by Lake, Keri
The question was, who was my captor? Had I seen him?
Think, Aubree. Goddamn it. Through a murky haze, I heard the faint sound of a voice, mumbled conversation, jumbled inside my head, like a TV playing behind a black screen. A memory.
Achilleus X wouldn’t spare a minute on you.
Not Achilleus. I’d hoped his threat to Michael had somehow made me the object of his next attack. It hadn’t. My fantasies of being set free by the mysterious masked man had been nothing but illusion, it seemed.
Not that I knew I’d be any safer with the infamous hacker, but at least he wasn’t known for hacking up women and burying them riverside. Then again, neither was Michael, and yet, I suspected otherwise.
I had no idea who my captor was, what the hell he wanted, or worse, what the hell he planned to do with me.
If Michael’d hired him, I’d definitely need to find an escape, because no way in hell a hit man, hired by my political figure husband, would ever let me live. I’d need to get him to undo the binds, somehow. I’d come up with a good reason.
Somehow.
I should’ve been more frightened than I was, but getting handed off by psychopaths was a lot like a foster kid getting passed around, or playing a really messed up lottery, where the newbie might be less fucked up than the last guy.
I’d already been through hell and back and survived.
The charity ball should’ve been my chance for escape, with all the important guests that could’ve kept Michael distracted. I could’ve kicked myself for failing, for falling into another complication. Another house of horror that I’d have to navigate for an escape door.
The guy could’ve been some insane, leather-faced serial killer who collected the skin of his victims, but I was married to the mayor of Detroit, and no one trumped that asshole when it came to crazy.
In a fit, I tugged all four binds at once and screamed in frustration. “Hey! Hello?”
Silence.
I blew an exasperated breath. “Are you shitting me?” Tendrils of fear climbed my spine, as the questions swirling inside my head narrowed to one singular thought: what if he doesn’t come back at all?
10
Nick
“Daddy?” In the black void, the voice whispers, and a slight shake wakes me. “Daddy, wake up.”
I open my eyes to bright, almost blinding light. I feel as if I’ve fallen onto a blank page, and smack in the middle is my son, James, holding his ragged rabbit, Mister Tims. “Jay?” The urge to scoop him up into my arms burns in my muscles as I run toward him, but my body is heavy, weighed down by gravity, and he remains out of my reach. I stand still, arms outstretched, and smile. “Come here, Jay. Come see me.”
His eyes study me from afar. Dubiously. Cautiously. “Did you do something bad, daddy? To that man?”
I bow my head, thinking of Marquise and the needle I’d stabbed in his throat. Only my son could incite the shame I’m suddenly feeling. “He hurt you and mommy, Jay. I had to hurt him. So he wouldn’t hurt anyone else again.” I frown when it occurs to me that one small detail is missing from all of this. “How did you know I hurt him?”
Jay tips his head and gives me a sidelong glance as he toys with a string hanging from Mister Tims. “Alec told me.”
“Alec?” Anger stirs in my stomach, completely overshadowing the big question—how did he discuss anything with Alec?
“I have to go, Daddy.”
“Jay! Wait!” I reach out for him, but I’m too far away to touch him. “Where? Where are you going? Let me come with you. Please.” Tears form in my eyes. “Show me where to find you and mommy.”
A smile stretches across his face. “That’s cheating. You have to wake up.” His voice morphs into the deep timbre of a man. He curls his lip and kicks me in the shin. “Wake up.”
My lids flipped open, blinking hard as blazing sunlight streamed through my opened bedroom drapes and damn near fried my eyeballs. An obscure figure stood leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, the smoky flavor of his cigar hitting my tongue at the same time a plume of smoke drifted upward from his mouth. I lowered my gaze to the surrounding floor, where I’d apparently spent the night with my boots on. “Fucking whiskey.” A film of sweat coated my skin when I rubbed a hand down my face. “Does it to me every time.”
“Fun night?” A sobering disappointment drifted on Alec’s words.
I scratched the back of my head. “Your girlfriend’s in the other room. D’you say hi?”
“Peeked inside. Sleeping like a baby.” He blew another cloud of smoke. “I forgot to congratulate you on your first kill the other night. Potassium chloride. Nice finale.”
“Thought you’d like that.” I rose to the edge of the bed and swiped up a bottle from the nightstand, sucking down the last of the whiskey, before holding it up like a toast to Alec’s stoic face. “Hair of the dog …”
“Speaking of which, perhaps you can train your mutt not to rub against my fucking two thousand dollar Armani suit.”
“Courtesy of the good folks at DigiCoin International.”
About six months earlier, Alec had hacked into DigiCoin, the world’s leading digital currency exchange site, stole eleven million dollars that’d been carelessly stored in a hot wallet, and transferred the cash to offshore bank accounts. Completely untraceable. In the deep net, the exchange site was famously associated with some of the most sickening kiddie porn sites in existence. After hacking DigiCoin, Alec had proceeded to shut down a half dozen affiliated sites featuring children for sale.
“I think you’ll agree, this is money well-spent, my friend,” he said.
“I’m waiting for you to support a third world country somewhere and dispel any myths I may have developed, that you’re a selfish prick.”
“Why deny the truth?” The cigar hung from his clenched teeth as he grinned around it. “Thought I’d find you in bed with her. Which can only mean you went out trolling for prostitutes last night.”
“Cap it. I never agreed to go celibate in this shit.”
“Killing prostitutes in public places is not the best way to keep the authorities on the right trail.”
“I never killed them,” I said, pointing a finger. It was true. I never once killed the girls, though what happened in those moments of blackness, I honestly couldn’t say.
“Yet.” He tipped his head. “So, you innocently fucked a woman, and the two of you parted ways, all sated and happy with the world?”
I rubbed my hand across my skull. “I never hurt her.”
“I’ve seen you, Nick. The blackouts. Gaps of memory you can’t account for. The violence in your eyes. You’re about a thread from losing control.” He rolled his shoulders. “Are a few strokes to your dick worth fucking up the plan before it’s begun?”
“I won’t fuck it up! Trust me.”
“Trust is all I’ve got, Brother. And if you fuck that up, I’ll be running this show alone. I don’t think either one of us wants that.” Gaze fixed on me, he toyed with a cufflink and straightened the shirt beneath his jacket. “You got everything you need for tonight?”
“Yeah. All set.”
“Staked the place?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Don’t do anything stupid.” His gray eyes drilled into mine, full of all kinds of serious that I just didn’t have the fucking brainpower to appreciate through a monster hangover. “It’s important that you keep yourself alive.” He smirked then cocked his head toward Aubree’s door. “Speaking of staying alive, she’s probably starving. Try not to subject her to your eating schedule. And give the girl a bathroom break, for fucks sake.”
11
Aubree
Heat hit my face, and I was suddenly aware of a grotesque numbness in my hands. I opened my eyes to a room, lit only by the streaks of sunlight fighting their way past the god-awful paisley drapes. An upward glance spurred both nausea and relief at the sight of my hands chained to the bedpost—at least what I felt wasn’t phantom limb from being
hacked alive by a madman, but I was still bound to a bed in a room that looked like it’d jumped out of an Edgar Allen Poe Home and Gardening magazine. Dark gray walls and dark wood—aged-looking furniture—coupled with the peeling paint and cobwebs gave off a Halloween vibe.
The warm scent of a cigar filled my nose, notes of cedar over the delicious flavor of musk. Had my mouth not been bone dry, it might’ve watered at the scent.
Pumping my fingers did nothing to abate the numbness, and while I felt glad they moved at all, the dead sensation made my stomach queasy. Squirming definitely wasn’t helping, but being able to move at all told me I wasn’t completely paralyzed.
In one last futile attempt to break the chains, I kicked and screamed like a madwoman. The squeak and thump of the bed beat out the rhythm of my tantrum, until at last, my muscles sagged in defeat.
“Numb?” The deep, rich voice snapped my gaze to the dark figure across the room, propped against the wall with his arms crossed.
A zap of panic shot through my body, but crackled in my hot blood like ice cubes melting in boiling water. “Do you earn bonus points if I feel dead before you actually kill me?”
“I could untie you.” Inflection gave his words an air of taunting.
Between his calm tone and casual posture, I didn’t immediately peg him as a killer. “But that would make you a decent human being when clearly you’re an—” Asshole.
Easy now. No sense pissing off the guy who kidnapped you and chained you to a bed.
Getting unchained was one step closer to getting the fuck out of there.
“A what?” He pushed himself off the wall, and the first features to come into view were his eyes—a striking cut of blue diamonds that sliced me open with his intense stare. Evocative, distracting eyes that didn’t belong on the face of a kidnapper.
Not that I’d thought about kidnappers much, I certainly didn’t fantasize about them, but I’d imagined them with coal-black, almost demonic eyes—like Michael’s. This man’s powerful glare and calm vibe told me, without a doubt, he could probably slice me open while softly chanting a dirge like an angel.
The hood of his black leather jacket concealed his hair, but the white wife beater he wore beneath provided an eyeful of muscles. Deep ridges that looked like they’d been hand carved peeked over the top and disappeared behind the shirt where the outline of his pectorals and nipples punched through the fabric. The bronze tone of his skin left me wondering if he worked outside. Maybe a construction worker?
I glanced down to see if he sported any calluses on his hands, but black leather gloves covered them. People generally wore gloves indoors to hide fingerprints. While committing crimes.
His face was flawlessly chiseled and symmetrical, those eyes set beneath dark, broody eyebrows. The smirky shape of his lips, smooth and perfectly proportioned, left me resisting the urge to bite my own.
“My husband has connections. He’ll find you. And he’ll have you killed if he doesn’t do it himself.” It sickened me to give Michael’s power any merit, but perhaps mention of the asshole might lead me to what this guy wanted with me.
Those eyes, as beautiful as they were, held a terrifying emptiness—a complete lack of empathy as he stared back with an evil glint, silently warning me that I’d said something stupid. “I’m not afraid of your husband.”
I should’ve been scared. Why wasn’t I scared?
Maybe I just couldn’t feel fear anymore. Perhaps I’d stared into the depths of the devil’s eyes for too many years. I knew the sting of a whip, the burn of a blade, and the uncertainty that I’d live beyond the next hour. I lived in a constant state of defense, and had taken enough punches in the dark that my body’s reflexes were always wired, tense.
The guy wore an air of calm over the sizzling power that rolled off him in waves. His handsome features didn’t match the faces of serial killers running through my head. Bundy. Gacy.
Don’t be stupid, Aubree.
In my defense, his black hood and dark, enigmatic personality were reminiscent of Achilleus X—the man, or woman, I’d fantasized about for months.
The beauty I’d extrapolated from the stranger’s face both confounded and pissed me off, that I’d notice it in the thick of a nightmare, like Red admiring the Big Bad Wolf’s lovely teeth. The man staring back at me was a stranger in the literal sense—the kind mothers warned their children to stay away from at an early age. The kind that swiped young women and turned them into terrifying statistics found on crime television shows and forensic classes. He was also what the weird chicks probably fantasized about in their twisted rape fantasies, with his dark hoodie and deep voice—a far cry from the chubby, middle-aged guys with bad comb-overs and messed up teeth, who always played the perverted kidnapper in movies. Though, maybe he stole me for a chubby middle-aged guy with a bad comb-over, and he just happened to be the pretty precursor, meant to keep me calm, before I really lost my shit.
Still, I couldn’t look away from those eyes, as much as every cell in my body screamed retreat! I’d seen them before. Behind a mask. “You … you were at the …” Realization hit me with a double dose of fuck me and a sudden case of indigestion. “I have to use the bathroom. Or would you prefer I go right here?”
He silently stared at me, his left eye twitching. I could only guess he might be fantasizing what it’d feel like to strangle me. As if confirming my thoughts, he smoothed his hands over his black leather gloves as though making sure they were nice and tight so they wouldn’t bunch while his palms throttled my neck.
Something pulled at my body—an odd sensation that I wanted to push down and smother with good sense, but I couldn’t. I hated what his unwavering stare had drudged from some primitive, animalistic part of my brain, and I was ashamed to admit that, for a kidnapper, he was gorgeous—a gorgeous bastard who’d tied me to a bed all night, while he skipped off to what I imagined was some kidnapper bar somewhere, getting drunk and bragging to all his kidnapper buddies.
I cleared my throat and shifted on the bed, my fingers turning to sausages while I waited.
After an eternity, he leaned forward and started unshackling my ankles. My toes curled at the cold leather of his gloves against my skin.
“Any chance you could start with my hands? It’s that … gravity thing, you know?”
The narrowing of his eyes alongside the slight twist of his lip said shut the fuck up, I’m not here to make you comfortable, but he went to work on my right hand, anyway. Even with his GQ face and pretty eyes, the guy radiated fiery waves of hostility like a swarm of sharks beneath a placid surface.
A line of tension ran down my spine as I watched while his black-leathered fingers unfastened the cuffs, anxious for the damage, the stomach-twisting sensation of dead weight. At once, my wrist was free, and my arm dropped.
Pins and needles, pins and needles. Ah, shit.
I shook out my wrist, pumping, pumping, pumping my fingers. Like trying to control a dead body. If the movies depicted their gaits right, the walking dead should’ve been less concerned with scouring for brains and more focused on getting the goddamn tingles to stop in that leg always dragging behind them and slowing them down. My hand pulsed with a heartbeat again by the time he loosened the other binds, and I was battling tingles in both, feeling like the green monster from Yo Gabba Gabba.
“Perhaps next time you might consider a more ergonomically correct kidnapping by installing retractable chains in the wall, instead of tethering to the bedpost.” My comment was met by an unamused stare. “Just a suggestion.” With a lingering thickness to my limbs, I flapped my arms one more time and rose up on the opposite side of the bed to where he stood.
He was huge, maybe six four or five, and if those muscles and ridges behind his shirt were any indication, he was probably pretty ripped, too. A fighter, if I had to guess. My best chance for escape would likely be outsmarting him.
“I don’t know what you’re scheming, lady. But if you think you can get past me, you’re abou
t two seconds from getting slapped down by reality.” He had the accent of a man who’d grown up in Detroit. Hard to pick up on the night before, but clear as day, the more I listened to him talk—his clipping of hard consonants and slurring words. He probably needed money, which meant money might be a negotiating factor.
As if he could read my mind, he nabbed my purse from the nightstand, rifled through it contents, tossed it on the bed, and held up the chip I’d swiped from Michael’s office. Perhaps he’d been paid to retrieve it. “I’ll be keeping this.” He stuffed it in his pocket, and crossed his arms like a bully on the playground after stealing lunch money.
Nice going, Aubree. Probably could’ve used it as a bargaining chip. Note to self: stuff important shit down the bra, not inside the purse. I didn’t even know what was on it, but considering Michael and his Pentagon-secured office, any object holding information was probably important.
The stranger lifted a gloved hand, ushering me toward what I was certain was something else, entirely. My head snapped between him and the door. “I … isn’t that a closet?”
“Was.”
My heart sank at the revelation, and with reluctant steps, I inched toward the door I’d been convinced had to be a closet. What the hell kind of bedroom didn’t have a closet, after all?
I opened the door to find one of the do-it-yourself variety bathrooms, complete with a plywood floor and a pedestal sink. No mirror. The rack that extended to the back of the small room stood empty and useless. No window. No vent. And no possible chance for escape. I’d been certain the only place I’d be relieving myself would be out of my prison room, with a front door in my sights and freedom at my back.
“You look disappointed.” The close proximity of his voice tightened my muscles.
