No Dogs Allowed

Prologue - No Dogs Allowed

[A BRIEF DISCLAIMER:
This book contains elements of blood and violence, brutality, alcohol and tobacco use, gore, domestic abuse, disordered eating behaviors, explicit language, and explicit sexual content. If any of these topics trigger you, please refrain from reading further. Thank you.]

- PART 1 -

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C8H18

Octane.

Hydrocarbon. Colorless liquid. Highly flammable.

_________________

Here's the secret of life: Or die trying.

If you want a translation, that means: Win.

Don't start saying it about cooking your eggs or buying your tennis shoes, but for the most part, there's your motto, clean and simple. Win. Or die trying.

If you were everyone, you'd roll your eyes and wave me off and move to the next story. That's your problem. Whether that's a loss depends on how much you respect yourself. If you're a winner, you already know what I'm talking about and I'm wasting breath as we speak.

But if you don't, well. Pleasure to make your acquaintance.

Not to say I'm a winner. That's what the gods of the world get to say. The ones in bronze, on cotton linen bills, reincarnated in Hollywood movies, frozen mid-life on plaques in New York museums. The ones with bones in their closet worth hiding. The ones with cuffs worth biting off. The ones who wear crowns on their wrists, in red under their heels, in the pockets of their suits, in the velvet of their bags. The ones who know blood because of paper cuts and baby teeth. The ones who know heat because of southern summers and sex.

So, no. Not me.

But those are born winners. And what's the story in those? No, you want a made winner. The last breath in the cell. The last runner beneath the wall. The last dog in the ring.

Translation: you want a survivor.

Which, depending on who you're talking to, could be me. But then you'd have to debate what that means. The winning part, that is. Not the surviving part.

Give me some trust then, and I'll tell it. At least this way, you only have to hear the story once, and we can know that somewhere in the crevices of this, we'll all walk away a little satisfied at having heard what we want to hear. That's how you do it, anyway.

Again, not the surviving part. The winning part.

The surviving part, well. You'll see.

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So you trust me, I'll tell you a secret from the get-go: I'm a Class III Stirling Omega. Read that S-T-I-R-L-I-N-G. Not your silver. Fuck your silver, what are you, a murderer in the making? STERLING is your earrings. STIRLING is Walter.

Walter M. Stirling was one of those gods I was talking about. He's praised for his American industrial empires mostly and occasionally the Stirling Stir-Up Special at Wendy's. But if you went by search results, he was most known for being the leader of the dead-last lycan pack in the entire Northern Hemisphere.