Tangled Fates by Carly Fall, Allison Itterly Read Free Book Online Page A

his shit pretty close to his chest, especially the details of his childhood.
    “Nice area,” he said. “Why did you leave?”
    “I didn’t.”
    The waitress brought their plates, and Laura grabbed a piece of bacon.
    “Well, what happened then? You’re approximately three thousand miles away from Napa
    Valley.”
    She took a huge bite of the blueberry muffin and closed her eyes in appreciation as she
    slowly chewed.
    “I was kidnapped,” she said in a soft voice, not meeting his eyes.
    “From where?” Damn, the omelet was good.
    “The mall,” she said, and finally looked at him. “I was so stupid. The oldest trick in the
    book and I fell for it. Some guy came up to me while I was waiting for my friend and said he was
    a photographer. He thought I was pretty enough to be a model. He said he wanted to give me his
    information. I went out to the parking lot with him, and the next thing I knew I was in a van with
    him and two other men. They stuck me with a needle, and I passed out. I woke up in that
    woman’s apartment, and she told me she had sold me.”
    Tears welled in her eyes. “So stupid.”
    “So, I can assume that you want to go home,” Blake said.
    She nodded, shoveling the food into her mouth.
    Blake pulled out his phone and laid it on the table in front of her. “You can call your
    parents if you want.”
    She quit eating and looked at the phone. A long minute passed. “I do want to call them,
    but I have no idea what to say.”
    Blake shrugged. “I’ve found that most of the time the truth works pretty well.”
    The door to the diner opened and Annis walked in. She stood at the door and looked
    around. When she finally saw Blake, she gave him a wide smile. As she walked over to them,
    Blake couldn’t help but stare. Her long, wet, jean-clad legs carried her confidently, her steps as
    graceful as a ballerina even though she was wearing boots. Yet, there was nothing delicate about
    her. Blake knew she was lethal, and he wondered if she had put an end to shitbag-Susan’s
    miserable existence.
    “Looks like you two have some good food,” she said as she slid into the booth next to
    Blake and grabbed a piece of his bacon.
    “Get your own, Annis. I’m not in the mood to share.”
    She arched an eyebrow, and he laughed.
    “I was just trying to get Laura to call her parents,” Blake said. “It sounds like they’re
    good people.”
    Annis smiled at Laura. “Good idea. I’m sure they’re worried sick about you.”
    “But there’s some things you can’t be completely honest about, Laura,” Blake said. “Not
    that I condone lying, but you can’t let your parents know about us.”
    “Why not?”
    “It’s complicated. But you should call your parents and tell them that you were
    kidnapped, but you escaped and found some people to help you. Tell them that you don’t have
    anything to tell anyone about who took you.”
    He couldn’t have this girl telling anything about him and he wished he had the
    forethought of giving her a fake name, but hopefully nothing would come of it. He had read
    somewhere that there were over fifty-eight thousand people named Blake in the United States, so
    he felt reasonably certain he was safe on that regard. How many of the fifty-eight thousand had
    broken their oath to their government and busted into a top-secret government facility, he didn’t
    know. His guess was one.
    Laura studied him a moment and then nodded. She reached across the table, grabbed the
    phone, and dialed. Ten minutes later, she hung up the phone, tears running down her face, but
    she was smiling.
    “They were happy to hear from me,” she said.
    Of course they were. Blake had never wanted to have children. Maybe it was because he
    didn’t wear any rose-colored glasses when he looked at the world. His vision was twenty-twenty,
    and it showed that this world was on the south side of fucked up. He didn’t want to bring kids
    into the cesspool. Besides that, with the Colonist DNA flowing