by Eden Butler
Copyright © 2021 by Eden Butler and Cocky Hero Club, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locations, and incidents are products of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to actual persons, things, living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.
Editor: Mary Cain
Proofreader: Kathryn Tate, Luna Joya, and
Marie Anderson-Simmons
Sensitivity Reader: Andrea LeBeau
Photo Credit: Lori Jackson
Formatter: Champagne Book Design
Fearless Rebel is a standalone story inspired by Vi Keeland and Penelope Ward’s Cocky Bastard. It’s published as part of the Cocky Hero Club world, a series of original works, written by various authors, and inspired by Keeland and Ward’s New York Times bestselling series.
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
AUTHOR LINKS
DEDICATION
NAVAJO DICTIONARY
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
PART TWO
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
EPILOGUE
COCKY HERO CLUB
THIN LOVE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ALSO BY EDEN BUTLER
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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For Nina and the miles of interstate, jingle dress dances,
smelly tents, drum music, and boys that were no damn good for us.
And for Oklahoma, T.G., wherever you are now, cousin, I still love you.
I pray you broke free.
Acheii—Grandfather
Atsili—Brother
Aoo’—Yes
Ataa’—Father
Ayóo anííníshní—I Love You
Choady—Round, plump
Nizhóní—Beautiful
Shímasani—Grandmother
Shíyázhí—Son
Yázhí—Little One
Stillwater Penitentiary
Eddie
Dumb luck, bad decisions or outright lies were responsible for landing every inmate in Stillwater. Give them half a second and they’d tell you all about it. My story though, didn’t belong to me, and it was wrapped up in a dream and a wish and a promise I believed I could keep.
“Move it, Mescal.”
Cooper’s fingers bit into my shoulder when he pushed me, but I wasn’t the angry, terrified punk I’d been five years ago. I wasn’t scared shitless about walking into this place not knowing if I’d live or die or how my kid sister would do with only her skinny man and our grandparents watching over her.
Let the guard be a prick to me. I was used to it.
The rage had not lessened. But my reactions were tempered now. Calmer. I’d learned to survive. Had to.
The truth that I hadn’t done a thing to deserve spending a single night in this hellhole cooled to something that only ached in my gut. It was nothing like the searing burn that threatened to tear me apart from the inside the first night Cooper shoved me through the front doors and into processing.
He’d been an asshole that first day too. Why should my last day be any different?
“We got a bet, you know.” Cooper didn’t look at me when he spoke. He’d never get himself that low. Of all the guards on the block, he was the only one who took his gig for a power trip. The asshole got off on it. The way he stood next to me, his face twisted in a make one wrong move and I’ll throw you back in a cell sneer, telling me he was gonna miss having me around.
“That right?” I took the large sealed bag filled with my belongings from him in the room adjacent to the front office, refusing to give Cooper what he wanted—a rise out of me.
“I got a hundred bucks says you end up back here in less than six months.” He crossed his arms, laughing under his breath as I tore open the bag, digging out my socks, low-top black Chuck Taylors, wallet empty except for my expired license and library card, dark wash Levis and black Led Zeppelin T-shirt. Still, that asshole didn’t let up. “Convicts don’t get reformed…they just get relocated.”
“Guess you missed the memo,” I told him, standing to tear off my state issue gray jumpsuit, anxious to get back into my own clothes again. Didn’t much care that Cooper eyed me, looking, I guessed, for a fracture in my composure, wanting to see if he’d gotten under my skin. To hell with that. The man would have to do a lot more to get me to fold on this day. The jeans were tight over my thighs, but hung loose on my waist. I glanced up at Cooper, stretching out the tee, knowing it would be snug. “Can’t be a convict if your conviction was reversed.”
“Technicalities don’t mean shit if you been five years on the inside.” The prick was standing so close I could make out the seed stuck between his teeth. It was green and his breath smelled like pickles. Kinda squashed any threat he thought he might be as he squared closed to my face.
“Maybe not,” I told him, my attention moving behind him when Mark Bolton, Cooper’s boss and a Sergeant at the prison, stepped in from the office. I tugged on the shirt, pulling it down quick, making sure to smile at that asshole so he knew he wasn’t getting to me. “But it’ll make a hell of a difference when I walk through that gate and don’t have to come back.”
“You’ll be back. And I’ll be a hundred bucks richer…”
I shrugged, biting my tongue, my gaze slipping to the set of windows at my right. The parking lot and gray concrete of the building didn’t conceal the trees on the other side of the highway or the mountains beyond it. A thousand yards separated me and freedom. There was no way some asshole who’d never get more juice than the high he got pushing around men with nothing left to lose was going to make me risk my shot at walking through that gate.
“You keep waiting,” I told him, grabbing my Chucks and socks. I shoved my wallet in my back pocket before I left Cooper and his boss behind. Five minutes later, after the voice of someone yelling behind that office door went quiet, I stood at the exit. As I inched my feet into my shoes Cooper slammed the door behind him, his face red.
Bolton watched him leaving down the hallway, then paused to stand next to me, his attention on my shirt, then the braid that fell halfway down my nec
k. “You’re the one he shaved bald, right?” I didn’t answer the man, trying like hell to keep the rage that memory caused from surfacing. I managed well enough with the smallest tip of my chin down. Bolton rubbed his hand over his mouth, scrubbing the whiskers on his thin face. “My…ah…daddy, he was Ojibwe, half anyway. The good half he used to say.”
When I twisted a look at him, but kept my mouth shut, holding back the comment that the man’s light eyes and brown hair told a different story, he seemed to catch where my gaze shifted and shrugged, scratching the stubble under his chin again.
“Don’t look it, I know, but it’s the God’s truth. And I ain’t saying I understand a damn thing about you or the life you had outside these walls…” He looked back, toward the hallway where Cooper had disappeared to, then straightened, his mouth tight. “What I’m saying is I get why you clocked that fucker for shaving your head. I get why him doing it was so disrespectful. It…wasn’t right what he did.”
“No,” I said, not bothering to hold back the anger that bubbled to the surface. “It wasn’t.”
His mouth eased, and the man gave me a look I hadn’t seen from anyone but my old cell mate in five years, one that told me I wasn’t completely alone. I’d willingly taken a month in the hole two weeks into my sentence because Cooper had shaved my waist length hair. He’d stripped away something he’d never understand because he could. It wasn’t about the way I looked. It wasn’t about the control he had over me. Like my ancestors, like my father and grandfather and all my people, my hair was about my connection to the Earth, the source of my medicine. It was a sacred thing Cooper tried to destroy. He knew what it meant to cut my hair. He knew it and still shaved me. That shit couldn’t go unchecked.
“Watch yourself out there,” the Sergeant told me, shifting his head toward the door as he lifted his hand up. “One coming out.”
The door buzzer echoed through the office, and the noise shot right into my gut, intensifying the nervousness already there as the doors unlocked.
I stepped out into the long hall that led out of the building, surrounded by fencing and armed guards, that tension in my stomach only coiling tighter.
And I didn’t look back.
Eddie
The parking lot surrounded the building. There were two towers flanking the gate and as I moved toward them, down the broken concrete walkway, I got as close as I’d ever get to navigating a minefield. Or, at least, what I figured that shit might be like if my Acheii Tasso could be believed when he remembered being scared stupid in Vietnam. My grandfather had proudly served and recalled what that had been like—him walking with his unit, the balls of their feet barely touching the ground because each step could bring death.
“I never prayed so hard in my life,” he’d say. “I’d never moved so slow.”
The guard booth up top felt alive. It reminded me of an animal with two peering eyeballs staring, set in an anxious body waiting for nightfall and the fools with balls enough to make a break before it pounced. The man holding the rifle watched me, glaring, and I swore his gaze followed my every step. The gate seemed like a mile from me and it stretched longer and longer every inch I made away from the door at my back. I only exhaled when I stood in front of it, bouncing on my feet waiting for it to open.
And then…I was nobody’s prisoner anymore.
I might have stayed there, standing in the sun, letting the first full rays of real freedom burn my skin, if it hadn’t been for the bus whipping by on the highway when I moved through the parking lot and the cackling laughter that pulled my attention away from the only ride I had out of Stillwater Prison.
“Eddie Mescal.” My throat closed up at the thick accent. It was Australian, muddled by the years stuck in the hellhole with me, and a solid thirteen months away from it, but I’d know that voice if I was blitzed out of my head and couldn’t do more than twist open one eyelid.
There was a laugh peppered in my name, and it came behind the shit-chomping smile of the only man I knew that had managed to leave this place with his ass intact besides myself.
“Holy shit. Chancey boy…”
Chance pushed off his truck, and met me in the middle of the highway. That mop of blond hair flapped in his eyes as he held out his hand to pull me into a hug I gladly took. How the man knew I’d be released today, I had no clue. I hadn’t even bothered to let my kid sister Evie know today was the big day.
“Mate,” he said, slapping my shoulder when I pulled out of his one-armed welcome. His smile was broader than it had been the day he’d walked out of our cell the year before. Chance had done his time and spent those last minutes in our tight cell looking nervous and excited and doubtful about stepping into the real world to find the woman he’d left behind.
I slipped a glance at his left hand and couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled from my throat when I spotted the ring on his finger. “You did it.” He nodded, that smile stretching wider when I gave his shoulder a soft punch. “Knew you couldn’t stay away from her.”
“Not in the least. Got a kid now too. A boy. Named him Ed.”
“Seriously?” I said, slapping his shoulder, my mouth stretched in a grin.
“Are you mad? Hell no. He’s named Chance, after his pop.”
He led us back to his pickup—a sleek, black Chevy that I hopped into without an invitation. Chance paused, his smile still stretched across his mouth, and a single, slow movement shaking his head like he couldn’t believe we were there, in his truck, on the outside. Then, he started the engine, pulling onto the highway and I was too damn happy about driving away from Stillwater to ask where we were going or why he was there to pick me up.
“How’d it all happen?” I pointed my chin toward his ring finger as I eased back into the seat, letting my legs stretch.
“That’s a bit of a tale.” He waved me off, reaching to the floorboard to open a small cooler. “Have at it, mate.”
Any other man leaving prison, getting a ride from his boy might have been disappointed by the soda and water mixed in with the few long necks of beer. No hard liquor, nothing that would do much damage at all.
But Chance knew me, probably better than anyone.
I wasn’t completely on the wagon. There were no monks in this truck, but watching my old man drink himself to death had me pumping the brakes on how much I drank over the years. That big Aussie seemed to remember that.
“Oh shit,” I said, reaching for the bottle of Evian, “water that ain’t brown. I’ll take it.” With a grateful groan I twisted the cap off and poured the frigid water down my throat, ignoring his laughter.
Despite the refresh, worry took over and I kept looking behind us, to the cars that pulled up behind Chance’s truck, the ones that sped into the oncoming lane to pass us. For some reason I hunkered down in my seat, checked and rechecked my seatbelt, dipped my head to stare into the rearview at least a dozen times while I gripped the bottle before we’d made it even five miles from Stillwater. There was nothing around us but mountains and the endless rows of empty fields, most bought up by the state; land used for crops the unluckiest of prisoners had to plant and harvest. There was never an escape from that place and too much work to be done. All around us as we drove, that reality weighed in on me, had me tightening my hold on the water, polishing off the first one, grabbing for another one until Chance flipped on his blinker and we’d eaten up a good fifteen miles from the prison and pulled into a small roadside diner.
“You gotta relax, mate,” Chance told me, squeezing my shoulder when I looked around the parking lot, white knuckling the bottle in my hand.
“I’m good.” But I wasn’t. We both knew it and when I caught the look he gave me, the trace of pity in his blue eyes, I realized how stupid I was being. “Five years, man,” I told him, staring out of my window, pulling on the bottle as I looked at the diner and the plump waitress taking the orders of two old women with white hair.
“It takes a minute, but you’ll be right as rain soon enough.”
<
br /> Chance watched me, that pretty-boy smile still stretched wide as I polished off the water and tossed the empty bottle back into the cooler. Ignoring his advice, I decided to change the subject. “How the hell did you know I was getting out today?”
“I left that hellhole and walked back into Aubrey’s life. It was a good place to be and we got ourselves sorted, eventually. But after that, I couldn’t help thinking of you stuck in there on your own, ay? Especially not with what happened to that reporter.” My stomach dropped and I scratched the label on the neck of the bottle. “Ed, come on, it wasn’t your fault,” Chance said.
“No? It was my case she was investigating, and she just turns up dead?”
“She was doing her job. And, from what you told me, your sister said she had her nose in a lot of research on a load of criminals. Could have been…” He shut his mouth when I glared at him, his hand raised in surrender.
Finnley Michaels had only been on my case because my sister Evie had complained about its corruption on a forum for a nonprofit legal organization that helped exonerate people doing time for crimes they didn’t commit. Michaels was investigating district attorneys who’d been accused of violating the Brady mandate by concealing evidence that might undermine their case. That led her to Midland Grove, my hometown, and right into the clusterfuck that had brought me to Stillwater. Soon after, the woman somehow ended up in a canyon with two bullets in her head.
Unbothered by my glare, Chance cleared his throat. “Point being, I couldn’t let you rot there, and Aubrey was an attorney before she gave it all up for the animal rescue. She still has contacts.” There was a grin that had always moved over his lips anytime he said his woman’s name. It was still there, though now that grin was broader. “When you wrote about your case getting looked at again, I asked her to find out what was going on.”
Two guys, their guts hanging over their belts, sporting Stillwater uniforms, moved out of the diner and shuffled in front of the truck. They didn’t seem in a hurry, kept their attention on us, their gazes sharp, as they walked, but didn’t stop. I didn’t recognize either of them and like me, Chance kept his attention on them until they ambled into a red Honda, the back dipping as they sat inside.
