After a shattering secret from her past is revealed, a former prostitute is forced to move to a small Nevada town and befriend a mother and son, who are unaware of her true intentions and ties to a secretive corporation that monitors each of them.

SYNOPSIS:

To look at her could break your heart. Fourteen-year-old Vale Johanson is working the streets and pregnant with an unknown customer’s child. She also has a secret she won’t know about for five years. But more pressing matters are at hand. Having just been arrested for solicitation she will most likely be carted off to yet another foster home she’ll just run away from.

Five years later nothing much has changed for nineteen-year-old Mike Langley, who comes from a completely different world. Adopted at birth, he’s lived safe and secure in small-town Rhyolite, Nevada his whole life with his loving and recently widowed mother, Bettie. Mike remains blissfully unaware of the secret he shares with Vale until the night an ear infection reveals a series of tiny numbers tattooed in the fold of his ear since birth. Curious as to their meaning, Mike and his best friend, Dwight, put them on the Internet to see if anyone knows their origins.

The question is never answered but leaves in its wake, Dwight and his entire family savagely murdered with Dwight decapitated by the unknown killers, who, for some reason, have taken the head with them. Despite the tragedy, for Mike, there’s one bright spot. A beautiful girl his same age has moved to town. Vale Johanson, polished and beautiful now, is every young man’s dream. A former tarnished angel, who arrives one day and hides out at the local motel until she gets the nerve to venture out and reluctantly set into motion the plan that has forced her to move to Rhyolite: Befriend Mike and his mother. And most importantly, at all costs, keep from Mike what they have in common. Something Vale now fully understands.

Bettie watches uneasily as Mike falls hard for Vale, even defying her wish to move out of Rhyolite after the murders. Wanting to spare Mike a broken heart, Bettie does some detective work of her own and comes to realize Mike’s feelings are the least of their worries. His life and hers are in imminent danger as she has uncovered information that directly links Vale with the murders and a shadowy man, who was once Vale’s stepfather and is now her husband and the founder of a secretive government agency.

He has been to Rhyolite before, biding his time and watching Mike, with whom he shares an eerie similarity, as does Vale, who soon confesses to the terrible secret and having a set of tattooed numbers of her own. Folks in small towns tend to band together in times of crisis. And it is no different in Rhyolite as a carefully orchestrated plan is set into motion to protect Bettie, Mike, and Vale from the calculating grip of her ruthless husband, who will stop at nothing to cover his tracks and terminate the unwitting subjects of a sinister project started twenty years earlier.

THE GENE POOL