Riding On Fumes_Bad Boy Motorcycle Club Romance Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE

  PART 1

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  PART 2

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  PART 3

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  PART 4

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  PART 5

  EPILOGUE

  THE AUTHOR

  Running on Fumes

  The Crow's MC

  BOOK TWO

  Cassandra Bloom

  Copyright© Cassandra Bloom, 2018

  PROLOGUE

  ~MACK~

  “HEY, CHOBAVICH! YOU GOT A VISITOR!”

  The guard’s call caught Malcolm’s already nervous breath in his lungs. His time in prison hadn’t been the easiest of his life—there was a morbid curiosity that ebbed at his mind, demanding to know who’d taken more cock since he’d been put away, him or his sister—and the life of a prison bitch was, as he’d come to find out, much happier when people didn’t come to visit.

  But the folks who raped Malcolm were inmates or, on one “special occasion,” a guard who’d been having marital issues. On that occasion, he’d been called “Stacy”—the guard weeping and laughing, beating Malcolm one moment and stroking his hair the next—and on all the other occasions, when his partners had been the more straightforward and, in Malcolm Chobavich’s honest opinion, the more sane inmates they’d simply called him “mine.”

  No, Malcolm—Mack—didn’t think that the day had come when rapists started coming in from out there, but it didn’t make the news any easier to take.

  Especially since the people out there were a lot more dangerous than the ones in here.

  Hell, if it came down to being let out or staying behind bars, Malcolm Chobavich would sooner don a wig, fake tits, high heels—hell, the whole shebang!—and strut around as Stacy, “Mine,” or even that big, purple, Down’s syndrome-lookin’ Micky-D’s muppet that looked an awful lot like a fuzzy butt-plug.

  Just strap me down, lube me up, and call me “Grimace,” he thought with morbid humor, nearly throwing himself into a giggling fit. He did not giggle, however. Instead, Malcolm, feeling everything below his waistband tighten with worry, asked, “Me?” and then, realizing that sounded stupid, added, “I do?” Even this seemed to carry with it a tone of idiocy, though. Then, still picturing the eerily cheery face of the butt-plug burger muppet and wishing it was just the guard with another pent-up Stacy-complex, he asked the question that really mattered:

  “Who is it?”

  Because, though it sickened him to know, Malcolm “Mack” Chobavich already knew why somebody from the outside world should be coming to visit. And, while the curiosity sickened him, he wanted to know just who-in-the-fuck had come to kill him; which of those sons-of-bitches with the Carrion Crew had finally decided that their little deal wasn’t good enough and that blood was finally due to pay past debts.

  “THE FUCK DO I CARE?” the guard wailed back, his patience with Mack and his questions gone the way of the dodo and the Macarena. Then, deciding he maybe had a shred of patience left, he offered, “SAYS HE KNOWS YOUR SISTER!”

  Well if that didn’t just staple the flapping folds of doubt right down to the unforgiving surface of certainty nothing would. The world—hell, even his own damn family, it seemed—had all but forgotten that the Chobaviches had had more than one little critter running around the front yard. Mia’s little claim to local stardom back when she was still a kid had put the name “Chobavich” on the tongues and in the ears of just about anybody within a hundred-mile radius. She had, after all, stumbled across a body, uncovered a murder, and become something of a sob story for everyone to fawn over until some brat found themselves at the bottom of an old well or another brown baby washed up from some third-world shithole. Nevermind the fact that Mia wouldn’t have found shit—wouldn’t have mattered for shit—if Mack hadn’t snuck out with her; if Mack hadn’t busted the lock to the locked-up basement of the seemingly abandoned Creely house. Mack had taken all the risk—granted the booze he stole from their old man and the girl he was feeding three fuck-fingers to that night were on him, he knew—but Mia had gotten all the glory. After that night, the world had basically forgotten he existed, and that was just the way it had been. That was just the way it was as the years passed, and those years had a way of amplifying the distance that was wedged between troublesome Malcolm Chobavich and the good-for-nothing, gamble-happy degenerate and the Mack of here-and-now. The only people who knew that the Mack of here-and-now was once Malcolm Chobavich and that he, seemingly only by association anymore, had any ties to Mia Chobavich were him, Mia and the rest of their family (presumably)…

  And the Carrion Crew.

  Because that’s who owned Mia now.

  Because that’s why Mack was alive.

  Because that was the deal.

  Wasn’t it?

  “Shit…”

  A long, ugly silence passed then. It barreled like a drunk driver—all jerks and swerves—ever-nearer to the vicinity of Awkwards-ville, population two (with one on the way, it seemed), and then veered off down a dusty, unmarked road. Because what was really awkward about all of this? Had Mack really believed that his debts to those psychos could be paid with his sister’s pussy alone? Had he really believed that she’d go along with it? Or that the Carrion Crew could truly make her into a whore?

  It wasn’t that Mack didn’t think his sister had the goods. He knew she did, a fact that he was embarrassed to admit even to himself. If asked aloud, he’d deny it left, right, and back again; Mack wasn’t a sister-fucker, and he’d certainly never aspire to be.

  That was his story, and he was sticking to it.

  That he’d instantly and without question named her to the Carrion Crew as “prime piece of pussy-meat” as a means of saving his own skin was more an act of cowardice than anything else. Mack could live with being a coward, after all; but being seen as a pervert who lusted after his own sister…

  No. That simply wouldn’t do at all.

  And if it was Mia’s face that came to him when he was getting called “mine” or “Stacy” or whatever, then that was just happenstance, right? Just coincidence.

  That was the road that led to Awkwards-ville, population Mack and only Mack. It was barred-off, barricaded, and littered with “ONE WAY” signs—and that way was out. And now that Mack had a visitor—a visitor who knew about Mia, which could only mean a visitor with the Carrions; a visitor coming to collect on their unsatisfied debt—he figured the only way out of Awkwards-ville was on a bullet train.

  He heard “POW!” in his head just as the gate opened and a man started into his cell.

  My visitor’s coming in here? he thought to himself. They’re not even going to stick me in the yard or something to make it look like an accident… but they’ve just got that much power, don’t they? They’ve just got that much power…

  “You Mack?” his visitor asked in a “we both know who you are; don’t fuck with me”-tone.

  Mack, figuring he was about to be killed anyway, figured there was not point not fucking with his unexpected guest. “Who wants to know?” he asked, trying to sound calm and in control and failing with each new syllable.

  “Malcolm Chobavich?” the visitor pressed on, seeming either not to hear Mack’s sloppy attem
pt at the tough-guy chatter or not giving a rat’s ass.

  Judging from how well Mack’s tough-guy chatter worked in this place, he wondered why it should work any better with somebody from out there.

  “People don’t call me that,” Mack confessed, feeling suddenly like a deflating balloon.

  If Mack’s air was getting let out, his visitor seemed to be inflating himself with it. He breathed in, smiled a smile that made Mack feel dizzy, and said, “But it’s your name.”

  “What’s in a name?” Mack muttered, then immediately wondered why.

  “Huh?” his visitor asked in a disinterested-yet-challenging tone. He pressed the thumbs of either hand to his index fingers and gave a series of sharp pushes—pop, pop—and then repeated the act on his middle fingers—pop, pop—before working the process on either of his ring fingers. Finally, finishing with the popping of the knuckle joints in his pinkies, he pressed his palms together, seeming to Mack in that instant to be praying, and folded his pressed-together fingers back—nearly bending his hands in half as he did—and filling Mack’s cell with a chatter of groaning joints.

  Mack didn’t want to admit that he jumped a little with each pop; they seemed to him to sound like little gunshots rattling off his final moments.

  “Nothing,” Mack said with a flinch. Suddenly “don’t fuck with me” seemed like good advice, even if it was unspoken advice. “What do you want?” he asked, certain he already knew. “What’s this I hear ‘bout you knowing my sister?”

  Like we both don’t already know…

  “Oh, that?” the visitor’s voice took on a fresh pitch, almost song-like.

  Not so disinterested now, are ya? Mack thought. He dared not speak, though.

  “No, no,” his visitor went on. “I more know of Mia than having had the pleasure of actually meeting her.”

  “That a fact?” Mack asked, his stance regarding this man’s business creeping closer towards curious but no further from skeptical.

  “It is. Are you aware of her arrangement?” the man asked.

  And there it was…

  The subject that Mack was so eager—and yet, at the same time, so terrified—to have brought into the open. It was the subject that scared Mack more than any other, more than the prison rapes and the threats of getting shanked in the showers. Prison was the better of the two evils, after all. That’s why he’d chosen it over trying to make due out there. As far as he was concerned, those bars would keep the Carrion Crew out just as much as they’d keep him in. That was what he’d believed, of course, until the verdict had been passed. Then, in the commotion of being dragged hither-and-thither, passed not unlike a prison bitch from rough hand to rough hand, he was told the cold truth:

  “There’s nowhere they won’t find you, Mack,” some strange voice in that crowd had whispered to him, cutting through over even the shouts of so many others. “Nowhere they won’t find you, and nothing you can do to stop them. Unless, of course, you’re prepared to make a deal.”

  Mack still wasn’t sure just what sort of deal they’d originally had in mind. As far as he knew the deal they’d been considering might have made him a free man—or, rather, as free as anybody could be when in the debt of the Carrion Crew—but those bars were still too damn alluring. He’d committed to a sort of holy scripture written within those bars—subscribed to a dogma of certainty within that soulless cell—and he wasn’t prepared to give in to heresy; wasn’t ready to put his own neck on the line.

  And so he gave them Mia. He’d told them she was good—both a good person and good pussy, but he’d never admit to the latter after the fact—and that, if she thought it would save his life, she’d do whatever they wanted. He didn’t know if this was true, of course, and at the time he hadn’t much cared. He’d be behind bars, and, no matter what sort of threats they threw about, that would be that. If the Carrion Crew didn’t get what they wanted out of Mia by that point and if they still wanted blood to pay back his debt, then it would be her that paid the tab.

  Mack had never been one to feel bad about leaving someone else to pay his tabs.

  Why should Mia be any different?

  But now there was this man standing in his cell, bringing up the arrangement that was supposed to be keeping his ass alive—bloody and sore, sure, but alive!—and looking all sorts of pissed.

  “I should say so, since I was the one who arranged it,” Mack admitted. He figured that his skepticism was justified either way, but his curiosity was beginning to lend itself to a shimmering, glittering beacon of hope. Something about this man and the way he spoke sounded interested, sure, but also disconnected from… well, from all of that. It seemed to Mack that somebody with the Crew, a Carrion, wouldn’t be quite so passive. There was shady business to be had here, no question, but maybe not the sort of business that ended with him shot or stabbed or drowned to death in his own toilet.

  Man, he thought, catching himself glancing around his cell, there’s a lot more ways to kill a man in here than I noticed before.

  The man nodded slowly, and Mack couldn’t help but think that, had he a cigarette between his fingers or a drink clasped within his hand, that would be the part where he’d drag or sip solely for punctuation’s sake. Instead, he moved to crack his knuckles again.

  There weren’t so many pops this time around. Mack still jumped all the same.

  “Just wanted to make sure you understood that.”

  “Understood what?” Mack asked, squinting at his visitor as though he might suddenly recognize him. He didn’t.

  “That you were, in fact, the one who told us to acquire your sister to fulfill your debt.

  “That’s what I just… wait, ‘us’?” Mack’s mouth went dry and he felt like he might piss himself. “Y-you with the Crew?”

  Suddenly that shimmering, glittering beacon of hope felt more like one of the glowing bulbs at the end of a grotesque appendage hanging from one of those scary-as-hell fishes that swam about in the cold, dark depths of the ocean.

  “Mister Chobavich, I am The Crew. You may call me ‘Papa Raven.’”

  A sick sort of numbness crashed down over Mack. He distantly remembered a trip to the ocean, long before prison, debt, and even long before the Creely house. It was late-Summer—one last hoorah before “off to school,” as their father might say—and the salty air held little stinging spit bubbles from the crashing surf. He remembered the sound of the waves, the fishy, nearly rotting smell of the sea, and the glow of sunlight off the distant stretch of eternal ocean water. It captivated him, hypnotized him, and little Malcolm had marched, horny with childhood eagerness and curiosity, dangerously close to where the solid, unquestioned line separating dry from not resided. That line, where the water climbed, waited, and fell back momentarily so that it might climb back again, was a challenge in his adolescent mind. His mother called after with “you can’t,” his father called after with “I wouldn’t,” and Mia, too young to say a damn thing, belched and giggled and cooed.

  Belching and giggling and cooing seemed just as good as “DO IT, MALCOLM! DO IT!” and so he did. He crossed the line, forgot all about it, and kept right on running. The ocean current had yet to start its fresh climb—had almost seemed to retreat that much farther in response to little Malcolm’s daring invasion beyond the line—and he’d felt within him a great swell of empowerment.

  I’m scaring away the water, he’d foolishly convinced himself.

  But the ocean had not been losing its courage, it had only been building up strength.

  And then the wave came.

  The freezing wall of water that had come crashing down over little Malcolm on that day was a gentle kiss compared to frigid, paralyzing numbness that overtook Mack in that instant.

  Papa Raven. His visitor called himself Papa Raven. And he was the Carrion Crew…

  Whatever the hell that meant.

  “That’s funny,” Mack heard himself say, too numb in body and mind to be sure he’d even meant to say it or why he’d even
think there was something humorous at play here.

  “Why?” Papa Raven asked.

  Mack moved to shrug, and it felt like he was trying to drag the Titanic from the ocean floor with his shoulders. “Last guy I talked to with the Crew called himself T-Built. Seemed like a funny guy. How’s he doing?”

  Papa Raven offered his own shrug. It came much easier to him than it had for Mack. “Dead.”

  The word hung there, violent and bloody like a slab of roadkill.

  Mack stared, feeling like there was a punchline waiting for its opportunity to punch once its line was reached. There was none.

  “Oh,” said Mack.

  “Yes,” replied Papa Raven, sounding like he cared little for the fate of T-Built but, instead, for everything else surrounding it.

  Mack figured dollar signs had something to do with that.

  This suspicion was confirmed as Papa Raven said, “And your sister was not without a certain degree of involvement in that matter.”

  “Mia?” the numbness left Mack just enough to allow him to feel an almost staggering degree of doubt. He felt like this Papa Raven guy had just tried to sell him a sex tape featuring the Pope. A buyer knew better than to trust the authenticity of such a thing. But, then again, this Papa Raven guy didn’t seem to be trying to sell him anything. Numb, skeptical, and increasingly curious, Mack pressed, “You’re telling me Mia was somehow involved in some guy’s death?”

  “That is what I just said,” Papa Raven challenged, “yes.”

  So maybe there was a sex tape featuring a guy in a pope hat, but that didn’t exactly mean…

  “You sure we’re talking about the same—”

  “Mister Chobavich,” that “don’t fuck with me”-tone made a fresh appearance with a healthy dose of “or else…” to spice it up, “I’d like to hurry this along. This place depresses me and I’d really rather not be here any longer.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Mack said, looking around at his cell and considering the rest of the prison that, true to that whispering somebody the day his verdict had been passed, had done nothing to keep the Carrion Crew out. Forgetting himself and, moreover, his present company, he muttered, “That’s sort of the fucking point, Papa.”