Page 38 of Exposed

This was happening all over again. I was losing someone that I cared about.

“She’s crashing, we need to get to the hospital now!” one of the EMTs yelled and they lifted her on the gurney and left the room.

“Are you riding to the hospital with her?” Danielle questioned, rubbing my back.

I shook my head no, looking down at my hands covered in blood from her dress.

“Don’t shut down on us now, Shooter. Lauren needs you, man,” Mark said, following me out of the hotel room.

Fifteen minutes later, we arrived at the hospital and I still hadn’t changed my clothes. Danielle, Mark, Emmanuel, and our families filled the waiting room, wondering when the doctor was going to come back and give an update on her status. I heard when they loaded her up in the ambulance, she crashed.

Mark walked up and passed me a cup of coffee. “Get out of your head, this isn’t your fault.”

“You know us navy men never take a mission without seeing it through. The second we lose someone, that’s a failure,” I remarked.

“Love will do that to you.”

“Do what?” I questioned.

“Have you guessed every little thing? This would have happened with or without you two being together. I had some men from Cole Security do a sweep of Carol’s place and found a lot of shit that she’s been doing for the past few years,” Mark advised.

“She’s been planning this for a while. Emmanuel had our best guys on tracing that number and it led back to Jacinda. When we talked with her, she confessed that Carol approached her about working together, but it was only to scare Lauren and try to get me back. Things took a turn when she saw we hadn’t stopped with the launch of the brand.”

“Her office was filled with photos of Lauren and different ideas on how to get rid of her by sabotaging the lipstick line. She was even thinking of poisoning the next batch they made. Josslyn was close to finding out about what was going on, because she kept seeing strange discrepancies and mentioned them to Carol and nothing got fixed.”

“Probably rigged the camera we installed, because we never saw anything off besides her walking in and out of the camera view,” I mumbled, thinking about the same scene playing over and over again.

“What? You remembered something?” Mark asked.

Nodding and walking off, he followed behind.

“Dominic, where are you going? Lauren’s going to be looking for you,” Devan said.

“Not now, Devan. I’ll be back.”

I jogged out of the hospital with Mark behind me, getting into my car. We drove off toward my office. Running the red lights, a normal forty-minute drive turned into fifteen minutes and we hopped out.

“What do you think?”

“The tapes, she had to have known about the extra hidden one or manipulated someone to help.” I opened my office door and picked up the remote and hit play on the recordings for Raven Cosmetics.

“Tell me what I’m looking at,” Mark commented.

“Right there. The time stamp. Remember that number 00021,” I called out. Fast forwarding to another date, it was the same thing. Her walking by in the same direction, same movements with her pushing her hair back behind her ear.

“I don't see anything,” Mark said.

“That’s it.”

“What is?”

“She cloned the tapes and manipulated them to have the same sequence so we wouldn’t think anything was off because she wore the same outfits, most of the time. The problem is that she wasn’t expecting me to catch on that this day, she had a Raven Cosmetics lipstick on, and the other days, she didn’t. So, she must have forgotten, and I never paid attention to the little detail because I was distracted,” I confessed.

“I know what you're thinking and you're going to regret it. Give yourself some time before you completely throw everything away,” he said, pouring a glass of scotch and passing it over to me.

“Tell me why my head and heart are not on the same wavelength, because I fucked up again this time.”

“What happened with Jackson is not your fault or mine, all of us couldn't predict he’d get hurt back then. Time heals all wounds and you can’t burden yourself with the past.”

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