Did that mean what I thought it meant?
“Let’s just keep flipping,” I said as I cleared my throat.
The next red highlight I came to was a name. It wasn’t my name, however.
“Rachel Ludick,” I said softly to myself.
That stopped me dead in my tracks. I blinked a few times, trying to see if maybe the name would change. Trying to see if maybe my brain was playing tricks on me. After all, I had been beaten. Starved. Tortured, practically. Maybe my brain filled in blanks. I swiped my thumb over the name. I spat on the paper and tried to wipe it away. And even though the paper curled up, fiber by fiber, the name didn’t disappear.
Rachel Ludick.
When I was adopted, it was shortly after I was born. I knew the extent of my adoption. My parents never tried to keep it from me. They answered any questions I had, and one of my impending teenage-hormone-addled questions was whether or not my birth mother had named me before they did.
Want to know what they named me?
“Rebecca Ludick,” I whispered to myself.
I leaned up, pulling my entire torso out of the water as I furiously flipped through the pages. I came upon pictures. Black and white pictures of a woman smiling into a security camera that looked exactly like me but wasn’t me. Pictures of her holding a knife to a man’s throat. A picture of her just after she had tossed that man’s body to the floor. She was covered in blood, holding the knife above her head, and even though she had her face angled down, it didn’t take a genius to read the curl of her lips.
To see the smile of her crow’s feet.
To see the confidence of her posture.
She was enjoying what she was doing.
And she looked just like me.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said flatly.
As much as my brain screamed at me to stop, I kept reading. Maybe I enjoyed the torture. Enjoyed the pain. But the more I read, the more my heart broke. We looked exactly alike, and yet the more I read about this woman, the more I sided with the guys that had taken me. This woman was sadistic. She was as cunning as she was evil. Her torture tactics alone made the guys’ tactics seem like child’s play, and bile crept up the back of my throat. I clutched the papers with a death grip as I leaned my head over the edge of the tub. My stomach heaved and hoed, clinging to the food it so desperately needed while bile spewed from the back of my throat and onto the floor next to the tub. My entire body quivered with fury as those black and white photos emblazoned themselves onto my brain. My knuckles turned white as I gripped the edge of the tub. My body strained, then shook. Strained, then shook. Strained, locked out, then shook some more. And the entire time, her name rushed through my mind.
Rachel.
Rachel Ludick.
Holy fucking hell, I had a twin sister named Rachel.
And she was a murderer.
Fucking hell, Dante was right.
8
DANTE
“How bad was the rest of the clean-up?” I heard Mav ask as I made my way down the stairs.
Axton harrumphed. “Little piss never hurt anyone.”
I heard Mav munching on something crunchy, and I would have rather he knocked me the fuck out. I couldn’t stand listening to that man eat every chance he could.
He always ate so damn loud.
“You know,” I said as I made my way into the kitchen, “it may be worth it, having her looked at by our doc.”
“Already on it,” Axton said flatly, “that peroxide I dumped into her bath is only going to do so much.”
“When’s the doctor supposed to be here?” Mav asked.
