Page 1 of Mountain Beast

CHAPTER ONE

BRIGGS O’HARE

Rage is pain's protector—the spiked armor of those more comfortable with expressing their anger than their vulnerability. It shields their soft underbelly from a world that wounds without prejudice.

At least, that’s the poetic bullshit my social worker told foster homes every time I was shipped away after another school fight got me expelled, or my parents were deemed unfit—again.

He’s been hurt; no one taught him how to express himself properly.

He’s a good kid who’s been dealt a bad hand. His parents showed him that violence was the only way to settle conflict.

On and on Trisha would drone, trying to pave my way into a loving family that would keep me for more than a few months.

It never worked.

I was too fucked up to be saved by even the most well-meaning of foster parents, and there hadn’t been too many of those to start with. So, the pattern continued—new home or old home, same fucking trouble—until I aged out of the system at eighteen and smartened up. Cut off my lousy parents, who miraculously never lost full custody of me, and stopped fighting.

That didn’t change my reputation, though.

I’d already been branded a troublemaker in High Ridge, and nearly twenty years later, the name still sticks to me like gum on the bottom of my boot.

Not that I give a damn.

Nor do the surrounding counties’ businesses.

They don’t care about my wayward youth when they hire me to haul their shit to my junkyard.

O’Hare’s Salvage.

Most people consider it poetic justice that O’Hare white trash owns a garbage heap.

Because High Ridge will always see me one way.

Ask poor Asa Keller.

He’d been known as the town Beast for forever until his girl shut that down years ago. Some people whisper the moniker every once and awhile, but never where Poppy Keller can hear them.

“Small town problems… Should have set up shop somewhere else,” I mutter to myself as I press the button for another cup of coffee from the Keurig set in the corner of my office.

But the two friends I made in high school decided to stay here after graduation, and as a foster system cast-off, sentimentality won out—better to stick with Cormac and Deacon, and have each other’s backs, than ditch the only people to ever accept me.

Though things with Cormac have been rocky since he got married.

“Because you’re an asshole,” I say aloud as the coffee machine spits and groans before a stream of liquid hits my mug.

If I’d known the woman searching for my buddy at the hardware store would become Cormac’s wife, I might have kept my mouth shut. Maybe wouldn’t have directed her to the Rocking M Ranch, where Cormac promptly fell for the girl, along with his newfound son, the woman’s nephew.

Jesse.

When I think of the baby, I remember that I’d do everything exactly the same way if I had to do it over again. No kid should grow up without a loving family, and Cormac didn’t deserve never knowing he had a son out in the world.

And Davie isn’t terrible. She clearly loves Jesse and Cormac.

It’s my own baggage that makes me distrust the speed with which she and my best friend got married. Makes me question her motives beyond notifying Cormac of his biological son.

“Fucking Ashley.” My ex-girlfriend, the most recent reason for my trust issues with women and another loaded suitcase stuffed into my mountain of baggage.

For once, it’d be nice if something good entered my life and didn’t fuck it up even more.