AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I entered the salon from the employee room, taking immediate notice of Lauren’s tear-stained face. I could count on both hands the number of times I’d seen the perky brunette upset.
“What’s wrong?”
“Did you hear?” she asked through her sniffling.
“No, what’s happened?”
“They found Jamie,” she breathed out with a sob, twisting the butterfly charm on her necklace.
I had no idea who Jamie was, but her tears let me know that they were close.
“I’m sorry…what happened?”
“She’s dead,” she choked out, practically throwing herself into my arms.
“Okay, let’s go sit,” I soothed, walking to the waiting area with an arm around her shoulders. Her body was trembling so violently that I knew that if she didn’t calm down, she would make herself sick. After a few more minutes of her crying, she finally started to speak again.
“They found her on the side of the road. If it wasn’t for her scorpion tattoo, they might not have even recognized her.”
I wanted to ask what she meant by that but didn’t want to trigger anything.
“It’s like they tried to make her look like someone else.” Lauren lifted her eyes to my hair. “They dyed it red, like yours.”
Her words reverberated inside my skull. The rose and now this? They couldn’t be a coincidence.
The woman that had passed me in the hall at Gooskis flashed through my mind. How many women in Black Pine had scorpion tattoos?
“How did you find out?”
“My mom heard from a friend.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I found myself saying, trying to keep myself calm and put the distraught girl beside me first. “Do you want to go home?”
“No. I’ll be okay. We weren’t super close—we just went to school together. Besides, I don’t want either of us to be alone right now.” She shook her head and gave me a watery smile.
I forced myself to return it, tempering the chaos that was threatening to take over my psyche.
My thoughts went barreling toward the one person I couldn’t stop thinking of, and I resisted the urge to scream he was dead.
Constantine was dead.
Ashridge’s, Sheriff had confirmed it—personally.
I wasn’t sure who was doing this, but I knew it had something to do with me, so before they made their next move, I needed to find a way to be one step ahead of them.
It was no surprise that such a violent crime slowed business down. People were too scared to go anywhere.
I sent Molina a text telling her to call me ASAP. The shift was miserably slow, but at least Lauren seemed to be coping okay, answering the phone with a small dose of pep in her tone.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked me for the fifth time. It made me feel like shit. She was the one who had lost someone.
“I promise, I’m fine.” I gave her a fleeting smile before looking back down at the magazine I was pretending to read.
“Today isn’t all bad. Joshua is taking me to the Peak on Sunday,” she gushed.
Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’ started playing in my head. Did I respond to this news with matched excitement?
The Peak was for young couples that liked to fuck in the car after high school basketball games or the movies.
At least, that’s what I’d overheard from an elderly pair of ladies while grabbing a sandwich from the deli a few nights ago. The days of running off with my bad boy heartthrob were far behind me at this point in my life, but we’d certainly gotten in our fair share of backseat fucks when it counted, even with a body bleeding out in the trunk.
I wasn’t sure why Lauren would be going, though. Unless something had changed overnight, she was religiously saved and had been dating this Joshua guy since before I moved here.
“That should be fun, right?” I settled with, looking to her for some clarification.
“Yes. Oh, before I get,” she sang the last word, leaning forward like she was about to share something life-changing.
Her doe brown eyes rounded with excitement. “He has a friend—.”
“Absolutely not.” I cut her off before she could even get the sentence out of her mouth, and looked back down at my magazine, right at the section headlined: ‘Top twelve tips on how to land a hot date.’
The irony wasn’t lost on me.
“Oh, come on, Rose!” She crossed her arms and poked out her lower lip. “After what just happened, we need to do something to lift the mood.”
I grit my teeth. Did she forget how much older I was than her? “No,” I said, harsher than I intended.
Her expression fell, making me feel even worse. I had too much on my mind to deal with this. I didn’t even want to be at the damn salon, but I needed a job to survive adulthood, and it wouldn’t be right to ditch Lauren.
“Look, why don’t we just meet up for pizza or something one night after your date?” That was my compromise. She had offered me olive branch after olive branch ever since I applied for this job, and I kept turning her down.
