Cary (Henchmen MC Next Generation 5)

Abigail was back.

And the reason those letters that I’d clung to like a lifeline stopped coming was because she literally couldn’t send them anymore.

I hadn’t been exaggerating when I told her that her letters meant something to me, that they’d found me right when I needed them most.

It wasn’t like being locked up was anything new to me. But, in general, my sentences had been relatively short. I tended to spend time in jail, getting my sentence cut down to time served by the time I even made it to court.

And maybe the longer sentence wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d been locked up with some of my men. Or if any one of them came to visit.

It wasn’t long after I got locked up, though, that the club fell apart. Everyone left was likely scrambling to find a new club, a new life. Which meant there was no one left to come see me.

I was alone.

I was unaffiliated.

And if there is one thing you want to be when you’re locked up, it was affiliated. With someone, anyone. If you weren’t, shit got rough.

Unfortunately for me, most of the bikers who I was locked up with were fucking white supremacists. That was not something I was ever going to be associated with.

So I was as alone as a man could be.

When you didn’t have a crew inside, your only choice was to keep to yourself, keep your head low, and stay away from all the other organizations.

I’d always considered myself pretty self-sustaining. The fact of the matter was, though, that I’d always reaped the benefits of a club and brotherhood. I never had to go through something alone if I didn’t want to.

Not only was prison life just a minefield to navigate to begin with, but going in without a buddy to help point out possible danger up ahead. Or to simply distract you from it, that shit was not easy.

Sure, I filled my days with cell workouts, focusing on fitness. Eventually, I got a job in the kitchen, which put me with the Italian mob, who pretty much left me alone. I read. I kept my head on right.

Slowly but surely, though, the loneliness began to creep in. Eventually, it brought with it something I’d never experienced before.

Depression.

It was something new and foreign to me. It took work to get out of bed. If I wasn’t forced to do it, I probably wouldn’t have. I’d have just slept the days and nights and weeks and months away.

I’d never experienced anything like it before. It was like this shadow behind me, leaning on my shoulder, a weight that made every footstep heavy, made each movement feel like actual effort.

Even when I finally recognized it for what it was, there wasn’t much I could do. What? Tell one of the C.O.s that I was depressed? So I could get tossed in segregation with the other crazies? So I could listen to them talk to themselves and scream all day and night?

Nah, I was going to pass on that.

Which meant I just had to deal with it in silence.

It got harder and harder as each day passed.

Then, like a goddamn miracle, one day I got a letter.

In this soft, curly, feminine handwriting.

Christ, just the look of something feminine was welcome after so long away from women.

The paper even smelled like a woman. Soft and sweet. A little floral, a bit vanilla.

Whatever it was, it was fucking intoxicating.

I didn’t even give a shit that the only reason I was getting a letter was because some woman in some church somewhere felt it was her duty to try to convert me from my evil ways.

All that mattered was that it was someone to talk to, even if I’d never really communicated with anyone with letters before.

They came infrequently at first. Those first several stunted, forced notes where neither of us really knew what to say. But I held my breath each time the mail came regardless, needing that little hint of the “outside.”

It wasn’t long, though, before personal details started to come out.

Like the fact that she was a lot younger than I first thought. Very recently married, in fact.

I remember being jealous of that man. The one who got to be in the presence of all her soft and sweet, who got to be in possession of her big heart, who got to smell her floral and vanilla scent whenever he wanted to.

It wasn’t long before I realized the bastard had no right to be with her to begin with.

But, well, Abigail had been raised to shovel the shit a man left for her, and do it with a goddamn smile to boot.

So she didn’t really even see how shitty he was treating her. Or if she did, she placed the blame on herself.