Page 110 of Fracture

A room lined with plastic.

She wasn’t supposed to live through it. They intended to kill her. She wouldn’t have been the first.

“Another dream?” Vinnie asked, sitting up and kissing her shoulder.

Lorelei nodded.

“I’ll go start coffee.” He grabbed his shorts from the floor next to the bed and padded out of the room wearing only those shorts.

Lorelei hated that she was ruining their sleepy mornings with memories, but she couldn’t stop them. Not even Vinnie’s presence was helping her sleep anymore.

Lorelei closed her eyes and tried to go back to the house. To see more details. She knew it was gray stone, but she didn’t know where it was. How far away. What was around it.

Or if it was real.

Vinnie asked her the first morning if she wanted to talk about it, but she shook her head. It didn’t feel real. Like it was a place she constructed. After three days with the same dream, she wondered if it really was where she was held.

Lorelei grabbed Vinnie’s tee, then used the bathroom before she joined him in the kitchen. She slid her hands up his chest and pressed her cheek to his back.

He grabbed her hands and squeezed, pulling them away so he could spin in her embrace and hold her to his chest. He held her without a word, letting her decide what she wanted to say.

“I keep seeing this house. A mansion, really. I was led inside and dragged through hallways and dumped in a room lined with plastic.”

Vinnie sucked in a breath.

“I know they asked me questions and tortured me. I don’t remember any of that yet, but when they tired of me, they stashed me in a room with other women.”

“Oh, God,” Vinnie exhaled.

“I don’t know if any of it is real, though. If the place is real or if the women were real. It all feels fuzzy.”

“Do you remember anything else about it?”

Lorelei shook her head. “Not really. It was huge. I didn’t go upstairs, but I saw a staircase when I walked in. There were a lot of rooms, but most of the doors were closed. I heard yelling in some. Crying, screaming.”

“You think they were operating their sex trafficking out of the house?”

“It’s possible. Sonya said she saw Edie at a house near her apartment. It makes sense they’d have others.”

Vinnie nodded. “It’s possible. Especially since there was so much evidence at that house of others being there.”

Lorelei nodded, resting her head on Vinnie again. If she hadn’t been taken, they might have found some of those women. Instead, when the house was searched, it was empty. Stained mattresses and torn clothing were only small pieces of the evidence they found that led to the conclusion it had been used for exactly what they all feared.

“This house was huge, though. I haven’t seen anything like it around here.”

“You remember the outside?”

“A little. Gray stone. Lots of it. A huge front staircase that curves at the edges and leads to a solid wood front door.”

“Gravel driveway?” Vinnie asked.

“You know it?” Lorelei breathed.

Vinnie nodded. “I think I do.”

Lorelei pulled back and walked out of the kitchen.

“Where are you going?”