Crazy Eights (Stacked Deck Book 8) Read online

  CRAZY EIGHTS

  STACKED DECK BOOK EIGHT

  EMILIA FINN

  CRAZY EIGHTS

  By: Emilia Finn

  Copyright © 2020. Emilia Finn

  Publisher: Beelieve Publishing, Pty Ltd.

  Cover Design: Amy Queue

  Editing: Bird’s Eye Books

  ISBN: 979 855 499 3022

  This Book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This Book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return and purchase your own copy.

  To obtain permission to excerpt portions of the text, please contact the author at [email protected]

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of Emilia Finn’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale, or organizations is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Also by EMILIA FINN

  Looking To Connect?

  CRAZY EIGHTS

  Prologue

  1. Part 3, I Guess

  2. Jamie

  3. Victoria

  4. Jamie

  5. Victoria

  6. Jamie

  7. Jamie

  8. Victoria

  9. Jamie

  10. Victoria

  11. Jamie

  12. Victoria

  13. Part 4… Afterlife

  14. Jamie

  15. Quinn

  16. Jamie

  17. Quinn

  18. Jamie

  19. Quinn

  20. Jamie

  21. Quinn

  22. Jamie

  23. Quinn

  24. Jamie

  25. Will

  26. Quinn

  27. Jamie

  28. Quinn

  Epilogue

  Also by EMILIA FINN

  Also by EMILIA FINN

  (in reading order)

  The Rollin On Series

  Finding Home

  Finding Victory

  Finding Forever

  Finding Peace

  Finding Redemption

  Finding Hope

  The Survivor Series

  Because of You

  Surviving You

  Without You

  Rewriting You

  Always You

  Take A Chance On Me

  The Checkmate Series

  Pawns In The Bishop’s Game

  Till The Sun Dies

  Castling The Rook

  Playing For Keeps

  Rise Of The King

  Sacrifice The Knight

  Winner Takes All

  Checkmate

  Stacked Deck - Rollin On Next Gen

  Wildcard

  Reshuffle

  Game of Hearts

  Full House

  No Limits

  Bluff

  Seven Card Stud

  Crazy Eights

  Eleusis

  Rollin On Novellas

  (Do not read before finishing the Rollin On Series)

  Begin Again – A Short Story

  Written in the Stars – A Short Story

  Full Circle – A Short Story

  Worth Fighting For – A Bobby & Kit Novella

  Looking To Connect?

  Website: www.emiliafinn.com

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EmiliaBFinn/

  Newsletter: https://bit.ly/2YB5Gmw

  Email: [email protected]

  The Crew: https://www.facebook.com/groups/therollincrew/

  Did you know you can get a FREE book? Click here for Bry and Nelly’s story: BookHip.com/DPMMQM

  CRAZY EIGHTS

  STACKED DECK BOOK EIGHT

  EMILIA FINN

  Prologue

  Life sucks, and then you die…

  Jamie

  There was once a time in my life when a day felt like an hour, an hour felt like a minute. Back when the word “lifetime” felt unworthy, because although a lifetime is, arguably, a very long time, to a young couple in love, it wasn’t nearly enough.

  It wasn’t even close to enough.

  I know I went searching for love. I acknowledge my part in this mess, and I have no one but myself to blame for the heartache that cripples me on a daily – really, a minutely – basis. But damn, you’d think the universe would take it easy on a guy who’s lived a week… a month… two months since the one he loves raced out of his life without so much as a goodbye… or a valid phone number.

  Cameron Quinn, eighteen years old, five feet, six inches tall, blue eyes that reminded me of the jeans she always wore, and dark brown hair that hung a little past her shoulder blades.

  Most of that is verifiable fact. Her eyes, I saw with my own. Her hair. Her height.

  I suppose she could have been lying about her dreams to one day choreograph and dance with someone famous, but I feel in my heart that was true.

  Her age… well, she might have been lying about that, but the number fits well, so I doubt she was exaggerating much. Maybe she’s seventeen, or maybe she’s nineteen, but that’s as far as I can stretch my imagination.

  If she was fifteen, I’d be a dead man. Her brother would have had me assassinated the first time she and I kissed. And if she was twenty-five, I feel like he wouldn’t have been so mad about the kissing… or the time he found us together, asleep, lying in each other’s arms.

  The phone number I texted for a week no longer works. The hotel she and her brother stayed in gives us nothing but the names they already fed us.

  Cameron and William Quinn. Siblings.

  Jake and Eloise Williams are the names Oz had when he was trying to arrest Will… or, well, the guy who claimed his name was Will. But those names are as false as the first two.

  The familial relations are easy to confirm, at least. Not everyone is born with dirty denim eyes, bad attitudes, and matching butt chins.

  “Baby?” Mom walks into the kitchen on February thirteenth – the day before Valentine’s Day, almost two whole months after Cam… Quinn… Eloise… sped out of my life – and stops behind me as I sit hunched over the counter. She wraps her arms around my waist, and lays her cheek between my shoulder blades. “Hey, honey.”

  All I can muster is a sigh. “Hey, Mom.”

  “I miss your face.”

  I stare at the marble countertop, and simply… breathe. “I’m right here. I’m always here.”

  “But are you?” she questions. “Your body is here, but I’m not sure I’ve seen your eyes since Christmas. I haven’t heard you laugh.”

  “Nothing to laugh about.” I shrug. “Tell Dad to get better jokes, and maybe I will.”

  Her breath comes out on a gentle snicker. “He’s trying. Can you believe he lays in bed at night Googling jokes? He’s trying to crack you.”

  Yeah? Well, the problem is, once I’m cracked, I’m not sure I have the strength to put myself back together again. “What am I suppos
ed to call her, Mom?”

  “What?” She pushes off my back, only to come around and sit on the stool beside mine.

  Somewhere between my twelfth and thirteenth birthday, I grew bigger than my mom. I grew taller, broader, stronger. But the strength in a man’s muscles is nothing compared to the strength my mom and the other women in my life hold in their hearts.

  She sits beside me now, shorter, so she has to look up into my eyes, but she takes my hand and squeezes. “What do you mean?”

  “Cam.” I hate that my voice cracks on the word. A single syllable, three letters… enough to slam me against a wall so hard that I wish I was dead. “I know her as Cam. I fell in love with Cam.”

  I bring our joined hands to my heart and swallow what threatens to explode free. I’ve had this bubble of pain sitting in my chest for months. Wrapped in a sheen of rage. Interspersed with pockets of homicidal hunger. “But now they’re saying Cameron Quinn isn’t her real name. They keep saying she doesn’t exist. So tell me, what am I supposed to call her?”

  Mom hesitates. “Um…”

  “Is the goal for me not to call her anything?” I rasp out. “Everyone keeps saying she’s not real, so is that the point? For me to forget?”

  “Baby, I—”

  “Because she does exist, Mom! Maybe that’s not her name, and maybe she ran away, but her heart exists. It fucking exists, because I can feel it in here.” I crush my mom’s hand against my heart. “I’m sick to death of everyone saying she doesn’t exist.”

  “It’s not… We don’t mean it like…” She stops. Swallows. Nods. “I’m so sorry, baby. When people say that, they don’t mean for it to hurt you. They’re just trying to work. Sophia and Oz and them… they’re just talking in the literal sense. They’re not talking about her heart.”

  “She exists,” I whimper. “But she’s not here.”

  “They’re looking for her.” Mom perks up just a little, like her news will somehow please me. “You’ll know as soon as they know.”

  When a single tear slides along my cheek and rests on the corner of my lip, I brush it away with an angry swipe of my arm. “They’re looking so they can arrest them, not bring them home.”

  It took a whole day for me to stop staring into space after Cam’s car roared away and left town. When her wheels finally touched the ground, and the Quinns raced out of my life, I merely sat. In the dirt, in the snow, in the gravel parking lot outside my family’s gym, I sat like maybe this was some kind of cruel joke and Cam would be back any moment.

  I stared. And waited.

  It took a week for me to stop dialing the number she gave me. Every time I called, I was met with the same canned response; “The number you are calling is switched off or out of range. Please hang up and try again.”

  I spent a week doing that, like I thought the phone company would eventually change their mind and connect us again.

  Then it took an additional week for me to stop texting… Stupid, I know. But when I texted, it didn’t bounce back and remind me that the number no longer worked.

  Cam promised she would call me every single day once she was back in her town; every single night when she finally crawled into bed after a long shift stacking shelves, she’d call, and we could talk until we fell asleep.

  She’s a fucking liar. But I guess we already knew that.

  “What town was she born in?” Soph has asked.

  Cam didn’t say.

  “Who are her parents?” Oz has demanded.

  I don’t know.

  “She never gave you any other name? Not even by accident?”

  Quinn.

  That’s the only name she asked of me, and only when we were making love.

  I’ve been questioned by my own fucking uncles, cops, like I’m some kind of criminal, but even if I wanted to give them something, Cam made it impossible. She knew all along, she knew she would run, and she knew the details she was giving were all lies.

  She even told me once that what we had would end with her disappearing into the night. She literally told me, and still somehow, the fact she ran caught me by surprise.

  Now, I have nothing to snitch, and even if I did, I’m not entirely convinced I would.

  Stepping outside my mom and dad’s home, the home I was raised in, I slowly move down the porch steps and onto spongy grass. I cross onto the street, then onto the grass opposite, until I’m making my way through Uncle Jack’s yard and into the back.

  It’s only February, so it’s not particularly warm, but the sun is out, and the snow stopped falling a while ago. It’s the change of a season; the old is gone, and with it… the woman I fell in love with.

  I move through the gate, and pass our old-as-God black Labrador as she lays in a patch of sun with her feet lifted to the sky, and her tongue lolling out to the side.

  She’s Uncle Jack’s dog. He rescued her long ago, when she was hit by a car and lost a leg. She’s lived a long, happy life with only three limbs, and has never once complained.

  “Annie.” I walk to her, and kneel so I can scratch her belly. I wasn’t coming here to visit with her, but Annie’s days are numbered, and her belly is already exposed, so why the fuck shouldn’t I stop for a moment? “I’m going for a walk into the forest. Do you wanna come?” I slide my hand up to her neck, then her floppy ear. “You could keep me company,” I rasp out. “You could help me.”

  Annie’s muzzle is almost exclusively gray. Her teeth are stained and worn away. But she heard ‘walk’… or, more accurately, she heard the desperation in my voice, so she rolls to her stomach, and then makes her way to her feet with a tired grunt. She’s larger than a typical Labrador, tall enough that her head rests against my hip when she’s standing.

  With a nod of acknowledgment, I pat her ear and start walking again. Toward the wooden fence surrounding my uncle’s home, toward the few slats of wood we long ago loosened so my sister and cousins had a way to sneak out of the property without alerting our parents.

  Of course, in our children brains, we figured we were smarter than them. But as I grow older, I realize that maybe they knew more than they ever let on.

  I look over my shoulder, an old habit that manages to draw a smile to my lips, then I move the slats of wood aside and follow Annie through the gap until I find myself standing in the forest that surrounds our estate.

  The temperature drops as soon as I step into the trees, but there’s no wind in here, no sound of cars, no sound of anything except birds high above, and Annie’s breath coming heavier than it should.

  “We’re not going far.” I pat her ears again and keep my pace slow so she can keep up without trouble. “But if you wanna lay down, you can, okay?” I look down into her dark eyes. “If you need to rest, just lay down, and I’ll sit with you.”

  We make our way through the dense area, over fallen logs, and under low-lying branches. We pass the treehouse my cousins and I built as children, but I don’t stop to climb up.

  That’s not my space anymore. Not my place to snoop inside.

  “You met Cam, right?” I glance down as we walk. “You met her, so that means she’s real… right?”

  Of course the old girl doesn’t answer me, but my desperation means that I swear she nods. I swear she understands.

  And I swear, if someone utters the words ‘Cameron Quinn doesn’t exist’ one more fucking time, I’m going to do something that will land me on that same ‘Wanted’ list that Will is allegedly on.

  We walk for only minutes – six, maybe seven – before I step into a tiny clearing and find what I came looking for. Here once stood a tree, strong and true, but one day, another grew in its place. The second was stronger, more determined, so it pushed the first aside, knocking it over, so now it lays on the forest floor, and right beside it, the victor stands tall and proud.

  A romantic notion, I suppose. But the downed tree isn’t the reason I came out here today.

  I glance down when Annie grunts her way to the ground. She lays on her bel
ly, sighs, and flicks her ears, but her eyes remain on me. Watchful. Protective.

  I feel like she’s considered herself the protector of all Rollin On children over the years. She did a fine job, considering I’m not sure a single one of us have ever been hurt on her watch. But I feel like she’s yet to acknowledge that we’re grown. She considers her job incomplete, and hell, maybe that’s why she’s still around. Maybe that’s why she defies the rules that say large dogs should pass before their fifteenth birthday.

  If her sense of duty is what keeps her with us, then for as long as she’s not in pain, I won’t tell her any different.

  “Here it is, Annie.” I step away from her, and make my way to the fallen tree. My heart throbs in my throat, an ache settles deep in my belly, but I swallow it all down, adopt the bravery that Cam seems to always overflow with, then I kneel in the place I once rested. I turn and place my body in the Y that the trees make, then I lay back so my head rests where it once rested before.

  I laid here with Cam once. We touched, tasted, explored… More importantly, we trusted. Or I thought she did.

  Angling my head, I look up and find exactly what I knew I’d find. The words I carved into the tree myself, the nicks left behind from Cam’s pocketknife.