Shadow Force - 2 Promises in the Dark by Stephanie Tyler

Author:Stephanie Tyler
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9780440339724
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-22T23:00:00+00:00

Zane had been watching the entire scene play out in Liv’s eyes, had watched her withdraw into herself as she told him the story. But now she was quiet, and he had to tell her she’d done the right thing. Because she had. “Liv, you were thinking—you were smart. Your plan was good.”

“It didn’t help the other girl, did it?”

“We save who we can. You didn’t escape unscathed.”

“No,” she said quietly. “I took some scars with me.”

She lifted her shirt and pointed, and he stared at the tattoo again, the dark swirls, the colors, and all he could see was a mix of colors and a pretty cool tattoo. “Come closer and I’ll show you.”

He did. She took his finger and traced it along one part, noting that he immediately felt the deep indent that wasn’t visible to the naked eye.

He looked up at her face as she traced it again, and she saw the realization bloom in his eyes. “It’s a letter. T.”

She nodded and moved his finger over a bit and traced a second letter with him. R.

The third, O.

“Jesus H. Christ.” His voice sounded hollow, his eyes dark with horror as he realized the word trouble had been carved into her. “He did this to you. That bastard. That’s what he did to you … what he was doing to Erin.”

She nodded. His free hand clenched into a fist, but she noted he didn’t move his other hand from her tattoo, simply placed his palm flat there as if he could magically make the scars beneath it disappear.

“There was no way to explain the scars,” she said. “Doctors kept saying, They’ll fade as you grow, but they didn’t. My mom wanted me to have a skin graft, like the plastic surgeon suggested, but I had to wait until I was older anyway. And I decided that I’d get this done instead to cover it. Not for me, because I know it’s there. I’d always know it’s there. It seemed to be so important to other people that I get rid of it. I thought this was a good compromise.”

“Your parents figured, out of sight, out of mind. And then you went and put it on display,” he said. But he saw why it was her mark of survival, what drove her.

“I never told my parents, the police or the psychiatrist what he said about me.”

“Why?”

“I told myself that it was because I didn’t want to believe what he said. But all along, I felt it … knew he was right. It wasn’t over. And if I close my eyes, I’m back in the cabin, tied to a chair, facing the table and watching his scarred hands work the tarot cards. Telling me that I wasn’t going to die now because I had more trouble coming for me in the future.”

“Liv—”

She didn’t stop, couldn’t, he guessed. “He told me other things too. Things that have come, true. I’ve lived my whole life trying to be about science and the logic behind it; I didn’t want to let his truth override that plan.

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