Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 70004 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70004 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
I absently dropped my hand and scratched the dog behind his ears.
Months ago when he’d shown up, I’d never intended to keep him.
I’d asked my nearest neighbor, Rebecca, to share him on social media in hopes of finding his owner—because no fuckin’ way a beast as well fed and groomed as Dog didn’t belong to someone—but so far we’d had no luck.
So, for now, he was my ward.
He was good company, though.
Whoever he belonged to had taught him manners, and he was the best house guest I ever had.
“Is your Texas blood going to make it?”
“Probably not,” I answered Apollo. “My guess, you’ll have to come search for my frozen body come spring.”
“Sure.” He chuckled. “Heard from the others?”
The “others” were six other men that’d done the prison break thing with me.
Weaver, Gentry, Creed, King, Courtland, and Odin.
Though those weren’t the names that they’d broken out of prison with. They were what they were called now, though.
I was the only one to really keep my name.
I went by Meo—a childhood nickname—with a very select few, or just Rome most of the time at work. But Romeo was still listed on my license.
My last name was different.
Haynes.
So basic and boring.
But if it kept police off my tail…
“They’re good,” I answered. “All of them meet up once a month with me at the bar and we make sure we’re still doing okay. I see a few of them around town, but we act like we don’t know each other.”
The seven of us had spread around the Crazy Mountains, not holing up in the same town, so seven men with no pasts didn’t draw attention.
Only Gentry, Weaver, and I were in Sawtooth.
The rest of them were spread out in the surrounding towns.
Weaver was a lineman that worked for the local electric company. Courtland drives trucks for the sawmill, and Gentry is actually a Sawtooth police officer.
Like me, they spent quite a bit of their time outside freezing their ass off.
“Odin keeping his nose clean?”
I snorted. “Odin is a full-grown adult that does what he wants. I have no control over him.”
Odin was by far the surliest of us all. He was also the one with the biggest chip on his shoulder, and his “fuck the world” attitude was slowly killing him.
It’d get him in trouble one day, I was sure.
Luckily, all of our DNA and paper trails were erased from the system. And for several of us, our previous homes, A.K.A. Huntsville Penitentiary in East Texas, thought we were dead. They wouldn’t ever be looking for us.
Apollo had literally deleted us off the face of the earth.
The only people that would miss us were those that were in the know. And so far, there were only five people total that were in the know. Apollo, my sister, Shasha Semyinov, and Apollo’s club president, Webber, and another friend of Apollo’s, Jasper.
There was no one else that knew to look for us, and hopefully it stayed like that forever.
Because the idea of going back to prison sounded worse than death.
I was slowly dying inside those four walls.
I was desperate for the smell of pine in my lungs, and the only thing I got out of East Texas was nostrils covered in dirt.
“Maybe I’ll check on him,” Apollo muttered mostly to himself. “What’s your plan for this weekend?”
I knew he wasn’t asking because he wanted me to come to him.
I would never be showing my face in Texas ever again.
Which fucking sucked.
I had a whole ass family down there that I was missing like crazy.
But not even for them would I ever get close to that prison again.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I found your dog’s owner,” he said. “Some chick that’s been scouring the internet trying to find him.”
A sudden rush of disappointment assaulted me, and I almost wished that I hadn’t asked Apollo to look into it.
But looking down at the big brute, I remembered why I’d asked.
Because someone was missing him.
I would never take away someone’s happiness.
“Who is it?” I asked. “Is the person worthy of getting him back?”
“I’d say so,” he said. “Some heavy equipment operator. She drives a backhoe for a living.”
I pictured some six-foot tall, strong woman that bench-pressed small cars.
“That doesn’t scream ‘I’m missing my dog’ to me.”
“She’s posted in every single group in a two-hundred-mile radius,” he explained. “She posted missing dog flyers on every single pole in Sawtooth.”
“I guess I should’ve thought to look there.”
“She’s got no speeding tickets. Parking tickets. Nothing. She’s never been in trouble with the law. Has some credit issues, but what American doesn’t? Oh, and she’s been showing dogs at dog shows since she was a young kid,” he expounded. “She and her father have been breeding them for a while. Though the dog, Brawny, was a dog she rescued from a bad situation. Puppy mill or something. He’s micro-chipped. Which you would know if you’d taken him in like I told you.”