Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 70488 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70488 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Exhausted—both mentally and physically—he could barely put one foot in front of the other. Tired to the bone due to a never-ending war. He was desperate to find a new every day that didn’t revolve around getting shot at by kids that could barely hold a rifle steady. War had broken his soul, and the last thing he wanted to do was go home and pretend that he was just a normal citizen.
But then he sees her, also at her lowest of lows, for the first time, and his soul latches on. Bernice, his salvation.
He’s convinced that she’s the answer to his woes, and he develops an unhealthy attachment to her that carries over to his civilian life. For five years, he watches her. Protects her. Keeps her safe when she won’t protect herself. Hux follows her every move and hides in the shadows so she’ll never see.
Then she shows up in his town, and all bets are off.
She’s in his town now. That means his rules. His way. And no more highway.
She’s stuck, and she’ll never know it until it’s too late for her to run
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Prologue
I told you two minutes ago, I do not control the remember.
—Hux’s secret thoughts
Huxley
Five Years Ago
“And what do you want the world to know?” the reporter asked the woman on the screen.
“I just want the world to know that my brother is innocent.” The woman looked heartbroken. “My mother and that stupid police chief had their hands in this. He was set up. My brother is a good man. I…”
I didn’t know her at all, yet that didn’t change the fact that the pleading in her words ripped my heart in two.
I found myself staring at her face and not listening to her words.
Pale-green eyes the color of jade, so expressive and fierce for a brother that was wronged in such a horrible way. And you couldn’t fake that kind of belief in a person. No one protected someone that did something horrible like that unless they truly believed that they were innocent.
Her hair blew away from her face, like whiskey fire. Auburn with strands of red and deep brown.
The wind also blew the light sweater she was wearing in the middle of a heatwave backward, causing her belly to become exposed.
Her skin was so pale.
“Brother.”
I looked up from the television, finding myself staring at my battle buddy.
“What?” I asked, sitting up.
I should be sleeping.
I had to be up at oh-four hundred for a watch, yet I couldn’t stop staring at the woman on the screen.
Some invisible pull had me latching on and not wanting to let go.
“You want to take my watch, and I’ll take yours?” he asked. “I’m feeling sick to my stomach.”
I shoved my feet into my boots and laced them up quickly, so used to the act that I missed no hooks as I tied the laces into a double knot.
“Sure,” I said.
He thanked me, and I left the tent, my phone still in my hand.
I gave one last glance at the woman on the screen, the pleading in her eyes so desperate that my heart skipped a beat.
I didn’t know her. But somehow, some way, I knew that I would see her in real life.
One
I am both dumber and smarter than you think. Never estimate me.
—Bernice’s secret thoughts
Bernice
“Are you sure?”
I looked at my brother, Creed, and said, “Listen, Creed. I’m going to be perfectly fine, okay? I swear to you. I don’t want to live the rest of my life without you.”
My brother, my sweet, doting, big-as-life, caring brother, melted.
“Just promise me if you start having trouble, you’ll let me know. I can’t help you if you don’t let me know stuff is happening.”
I sighed. “Creed, I’m fine.”
I’d moved to Sawtooth, Montana, after Creed’s new wife, Birdee, had gone against his wishes and informed me that he was, in fact, not dead. He was very much well, living in Sawtooth, Montana, and had joined a motorcycle club. Though this was after he’d broken out of prison, staged his death, and then escaped.
Some nice man named Apollo had created him a new life here, and he’d had to change his appearance and lay low.
Now he was a game warden and lived in a big, beautiful house, the exact opposite of the kind of house we’d grown up in.
When we were small, Creed had to step up and take care of me after my mother decided it was more fun to do drugs and work the streets than it was to be a mother. Creed had been taking care of me my entire life, and it was time to show him that I was a big girl and could take care of myself.
“But…”
“Creed.”
I looked at my sister-in-law and thanked her with my eyes.
She winked.
I gathered my things from my brother’s fancy kitchen table and shoved everything into my various pockets.
It was nearly June, but you wouldn’t know it.
Not with the fact that there were still piles of snow nearly everywhere. Plus, the mountaintops would apparently still have snow on top of them at least until mid-August. If not through the entire summer and fall.
I was both excited and terrified out of my mind.
I hoped that my body would allow me to live here.
When I was a child, I found out that not only did I have anemia—a very mild form of it that constantly kept me cold and eating red meat every meal—but I also had asthma.
The asthma wasn’t a mild form.
The asthma was intrinsic. It was triggered by whatever the fuck it wanted. Cold air. Stress. Getting sick. A light summer breeze.
You named it, I had an asthma attack.
It was also fairly severe, and I was often fighting to keep it under control with my medication.
Luckily, my asthma doctor was willing to see me remotely, seeing as I was now moved halfway across the country.
I wouldn’t be sharing what my doctor thought of the move to one of the coldest states in the US of A.