing that held the water—and I even knew how to add more, though only if the car wasn’t hot—and there was so
mething in there that held oil and some other fluids that they refilled when I could afford it and took my car in for a tire rotation and whatnot, but that was all I could say with any certainty. With no other options save getting my dog out and walking, I left the hood up and got back in the car. That was the universal signal for help, right? Besides, I had a nine-millimeter in the center console, which I took out and made sure I had a bullet chambered with the safety on and double-checked that the doors were locked. I turned the key to lower the windows just slightly more than they already were, reclined my seat, and tried to close my eyes. There was nothing for it. I would have to wait until someone decided to drive by and stop to help or call a tow, which I would have to figure out how to pay for. This wouldn’t be the first or last time we had spent the night in my car, so my boy did a couple of circles on the backseat and then lay down snuggled into his blanket.
It felt like years but was probably only a couple of hours, as the sun was now glaring through the clouds, before I heard the distant roar of motorcycle pipes roll up behind me. Traffic had picked up but not a soul had stopped. My four-ways were still flashing, so all I could do was pray the biker that stopped wouldn’t end up killing me for the effort. I decided to step out of my car and put my pistol in the back of my waistband on my jeans. I had just closed the door when Zeus jumped to attention and let out warning barks as the motorcycle slowed to a stop right behind my car. I shaded my eyes from the bright light of the morning sun as the driver cut the engine and removed his helmet. It was hard to make out my would-be rescuer (or murderer) in the dark stillness of the night, and I jumped when he spoke.
