AllFreeNovel
Share Us
PROLOGUE
Sawyer
Luck was not on my side.
Then again, it never was.
I wasn’t necessarily surprised by my current situation, though. It wouldn’t have felt like real life for me if it wasn’t constantly wrought with struggle.
I was used to it by now.
But accepting that life had thrown me plenty of hits already and was just sending another one my way didn’t mean that I hadn’t wished things would be different.
For just once, I wanted to live a normal life. I wanted to be a woman who made her own way while checking things off her bucket list. I’d have been content to do this life on my own if I could simply manage to stop the hits from coming.
I lost a huge part of me once.
Then I losteverything.
Wasn’t that enough?
As I got out of my car and walked toward the building, the answer to that question was easy.
No.
No, I wasn’t quite done taking the blows just yet.
The fact that I was walking into the place I’d been employed for the last five years for what would be the last time was evidence enough of that fact.
I’d lost my job. Though, in all fairness to me, I hadn’t exactly been fired. In fact, I hadn’t even been at work the night it all came crashing down.
I had been working as a bartender at a strip club in a town just outside of Baltimore, Maryland, for years now. Thinking back to my younger days, back when I was in high school, this was not where I imagined I would have wound up.
I had plans.
I had dreams.
There was so much I had wanted to do with my life, but that all changed in a tragic instant.
So, I settled for the time being. I was doing what I had to do to make a living.
Unfortunately, no matter that I’d simply been trying to make an honest living, I couldn’t control what other people did.
Maybe I should have expected some of this, considering my chosen line of work, but I didn’t. I never imagined that I would have gotten a call two days ago telling me not to come into work that night because the joint had been shut down.
As it turned out, the club had been raided, and several individuals—including the owner—had been arrested. I was still fuzzy on all the details, but from what I’d managed to gather, it seemed as though there had been a couple of minors employed by my boss, Wade.
At first, I’d been shocked. Wade seemed like a straight shooter to me. He valued his business, and I didn’t think he’d have done anything to put it in jeopardy.
But I realized that was particularly naïve of me. Because the truth was that I knew many people only showed others what they wanted them to see. I was one of them.
For years, I’d been showing up at work and doing my job, pretending to have the same life complaints as everyone else.
Nobody knew the truth.
Nobody knew about my life before I arrived in Maryland twelve years ago.
For that reason, I understood that if he hadn’t been fooled by these young women, it was entirely possible that Wade had his own secrets he was harboring.
