Broken: A Billionaire Love Story by Heather Chase Read Free Book Online

a credit card, which would be cancelled as soon as Shane got his hands on a phone, and maybe twenty dollars in walking-around money—if Shane hadn't drunk all that cash away already.
    By seven o'clock, Shane managed to find a Western Union and had some money wired to him from home. He used Arthur. Arthur wouldn't ask any questions.
    As he waited for the money, he found out from the clerk that it was the thirtieth of September. The last day he remembered was the twenty-fourth, when he was going to party his brains out so that he could manage to stay without alcohol or drugs for the next three days, where he was due back home in St. Louis for his little brother's sixteenth birthday.
    He clearly remembered Hunter’s voice. “You'll make it, right?”
    “'Course I will,” said Shane.
    “It's just...you've missed the last couple.”
    Already, Hunter didn’t believe him. Shane considered that his little brother’s right, though he hated to think about why that was so.
    “I know! I know I have.” Shane's voice clogged up a bit with shame. “But I'll make it to this one. I promise.”
    At around ten o’clock, Shane checked into a motel using the money from the wire and cleaned himself off. The motel was in a dirty part of the town, every surface looked  filthy and overused, like God had taken a dirty, greasy sponge to every building. Shane wrote down a few lines of poetry on the motel stationary, something about the color of the blood on his hands, his face, stuffing them into his pocket to work on them later. These lines were lost again before he ever made it back to college.
    Somewhere in this city, his friends had been staying at a hotel. Well, they were gone now. Their stay had only been for the weekend, which ended a few days ago. He supposed they thought he had just wandered off on his own—a reasonable assumption. Shane had done that several times before.
    Ten minutes after his shower he had picked up a fifth of vodka, and swaggered into a tattoo parlor down the street. With no ceremony, he sat straight down in the first open chair he saw.
    The artist—heavily tatted himself, eyed Shane with some curiosity. The only-just healing scabs on his hands, his forehead.
    “You ever had a tattoo before, fella?” the artist asked him.
    Shane told him no, of course. He didn't say that his mother would hate it—that his father probably would have too. His uncle definitely would, wanting him to be in the business.
    In a sick way, he had enjoyed the blackout. That was the way his little brother Hunter had described his accident—like a black out. One moment, Hunter knew exactly what was happening, and the next it was days later.
    Shane blamed himself for the accident, of course. But he wanted to be able to commemorate this new understanding—to remember it forever. To show the way his memories had been burned away in the same way he had done them to his brother.
    “Flames,” he told the artist. “Here, on my shoulder.”
    He pulled up his shirt, showing the artist where to work. The blackout was troubling, of course, but also pleasing—and it was the same way when the artist began to work. Pain and pleasure mixed together, just like people said. Shane wanted his body to remember this incident, even if his mind didn't.

Chapter 7:
    At around nine at night, Olivia finally made it back home from the hospice.
    Home was a small house that she and her mother had shared, until Harriet became too ill to be properly cared for inside of it. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood that shifted its fortunes with the wind. Ten years ago it had been affluent, but on the downswing. These days, it was downright shabby in places, but was crawling back up to some tender amounts of wealth—young, poor folks getting nice jobs after graduating from college and staying in the trendy area. So, small houses had begun to replace their chain-link fences for wood, or houses with sagging garages had them torn down and replaced with