That possibility is very real.
I check my phone, like maybe she texted.
As if shewould.
Nothing. I scroll. Refresh. Try to call her. Still nothing.
She overslept. Has to be. She probably stayed up too late plotting how to poison me and get away with it.
Whatever the reason, the second Coach Carmichael notices she’s missing, the finger’s getting pointed at me. I know how this works. We’re two days into this cohabitation disaster, and I’ve already got the blame-to-innocence ratio of a convicted felon.
“She’s not answering?” Luca asks.
“No.” I rub the back of my neck, suddenly too aware of the way the cool air bites into my damp shirt. “She’s never late.”
That’s the part that throws me off. Blake isn’t predictable in a calm, grounded kind of way, but she shows up. She gets shit done. It’s one of the many things I love about her.
She doesn’t miss practice, and she doesn’t sleep through alarms, and if she did, she’d still storm onto the field pissed and swearing with a protein bar between her teeth and two boots that probably don’t match.
I glance back toward the path.
And I start to worry. Not a lot. Just a flicker.
Because something about this doesn’t sit right. And I’ve got a really bad feeling that if she’s not on this field in the next five minutes, I’m going to end up sprinting across campus like some panicked boyfriend cliché.
Which I’m not.
Yet.
Chapter 6
Blake
Iwake up disoriented, wrists numb and tingly, head heavy with sleep.
For a second, I can’t figure out what’s wrong. My arms feel weird—awkward, suspended. I try to roll over and can’t. Something tight digs into my skin at my wrists.
I blink against the dim light, trying to shake the fog. My limbs feel slow, heavier than they should. Like I’ve just woken from a sleep I don’t remember falling into. A nap meant to be thirty minutes that you wake up from four hours later. My head throbs, vision swimming at the edges, and there’s a sour taste coating the back of my tongue.
I shift again, testing the resistance.
It takes me a second to realize why thereisresistance. I yank hard.
My eyes snap fully open.
I pull again—harder this time—and the grating sound of plastic on metal confirms it.
I freeze.
Everything in me goes still, like my brain has to buffer before it can deliver the next logical conclusion.
What the fuck?
Both arms are pulled tight above my head, locked to the headboard. Thick zip ties, not the thin ones you can snap with enough leverage. These are heavy-duty. Industrial.
The kind that means business.
Panic rises fast.
