Dog, the mountain of a dog that’d been dumped at the mouth of my property, nudged my leg.
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.
