Prologue
Drew
One thing about the place that I’d never been able to get used to was the temperature.
It was fucking cold.
Even during the summer months when the sun was trying to shine through the wire on the windows, all I felt was ice. My bones ached, creaked, fucking groaned to stretch and feel anything other than pain. Maybe I deserved it. Maybe it was all a part of my penance. For every guy I’d knocked out and every old timer I’d killed, I was served with the kind of agony that had to be endured in silence.
I took it. I had to. It wasn’t like there was any other choice. Four years, nine months and twenty seven days inside the joint had taught me to keep quiet. A big boy on the outside I might have been, but the second I was pushed through those doors, I was nobody. I wasn’t the infamous, feared and revered Drew Tucker. I didn't have ten men around me, a badge across my chest or a weapon in my hand. I meant nothing. I was nothing. I'd been nothing ever since.
But all that would change tomorrow.
Tomorrow I would return to the world on the outside, a man who paid the price for some of his sins and got the law off his back for at least a handful of his crimes. I'd done mytime. I'd survived with a few scars to remind me what this place held for me if I got sloppy again.
Now I had to get ready to take back what was mine.
My hometown, my men and above all else, my reputation.
Pete hadn’t died for me to throw it all away.
Chapter One
Ayda
“Ayda? Where are all my jeans?”
The moment the question fell from his lips, I froze midway between the bathroom and bedroom, wearing nothing but my towel. My brother Tate was fifteen and ten years my junior. Our parents had met in high school, and three weeks after Mom’s sixteenth birthday, I was born. By some miracle, the two of them stayed together and decided, almost a decade later, that they were going to have another.
Along came Tate.
Mom said the first time I saw him I scowled and mentioned how I didn’t know how to deal with a boy so she should exchange him for a girl. The honest to God’s truth was that I still didn’t know what to do with him most of the time. He was a good kid, but what the hell did I know about a hormonal teenage boy?
A big, fat nothing, that’s what.
Unfortunately, I didn’t really have much choice. When he was twelve, our parents were killed in a bank robbery gone wrong. They’d been in there trying to get financing for my college. They hadn’t wanted me to take out loans with an astronomical APR when they couldget one cheaper and not cheat me with an excessive rate, due to my partial scholarship being pulled in my final year. It had ultimately cost them their lives and, as selfish as it sounded, it had cost me mine, too. I'd had to give up the college they’d been trying to pay for and get three jobs to support the two of us at the tender age of twenty-two. That was three years earlier, and things had yet to improve much.
“I’m so sorry, Tate. I forgot to do laundry. I did an extra shift last night and just crashed when I got in. Do you have anything you can wear today? I’ll get them done for tomorrow, I promise.”
“A domestic goddess you are not, Ayda,” he said, sticking his head around the bedroom door and laughing. At least he had a sense of humor about my epic fails in life, which was more than could be said for me most of the time. I just wanted to crawl into bed, cry myself to sleep and stay there for a week.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a full eight hours.
“Don’t worry about it, sis. I’ll figure it out. If you’d show me how to use the fucking thing, I could do it myself.”
“Language, Tate. Anyone would think I’d fucking dragged you up.”
“You did.” He grinned, patting me on the head. He may have been ten years younger but he was built like a brick shit house and towered over my five foot four frame. I swear it looked like he was the one taking care of me sometimes.
“The world doesn’t need to know that,” I said, flipping him off with a genuine smile. Grabbing the front of my towel, I headed to my room to dress for job one of three.
The first was the morning shift at Rusty’s diner, where I worked for minimum wage and tips. The second job was lunchand dinner at the local fast food drive-in, where I got to roll around on skates for the afternoon, balancing a tray on my hand while I fought a constant battle against gravity. Finally, there was job number three, working the close at the local food mart, where I played enabler to old Mrs. Bridgefort’s ice cream addiction before I locked up at ten and headed home to eat, if I remembered, then fell into bed. Some nights, for a little overtime, I went back to the fast food place and worked until two am.
It really wasn't much of a life. I couldn't have told you what had been on television for the past three years, other than crappy made-for-TV movies that kept me company when I couldn't sleep. I hadn't seen a mall since Christmas when I'd almost broken us to buy some new cleats for Tate. My hair hadn't been cut in years and always ended up pulled into a tail at the back of my head, and men... Well, who the hell had time for them?
I was tired. At twenty-five, I was exhausted and bone weary.
Tate did what he could to help, but he was running back on the school’s football team, which meant practice every night. Then he'd go and see his tutor, who was worth every penny now that he was passing algebra, before coming home and studying. School was one of the only things I got on his ass about, which was why I picked up the slack everywhere else.
