“Could be stolen like the car,” Blaze suggested, shifting his weight eagerly on his feet. “No wallet or anything?”
Garrison grimaced. “This is it. Unless there’s something in her bag.”
Julius upended the tote bag onto the chair in the corner. Several more pieces of jewelry tumbled out, along with a small heap of clothing… and a worn stuffed tiger that looked as if it’d seen better days.
Garrison raised an eyebrow at that. “Cash, stuff that can be pawned for more cash, clothes, and a personal belonging. That paints a pretty clear picture. She was running away—from someone or something.”
“Without any ID on her?” Blaze said, obviously frustrated that he couldn’t work his computer magic on it.
“Could be whoever she was running from had it under lock and key,” Julius said. “Take your photo of her face. You can still use that.”
As Blaze got out his phone, Julius turned the woman so she faced the ceiling, her black hair fanning out across the thin pillow. Her face had come out of the crash relatively undamaged, only a faint bruise forming at one corner of her jaw.
Blaze tipped his head to the side with a skeptical look. “Not sure how much we’ll get with this. People’s faces take on a different shape when they’re slack like that, and without her eyes open—but I’ll see what I can turn up.”
When he’d snapped his picture and started tapping away on his phone to set up whatever he needed to do in that app of his, Julius bent over the woman and started to ease aside her outer clothes with an analytical precision. “Let’s see if anything else about her appearance can tell us a story.”
As he uncovered her torso from waist to collarbone, baring everything except her breasts in their modest sports bra, Garrison sucked in a breath. I went still, staring.
Her abdomen was lean and strong with an array of muscles I could tell came from regular, intense workouts. But more unusual were the scars marking it: dozens of them, long and short, some cuts and some burns, darker or fainter depending on how long it’d been since the wounds had been dealt.
The largest one covered a section of skin about as long and wide as my thumb next to her belly button. A thinner but longer line cut across her shoulder, disappearing beneath her bra and showing on the other side where it crossed her ribs. The others dappled her skin all across her torso, many no bigger than a tiny nick.
Garrison let out a low whistle. “I could come up with a few theories now about why she’d have needed to run away.”
Blaze glanced over, and his eyes widened. “Someone was messing with her on a regular basis.”
“Or maybe she was messing with other people,” I said, raising my chin toward her sculpted abs. “That kind of musculature would have taken years of hard, rigorous exercise to build. She isn’t any wimp.”
It took my body two years to become a mold of pure power and strength, with a lot of effort every day to maintain it. The girl before us could have been my smaller, feminine twin.
“She doesn’t have any fresh wounds,” Julius observed. “The blood on her shirt didn’t come from her.”
“Turn her over,” Garrison suggested.
Julius did, and we all noted the newly forming bruises that covered her right side where she’d taken the worst of the airbag impact. He was careful not to press on those and to move her injured wrist gently. Was he worried about her? It was hard to wrap my head around that kind of compassion when nothing like it stirred in me.
But then, you didn’t need to feel sympathy to know avoiding further injury of someone who wasn’t your enemy—yet—was the just thing to do. And if Julius followed any kind of code, it was for justice.
The woman’s back was mottled with the same sorts of scars. I spotted at least one that looked as if it’d been from a wound so deep it must have taken weeks to recover from it.
What the hell had she been doing to take a blow like that? Or had she not been doing anything, just enduring abuse from some other party while she trained to get ready for her escape?
The form in front of me looked like both an opponent and a victim. I didn’t know how to fit those clashing elements together in my understanding of her.
“Hey, look.” Garrison leaned forward and swept her hair to the side of her neck, revealing a tattoo on the base of her skull just above her hairline.
We all bent over, examining the small shape. It was hard to make out much with it embedded under her hair. Garrison’s attempt at uncovering it had still left it looking like little more than a blotch, vaguely circular with a couple of bumps protruding on either side at a diagonal. I didn’t recognize the shape as anything meaningful.
“That’s not any gang symbol I’m familiar with, as far as I can tell,” Blaze said, “but I’ll see if I can dig up anything on that too.”
Julius tugged her shirt back down and rolled her onto her back again. We gazed at her in silence for a long moment.
Blaze lowered his phone, a sly smile crossing his lips. “If nobody else is going to say it, I will. She’s fucking hot.”
Julius rolled his eyes. “Not exactly a productive observation. Get on with your computer work.”
Garrison stepped back too, but I thought I caught a glint of approval in his eyes when he looked her up and down one last time.
I hadn’t let myself think about it while she’d been exposed, since we’d been focused on the business of unraveling the mystery she presented, but now, studying her leanly muscled form with Blaze’s comment ringing in my ears, a twinge of arousal woke up in my groin. It would be something to fuck a woman that physically capable. To feel that strength moving against me in tandem with my own. Her face with its straight, sloping nose and high cheekbones was hardly difficult to look at either.
Not that I expected to have a chance to indulge that kind of urge with her. I only fucked women I didn’t have to see again, who were completely separate from every other part of my life. This one had already gotten more entangled with my work and my crew than seemed safe.
Hell, we might still have to kill her. Anyway, I doubted she’d be in the mood to be thinking about getting it on with anyone when she woke up and found out she was a prisoner here.
Julius motioned us all out of the room. “Go get some sleep while she does. I’ll check over her injuries more closely and then do the same. We’ll see what she can tell us when she wakes up to fill in all the blanks.”