Page 21 of Always Salty

Which worked for me because I slept just as fitfully.

Luckily, no nightmares plagued me this day.

Visions of a green-eyed woman did, though.

And when I woke up, snot dried to my chest, I idly wondered if our kids would have her green eyes, or my brown.

We are the granddaughters of the grandmothers you couldn’t run over last year.

—Keely to Dima

KEELY

“Hello?” I answered, belly quivering.

“Hey,” Cutter’s voice sounded…odd. “You got a minute?”

I looked at my watch.

I had to work tonight.

Which, I might add, I was reluctant to do after the night that I’d spent worrying myself to death.

The only thing that’d calmed my ass down was an email I’d finally gotten around to checking an hour ago.

I’d gotten two emails from weird email addresses that at first, I’d thought were spam.

One had been a clean bill of health with the subject line reading: I’m safe.

After reading, then rereading the email and the ‘clean bill of health,’ trying to find the name of the man that’d clearly been redacted, I’d decided that I was going to believe the man.

And, to be honest, that particular thought hadn’t even crossed my mind until I’d received the email.

The second email had been what’d really calmed me down.

Which was crazy, because the email had been a video from a security camera from the club that I’d been in last night. The security camera was pointed directly at where we’d been last night, and it had night vision.

Meaning, I got to see the entire freakin’ thing all over again.

Which had me deciding that though last night had scared me, it hadn’t been in a way that I wouldn’t do it again.

But it made me realize that I needed to be a lot more careful.

What kind of fucked up person was okay with a complete stranger fucking her? Also, what kind of person was okay with the fact that she was okay with it?

Needless to say, my head was a freakin’ wreck.

Normally, I’d head to breakfast with one of my brothers when I was feeling out of sorts but today was different.

This morning sometime I’d gotten a text from Chevy that something had happened and he was heading to Montana.

I’d called him and he’d sent it to voicemail, only to send me a long-ass text message saying that something had happened with Milena. She was okay, but Cutter needed some backup.

I’d left it at that, trusting them to tell me when they got home.

Likely, they didn’t want to tell me something bad had happened so I didn’t worry.

That was the way of my brothers, though.

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