TRIGGER: A Motorcycle Club Romance Novel
TRIGGER
A Black Smoke MC Novel
By Meg Jackson
Table of Contents
Prologue
Part 1
Part 2
Epilogue
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Prologue
“What’s on your mind, Trig?” Reign asked, eyes narrowed to slits, mouth screwed up in worry.
“Nothin’, boss,” Trigger said, spitting out his mouth guard, eyes averted. His jaw moved in small circles. His eyes were set heavy as lead weights on the man across the cardboard ring. Sweat trickled down the side of his face, but his chest rose even. Too damn even to make Reign happy.
“You never lied to me yet, Trig,” Reign reminded him. “I wouldn’t recommend starting now.”
Trigger glanced at his President, a wincing pain in his heart. In that glance, Reign saw everything he needed to know to make his heart fall. Whatever was going on in Trigger’s head, it wasn’t what needed to be going on in his head. It was something that could get him – and Reign, and the whole damn club – in a hell of a lot of trouble. But he swallowed his words. That was the thing about Trig; he was trustworthy in ways that transcended lying and cheating. Reign knew Trig would never do him wrong if it wasn’t for a damn good reason.
“I’m thinkin’ of how to take the fall,” Trigger said, his eyes focusing once more on the man across the ring. All around, other men stood with grimaces painted on their faces, stone-cold and red-eyed. Smoke drifted upwards, around, the tendrils beautiful when seen on their own but, when taken all together, forming a dirty grey smog. Three men in particular caught Reign’s eye as he squinted through the smoke. They’d been catching his eye all night. They were the men he was most afraid of – which said a hell of a lot, considering how few men actually managed to put fear in Reign’s callous heart. They were dressed almost goofily like members of the Rat Pack, fedoras and suits and old-timey patterns on their ties. But they weren’t goofy. Not in the least damn bit. The low muttering hum of male voices was as thick as the smoke.
Trigger was staring at his opponent, a big burly man with yellow teeth and a scar over his left eye that looked somewhat like a crucifix. But he wasn’t seeing the man, so much as he was seeing Cass, her lips parted, her body plump and yielding, her flesh like sweet licorice under his tongue. He was seeing her, tasting her, smelling her. And each sense, heightened by pulsing adrenaline (and a bit of whatever was in that pill Reign had slipped him to help dull the pain), drove deep scarring grooves through his heart. He didn’t want to remember her like that, her warm thighs wrapped around him, her blue eyes watery with tears of pain and pleasure, her voice like a church bell calling him to God. Yet this man across from him did nothing – nothing – but remind him of her, even though they couldn’t be more different. Where she had soft, rolling flesh, he had solid muscle. He had brown eyes, brown hair. He was tall, she was short. His cheeks were high, the bones popped out from his face like a cartoon character. Cass’ cheeks had a constant natural blush, a trickle of freckles, kissable, so kissable…
“Trig,” Reign said, leaning in now to whisper in his ear. Reign’s eyes were steady on the three men in the stupid suits. “If you’re thinkin’ of something stupid, you best just tell me now. I mean it, man.”
Trigger looked back at Reign, saw where his eyes lay, felt his spine stiffen out of instinct. He knew he was about to do something very, very stupid. He knew he was about to fuck up – again. He knew he wasn’t just fucking things up for himself, but for Reign and the whole club. He knew all those things in his brain, they throbbed there, sharp-edged and bellowing. But he knew something else, too.
He knew how lucky a guy could be with a good woman.
And how, no matter what, he’d have to do things for her that belied all sense and logic.
His jaw moved, but he didn’t respond. And then, a moment later, just as he made his mind up to tell Reign what he was gonna do, his body lurched forward, another instinct. The bell had rung. It was too late now.
End of Prologue.
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Flip the page to start Part 1.
Part One:
Ten Years Earlier
“Cassidy?”
Oh, holy crap, she thought. Suddenly, her messenger bag seemed too heavy. Her armful of books and folders, haphazardly stuffed with papers and notes, was embarrassing. As were her ill-fitting flare jeans with the torn-up bottoms billowing out around her dirty tennis shoes, her too-big, worn-out blue hoodie, and her sloppy ponytail.
“Um, just Cass,” she said, nearly throwing the pile of books onto the cold wooden tabletop, etched with graffiti and covered in unidentifiable black smudges. She unwrapped herself and draped her bag around the top of the chair opposite her new pupil. Even the chairs in the library were cold, and wobbly, with hard wooden seats that left you feeling flat-assed if you sat in them too long.
“Thomas,” the boy said, offering his hand. She took it, praying her palms weren’t sweating. She hadn’t expected the boy, one year older than her, to be so good-looking. With long red hair pulled back into a bun and a wry smile, he was the sort of boy you’d expect to see in the headlines of some student-teacher romance scandal.
Cass scolded herself for her reaction; she’d long trained herself to ignore her classmate’s looks, knowing that even the homeliest boy would consider her below his league. It was better, then, to be blind altogether, than to have to notice all the boys who’d never want her.
“Nice to meet you. Do you go by…”
“Tom? No, that’s my Dad’s name. I prefer Thomas. Thanks, by the way, for this. But just so you know, it’s probably a waste of everyone’s time. I’m no good at school. Mad attention issues, I guess. Only doing this ‘cause my brother says he wants to see me graduate,” the boy said, almost seeming sheepish.
“Oh, well, uh…yeah, no problem. I mean, I’m not, like, a professional or anything. Just good at history. So…this unit is on the rise and fall of the USSR, right? We covered that last month in my AP class,” Cass said, lowering her head and shuffling through the textbooks and folders for her notes.
“Must be nice,” Thomas said, leaning on his elbows on the desk. “Being smart.”
Cass blushed, kept her eyes down, finding her notes but continuing to shuffle through papers just to have something to do with her hands.
“I’m not that smart,” she said. “I just study a lot…”
“Fuck studying,” Thomas said with a laugh. “I’d rather be sleeping. But, so yeah. USSR. Like the Beatles song. That’s….that’s about all I know about it.”
Cass laughed, daring to look at him. She noticed, wondering how she’d missed it in the first place, the tattoos that peeked under his short sleeves. Her eyebrows raised slightly, and his own eyes followed hers.
“Wanna see?” he asked. Before she answered, he pulled his sleeves up slightly, revealing the slapdash collection of tattoos on both his biceps. Skulls and dice and sloppy-looking daggers.
“Cool,” Cass said, thinking that this guy must be the coolest guy she’d ever talked to. Brooklyn was full of tatted-up men, but her own tiny social circle limited her exposure to such people. She’d always
had an interest in ink, though, wondering how it would feel to have someone etch their drawings into your skin forever, admiring the ability to withstand the pain. “What do they mean?”
He laughed, and it sounded like a stream bubbling over rocks. Cool and fluid and easy.
“Not a fucking thing,” he said. “Just stupid shit.” His smile dropped slightly, and he straightened up a bit, cheeks reddening. “Oh, man, sorry about the language.”
“No, it’s totally fine, trust me,” Cass said, somewhat thrilled that this guy, who clearly didn’t need to worry about what she thought of him, still cared enough to want to have some decorum. “I hear worse from my Dad on the regular.”
He smiled again, and lowered himself, relaxing.
“So…Stalin, yeah? And uh…Trotskin?”
“Trotsky,” Cass said with a smile. “But let’s start with the basics, right?”
She slid one copy of her note sheet, prepared that day during lunch, with the general tenants and history of Communism in Eastern Europe, across the desk. He took it and held it up, eyes scanning the words.
“So, it all kind of starts in 1825, with the Decembrist Revolution…”
Trigger
“Trigger, you’re gonna be more than an asset to this club than your brother, if you keep impressin’ me like this,” Steel said, looking at me slant-eyed. He only had one eye that worked, so every way he looked was pretty slant-eyed. The other eye was sewn shut, almost caved in, repulsive, in fact. But it gave him an air of unfuckability: no one wanted to mess with him.
What he’d said was a compliment, for sure, but it came with a lot of bad feelings. My brother had given his life for the Bleeding Deacons – I couldn’t see how I could top a sacrifice like that.
The road bumped underneath us. I wished we were on our bikes. But you couldn’t exactly haul ten pounds of dope, forty pounds of high-grade speed, and a couple bushels of the best cheeba this side of Brooklyn across the George Washington Bridge on a couple of hogs.
Instead, we got ourselves a bona fide FedEx truck; “Relax, It’s FedEx”, indeed. Clean tags and a dirty registration, and a good amount of NYPD on our payroll, and we were about as worried as a tiger in a seafood market. Life was good.
Except for my brother being dead, of course.
That, and my no-good father and my run-off mother and my failed attempt at getting an education and this strange sick feeling inside my stomach that never seemed to go away, unless I was drinking with the boys or speeding on my hog or rolling my face off at an underground rave. Those were the kinds of things some kids did for fun. I did them because they were the only way I could get around life without smashing myself up against a brick wall.
But Steel didn’t know, or didn’t care, about any of that. Probably the latter. He’d taken quite the liking to me, which made sense considering that he’d liked Riker a lot, too. He respected that my brother gave his life for the club, and treating me right was as good a way as any of honoring his memory.
I respected him for it, appreciated the fact that I was such a rookie but already had as much trust as any of the guys who had ten years on me. I was picked for plum jobs, where the rest of the guys my age were stuck licking shit off the stripper poles after a rough night and delivering bloody messages to guys who wronged the club.
I’d have felt guilty, but I also knew I had something in me that a lot of other guys my age didn’t have. I had a pretty good head on my shoulders. I did make it all the way up to junior year of high school.
More than that, I had a nice sense of fear that kept my eyes weathered and my shoulders hunched. I knew what could happen to a man who let his guard down. And Steel appreciated that I wasn’t the type to go running head-first into a situation without looking every which way first.
He especially appreciated it because it meant he could take it a little bit easy; with me looking around all the time, he only had to do it half the time. Already, I’d saved his ass once or twice by seeing something that didn’t look right and pointing it out. That’s why I got to do jobs like these, where brute strength or a steady hand just wasn’t as important as a strong sense of my own mortality. When it came to high-volume drug deals, how fast you pulled your piece was a lot less important than knowing you might have to pull your piece in the first place.
As we rattled on through Fort Lee, leaving the fair isle of Manhattan behind us for the moment, I put my guard on extra-high. We didn’t have nearly as many friends in New Jersey, either on the police force or just in general. We only had five more miles before the pick-up location, but anything could happen in one mile, never mind five. The guys we were going to deal with, we’d dealt with three times in the past – not enough to really make me comfortable. Most of the time, our rep was enough to keep us safe.
But not always.
We were a big club in New York, with two hundred and some members, and some satellite groups in the surrounding states. The core of the Bleeding Deacons was based in Sunset Park, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, where we operated a few strip clubs and owned some waterfront warehouses. We mostly dealt in the drug trade and prostitution, but Steel had his fingers in some high-profile gambling rings, too.
As we pulled up to the vacant lot that would serve as the exchange point – a large, weedy parking lot next to the water, where a few banged-up dinghies bobbed pathetically and high sloping marshland obscured the view from the bridge or highway – I leaned forward, squinting my eyes to better see what we were up against. Two guys – that’s what we were expecting, what we’d been told to expect. And, from the looks of it, it was two guys.
That is, until we got a little closer. I squinted harder.
“Slow down a bit, Steel,” I said out of the side of my mouth. There was something off about the scene – it could have been the angle of the light, or a reflection off the murky waves but…
That shadow…Steel looked at me steadily as the truck slowed to a crawl. There was something about the shadows under the truck. And then that something moved.
“There’s a guy behind there,” I said, blurting it out. I turned to Steel; he narrowed his eyes, stopping the truck entirely and leaning forward in his seat, trying to see with his one good eye.
“I don’t see…”
And then we heard it. A zipping sound through the air, and then a nauseating canter as the truck suddenly groaned over to one side.
“Fuck! Fuck!” Steel said, and I realized that one of the men was shooting at us – he began to move forward, gun held at chest-level, while the second man disappeared behind the truck. Steel and I ducked through three more shots fired. The truck leveled into a kneeling position as one bullet took out the other front tire; a second bullet showered us in glass from the windshield; the third hit the side view mirror and it clattered to the ground.
“Goddam guinea sons-a-bitches,” Steel shouted, raising his own gun and firing out the broken window; I raised my own head, gun held in two sweaty hands, finger curling around the trigger. The man who’d been advancing now lay on the ground, a pool of blood blossoming outward from his limp figure. The two other men – if there were two – were still behind the truck, apparently unaware that their comrade had been felled.
“What do we do?” I asked, knowing the answer before I could even finish the question. The Bleeding Deacons were a lot of things – but we weren’t cowards. If Tweedledee and Tweedledum weren’t gonna come to us, we were gonna come to then. I kicked open the door on my side of the truck just moments before Steel did the same.
“We kill their sorry asses, son,” Steel said as our boots hit the ground. I felt like a SWAT guy, from the movies, running up all crouched-down, gun still held in two hands, pointed at the ground. A flutter, that shadow under the truck…just as the man appeared around the back end of the hulking machine, I felt my arms rise on their own, my finger squeezing before I could think about it, the sound of the bullet leaving the barrel like some awful soundtrack to this awful movie.
The man yow
led and fell to the ground, clutching one knee, his pistol abandoned on the ground and then kicked underneath the truck as he sprawled himself out, surely blind to anything but the pain. I’d gotten him square in the kneecap, one hell of a place to take a bullet. To my left, I heard another gunshot, then another, and then a third. Looking over, bright red blood stained Steel’s shirt on the shoulder, but the third man lay unmoving on the ground. Steel’s eyes met mine.
“Just a flesh wound,” he said thickly, his face red. Before I even registered what he was doing, he lifted the gun and fired once more, in the opposite direction of the fallen man. I followed the bullet’s trajectory; the man I’d shot, who’d been blubbering and crawling away from us as slow as a slug doused in salt, now collapsed onto his chest.
Three bodies.
And I was 19.