Page 3 of Outlaw Ridge: Jesse
Too smooth.
A faint shadow of something, something erased, lingered there, the ghost of a tattoo long removed but never fully gone.
Jesse’s stomach turned to ice. Because he could make out the heart and the symbol inside it.
Hell.
It was the same mark inked on the blood-soaked woman’s arm.
Chapter Two
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“This can’t be happening again,” Lauren muttered.
Her pulse pounded in her ears, her breath was shallow as she stared at the faded image on her arm. It had taken several painful laser treatments to get it to this point, where it was barely visible.
But there was no laser treatment to rid her of the memory of it.
The memory was always there,always, bringing the sickening flashbacks along with it. It all came back to her now. Not as vague smears like the tattoo on her arm but full-blown images.
“Is the woman out there connected to what happened to you?” Jesse asked, the sound of his voice cutting through those nightmarish memories.
“I think so, but I don’t know how,” Lauren admitted.
She saw Jesse and Hallie exchange a concerned glance. Lauren was plenty concerned, too. What was going on here?
Whywas this happening?
“Sixteen years ago,” she said under her breath.
She’d been eighteen, excited, nervous. She was supposed to meet Jesse that night, their first real date. She’d spent an hour debating what to wear, feeling butterflies in her stomach.
But she never made it.
“Someone grabbed me from the back parking lot of the hair salon where I’d just had my nails done,” she went on.
Of course, they knew this part, but Lauren was hoping by spelling it out, it might help her make sense of why a blood covered woman with an identical tattoo to hers had stumbled into the police station.
“I never saw my attacker,” Lauren emphasized. “There was a blur of motion on my right, a sharp sting at my neck, then darkness. I woke up blindfolded, restrained, trapped.”
She had to squeeze her eyes shut a moment, but she opened them when she felt someone touch her hand. Jesse. He was looking at her with even more concern in his dark brown eyes.
“There were others held captive,” she made herself continue. And she said it fast, like ripping off a bandage. “I never saw them, never knew how many. But I heard them. The muffled sobs, the whispered pleas. Once, a girl had screamed until her voice gave out.”
Then silence.
Lauren hadn’t thought anything would be worse than the screams, but she’d been wrong. The silence had been much worse.
“The kidnapper never spoke,” she added. “Never touched me except to mark me with the tattoo.”
More flashbacks came. More memories. A sharp burn of a needle, ink pressing into skin. A brand. Lauren had no idea if the others had gotten one too or if she’d been singled out. She never got the chance to find out.
Because she escaped.
Lauren didn’t want to go over all of this. Mercy, she didn’t. But every piece might be relevant. Even after all this time.
“I was kept in total darkness in what I know now was a small room in a survivalist bunker underneath the ground in the woods. The floors were old wood pallets, and the walls wereconcrete. The man who was holding me had shackled my hands and ankles with duct tape, but on that last day, I managed to get the tape off my ankles.”
