KENNICK: A Bad Boy Romance Novel Read online

  He would never see the sky outside of a prison again.

  Kim wondered if that was supposed to make her happy.

  It didn’t.

  When she thought of it, she felt sad. Sadder than when her father had died, even.

  And when she felt sad, she would find Kennick and curl herself beside him, laying her head on his chest and hearing the deep, strong, real rumble of his heart. She would let her fingers play along the black ink across his chest, her lips fall to his ribcage and land there with softening kisses. He would run his hands through her hair and tell her stories. Wild, fantastic, gypsy stories.

  They hadn’t discussed marriage yet, but Kim would accept him when they did. Already, they were fighting over whether to move into a new trailer or have Kennick move into her apartment. It was a fight Kim knew she would lose; and she didn’t mind, not really. She mostly liked the fighting because when they made up, it was in bed.

  They did need a new place though, regardless of what sort of place it was. The Volanis brothers’ trailer simply was not fit for four grown adults, two of whom could get quite loud when the spirit took them (and oh how it took them!).

  But first things first. The squeaky chair, and the streetlight on Tudor Street. Later, Kim could fantasize about a double-wide trailer that would be too large for just them, might someday be homey for a family, some little green-eyed babies…

  As Kim tried to keep her mind from drifting too far, Jenner Surry was across town waiting for his phone to ring. He knew it would. He’d made the call, left the message. And it was all just waiting now. He’d never been particularly skilled at waiting, but he was willing to do it now. Because this waiting was like being on line for your favorite ride at Disney World. There’d be plenty to look at as you tapped your foot.

  He was going to take the Volanis brothers down, one by one. He’d failed to take Kennick down, but then he’d realized: it was a lot easier to take out a big man by kicking him in the knees. Which had led him straight to Cristov.

  The phone buzzed but he let it buzz once more before answering. No use in being over eager for something like this.

  “Talk to me,” he said when he picked up.

  “You’re the one who called us,” the voice on the other line said. “You talk to me.”

  “Well, I heard you guys were interested in expanding your consumer base,” Jenner said, not letting on that he was the slightest bit intimidated. He’d have to learn not to let big voices shake him up. Not if he was going to be rom baro. “And I happen to know the town of Kingdom would be a great place to sling. I know who you’d want to talk to. All you’d have to do is get rid of the current…eh, purveyors. And with my help, that wouldn’t be hard.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  “Alright,” the voice said, low and gruff. “Tell me more.”

  Jenner smiled. Outside, the dying summer day played a cicada symphony. Jenner leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

  “First, I’m going to tell you a couple things about gypsies.”

  THE END

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  Part One

  ~ 1 ~

  Oh great, a used condom.

  Oh, wow, super, a bloodstain.

  What is this even, yogurt?

  Who does this to a pillow?

  Was it very necessary, whoever you are, to completely cover the walls with shit?

  What is this…oh please…don’t even…no…yup, it’s piss.

  Jesus Christ, is it that hard to put your used needles in the damn trash can?

  Oh…a dollar tip, how nice, considering they left an entire week’s worth of rotting fast food and half-empty beers all over the floor.

  How did they manage to get cum on the ceiling?! That’s actually impressive, I can’t even be mad…

  All in a day’s work for me. I pushed my cart from room to room, arms sore from scrubbing at mysterious stains, clothes splotched with bleach, mind numb to what wonders might await me behind the next door.

  People are animals, I tell ya. No one knows that as much as a cleaning lady at a hotel. And, no, before you start dreaming up my identity for me, I’m not an “illegal alien”. I am half-Latina, but I’m a full-blooded American citizen, born and raised, and I speak perfect English, thank you very much.

  What is it about staying at a hotel that can turn even a mild-mannered person into an untamed beast with no problem pissing all over the floor or dumping an ashtray onto their sheets before checking out? Is it because it’s not their home, so they don’t care what happens to it? Is it because they don’t realize someone like me has to come and clean it up? Or – and perhaps this is the scariest possibility – is it possible that they’re actually like that at home, too, and you just never see it?

  Not everyone who came through the doors of the Gateway were like that, of course, but way too many were. We had our fair share of families, businesspeople, truckers. But for every guest who left the room in a decent state, there were two prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, alcoholics, or other such devils who took it upon themselves to make my job as hard as humanely possible.

  And I never held anything against those people for what they did. If you’re a lady and you need money and you don’t mind letting someone give you the old in-out to get some, go on with your bad self. Got a drinking problem and can’t drive home? By all means, keep everyone safe and stay at the hotel. Need to “figure stuff out” through a drug-fueled weekend? Not my place to judge.

  But, goddam, a little decorum would be nice to see once in a while.

  “Gabriella, Rosa is taking her break now, can you make sure 215 is ready? Early check-in,” my walkie-talkie crackled on my hip.

  “Already checked it, boss, all good,” I said, pushing down the ‘talk’ button and hoping that my manager would actually hear me for once instead of badgering me about why I “didn’t respond”. The woman was a sweetheart, but she was deaf as hell and the flask of vodka she sipped on all day didn’t help her comprehension skills.

  As I heaved my cart down the hall, legs already aching from all the bending over and crouching down my job demanded, I tried not to think about what would happen at the end of my shift. To be honest, as much as I hated playing nursemaid to the lost souls of the world, tidying up after them, wondering whether that puddle was vomit or melted ice cream, there wasn’t a whole lot to look forward to once I was done for the day, either.

  It was late June, when it’s really only just beginning to warm up in the high Rockies.

  Maybe it’s a good night for a barbeque, I thought idly, until I opened up the door to the next room and my list and remembered that it was raining lightly. No use stopping at the store on my way home for hamburgers and potato chips.

  Maybe I’ll make lasagna, I thought. Lasagna is good for a rainy day. Jeremy loves my lasagna.

  Lasagna was a safe bet. Anything that I already knew Jeremy loved was a safe bet. Anything I wasn’t sure about was a gamble. And if I made anything that he’d told me once, even if he’d said it years ago in a conversation that I had no reason to remember, I was treading on ice so thin it might as well be paper.

  Yeah, lasagna, I thought, thankful that this room, at least, wasn’t as bad as some of the others I’d seen that day. As I pulled up the covers, balling them up with the sheets, ready to throw them in the hamper, I made a quick mental inventory of the room. I was looking for chargers, cell phones, socks, shoes, a ski goggle, anything that a rushed guest might have left behind on their way out the door.

  You’d be surprised what people leave behind in hotel rooms. Usually it’s just crap, but sometimes you find interesting things: photographs, mysterious pills, strange powders in baggies, gold jewelry. Some of the girls I worked
with, I knew, were prone to taking such finds home with them instead of bringing them to the front desk, like we were supposed to. I didn’t hold it against them, but I always brought anything I found straight to the clerks to hold onto or dispose of as they saw fit.

  It wasn’t worth the risk of getting caught, for me. And besides, I didn’t do drugs, and I didn’t need jewelry. Jeremy, though he had many flaws, was an excellent provider. Or, I should say, the police force he worked for was an excellent provider. We didn’t want for money. The fact I had this job at all was due to one of his whims.

  After we’d married, three years before the shit hit the fan, he didn’t like the idea of me “sitting around at home” all day. Unfortunately, he also didn’t like the idea of me getting a job that would be “too mentally taxing” or take up “too much time”. Really, he just wanted me to get a job where I’d come home too dog-tired to do anything but put up with his shit, and working for housekeeping at the hotel was the perfect mix of physical labor and mind-numbing repetition.

  “But what did I get a degree for, if I can’t do anything with it?” I’d said, still so naïve.

  “Well, I don’t know what you got a degree for, I sure as hell didn’t tell you to get it. I mean, what can you even do with a degree in philosophy? You’d have to go to grad school if you want to make anything of yourself, and we can’t afford that right now. Besides, if you went back to school, you’d have your nose in a book all the time again, no time for me. I waited two years to have you all to myself, I don’t want to wait another four,” he’d replied, appealing to that sappy part of me that loved him beyond reason.

  “I guess you’re right,” I’d resigned, not wanting to have the same argument again for the third time that week. After our honeymoon, that had been our first major issue. The first of many, I’d like to add.

  So I’d started looking for a job. With almost no work experience, it was tough. I could flip burgers, but that seemed beneath me, and with a degree I was way overqualified, anyway. I wanted to take a position as a secretary at a law firm, but Jeremy had thought that would be too stressful for me, with crazy hours and demanding lawyers to cater to. He was the only man I should be catering to, in his opinion.

  So, I’d taken the gig as housekeeper at the Gateway. I’m pretty sure I was only hired because I looked like I could speak Spanish. Which I can’t, by the way. Well, I can, but only curse words. Plus, my name, Gabriella, is only one “l” away from the traditional Hispanic spelling of the same name, blurring the line even further. Being half Puerto Rican and half Italian, I’m what they call “ethnically ambiguous”, which is a nice way of saying “no one knows what the hell you are right from looking at you.”

  With large, almond-shaped, dark chocolate eyes, a deep tan complexion, and crazy, kinky, black hair that does whatever it wants at all times, I’ve been mistaken for a Jew, a Mexican, a Filipino, and even, on one occasion, a Hawaiian. My body, though, is pure Latina. I blessedly missed out on the dark body hair and stick-thin frame of my Italian mother, and got my paternal grandmother’s luscious hips, large, C-cup breasts, and wide, womanly thighs.

  Not that I always appreciated that, mind you. In fact, when I was with Jeremy all those years, I hated it. He was as Irish as they get, pale as the moon and thin as a rail. He always made me feel like I was fat.

  He’d buy clothes for me, intentionally buying sizes too large, because he knew that it made me think I belonged in the “plus” size section. He’d make little backhanded compliments about my roly-poly tummy, which never seemed to shrink no matter how much I tried to diet or exercise.

  Now, of course, when I look at myself in the mirror and see the slight pudge in my stomach, I know it’s just a necessary evil of being what they call “voluptuous.” But back then? I did all I could to hide my body, thinking that, since it didn’t look like a fashion model’s, it wasn’t any good.

  But that was just par for the course when it came to Jeremy. I was never good enough, never pretty enough, never smart enough or funny enough. He never ceased to remind me, in little ways, never outright, how he’d “settled” for me because he loved my personality, not my mind or my body. And how much could he have loved my personality, anyway, considering how much he thought I screwed up on a daily basis?

  As I went into the bathroom, gathering towels and making note of what toiletries needed to be restocked, I instinctively paused to check myself in the mirror.

  I’ll need a touch-up soon, I thought, brow furrowed, hand gently touching the tender spot above my left eyebrow where my concealer was just starting to look splotchy. You could just barely, if you looked hard enough, make out the dark purple markings underneath my make-up. I flinched under my own touch, the spot still tender although it’d been three days.

  Here’s something you should know about humans, if you are one.

  None of us are of one mind.

  Or, maybe I shouldn’t be so broad. But I’ve met a lot of people, and there’s always two sides to the coin. It’s not like some old, tired, trope, like good and evil or black and white. It’s just…there’s the “you” that you’ve always believed yourself to be, the one you want to be, and there’s the “you” that you’d like to ignore, that you don’t want to take ownership of.

  I don’t tell many people about that time in my life, because in that time of my life the latter “you” was in charge of me. I thought of myself as feisty and smart, with a spitfire wit and a take-no-prisoners attitude. The way I’d been raised, in a household that was half no mames, guey! and half fangul!

  But, of course, that wasn’t who I was. I was – and this pains me to write – a “battered women”. Ugh. What a horrible phrase. It makes me think of cake, or cookies. When, in reality, there was nothing sweet about my marriage. Jeremy, love him though I did, was a gigantic asshole. A disgraziat. A so pendejo.

  He didn’t always hit me. Maybe once, maybe twice a month. But I never deserved it – does any wife deserve it, really? I can maybe see if you walk in on her banging three dudes at once, or if she’s got a knife to your head. I wouldn’t put someone in jail for smacking their woman if she was about to go full-on Misery on the guy. But a good, hard, close-fisted slug because you spilled coffee on his shirt in the morning?

  But, the thing is, he made me feel so low, emotionally, that I thought I deserved it. Even though, deep down in the back of my mind, I knew that it was all a lot of macho bullshit and that he was wrong about me, he was really, really good at making me feel like I’d have nowhere to go, no one to turn to. He made me feel like being his wife was really my only purpose on this earth. And lord, even if it was the most fucked-up love in the world, I did love him.

  How’s that for honesty? I can still admit – now, after everything – that I loved that man with all my heart.

  But some loves are just no damn good. Heroin addicts love heroin, don’t they?

  See, this is the thing I need you know about me before I go any further. I’m not stupid. I’m not pathetic. I’m not a mindless bimbo. I was, and am, smart as hell. I graduated top of my class from Baruch University, with a degree in philosophy. I can think my way out of a steel trap.

  But back then? I had the emotional wisdom of a slug. And as much of my own will, or even mind. It had only been three years that I’d been married to Jeremy, but, like most lifelong abusers, he was good at mind games and manipulation.

  We’d dated for two years prior to being married, when I was still in school, and when I look back I see all the signs. The little concessions I’d make for him, starting way early in the relationship. The little power struggles, which he always won. By the time my story gets started, I’d lost pretty much anything that had once made me proud to be Gabriella.

  ~ 2 ~

  Reign barely looked up from the girl whose legs were draped across his lap as Endo walked into the back office.

  “’Sup,” Reign said, his hands busy playing with the girl’s tight curls, bouncing them up and down. She was giggl
ing like a lunatic. It wasn’t exactly a sexy sound, more annoying than anything else, but Reign was tired, and she was there, and she wasn’t a challenge.

  He wished she had something to say besides “like”, “cool”, and “hot”, though. He knew that in reality she probably had a hell of a lot more to say than those few words, but she probably thought he wanted her to be a bimbo. Whatever.

  It wasn’t worth the effort to explain to her that, sometimes, men like a woman with a little substance to her – in mind and body. The girl looked cute as shit in booty shorts and a crop top, but she also looked cold, and young, and thin. The word squeaky came to mind.

  “So, you know that dealer, the one who thought we were giving him the run-around on that dope deal?”

  “You mean, the one we are giving the run-around?” Reign asked with a chuckle, drawing his eyes away from the lollipop on his lap long enough to look at Endo expectantly.