Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 71226 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 356(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71226 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 356(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
“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.”