Chapter One
“Fuck.”
Kinzer’s eyelids flitted open as he came to.
A haze of white and gray came into focus.
White sunlight poured through a rectangular window with chain-link fencing drilled into the frame, scattering the light across bare, cracked, concrete walls.
Kinzer’s face felt swollen, like it’d taken a good beating. Blood dripped from a cut in his upper lip, and the taste of iron filled his mouth.
His naked pecs and abs, covered in bruises and welts, stretched across a sheetless mattress.
Kinzer moved to get up. His arms and legs stuck in place, as if he were being pinned down.
He rolled his head back.
A knee in gray slacks pressed into the corner of the mattress. Their owner, a man—his face speckled with liver spots—closed a padlock around two links in a set of charcoal colored chains that wrapped around Kinzer’s wrist, binding it to the side of an iron-framed headboard.
Kinzer tugged at his other arm.
It didn’t budge.
He tossed his gaze to a matching chain that tied it to the other side of the headboard. A glance at his ankles revealed another chain, locking them together and trailing off the end of the mattress.
Shit.
Conscious as he was, Kinzer couldn’t make sense of where he was or how he’d ended up there.
“I was a little worried you wouldn’t pull through.” The liver-spotted man gazed at him through oval-shaped glasses. A patch of sunlight sparkled across his naked scalp, framed in stringy, white hairs. Vertical creases streaked across pale lips. “Glad you did. You cost me a pretty penny, but not too shabby for that cock.”
“Who the fuck are you?” Kinzer’s biceps pushed streaks of blue and purple veins forward as he struggled with the chains.
“No point in resisting, now. You’re not going anywhere.” The man stepped off the bed and walked alongside the mattress. “Jerry’s the name. Your…friends…tell me you go by Kinzer.” He sat by Kinzer’s hip, his eyes scanning his prisoner’s form as if he was taking mental notes. “Doesn’t make much difference. You’ll go by a lot of different names here. Right now, Jason seems to be popular. But you look like a Brock or a Rocky.”
“You just gonna keep me chained?”
“For now.” Jerry fondled the mattress, his wrinkled fingers moving over the sewn grooves in the fabric. “Don’t want to give you the opportunity to try a first escape. It’s a common problem, as you can probably imagine.”
“Escape from where?” Kinzer asked.
“That’s not important. You could be anywhere, and your duties will still be the same. I’ll send one of my guards down. He’ll help you get cleaned up, feed you…show you your new living quarters.”
“And I’m just supposed to go along with this? Are you fucking kidding?”
Jerry’s fingertips moved from the mattress, tickling their way up Kinzer’s side, trailing across his abs.
“I’m not a humorous man, Kinzer. Just straightforward. So I want to be clear. As long as you’re here, I control your fate. I control how you are used, how you are abused. I control how much fucking you can handle. I control how good of a shape you’re in.” He pressed his finger against a black bruise.
Kinzer ground his teeth.
“That said, I recommend you be as courteous as possible. Obedience is very important to me. If you don’t obey, you will be punished.”
Jerry stared into his eyes. Offering a pleasant smile, he rose and left through a door on the other side of the room.
Kinzer tried to contemplate his current predicament. He figured he should be trying to plan an escape or at least thinking about what this Jerry guy had in store for him, but he was preoccupied with a flood of memories that rushed through his mind in an instant.
“Oh, Kinzer,” Veylo said.
