Chapter 9
Nine
Mentally spicy.
—Sage’s secret thoughts
Sage
Romeo’s wife, Mable, was there when I hung the first flier up on the tree outside of the coffee shop.
“What’s going on?” she asked, looking worried.
I handed her a flier. “I can’t find my dog, Neo.”
“Oh,” she breathed. “I had to do this with my dog, too! Come inside, let me get you added to all the local groups. Then we can both post all about it.” She paused. “Do you have time?”
I had to work today, but not until way later. It was an overnight shift.
“I have plenty of time.” I blew out a relieved breath. “This is the worst day ever.”
Well, not the worst.
The worst would be finding out that by saving me from getting sexually assaulted, Gentry had signed his son’s death warrant.
Weeks had passed since I’d gone to Gentry to ask him for help in finding Neo.
Weeks of sleepless nights, wondering if he was okay.
Weeks of relentless searching, all to yield no results.
No one had seen him. No one had turned in a stray dog in any of the county animal shelters in the closest four counties. And no one had reported any sightings.
I had fliers up everywhere, and there wasn’t a single query from anyone.
It was like he’d just vanished.
To make matters worse, the campground hadn’t caught anything on their cameras, either.
So I literally had nothing to go on.
Mable’s help meant a lot to me, but I was slowly losing hope.
That hope all but vanished as ten days turned into fourteen. And fourteen days turned into three weeks.
It was on the fourth week that Neo was missing that I’d finally gotten the call.
It was the middle of the night when I heard the soft knock on my RV door letting me know that someone was outside.
I launched myself off the bed, ten years of ingrained self-awareness forcing me to be clear as a bell to prepare for any possible outcome on the other side of my camper door.
“Who is it?” I called.
There was a pause and then, “It’s me.”
I yanked open the door and threw open the screen. “Did you find him?”
I mean, why else would he contact me in the middle of the night?
“We did,” he said.
My heart was in my throat when I said, “Where is he?”
Gentry’s face was grim when he said, “We’re not sure if it’s him. But if it is…he’s not good, Sage. Not good at all.”
I didn’t understand until a couple of hours later when I was finally able to see him.
He barked and snarled at anyone who got close to his kennel, even me.
“I know that this isn’t what you wanted to hear,” Boone, one of Gentry’s friends and a vet in town, said.
“But he’s not ever going to live a normal life again.
He’s really messed up. Won’t eat anything we give him.
Won’t drink anything. Attacks even while under sedation.
I know, I really do, that you want to save him but…
it’s not good. He might be like this for the rest of his life.
We don’t know what kind of trauma that he went through when he was being held at that dog fighting ring, but it was something significant enough that he’s scared to death of humans and other animals. ”
Gentry and his club brothers, mainly Denver, had found these dogs when they’d been searching for Holly, the other vet at Boone’s vet practice, who’d gone missing.
When they’d found Holly, they’d also found a dog fighting ring that several men in town had started.
During the altercation, the main instigator for the dog fighting ring had been caught and sent to jail.
Meanwhile, all of the traumatized dogs that had come of the asshole’s actions were left behind.
Several of them had been euthanized.
More of them had been put on close watch.
Neo was one of those.
If I couldn’t pull him out of this downward spiral then I wouldn’t have a choice.
I didn’t want him to suffer for the rest of his life.
But somehow I knew that I couldn’t give up on him, either.
I would fight for him.
No matter what it took.
And only once I’d exhausted all options would I admit defeat.
Until then…
“I’m going to get him better,” I declared.
A week later, we were no better than when we started.
Well, mostly.
I could get him out of his kennel. I could get him to eat. I could get him to drink.
But I could not get close to him while he did any of those things.
I could not trust him with other people besides myself. Though Gentry was able to get close to him. Just not touch him.
He hadn’t threatened to bite me yet, but he was scared to death of me nonetheless.
It made me feel awful.
I should’ve been able to save him.
Yet, there I was, trying to talk to him and get him to tolerate me enough to come home.
“He can stay here however long he wants,” Holly assured me. “He has this nice little kennel area. You don’t have to pay us. We just want him to get better.”
I looked at Holly and smiled, though it didn’t reach my eyes.
“Tell it to me straight,” I said, tearing the rawhide into strips. “Do you think he can get better? Do you think that he’ll ever get to the point where he can be around other people without attacking?”
She thought about that for a long moment before she said, “I think that he’s shown remarkable change in just a week. I think that, given enough time and incentive, he’ll learn to be more than okay with you. And probably Gentry. What I do not think he’ll ever be able to do is trust other people.”
My head ached.
“That’s fine and good for now, but he has to be able to go to the vet. And I have to be able to take him outside. He can’t stay cooped up in my trailer all day or he’ll go mad.”
“Gentry has a fenced-in yard, and a large house that you could take him,” Holly suggested.
“I also think that this kennel he’s in isn’t the best thing after he’s been held in it as a punishment while he was at that dog fighting ring.
I think that it would do him a world of good if he could go out and be in a space that wasn’t concrete floors and chain-link fence. ”
That was the same thought I had.
Only, minus the bringing Gentry into it part.
My stomach was in knots as I walked closer to the kennel where Neo was staying in the very corner of the large room.
Neo looked up at me and stared.
He didn’t snarl, but he definitely wasn’t welcoming, either.
His tail didn’t thump in happiness once.
What I wouldn’t do to see his tail wag for me one more time.
“I would recommend a muzzle if you’re out in public,” Holly said. “They’re not always a bad thing. They can be both a comfort and a safeguard for others and Neo. He gets to be out of that kennel, but he also has to be safe. If he bites another person, Sage…”
I didn’t need to be told what would happen.
I knew.
“Get him outside, get him to go on walks. Hell, bring him to the search and rescue meeting to get him some socialization without the pressure,” she said. “You’re going to that, right?”
I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten roped into it.
One day I’d been talking with Mable, who’d been like a rock these last few days since we’d finally found Neo, and the next I was agreeing to join a search and rescue team.
Mable had convinced me by sharing that several of the women were going to join.
And since I was so desperate to make some friends here, I’d agreed. Even though I knew next to nothing about search and rescue.
“How do I get the muzzle on?” I wondered.
Without getting my hand bitten off for coming too close.
Though at this point, I had gotten close enough to pet him. I’d just given him the space that he so clearly wanted and hadn’t breached that particular act with him yet.
Holly was right, though.
He had made significant progress since he’d first been brought in a week ago.
Just not enough.
“Maybe I’ll try my place first,” I suggested.
“Don’t be surprised if he has trauma where that trailer is concerned,” she pointed out. “That’s where this all started for him. He was taken from your trailer.”
He was.
There was a man who was on Bear Pass city council who had admitted to taking the dog from my trailer. Apparently, the lock that I had on my door had been a universal RV one, and he’d been able to bypass the software to open it.
He’d taken Neo straight from my trailer while I’d been at work to his own. Where he’d then left with Neo in the back of his RV.
He’d taken four other dogs that day, and Koen, the RV park owner, had put up so much surveillance equipment afterward that it now felt like I lived in Fort Knox.
I pulled out my phone and texted Gentry.
Me:
There’s something I want to try.
Gentry answered within two minutes.
Gentry:
You’re not taking Neo home with you.
I rolled my eyes.
Me:
You can’t tell me what to do. Anyway, I might not be taking him to my place. I was thinking about taking him to yours.
Those three little dots appeared. And stayed for a solid five minutes before they disappeared.
No reply.
“He say no?” Holly guessed.
Before I could answer that, the door to the kennels opened and Gentry appeared in uniform.
My heart skipped a beat like it always did when I saw him.
It was weird.
Over the last few months, my pull to him had grown stronger. Darker and sharper.
I literally lived for the moments that I’d see him around town.
When he showed up at the ER when I was working, I literally couldn’t stand the attention that he got.
I also didn’t like him giving any attention to anyone but me.
Which was stupid, I knew.
But I’d had this claim to him for so long that it was kind of hard to turn it off.
We may have been husband and wife in name only, but he was still mine.
I’d called him mine for seven years.
I was a possessive bitch, what could I say?
“Is he doing better?”
Holly and I were okay to be in the room with him, but having three humans staring at him had Neo’s hackles raised.
“Not exactly,” I said. “Holly and I were talking, and we think he might do better if he isn’t cooped up in this cage anymore.”
“We were thinking we could put a muzzle on him,” Holly suggested, backing up so that she wasn’t also in Neo’s line of sight. “The muzzle is a lot less scary than it sounds. He can still eat or drink in it, but he just can’t bite.”
Gentry’s hands clenched. “And you think that this will help him for real? Why my place and not hers?”
“We’re thinking it might be traumatic for him to go back to the RV where he was taken from,” I admitted. “Holly admitted that you have a fenced-in yard.”
Gentry grunted. “I do.”
“And you could move your RV, too,” Holly added. “I heard you have a hookup for it.”
Gentry looked surprised that she would know and looked at me mulishly.
Gentry grunted. “I do. But I’ve offered it to her already.”
He had.
Once.
In passing.
Right after Neo was stolen from me.
Gentry hadn’t been happy to hear that the security at the campground was so subpar that no one had caught Neo being stolen.
But I’d turned him down.
I wanted my own space.
I wanted to be able to live and breathe like normal for the first time ever.
Being in Gentry’s backyard meant that he would always be there, never able to escape my constant thinking about him. I would see him every morning when he went in to work. Every evening when he came home. Every time he ran home for lunch.
That probably wasn’t the best idea in the world…
However, when I looked at my poor Neo, I realized that I needed to do something.
He couldn’t keep living like this.
“I guess that I’ll move the RV.” I paused. “If you can find me a truck to borrow.”
Gentry looked at me with surprise. “You can use mine.”
“You can pull a fifth wheel with your truck?” I asked in surprise.
“Not my department issued one, no. But the one I bought when I got here? Yes.”
I had yet to see him drive anything but the sheriff’s department truck. Honestly, I was surprised to hear that he had one. How had I missed that? More importantly, how could I stalk him appropriately if I didn’t know all the vehicles he drove?
I gathered my pride and said, “If you’ll have me, I’ll stay.”
His eyes studied mine.
The brown eyes were disconcerting since I knew what that gaze was supposed to look like.
Hell, everything about him weirded me out.
The man was supposed to have full sleeve tattoos and gray eyes.
Now he had unblemished skin and brown ones.
It was like he was a completely different person.
Then again, maybe that was a good thing.
Maybe he needed to be a different person.
Maybe it was time for me to become a different person, too.
I mean, what use was a new identity if I didn’t use it?
“I’ll come by tomorrow when you get off work, and we’ll get you moved,” he offered.
“How do you know when I’m going to be off?” I grumbled.
“I know everything there is to know about you, Herb,” he teased as he walked out. “Take care now.”
Okay, so maybe he wasn’t the only one who did the stalking.
Holly waited for the door to shut behind me before she said, “Who the hell is Herb? And why are y’all acting like you know everything there is to know about each other?” She narrowed her eyes. “And don’t give me that ‘we’re divorced’ shit. I know that’s not the case.”
I rubbed at the back of my neck before I said, “We were married. But we’ve never been divorced.”
Her eyes widened. “Are you saying y’all are still married?”
I answered her one hundred percent honestly with, “I have no clue.”