Shocking Pink

Then she knew.

This wasn’t happening, she told herself, sucking in a strangled breath. Not in Thistledown. Not in her own neighborhood.

But it was.

With a squeak of fear, she ducked down, grabbing her friends’ hands and dragging them with her. They stared at each other in shocked silence, then looked away, embarrassed and uncomfortable. Andie opened her mouth to whisper something to break the silence, but nothing came. It wasn’t so much that she couldn’t speak as that suddenly she didn’t want to.

The three ran. Away from the window and back to the abandoned tree house in the empty lot. Breathing hard, they scrambled up the makeshift ladder and onto the platform.

Several moments passed in complete silence except for the sound of their ragged breathing. Andie stubbed the toe of her sneaker against the platform floor, the need to speak nearly strangling her. But for the first time in her life, she didn’t know what to say to her friends.

Suddenly, Julie giggled. Self-conscious, she slapped a hand over her mouth. Still, she giggled again. Raven and Andie looked at her, and she shook her head. “I can’t help it. It was so …” Julie flushed. “You guys, she was … blowing him.”

Andie brought her hands to her face. “I can’t believe they … I mean, that? Here?”

“No joke.” Raven drew her knees to her chest. “I’ve never seen anything like that before. It was wild.”

Andie made a face. “And what was that blindfold all about?”

“They’re sex perverts,” Julie answered, looking at Andie. “I saw a book in the library about it. In the psychology section. It was called sexual—” she thought for a moment “—sexual deviation. I think that was it.”

Sexual deviation. Just as Andie couldn’t rid herself of the sensation of gooseflesh crawling up her arms, she couldn’t shake the image of the woman standing blindfolded and naked in the dark.

She looked at Raven, then Julie. “That woman, why does she do that for him?”

The other two looked blankly at her, then at each other. “I don’t know,” Raven answered, shrugging. “Because she likes it?”

“But how could she?” Andie continued, wishing she had seen the man’s face, wondering if, somehow, she would understand if she had. “It was so … awful. It seemed, I don’t know—” She searched for the right word. “Demeaning,” she said, finding it. “Like the woman was nothing and he was everything. Like she was a slave and he was her master.”

“Gross,” Julie said, screwing up her face. “I sure wouldn’t do that for anybody.”

“No kidding.” Raven looked thoughtful. “What do we do now? We could drop it, but it was just so weird … so wrong.”

“Do you think …” Andie hesitated a moment, knowing what she was about to suggest was far-fetched, but feeling as if she had to say it. “I know that the woman … that she showed up alone and all, but do you think she could have been … that maybe she wasn’t there of her own free will?”

Julie widened her eyes. “What do you mean, like she was kidnapped?”

“Or being blackmailed.”

The other two said nothing, just gazed at Andie, their expressions troubled.

“I don’t know,” Julie murmured after a moment, her cheeks pink. “Maybe. But why would she do that? What could be so bad that she would get in a car and drive someplace she didn’t want to be and do something like that?”

“Something really bad,” Raven answered softly. “Life-and-death.”

Andie glanced down at her hands, realizing that she had them clasped in front of her so tightly her knuckles stood out white in the darkness. She lifted her gaze to her friends’, suddenly thinking of something that hadn’t occurred to her before. “Guys? Why two scarves?”

The question landed heavily between the girls. They looked at each other.

“He brought two,” Andie prodded. “Remember?”

For a moment nobody said a thing, they didn’t even seem to breathe. Julie jumped as a creature scurried in the branches above them, then she rubbed her arms, as if chilled.

Raven swore softly. “This guy’s a freak. We can’t let it go. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on. Agreed?”

Julie hesitated, then nodded. “I’m with you, Rave. We can’t let it go.”

They turned to her. Andie squeezed her eyes shut, wishing she could stop thinking about the woman, about what she had seen. Wishing she could go back to an hour before she had peeked through that window. If she could, she wouldn’t look through it.

But she couldn’t go back, as much as she longed to.

Releasing a breath she hadn’t even realized she held, she inclined her head. “Agreed.”

8

Raven sat in her dark kitchen, awaiting her father’s return. She waited up for him even though it was nearly 1:00 a.m., because he expected it, expected it from a daughter to whom her father, her family, was everything.

Absolute loyalty. Complete devotion. Those were the things that mattered.

She hated his guts.

Raven brought a hand to her right temple and massaged the spot, the tiny fist of pain that had settled there. She had headaches often, some blinding in their intensity, but she had learned to live with them. They were a part of her life, of who she was, just as the scar that curved down her right cheek was.

She closed her eyes and breathed deeply through her nose, the events of the night, the events she and her friends had witnessed, whirling in her head. Something important had happened tonight. Something important to her, though she didn’t know why she was so certain of that.

Her exhilaration, her excitement, hadn’t been sexual. She had been spellbound, but not by the woman and what she had been doing. By him, the man.

Raven rested her head against the chair’s high back. Who was he? she wondered. What gave him such power over that woman?

And why couldn’t she put him out of her head?

She hadn’t been able to since that first night, when they’d all been in the house together. Contrary to what she’d told Andie, she had screwed up her courage and peeked around the corner from her hiding place—and seen his face. He had the features of a hawk, she thought, picturing him, all sharp angles and intense. He was older, not like her dad, but older than any of the guys she knew, probably in his twenties.

Raven frowned and rubbed her temple again, guilt plucking at her. She didn’t know why she had lied to her friends, she hadn’t planned to. The words, the lie, had simply slipped past her lips.

Andie and Julie were her best friends. They were her family. It was wrong to have lied to them. She had never kept anything from them.

Until now. Until this.

It was for their own good, she told herself. She was protecting them. The way a parent did a child.

But protecting them from what? she wondered. From who?

Raven thought of the man again. He knew many secrets, she was certain of it. Secrets that gave him power—over other people, over life and death. Tonight had been proof of that.

She wanted to learn his secrets.

From outside she heard the sound of a car door slamming. Her father. She straightened and turned toward the kitchen door, pasting on an expectant and welcoming smile.