Free Broken: A Billionaire Love Story by Heather Chase

that one last good drunk through his system.
    The last one didn’t count, after all—he had blacked out for nearly ten days. Who could end their drinking after that? Who would stop drinking after getting their ass kicked in the middle of a street because they were drunk? That was silly. You had to go out with some style, for god's sake. With a little bit of poetry in the mix.
    He wanted to go out swinging, have a nice ride into the sunset with a flask of whiskey at his hip. Didn’t he deserve to get drunk enough for that? Wasn’t he a big enough piece of shit to deserve to feel that good, just one more time?
    The facility was at the top of a large hill, at the bottom of which was a parking lot for staff and visitors. He snuck out through the automated gate—still open—and walked down the road. He didn’t have much of a plan, yet.
    Maybe a bar? Maybe a grocery store? Maybe a liquor store? Any of it would work.
    Over the past few hours, he’d scrounged through the couch cushions and looked in the corners of the rehab facility's big halls and the living areas, picking up whatever spare coins he could find. And so now, he had a two dollars in change in his pocket—enough to make some kind of a purchase at a store while he walked out with a bottle of booze in his coat.
    Shoplifting certainly had never been beneath him in the past, and it wasn’t now. Shane knew he really had no need to scrounge for money like that—somewhere there was a bank account practically exploding with funds, all with his name on it. But he didn’t want anything from his family. He didn’t want them to know he needed one single goddamn cent from those vipers.
    So, shoplifting was his plan.
    But that was a plan, like so many of his plans, that didn’t come to fruition.
    Instead, a few miles down the road, after an hour of walking, there was a bar: Spark’s.
    He found it hard to believe, almost, that a bar had placed itself so close to a rehab facility. It seemed in pretty poor taste.
    But maybe it made sense, he thought. Maybe a great many roads to recovery had been tested—or derailed—by this bar. Maybe it was a common dream among bartender’s, getting together at conventions—“Wouldn’t you love to have a location like Spark’s? Good god. The money that must come in to that place! Every drunk just pouring themselves into every drink put out there. And if someone got way too drunk, why, the police know just where to stick ‘em.”
    The parking lot was crowded but not too crowded. Nobody double-parked or sitting on the grass like sometimes he had seen in small, out-of-the-way places like this. Noises crawled out of the interior, entering the night and surrounding Shane in that sense of nostalgia that a bar always brought him. Good things happened there. Even despite all the bad, bad things he had been a part of in bars—always the first thoughts he had about them were good.
    As he approached, though, doubt attacked him. Should he go in? He came all this way. He could just walk all the way back. But then, he’d feel stupid, getting caught. He’d feel more stupid getting caught and not being drunk than getting caught sober. Why even go out if he wasn’t going to drink? That was silly.
    That was a coward’s move. Shane was no coward.
    Olivia wouldn’t like it. He knew this already. He’d have to explain it to her somehow. There was not much of his mind that believed that he was going to walk right back in to Edgemont Heights the way he had walked out. For all that he quizzed Rawls about leaving the place, not once had he thought to quiz him about coming back in. Maybe when the guards changed shifts? But how would he know the exact moment of that, not being able to see them?
    Anyway. He walked right in to the bar, of course.
    Inside, though, it certainly seemed crowded—there was a game on, blaring out on the three widescreens that the bar boasted. One over the bar, two in the back behind the pool tables.
    But, right there in the