Page 63 of Dozer

Her father called her an hour later, rather than texting her back.

“Thank you. It means a lot for your mother’s career, and I know that’s why you did it, but I want to tell you thank you from a personal perspective, because I get the feeling you didn’t go beyond the truth, and it’s nice hearing you say we weren’t terrible parents.”

Daisy looked at me, and I nodded. Whatever she wanted to say to her dad, she needed to say. She knows me enough to understand the nod was permission to be herself, to not hold back, and she told him, “The truth, Dad, is that I was raised by everyone except you and Mom. I saw ya’ll a few weeks a year, at most. Youdidtry to give me every opportunity that fit your agenda, that part is absolutely true, but sending me away, paying other people to raise me? It makes me wonder why you bothered having a daughter, if you weren’t going to love and cherish me, fight with me, teach me by example — all the things parents are supposed to do. I’m not going to say any of that publicly, don’t worry, but the honest fucking truth is that I had to write andrewrite what I was going to say in order to come up with enough nice things to say about the way you raised me to fill a video.”

Twenty seconds of silence, and then a sigh. “I’m sorry. We had the money to send you to the best school, and to give you extra learning opportunities in the summer, so we did. In hindsight though, you’re absolutely right. I find it hard to apologize though, after spending millions on your education just to get you through high school, only to have to deal with a runaway who wasn’t interested in the college degree we were making available to her.”

“I don’t think I expected an apology, though I admit one given without caveats would be nice. As Dozer says, the focus now should be in moving forward. I’ll do what I can to keep my life from reflecting poorly on Mom’s public persona, and in return, I need you and Mom to let me live my life without interference. If either or both of you wants a relationship with me, I’m open to that, but we all have separate lives now, so it isn’t necessary.”

“Quid pro quo? You don’t harm us, we leave you alone?”

“I suppose that’s how an attorney would view it.”

“Okay, Daisy May. Post your video, and thethank youis still applicable, for helping your mom’s optics.”

“You’re welcome. Do you still want to stick to the Monday night talks?”

“I do. Let’s see how it goes, yes? Video chat, me and your mom on our end, maybe your brother, if we can wrangle him. Whoever you want on your end.”

“Okay then, we’ll talk Monday night.”

She disconnected the call and looked at me. When I opened my arms, she ran into them. We were back home, and she was naked since it’d been a voice call.

“Open conversation, little flower. Speak freely.” I was going to have to look at changing some of our base rules soon. Perhapsnot being allowed to speak freely in a certain room, or during a scene? I needed to figure that out, but it was time to give her mostly free rein on when she could speak.

“You don’t have any tattoos, Master. Neither do most of your brothers.”

Hmmm. I’d expected her to talk about her parents. She wasn’t supposed to ask questions about my brothers, but I could answer this one. Not the complete truth, but enough of it. She wanted to change the conversation, so I’d bend the rules a little.

“Gonzo got his tattoos years before he met us, when he was someone else entirely. Law enforcement has databases of tattoos, and they can input a tattoo of a heart on the top of the left forearm and get a list of everyone who’s been a person-of-interest in any way with a heart tattoo on top of their left forearm. Traffic cops even note tattoos when they pull someone over for speeding, and it goes into the database. It’s true that we occasionally do illegal things, and the vast majority of the time that means we beat the hell out of someone who comes into our territory and sells drugs, but you can still go to jail for assault and battery, even if you’re trying to do the job the police can’t manage while you beat the hell out of the guy.”

The grief and anger in her scent faded, and I kept talking, hoping to keep her mind off her original family. “I’ve heard stories of people having a temporary tattoo put on, with ink pens or whatever, to mimic someone else, and then committing a crime where their face never shows, but the tattoo does. If you can time it right, so the person you’re setting up doesn’t have an alibi, and you can work the situation so they have the trifecta — motive, means, and opportunity — you can sometimes get them put into prison and keep yourself out. Even if they beat the rap, you can make their life hell for a while, and cost them tens of thousands in attorney fees.”

This wasn’t why we don’t have tattoos, of course. We don’t have tattoos because they disappear when wechangeto wolf and come back to human, but Daisy didn’t know I’m a werewolf. Gonzo was tattooed while he was human, and the tattoos were part of him when he was bitten years later, so there was nothing to heal. He returns to the state he was in when he was first bitten. If you lose an arm and you’re bitten within a few days, you’ll likely get the arm back, but even a week later, you might go to wolf with three legs and come back to human with one arm. The magic has a mind of its own though, so there are cases of someone being bitten months later and the limb coming back, but most of the time, it doesn’t work.

Did I want Daisy to know I was a wolf? Before we were married, the answer had been easy — I did not. Maybe when the five years were up, if she chose to stay with me, but not until then.

But we’d thrown those five years out the window. She was here to stay, so there was no longer a reason to wait.

The same could be said of allowing her to begin an apprenticeship. I’d been planning to hold off a few years so she’d become financially stable about the same time her contract with me was up.

Since the MC was going to go through with Viper’s proposal, it might be a few months before he was ready to take on an apprentice. The coffee shop beside the bike shop was about to go out of business, and no one had leased the old carpet store right beside it yet. Gen went to the company that owned the strip mall with a cash offer from us, and they jumped on it. This meant we had three long-term tenants, and four empty slots. We’d turn two of them into the tattoo and piercing shop, and the other into a salon, though we were considering making the salon larger while we were at it, because we’d heard from several stylists who were interested in making the move. Our guys werehandling demolition, and Matty was deep into planning how the interior and exterior of both would look. The contractors had us on their schedule to start work three weeks out in the already-empty slots, and Cam was designing the logo and signage.

“You mentioned once you’d never had a job, and it occurs to me that maybe we should fix that. Let’s start you out at the bottom of the ladder, which means folding clothes for the laundry. You’ll hate it, and I’m sorry for that, but two or three days a week experiencing what it takes for a business to bring money in will be enlightening, I believe. From there, I’m thinking we might get you to help out in the bike shop. We hired two people to replace the girl we’ve had forever, and our guys still end up having to fill in occasionally. I don’t want you there forever, but it’ll be nice to have a third person who knows the drill.”

“What happened to the girl who’d had the job so long?”

“She fell in love with someone who lives far, far away. It was time for her to move on, and we’re all happy for her, but she left a big hole we’ve had trouble filling. The laundry will be minimum wage, and you won’t be paid at all to shadow in the bike shop, but if you can pick it up and run with it, it’ll be a few dollars over minimum wage.”

I looked at her a few seconds, trying to figure the best way to explain the kind of money she’d be making for a shitload of hard work, and landed on, “You’ll have to work around one hundred and twenty hours to afford the suit you wore to the restaurant to meet your parents. That’s, what, around fifteen days of eight-hour shifts? The jeans you’ll wear to the club tonight, you’d have to work around twenty hours to afford, so two and a half days of work. Three or four hours for the cost of an uncooked steak. I’m not going to make you buy any of this — I’ll keep providing, but I want you to understand it’s a shit job with shit pay. The people who stick around and can work with little supervision make alittle more than double the minimum wage, but you’ll start at the bottom because you won’t have experience. Also, I think it’s an important lesson towards someday making you a kick-ass tattoo artist.”

“I have no idea what the minimum wage is, Master, or how much more than that a tattoo artist makes.”

“Depends on the tattoo artist, but I gather experienced ones make three or four times minimum wage, and the famous ones can make fifty to a hundred times more.”

“Does the MC have a whorehouse?”

“We own a hotel that was on the main traffic route until the interstates were put in. We have a few rooms we can rent to tourists if one happens to want a retro hotel off the beaten path, but that rarely happens. Anyone who transacts with one of our girls knows they’d better be on their best behavior, so they are. We rarely have to beat the hell out of someone to make an example of them. Our girls are well-paid and safe. We also have a retired doctor available for them at no charge. We provide birth control pills or whatever form of birth control they prefer. We also provide a variety of condoms. Experienced girls come to us wanting a job. There’s no need for us to recruit women or turn them into prostitutes.”

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