Repo (The Henchmen MC 4)

Prologue

Maze

I've been a magnet for trouble my entire life.

It has never been by my own doing, mind you. I've always been on the up and up, the straight and narrow, the right side of the law. But as for the people around me, yeah, therein was the problem.

It all started with my mother who somehow managed to illegally obtain social security benefits she wasn't entitled to for ten years before they found her. By that time, they had attempted all the nice ways of contacting her and trying to get her to settle her debt. My mother, being the selfish, stubborn woman she was, never responded. So then one day, they stopped by and dragged her to jail and me into the system.

It only lasted for two weeks before my grandmother from Vermont made the trip down to the city and picked me up.

For the next eight years, there was no trouble, no fear of the police, no pit in my stomach. I had a good, albeit rather boring, childhood and adolescence.

About two months after I turned eighteen, my grandmother died. She left me the house and her car and what little money was in her bank account as well as completely and utterly alone in the world.

Then, well, what is a story about trouble without involving a boy, right?

I was nineteen, attending the local community college, taking classes in accounting, going home to an empty house filled with the ghosts of the woman who had lived there for sixty some-odd years, studying and eating dinner alone.

Then one day, behind me at the line at the coffee shop, I met him.

His name was Thato and he was tall and blond and beautiful with the most hypnotic gray eyes I had ever seen in my life. He asked for my number, his voice with a slight accent I couldn't place at first that sounded almost British, but wasn't. I learned when he took me out on our first date that it was South African, that his parents had moved to the states when he was thirteen and he never shook the slight inflection in his tone. Which was fine by me because it was one of the things I liked best about him.

Thato lived in an apartment above his mechanic shop and it wasn't long before I sold off my grandmother's house, stacked her belongings in storage, socked away the money, and moved in with him.

What could I say? I was young and in love.

And, as it often followed with a woman being young and in love, things didn't exactly go to plan.

Meaning, one night eight months into our relationship, I was shocked awake by the front door of our apartment being busted open with a battering ram and half a dozen of Burlington's finest burst into the bedroom before I could even pull up the blankets to cover my naked body.

See, as I learned later that night after being allowed to dress before being dragged down to the police station for questioning, Thato did own a mechanic shop. Sort-of. It was a mechanic shop in the way that it was a building with lifts and oil-stained floors and tire irons and torque wrenches and all that kinda stuff.

But it was not the place anyone went to have their cars fixed.

No, see. It was a place that Thato and his employees (or as the cops called them: accomplices)brought cars that they stole to dismantle and sell off as parts.

It was a chop shop.

The biggest one in Vermont.

So... yeah.

My little fairytale turned into Thato being hauled off to jail, me being scared out of my skin, and the decision for me to leave Vermont and start over again in New York City.

Then things went well for the next four years.

Or so I thought.

Then on one fateful January morning, I found out something.

And that's when everything went to hell.

One

Maze

"You can do this."

I paced the small space of my cheap motel room from door to window wearing nothing but the scratchy towel that came with the room, stiff from way too much bleaching. The room was dominated by a queen bed in a room not meant to hold anything bigger than a full, covered in a God-awful brown and red paisley comforter that in no way matched the faded blue window dressings and carpet. It wasn't much, but it was home.

Temporarily.

I hoped.

If I couldn't calm my nerves and focus, it might end up being my home-home. And, well, that wouldn't stand. I may not have had much left in the world, but I had my pride. And my pride told me that no matter what shitstorm I had lived through the past six months, I was way above living in a sleep-and-fuck motel on the highway full of truckers and whores.

"Focus," I said, turning back to the bed where I had my clothes laid out. Really, they weren't my clothes; they were my uniform. They fit the part I was playing, the part I would be playing for weeks, months, hell... maybe even years. That was the thing. That was why I was so stressed out. It wasn't like this was some no big deal interview for some job I could walk away from at anytime.