Camden (The Henchmen MC 18)

Five-gallon buckets, electric burners, metal pots, yards of tubing, fucking glass science beakers.

The entire space was overrun with their latest pet project. One that ended up being a helluva lot more profitable than I had expected.

I guess after years of living with a man with an inflated ego from being a big-shot in high school who somehow became a loser without realizing it, I had begun to expect for him always to fail. He was good at it.

But this time, I was wrong.

He and his buddies found their niche.

Selling dangerous chemicals to people who could barely afford it.

Within a few weeks, they were working around the clock, the fumes in the trailer too strong for me to take - burning plastic and cat piss were the closest comparisons I could ever come up with - I strung up an old hammock and started sleeping in the backyard.

It was easier back there too.

Because I could pretend I didn't know exactly what was happening when the women showed up at the door, muscles tight and twitchy, bodies skeletal. They left as high as fucking kites.

I was getting too familiar with the ugliness of the world to try to convince myself that my father and his buddies just did his regular customers a solid.

Because the men who couldn't pay were turned away, no matter how sick they were.

The women were given another option for payment.

My stomach turned over at the thought of all three of those bastards taking advantage of their addictions, using their bodies.

I had always disliked my father. Not only because he could never live up to my grandparents, not even because he never even tried to be a father. But just because he was a shitty man, a bad person. He was selfish and stupid and supremely arrogant, an inexcusably intolerable combination.

It wasn't until then, though, that I actively started hating him, that I couldn't stand to look at him.

I wanted to run off, to leave, to never have to see the bastard again.

But I was a young teen who didn't speak.

I couldn't get a job.

I couldn't provide anything for myself.

So I had to sit.

And wait.

Everything changed for the second time a week after my sixteenth birthday.

When my father and his crew seemed to piss off another local group. Not drug dealers, but gun runners.

From what I understood, it involved the little sister of the main gun runner.

It didn't take a lot of imagination to figure out what had happened there.

My guess was they had taken care of my father's friends first. Because they showed up at our place with confidence, without a concern of having anyone lookout for someone coming.

Besides, for all intents and purposes, my father was the boss. He was the last to fall. Because they had wanted to take their time with him.

I had missed a lot of it, passed out in my hammock to avoid the nauseating smell of the drugs cooking.

It wasn't until I heard a loud scream then a small 'pew' noise that I knew something was wrong. Seriously wrong.

I'm not sure why I rushed in, ready to, what, save my father? I guess that was the intention. If nothing else, he'd kept me clothed and fed while he did all sorts of other damage in mostly a mental and emotional way. Though he wasn't beyond using his belt on occasion when he was pissed and I was the easiest target. My back was a map of those scars.

Maybe it was simply a sense of self-preservation, needing his help still.

But whatever the motivator, I rushed in.

To find four men in the living room, overturning bins of chemicals.

And my father dead in the center of it all.

"Ah, shit. No one said he had a fucking kid," the oldest of them all, someone I pegged as the leader based solely on being dressed in a suit.

"He's not a kid," another reminded him.

I certainly didn't look like one.

Six feet, strong. I inherited a lot from my father in the looks-department. It constantly made people confuse me for much older.

"Shit," the leader said, scrubbing at his temple with the side of his thumb. Of the hand still holding the gun that had killed my father. "Your father was a fucking rapist, kid. Shittiest of men. The kind who don't deserve to go on living."

"He's not screaming for help," another noted, watching me with drawn together brows as I imagined no reaction at all crossed my face.

I don't know why I did it, feeling so lost in the whole craziness of the moment, but I reached for a notepad and pen, scribbling.

"What's it say?" the boss asked when one of his men took the pad.

"Says he don't speak. Guess that's why he's not yellin'."

"Hm," the boss said, tucking his gun away. "You gonna miss your dad, kid?"

I reached for the pad, scribbling down the truth.