Lacuna: Chimera Part One

You can abandon your past…
but your secrets won’t abandon you.

As a tattooist, it’s easy keeping people at arm’s length. Distract them with questions, and when they inevitably ask their own, reply vaguely. Lie. When the lies pile up, disappear.
It’s a cycle Lynna’s all too familiar with. Staying guarded is a necessity, but what keeps her safe is also what keeps her lonely. It’s an empty existence, hiding behind lies, and she wishes she was someone else. Someone not burdened with a secret.
A year into her most recent move, the loneliness bleeds into her work, and she admits a few truths. At the insistence of a client, she explores the city’s night scene, where she meets the enigmatic Rhys. As the months progress, so do her feelings for him, despite the risks of getting too close. When a dangerous encounter leads her straight into his arms, she abandons her past in exchange for a new beginning, only her secret refuses to be abandoned. With her life hanging by a thread, she’s forced to confess, but the secret that will change everything isn’t hers.

Set in an alternate present, LACUNA opens with Lynna’s transition to an atmospheric northwestern city. Derailed from what she’s built, she finds herself immersed in the lush world of medicinal horticulture, enveloped in the kind of close-knit relationships she always craved. Her fantasy has become reality, but not without caveat. As she plunges further into this new life, she begins to expose the conflicting threads holding it together, and what she discovers will bring more questions than answers.

Cover art: Erin Hosfield

Erin has been an artist since she was able to hold a brush, and collected her BA in Fine Art from California University with the intent of becoming a painter. After falling in love with tattooing she decided to chase that dream instead, and made it a reality in 2006. Outside her day job, that is very much a dream job, she likes to overextend herself by means of a variety of time consuming endeavors. She's an amateur herbalist, candlemaker, miniaturist, playlist curator, landscape painter, video game enthusiast, and most recently - novelist. Between those pursuits, she can be found having an anxiety attack from too much caffeine at her home in Pittsburgh, which she shares with her partner and two grouchy canines.