Page 2 of Cold Bastard
One hundred percent. That was what the download progress bar said, right before the screen went black, then flickered to a blue error screen.System failure. Corrupted drive. Fatal error.The words glowed against the darkness, accusing, damning.The computer was dead, a very expensive paperweight, a three-thousand-dollar corpse sitting on his mahogany desk. He would know someone had been in here. He would know someone had accessed his files. He would know it was me because I was the only one with a key to his office, the only one he trusted enough to clean up in here after hours. The only one stupid enough to think I could get away with this.
I shoved the flash drive into my bra, right between my breasts where I could feel it against my skin, where I would know immediately if someone tried to take it. The metal was still warm from the computer, a small burning reminder of what I had just done, what I had just condemned myself to. Then I grabbed my purse and headed for the emergency exit, my sneakers silent on the tile floor.
The hallway was empty and dim, lit only by the emergency lights that cast everything in a sickly yellow glow. The bass from the main floor thumped through the walls, vibrating in my chest. Someone had picked Def Leppard, “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” the stripper anthem, the song I had heard so many times it had lost all meaning. The guitar riff was muffled but unmistakable, a soundtrack to a thousand nights just like this one, except this one would be my last.
Someone was on stage, probably Crystal or Destiny, one of the other girls working the late shift, grinding through the motions for the handful of men who refused to go home, spinning around a pole like it was all they had in the world. The crowd would be thin at this time of night, mostly regulars nursing their last drinks before closing. The sad ones who had nowhere else to be. The ones who showed up every night because their wives had left them or because they never had wives to begin with. The ones who thought twenty dollars bought them the right to touch, to demand, to own us for three minutes at a time.
No one would notice me leaving.
Not for a while, anyway.
No one ever noticed me unless I was on stage, or on my knees, or bent over something. I could walk right past them in street clothes and they wouldn’t recognize me, wouldn’t connect a woman in jeans and a hoodie with the fantasy they had paid for the night before.
I was furniture. Decoration. Interchangeable parts in a machine designed to extract money from lonely men. Background noise in their pathetic little lives. And that invisibility, that anonymity, was the only thing that would save me now.
I pushed through the emergency exit, and the night air hit me like a slap. Cold. Clean. Sharp with the smell of spring rain that hadn’t fallen yet, that electric ozone scent that promised a storm but hadn’t delivered. It was late July, but summer in South Dakota was a fucking tease. Warm during the day, freezing at night, the kind of weather that couldn’t make up its mind, that left me never knowing whether to grab a jacket or leave it behind.
I looked exactly like what I was: a hooded stranger fleeing a crime scene.
A victim who had become a criminal in the span of five minutes.
Get on your bike. Don’t think. Run.
My Ducati was parked in the back lot, tucked between a dumpster that reeked of rotting food and stale beer and mystery liquids I didn’t want to identify, and a chain-link fence topped with razor wire that glinted dully under the single flickering streetlight. I had chosen the spot deliberately—out of sight of the security cameras, away from the main entrance, away from the lights and the prying eyes of customers stumbling out into the night. Old habits I had learned a long time ago to always havean exit strategy, always know where the doors were, always park where I could leave quickly if I needed to, always keep my keys in my hand and my pepper spray in my purse.
I just never thought I would need it like this.
I never thought I would be running for my life from the man who smiled at me every Friday when he handed me my cash, who had seemed like just another run-of-the-mill guy until tonight, until I saw what he was really capable of.
The keys shook in my hand as I stuck them in the ignition, throwing my leg over my bike. The metal felt cold against my palm, even though the afternoon sun had been beating down on the parking lot all day. My hands wouldn’t stop trembling.
I sat there, gripping the handlebars so hard my knuckles turned white, trying to remember how to breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Count to four. Hold for seven. Exhale for eight. The way my brother used to tell me when I would have panic attacks as a kid, back before the pills and the men and the inevitable descent that drove me away from the one person who really loved me.
Seventy-five million dollars.
The number was incomprehensible. Impossible. Unreal. The kind of number I had only ever seen in movies or on the news when they talked about lottery winners or Wall Street criminals or tech billionaires buying islands. Not people like me. Never people like me.
I had grown up poor, and now I had seventy-five million.
Blood money. Dirty money. Money soaked in exploitation and violence and God knew what else. Money that belonged to him and whoever he was working for—the Russian mob, maybe, or Mexican cartels, or just homegrown American criminals who had figured out that strip clubs were perfect for washing cash. Perfect for moving money through the system, making it clean,making it legitimate, turning blood and suffering into something they could deposit in a bank without raising eyebrows.
Money that could get me killed.
Money that had probably gotten other people killed already.
Money that came with a body count I refused to think about.
But also money that could get me out.
Out of Rapid City. Out of South Dakota. Out of this frozen hellscape where winter lasted eight months and summer was just a cruel joke. Out of this life where I took my clothes off for strangers and pretended it didn’t hollow me out a little more each night, didn’t chip away at whatever was left of my soul. Out of this endless cycle of makeup and G-strings and fake smiles and men who thought twenty dollars entitled them to put their hands wherever they wanted.
I could disappear.
The thought took root, grew, and spread through my mind like wildfire, consuming everything else. I could disappear. Change my name, change my hair, change everything about myself. Get on a bus or a plane and go somewhere he and whoever he worked for would never find me. Somewhere they wouldn’t even think to look. Somewhere warm, where the sun actually felt good on my skin instead of mocking me through the bitter cold. Somewhere with an ocean I had never seen, waves I only watched in movies, sand that didn’t freeze solid half the year. Somewhere I could start over, be someone new, build a life that didn’t involve taking my clothes off or letting men touch me for money or pretending to enjoy their attention while I counted down the minutes until my shift ended.
Someone who wasn’t Alexandra Jones, a stripper, victim, thief, and murderer—because taking his money was the same as killing him. Really, because once whoever he owed came looking for it, once they figured out the money was gone and he couldn’t produce it, they would make an example of him and send amessage to anyone else who might get ideas about skimming or stealing or running off with what wasn’t theirs.
My phone buzzed in my purse, and I nearly jumped out of my skin, my heart slamming against my ribs like it was trying to break free from my chest. The sound cut through the silence of the night, sharp and accusatory, making my breath catch in my throat.
