If you’re reading this, you’ve found the place of my death. The man who calls himself Embower, known locally as Chad Branford, is responsible for the deaths of Angela Chapman, Paige Lauffer, and myself.

She copied the date and time from the desktop calendar.

Sunday night, 8:53 PM, the fifth day of her captivity, her twenty-fourth day in Bloomington.

Something he said stopped her typing. “Wait, what?”

Embower nodded his head. “That’s right. Woods said he was ashamed for what he’d done to you.”

She tried to process the fragment of his story her subconscious had retained. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“He was sorry. Those were his words.”

“Wait.” Caitlin shut the laptop. When she’d seen him in the hall that morning, she’d assumed the wig was part of his kink. “You dressed like me?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Impressed?”

Impressed wasn’t the word. “You dressed like me, visited a men’s prison in drag, and met with Troy Woods?”

He tilted his head to one side. “I like to think I became you—”

Caitlin threw her hands up. “Bullshit.”

Embower smiled, reached into his pocket, swiped at a phone, then showed Caitlin a photo of herself, taken from the back of Fallen Angels.

“Before,” he said, then swiped again. “And after.”

The second photo resembled her back cover shot in both framing and wardrobe. Taken as a selfie, the woman in the photo wore a black sport coat and a white collared shirt. Her hair, brown, straight, and chin-length, looked beauty-parlor good, and better than Caitlin’s real hair any day of the week. More makeup than she’d ever owned coated the face, completely balanced and Photoshop-quality flawless. Even the lips were done. The second face didn’t look like Caitlin necessarily, but the whole package resembled a real-life woman. At least, a woman dressed for a male-dominated industry where sexuality was a weakness.

“Jesus, what the hell’s wrong with you?”

“All it takes is practice and an airbrush.” He put the phone away, smug. “I can’t say I came close to your natural beauty, but I did convince a room full of strangers. And Woods, of course.”

Blood rushed to her cheeks. Caitlin shook her head, violated. She’d known some of the best drag queens in West Hollywood, so it wasn’t the proficiency of the disguise that pissed her off, or the assholes who fell for it. Embower had done much worse. He’d taken her identity and presented himself to the man who’d scarred her for life. “You saw him? Talked to Troy Woods?”

He nodded. “Sat in the chair with the phone and the glass and everything. At first I was surprised he couldn’t tell, but it makes sense, doesn’t it? He didn’t see you as a woman then. Why should he now?”