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.”
I wrinkled my nose. “That would require me to go into town, and I try not to do that very often.”
Though I knew that I would never be looked for, thanks to Apollo matching the dead man’s DNA to “my” DNA that was now on file, it was still a really hard habit to break.
Apollo had done that for all of us he’d broken out of prison.
He’d given us new names and identities. He’d made it to where no one would ever look for us again.
Hell, for Odin, he’d even gone as far as to get the man plastic surgery to remove a few distinguishing facial features.
