And so, she did the only thing she could do at that moment. She turned and ran. Or, she tried to turn. Her door was blocked by yet another stranger. Ashley stared up at the man, her jaw dropping for maybe the millionth time that day.
This stranger looked just like her if she was being honest with herself. This stranger had light eyes that shone the same icy blue as hers. And his blond hair was the same winter white as hers. Even his skin was just as pale and highlighted with the same pink blush as hers. He was someone who, under any other circumstances, could have been related to Ashley.
If Ashley happened to have siblings, that is. Or maybe a cousin, if Ned had any siblings running around that she didn’t know anything about.
She blinked at the man in confusion, but only briefly. A mere second later, the man’s hands rose to her neck. She started to gasp as his fingers slid around and tightened at the back of her neck. Then everything went black.
Chapter
Five
It was dark.
That was the first thing that Ashley realized. It was dark, and she wasn’t in her bed. In fact, she had no idea where she was.
Ashley blinked as she slowly rose up from the ground, looking around in confusion, a frown tugging at her lips. She didn’t recognize anything about this place. All she knew at that moment was that she definitely wasn’t in her trailer and probably not in Tennessee. Unless her trailer had somehow been rebuilt to look like it was the dungeon of a Medieval Times restaurant.
It was a castle, that much was clear. Everything was brick and stone, like it came from another century. Ashley did not doubt in her mind that wherever it was, this extravagant look was required by whoever owned it.
Obviously, someone was doing some elaborate role-play. But was she the princess that needed to be rescued?
A princess she was not, but she might need someone to rescue her. If she couldn’t figure out how to get out of this place on her own.
Ashley had read about things like this on her newsfeed before. Weirdos just snatched people right out of their houses.
Fuck, was she being sex trafficked?
She’d heard about girls who had been kidnapped by people who had scouted them out at their jobs, or schools, or whatever it was they did with their lives. They’d be living their own lives one day and the next they’d be in some foreign place, with no idea where they actually were, expected to do sexual favors for some pimp or a bunch of businessmen.
“Jack Tracey,” Ashley said his name because if she had one thing at that moment, it was his name, and having the name of the person who had abducted her was a power. Or at least, that’s what people in documentaries had led her to believe.
She was a huge fan of the Dateline NBC documentaries. Time and time again, the girls in the documentaries talked about how being able to identify the person who had done these horrible things to them led to the kidnapper’s arrest. It didn’t exactly help them escape, but it helped when it came time to go to the authorities. She could quite clearly identify Jack Tracey. Now she just had to figure out where the fuck she was.
Too bad she had no idea where she was at that moment. Everything was hazy and foggy. The things she seemed to remember about the moments before the world went dark for her didn’t seem to be possible.
She heard a noise and looked up to see a familiar face. Familiar because she’d seen it right before she blacked out. And because it looked exactly like her own.
While Ashley had dreamed of having a brother when she was a lonely kid, she had always known that wouldn’t happen unless Ned found a woman to have a child with. She had no siblings and no cousins that she knew of. No matter how many times she’d asked Ned if she had any other family, the answer remained the same.
Despite all of that, this man was clearly related to her. His eyes didn’t move as he stared down at her, lingering on her eyes almost like he wanted nothing more than to memorize every detail of them.
To say it was overwhelming was an understatement. There was something so calculating and disconcerting about how this man looked at her, as if he thought that he owned her. That was something else that Ashley had learned in this life, you don’t trust men who acted like they owned you.
Her many years working as a waitress had proven to her that the more that a man felt entitled to your time, to your private life, to knowing everything about you, the more dangerous they often turned out to be.
Anger sparked to life and, using the little common sense she had left at that point, she backed away from the stranger wearing her face. At least she wasn’t in a cage or behind bars, which was something of a relief. Even better, she saw light through the doorway the man must have entered. Whether she could walk out of that door of her own free will remained to be seen.
Those Dateline NBC episodes showed her that a doorway could be good, they were a means of escape. But if she was stuck so far out in the middle of nowhere that her kidnapper felt no qualms about leaving the door open that could be bad. Some even got off on watching their victims try to escape, only to realize they never could. Freaks.
Ashley wasn’t exactly sure which of the two strangers she’d run into that day had kidnapped her. For all she knew it could be both.
They must have drugged her. That would explain the weird memories about a wolf, and then the wolf turning into her dad. And that even weirder red moonlight. She wasn’t sure how she could have been drugged, but she must have been.
“Are you just going to stand there staring at me silently or are you going to tell me why I’m not in my home?” Ashley finally spoke up, hating the silence as the man stared down at her. That silence made her skin crawl as her mind wandered back to other Dateline episodes.
The man with her face smirked down at her, tilting his head to the left as his eyes narrowed. His nostrils flared and he breathed out heavily.
She didn’t trust him.
