Chapter 5
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.
But she didn’t trust the other one either. Jack Tracey. That one was nowhere to be seen so maybe this one was the kidnapper?
“You’re scared,” the man noted, as if it hadn’t occurred to him that she might be less than pleased about being kidnapped.
“Ya think?” she responded before she could stop the words. His frown drew down his eyebrows, and he stepped closer to her.
“Nope. Not happening. Stay away from me,” Ashley said, pushing her hands out in front of her to stop him.
“Listen, I’m not going to be doing weird, freaky sex stuff with you, so just get that out of your head right now.
It’s obvious we’re related, somehow, and the fact that you kidnapped me is messed up.
I’m not in the mood for fending off a sex maniac so just take your gross ass on somewhere else. I will brain you if you try anything.”
His only response was to smirk at her even more.
Fucking asshole!
The man kept stalking forward, pushing past her hands, forcing Ashley back until she was plastered against the wall, feeling along it for a way out.
When she couldn’t find anything, she decided to do the next best thing in a situation like this and grabbed the first loose stone that she could find to arm herself with.
Instinctively, Ashley raised the rock, lifting it far above her shoulder and grimaced aggressively.
“I’m not playing around, buddy. I’m not destined to be any man’s sex slave, especially not to someone who could be my twin.
That’s just fucking gross.” Ashley growled out the words, hoping for intimidation, but the way he pulled his lips in between his teeth, as if holding back a laugh, told her she’d failed miserably. “Fuck you.”
“But you just said you wouldn’t,” he responded nonchalantly, and her fury rose.
“Stop correcting me,” she hissed, brandishing the rock at him, her empty hand pushing at him, but he didn’t back up at all.
He’d sounded just a little bit proud when he said that she was scared.
Yeah, that didn’t sit right with her, nor did the way he seemed to be on the verge of chuckling as she stood there.
She wanted to tell him that he was laughing at a woman used to breaking up fights and he didn’t have any weapons at all, but she didn’t.
She had a feeling he’d just have some smartass response that would only piss her off even more.
After all, being the daughter of Ned Bennet happened to have one perk in this world—the fact that Ashley had seen many a fight and happened to know exactly how to win them.
Yes, that probably qualified her as white trash, but she would rather be white trash than fucking dead.
And, right then, it seemed a lot like she would be fucking dead if she didn’t do anything. Especially because there was little to no fear in the man’s features, and he just kept standing there, acting like he had nothing to be concerned about.
Men who acted like they had nothing to be concerned about were the ones you had to watch out for. They were the men who would take advantage of all opportunities, the ones who would take things for granted. The men who would assume consent.
Ashley was more than ready to fucking kill the man.
“Sister,” he said, which wasn’t a word she wanted to hear from a total stranger, and certainly not from someone who currently had her trapped in a dungeon.
“Excuse me? Are you insane? I’m not your sister. I don’t have any siblings,” Ashley spit out, her eyebrows lifting as he smirked down at her again.
His only response was to perk up his eyebrows.
Mr. Silent-but-you’re-my-sister simply crossed his arms over his chest, smiling smugly down at her.
Ashley glared back at him. This was definitely some kind of weird cult shit.
Did cults often go around kidnapping people only to call them sister?
Not that she knew of. But some of them did call each other brother and sister.
She knew talking to him might open her up to manipulation, but she couldn’t help having questions.
“What the fuck do you mean ‘sister’?’” Ashley asked, raising the rock in her hand a little bit higher and trying to steel her jaw to look tougher than she was.
The door gently blew open from a breeze and the light spread over them.
Ashley gulped at what she saw. Yeah, those broad shoulders weren’t sculpted from fat.
That was pure muscle, which meant that he was strong, and being strong meant that he could probably catch her in a single stride and probably force her to do all sorts of weird crap.
And if there was one thing that Ashley currently wasn’t into, it was weird crap. Especially the weird crap that would happen in the middle of a medieval type of location.