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CHAPTER 13

Raleigh, North Carolina Friday, July 19, 2024

AS SLOAN PULLED PAST THE TOYOTA SHE NOTICED IT WAS EMPTY. SHE turned into the parking lot of her apartment complex, slid into a spot, and looked around. Several options ran through her mind. The first was to get the hell out of there, drive to her parents’ house, and wait for them to get home. Or, she could go back to the OCME and bide her time there. Hell, she could drive to FBI headquarters and tell the agents that someone with Nevada plates was following her. Nevada. As in Cedar Creek, Nevada, where she and her birth parents disappeared from.

In the end, she got out of her car and hustled to the steps of her apartment, still feeling the burn in her quads from her workout. She lived on the third story. She raced up the steps and turned the corner to find a man standing next to her front door. Leaning against the stucco wall, with one leg crossed over the other, he casually scrolled through his phone. But the man’s unimposing body language did nothing to staunch her fear. Sloan’s eyes went wide, and a rush of anxiety took control of her body, momentarily paralyzing her. After a couple of seconds, she managed a step backward as she fumbled for her purse.

“Sloan?” the man asked, pushing away from the wall and slipping his phone into the front pocket of his jeans. He took a few steps toward her. “Sloan Hastings?”

With shaking hands, Sloan unzipped her purse. She tried to scream but her lungs were void of air from hyperventilating. The man was another step closer, and then another, before Sloan found the bottle at the bottom of her purse. She looked up just as the man was reaching into the breast pocket of his jacket. In one swift movement Sloan raised the can of pepper spray and delivered a powerful stream to the man’s face.

So forceful was the aerosol that the pepper spray ricocheted off the man’s face and directly into Sloan’s eyes. The man went down in a heap, moaning as he clawed at his eyes. It took just a fraction of a second for Sloan to feel the burn in her own eyes. She dropped the can and also fell to her knees. Just before her eyelids spasmed closed, she saw what the man had removed from his breast pocket. It had fallen onto the ground in front of her apartment door. It wasn’t a gun or a knife, as she had imagined. It was a police badge.