“Hey girl. You look comfy,” she remarks as she walks in, dressed almost identically to me except for the heels.
Our loosely-prescribed “uniform” here at the parlor is a white blouse and black pants, hair up in a neat bun to indicate cleanliness. But Caitlyn always wears those clunky heels, while I tend to just wear comfortable black flats. I have my reasons for not wearing heels. Some of that reasoning has to do with just wanting to be comfortable since I do spend pretty much all day on my feet at work, but I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that part of the reason is just that I hate the idea of not being able to run fast.
In flats, I can cover a lot more distance in a much shorter window of time than if I wear high heels. And after the trauma that occurred in my life six years ago, I’ve never stopped expecting that I might have to run at any point. I just like to be prepared, that’s all. Maybe it’s paranoid of me to think that way, but oh well. Better safe than sexy, so the heels are a no-go for me.
“I’m bored out of my mind, Cat. Are you sure we don’t have any last-second bookings for the day?” I sigh.
She chuckles as she pours herself a tiny cup of espresso from the machine. She glances over at me in amusement.
“Are you actually complaining about getting paid to do nothing?” Caitlyn points out.
“Maybe,” I admit. “But think of all the tips we could be earning.”
“Meh. It’s been go-go-go for me all this week. I am totally down for a day of rest, as long as Rita doesn’t come sniffing around to give us busy work or something,” she says, wrinkling her nose as she takes a sip of hot coffee.
None of us particularly enjoy spending time with Rita, on or off the clock. She isn’t a bad person by any stretch of the imagination, but she can be a bit of a buzzkill.
“I get that. I guess I’m just worried,” I confess quietly. “My rent is coming due next Monday and I’m worried I won’t be able to pay it on time. I just had to replace the timing belt in my car so money’s a little tight. I could definitely use some tips at the moment. And it’s been so slow around here since Christmas four months ago. Don’t we usually get busier in January since everybody’s got all their New Year’s resolutions to get fit and do self-care and all that?”
“I guess people have a different resolution this year,” Caitlyn remarks.
She flops down in the chair beside me, pulling her long legs up to her chest as she sips her drink. I watch the curls of hot steam dancing up from the top of the mug for a moment. I must look utterly zoned out, because Caitlyn tilts her head to one side and waves her hand in front of my face.
“Hello? Earth to Kate,” she says. “You look exhausted, girl.”
“It’s stress,” I sigh. “It feels like I spend all my time working, and yet I still don’t know if I’ll be able to pay rent. What am I doing wrong here?”
“Pfft. That’s just the economy we’re working with these days,” she laments, rolling her eyes. “But I’ll let you in on a little secret: get yourself a side hustle.”
“Side-hustle?” I repeat dubiously. “When the hell do you find time for that?”
She giggles. “I believe it’s called moonlighting. I work here during the day, but one or two nights a week, I work at this other place, too,” she explains in a hushed tone.
I lean forward with interest. “What other place?” I whisper.
Caitlyn’s eyes dart back and forth as though checking to make sure the coast is clear. Then she leans in and says, “It’s just like this one, only it pays a lot more.”
“Really?” I ask, wide-eyed. “Where is it? Can I apply there? Are they hiring?”
She laughs and sips her coffee. “Oh, trust me: they’re always hiring. But it takes a special kind of person to work there. You have to be willing to, uh, bend some of the usual rules of massage therapy if you want to fit in there,” she says vaguely.
“What rules are you bending?” I ask pointedly. I have a feeling I know where this is headed, and judging by the suggestive smirk on my friend’s face, I’m correct.
“The one about, um, personal contact,” she whispers. “You know how people are always making jokes about how we should start giving out happy endings?”
I blanch at the phrasing. “Yes. Why?”
“Well, you asked what rules I’m bending. There’s your answer. I give happy endings. Not every time, but most of the time. And before you get all judgy, let me say this, too: I make beaucoup tips, girl,” Caitlyn admits proudly.
“What kind of tips are we talking?” I press her.
“Let’s just say you wouldn’t be worrying about rent at all,” she quips with a wink.
I find myself totally intrigued—and yes, a little grossed out—by her revelation. On the one hand, I know it’s totally unprofessional and risky to do what she’s doing. If Rita or anyone else here at the parlor ever finds out what Caitlyn’s been doing at her other job, she’d be fired before she could even say a word in her own defense. But on the other hand, I could definitely use the extra cash, and I have to admit that the idea of injecting some much-needed excitement into my boring routine is tempting. It’s just not my style, though. Never has been. I was never the wild one. In fact, after what happened six years ago, my former best friend Moxie and I broke off contact. I realized I simply didn’t have anything in common with her anymore. She was always seeking out trouble, while I was busy covering my tracks and lying low. I still crave adventure, of course, but not like that.
I want a kind of measured and safe excitement. An adventure I can feel safe doing. But I can’t do it on my own. I would need someone strong and protective to watch over me and rein me in. Someone like Breaker.
Despite the fact that I have spent a lot of time these past six years doing everything in my power to forget him, to not think about him, he has never disappeared from my thoughts completely. He’s always been there, lurking in the shadowy back corners of my head, waiting for me to think about him openly again. I can still so vividly remember the way he kissed me, the sensation of his lips against mine. The way his hand pressed supportively at the small of my back. The way he brought me back home and acted like a true gentleman. Still, though, he’s the reason I had to leave Stonedale and abandon everything I had ever known and loved.
He said he would always be watching me.
I don’t know if I believe that now, though. It’s been six years and I’ve never seen hide nor hair of him since then. Surely he’s given up on me by now. I felt his presence, more like a ghost haunting me than anything tangible, at first. I did as I was told. I left Stonedale, drove three and a half hours away to Casper, where I enrolled in community college under a made-up last name. Luckily, I managed to fake the documentation needed to join the massage college. I graduated with a certification as a masseuse, and I’ve been working here ever since.
For a while, I was just elated to finally be independent and working. I was starting to leave my dark past behind me, thinking I could finally move on. But after a while, I just began to feel lonely. My friends and colleagues here always try to set me up with men, always urging me to try dating apps.
But the truth is, I have no interest in those men.
For better or worse, I’m still hooked on the shimmering ideal in my head: Breaker, the man who saved my life.
My kidnapper-turned-hero who haunts my every dream and slips into my every fantasy. He always told me that if I ever told a living soul about what he did for me, he would come back to get me.
Though at first his threat scared me, over time it has come to excite me. The idea of running into Breaker again, regardless of the circumstances, is enough to make my heart race faster. Especially now that I have more free time. Things have slowed down considerably at the parlor, and the hours for my volunteer position as a kinesiologist at the local hospital have recently been cut, in favor of taking on someone with further schooling than I have. The fact of the matter is that nowadays I have more time to think. More time to stew on life, on how thing
s didn’t turn out quite the way I hoped. And I’m not getting any younger. I want adventure.
“Hey,” Caitlyn says suddenly, shaking me out of my contemplation. “You okay there?”
“Yeah, yeah. Of course. My bad. I guess I just zoned out again,” I admit.
“You looked like you were a million miles away, Kate. What’s going on? What’s on your mind, girl?” she asks with genuine concern.
I bite my lip, afraid to answer truthfully. But no respectable lie comes to mind, and she’s waiting for me to say something… so I just say it.
“Years ago, before I started working here, I had a run-in with a pretty dangerous crowd,” I murmur, almost as though I’m in a trance as I stare blankly at the breakroom table.
“Okay. And what happened?” she coaxes me.
“They kidnapped me. I was just a kid then. Eighteen. They put me in a room by myself and wouldn’t let me out. Then, the most amazing man I’ve ever met—he came to save me. He set me free. But sometimes, when I’m alone and awake in the middle of the night, all I can think about is how scared I am,” I whisper.
“Scared of what?” Caitlyn asks.
I swallow hard. “That they’ll come back to get me any day now.”
Breaker
I’m not the boy I was six years ago.
I sit at the head of a heavy wooden table in the room that serves as our clubhouse’s meeting place, hand on my chin as I gaze at the map of Crook County, Wyoming spread out before me. My kutte hangs on my shoulders proudly, and our club’s symbol is on my back like a king’s jewels: a devil piercing a bleeding heart with a spear.
We are the Wyoming Heartbreakers, and I’m their prez.
The map in front of me is marked in red with dozens of circles, scribbled notes, and arrows. I’m sitting back, still as a statue, taking a deep breath as I survey what has become the little kingdom I’ve carved out for our members.
My members.
Bones sits to my right, and Ironside is on my left. Big Daddy sits across from me, and even Skid sits beside him. After six long years, these men are the people I call my allies, even after everything we’ve been through. And goddamn, have we been through a lot.
After I dropped off Kate, I went into hiding. I had no other options. I showed my face enough to keep the pressure on Kate and make sure she did as I said, but other than that, the better part of a year consisted of getting all too acquainted with the inside of a safe house I rented with cash. From there, all I could do was plan. I watched the movements of Buzz’s old club as best as I could, but that was challenging sometimes. I’m the man who killed his son, and he wasn’t about to let that go unanswered.
But once the energy for the hunt for me fizzled out, my old comrades showed their true colors, and for once, that was a good thing.
They split up.
It didn’t happen all at once. Bones was the first one I got a hold of. Caught him in a motel halfway to Laramie and held him at gunpoint while he explained that Buzz had sent him out to find a girl for the strip club, but that his plan had been just to ride away and never look back. His story checked out. He had supplies with him, and he had always been a bad liar. I believed him and gave him an alternative: join my club.
Bones filled me in on the real situation back at the old warehouse: not everyone was on board with Buzz’s plan to get involved in sex trafficking. In fact, none of the ranking guys liked that idea, and Buzz was just the first one to have hit the road. They had all joined in the hunt for me because all they knew was that suddenly, I’d killed Roadster. Hell, for all they knew, we might have just gotten into a drunken fight and I’d killed him on accident.
He was half-right, I had to give him that.
Buzz tried to shut down the rumor that I’d kidnapped the girl because I wasn’t down to start pimping sex slaves. He failed, and that was bad for him. I was a symbol of rebellion. I was proof that the members could defy him and get away with it. Ironside was the next most influential member who filled the power vacuum I left, so he was the next one to contact.
He was easy to recruit. He had always been a straightforward man, so we figured the straightforward approach was the easiest. The look on his face when we just showed up at his front door like a couple of salesmen was priceless. He had his bags packed within an hour.
Big Daddy looked like he was going to be trickier, but he sought us out. Tailed us for miles before catching up at a diner on the highway and hashing things out over a few coffees and orders of fried chicken. The man can eat, there’s no question about that.
Skid still has a lot to learn, but he came to us by pure chance. Of all places, we rode past him outside a church in Casper, where he wasn’t even wearing the old kutte. I pulled him aside and offered him the chance to do something that wouldn’t weigh on his conscience so much. He was more than eager to jump horses and ride with us.
And I’ve gotta say, now that I’m calling the shots, things have been going well.
Crook County has been good to us, and we’re based out of some prime real estate in a town called Pine Haven. Our clubhouse is situated underground, under a modest establishment above that we have a good arrangement with. We don’t get bothered by strangers, we’re well connected to the highways, and best of all, the local cops recognize that we’re doing a better job at serving justice than most of them ever could.
That means they’ve been willing to cooperate.
I stand up slowly and look around at all the men gathered before me with a hard gaze.
“I want to hear your version of a full report,” I say, “from you, Bones. Tell me how things got out of hand. From the start, step by step, and then I’ll tell you whether the cops are overreacting.”
“We started with what you gave us in the last meeting,” Bones says, leaning forward. “One of our sets of eyes in town saw Ted James at a white tablecloth dinner with a guy we know to be a fracking lobbyist. They want to start fracking near Devil’s Tower, and they’re trying to climb in bed with small time politicians like Ted James.”
“Young councilman of a town of less than two thousand, he’s probably looking for low hanging fruit like that,” I agree, nodding. “He doesn’t have much of a track record, but the cops we have in pocket back up their theory that he’s liable to try this kind of thing.”
“We looked into the agenda for the next town council meeting and found that it’s up for discussion,” Bones goes on. “Ted James himself wasn’t going to bring it up in person, he’s smarter than that. He had a bought citizen put it forward, probably so that he could jump on it and spin it to the others like a sales pitch.”
“A good boost to the local economy would look good if he wants to make a bid for mayor next election,” Ironside adds, nodding in agreement.
“Never trust a man with two first names,” I sigh, shaking my head. “Alright, so we’re caught up to where Big Daddy, Bones, and Ironside busted into the council meeting. Give me the play by play.”
“Ironside took the lead, Big Daddy had our rear,” Bones says as the other two look on, knowing better than to try to talk over each other. “We’d been expecting to show up, make our presence known, maybe hoot and holler a little to disrupt things. What we didn’t know was that Ted had armed security guards on the premises, and they were looking out for us.”
“What does that mean?” I ask, drilling Bones for every detail I can get.”
“Twice as many guys as usual, and they moved on us too fast not to have been prepped beforehand,’ Bones says confidently. “I’d stake my life on it. Ted knew we’d be coming.”
“So, what, was there a gunfight in the town council chambers?” I ask.
“No shots fired,” Bones says quickly. “Guess Ted couldn’t afford real-ass bodyguards, because the armed guards just rushed us and tried to intimidate us out. I don’t even think any of them pulled their guns out. Well, they tried to after Ironside dropped the first one to come too close to us.”
“I wasn’t about to get escorted
off the premises,” Ironside growls.
“No, that was good,” I say, nodding. “It would have made us look weak at a meeting like that. What next?”
“A brawl that only lasted a few seconds,” Bones says. “Ironside took down another guy, and Big Daddy got to the other two before I could, so I watched the exit. The uh, attendees were a little excited at that point, so instead of taking a seat we decided to shout at Ted to keep his hands off the oil money, and we beat it. That was it. No deaths, maybe a concussion or two at worst. Don’t think the security guards were even locals.”
I nod solemnly, staring at the map for a few moments as I process my thoughts.
“The boys in blue probably wanted a quieter job, but it sounds like we got our message across. It might even work to our advantage that we made such a forceful show. It’ll prove that we’ve got more muscle than anything the likes of Ted can pull out of his ass, and that means something, even if it’s basic. I’ll go with your word and tell the cops they’re exaggerating, but let’s do some more intel gathering in the future, keep ourselves from getting blindsided like that in the future. You did good, but all it would have taken for things to go south is for one of those guards to pull a gun. And I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this.”
“That’s the least of our problems right now, Prez,” Big Daddy speaks up, and I raise an eyebrow at him as he puts a finger on the map not far from Crook County’s borders. “Table Rock Buzzsaws have been spotted in Gilette.”
My jaw sets, and I stare long and hard at the map. The Buzzsaws are the new incarnation of the old MC that Buzz pulled together after half his damn club jumped ship to ride with me instead. They’ve been pushing north and east hard over the past couple of years, and I know exactly why.
Buzz hasn’t forgotten me anymore than I’ve forgotten the way Roadster’s skull felt on my brass knuckles when I killed him.
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