Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 70516 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70516 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
“No,” Apollo admitted. “I’ve been watching this town since I found it.”
Since he found it?
“Why?”
He leaned forward so that his elbows were resting on his knees. “I’m going to talk, tell you a hypothetical situation, and see what you think.”
“Okay…”
“If you tell anyone about this hypothetical situation, I will make sure that your body is never found.”
My stomach somersaulted.
“I…”
“A year or so ago, I found out that my woman had a brother in prison that didn’t really deserve to be there.”
I blinked but didn’t speak.
“Fast forward a bit of time, and I found a way to get him out,” he continued.
“Okay.”
“Hypothetically, I did that in a way that meant when he was out, he had to disappear to a town that was small enough and far enough away that he wouldn’t be recognized.” He leveled me with a look. “Where he could go on a hike, and save the life of a woman getting attacked by a bear.”
My belly sank.
Romeo was his brother-in-law?
And the man sitting next to me was the one responsible for breaking him out of prison?
Somehow, I knew this wasn’t a hypothetical anything.
I also started to allow my brain to formulate the answer from earlier that I wasn’t allowing myself to think about.
Weaver had escaped from prison.
His daughter coming to visit him was bad, mostly because he was supposed to be dead. And if someone reported his daughter missing, and she was found here with the man that was supposed to be in prison, it would be bad.
Very, very bad.
No wonder he’d rightly freaked out.
“While I was looking into my brother-in-law’s problems, he ran a few names past me that he thought might benefit from the same kind of actions. Men that he met in prison either before he was sentenced or after that he felt like were wrongly accused and wrongly tried. I looked into them, and a few more, and hypothetically found them a way out. I found them a new life, way away from their old ones. Found them jobs. Established connections. Made it to where they had a place to lie low, with people that would always have their backs.”
A motorcycle club.
Sawtooth and the surrounding towns.
I wondered who else was here that’d had the same things happen to them?
I was now questioning every able-bodied man in the Dixie Wardens Motorcycle Club.
Were they all escaped convicts?
And did I care?
I didn’t think I did.
I knew the type of man that Weaver was.
He may not have shared his deepest and darkest secrets, but he’d helped me out of an intense situation.
And he’d told me about a man that would be looking into that situation.
“I want to thank you for looking into my parents,” I said instead of commenting about his not-so-hypothetical story.
His eyes darkened. “They’ll slip up.”
I sure hoped so.
“What are you going to do about Weaver’s sister?” I asked.
Apollo sighed and leaned back in his chair once again. “The easiest thing to do would be to make Boston disappear,” he admitted. “She’s fifteen. She’ll change a lot in the next year when she hits a growth spurt. She can change her hair, wear contacts, and maybe his sister will just think she ran away and doesn’t want to come back.”
“But you don’t think she’ll let it go,” I guessed.
“She’s already suspicious,” he said. “I read in one of her messaging boards that she was in for grieving widows that she doesn’t feel like her parents and Boston are sad enough for the loss of a son.”
“Shit,” I grumbled.
I didn’t even know Weaver that well, but what I did know was that I wanted to help him in any way that I could.
Hell, I didn’t even know why he went to prison in the first place.
“What happened there?” I found myself asking.
“A shit show of epic proportions,” he said, shifting so one ankle was resting on the opposite knee. “Did Weaver tell you he was a SEAL?”
I nodded.
“When he got out, he had some hearing issues. Not bad, but bad enough that he couldn’t stay in,” Apollo said. “He started lineman school and graduated in like eight months after getting out of the Navy. He started working, finally getting to spend some quality time with his daughter after getting out. And then he finds out that his daughter has been groomed by a man at her school.”
My gut clenched, which shot a bolt of pain through my entire body.
I didn’t move, though.
“The man’s name was Sonny Gibbons.”
“The billionaire professor that was substitute teaching?” I gasped.
Everyone had heard about Sonny Gibbons.
Apparently, the man had been grooming students for years and had been finding young eighteen-year-olds with their whole lives ahead of them and turning them into his playthings. When they would get too old—and being old to him meant getting to their twenties—he would pick up a new substitute teaching job and find another one.