“What if he got the news while he was driving?” Jackson suggested, his voice somber. “That could be why he went off the road?”
Otto pinned me with his stare. “Would that be enough to send him into some sort of regression?”
“I don’t know.” I sagged back against the wall. “He’s been doing really well, but I don’t know.”
“Let’s go find the car,” Clark suggested gently. “If he’s in the area, we should be able to pick up his scent.” He walked over to his husband and bent to kiss his cheek. “You’ll stay here?”
“Of course,” Jackson agreed quickly, waggling his phone in the air. “If I hear anything at all, I’ll get you.”
“No signal there, remember?” I huffed, pinching the bridge of my nose.
Jackson chuckled and tapped his forehead. “Mate link, remember?”
Oh. Right. Sometimes I forgot that some mates had that.
“Okay. Let’s get this show on the road.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Mitchel
Everything hurt, the world around me was completely dark, cold, and very, very quiet.
I was lying on the ground, blindfolded, and something was covering my ears. As soon as I tried to move, I added that my arms and legs were bound to my mental inventory.
I didn’t know where I was and I couldn’t remember how I got there, but I was one hundred and ten percent certain that nothing good was happening.
“Hello?” I tried to call out but my throat felt raw and scratchy. I could hear the sound in that weird echo where you hear yourself in your own head, but I couldn’t be sure if the sound had carried on the air around me and no response came.
Trying to get my bearings, I drew in a deep breath and focused on the scents that filled my nostrils. The air I breathed in was cool and slightly damp, a cellar or basement maybe? I tried rubbing my face against the ground under me to dislodge whatever was covering my eyes but whatever it was stayed stubbornly in place.
I had slightly more luck with the ear coverings, managing to catch them at the right angle to slide it the tiniest bit away from my left ear and was immediately rewarded with faint sounds. Noise-canceling headphones, I guessed. And the blindfold was probably a hood under them, explaining why they slid when I rubbed them on the floor.
Of course, none of that told me why I was tied up on the floor of a cold, damp place, why my head and body ached, or how I got there.
I assumed I was alone -at least, for the moment- since no one had interfered in my attempts to remove the blindfold and the headphones hadn’t been promptly moved back into position when I’d partially dislodged them. And since I was disabled but alive, whoever had me either meant me no harm or at least wasn’t in a hurry to kill me.
With a limited number of options, I decided to play possum until I was able to glean more information about my situation. As I lay still on the cold floor, I struggled to make sense of any of the noises I caught but even when I did hear voices, they were too far away and too low for me to make any sense of. Hell, I couldn’t even discern if they were male, female, or a combination.
Time passed incredibly slowly so I couldn’t guess how long I spent lying there, making micromovements to combat muscle cramping. Finally, there was a faint scuffing noise that grew louder when the air around me shifted, announcing someone’s arrival.
I grunted when I was grabbed by my shirt and yanked to a sitting position without warning and then sputtered and choked when a Styrofoam cup was pressed to my lips and tipped to fill my mouth.
“Jesus, don’t fucking drown ‘im,” a nasally voice snarled. “We’re sposed to be keepin’ him alive, yeah?”
The person holding me up grunted something in response and continued to pour the water into my mouth so fast that what I couldn’t swallow ran down my chin and soaked the front of my shirt. Then as quickly as I’d been jerked upright, I was released to crash back down, whimpering when my already painful head bounced on the hard floor.
“Aw, did that hurt?” the nasally man scoffed as a booted foot impacted my side, driving my breath from me. “Lucky for your scrawny ass that the boss needs you alive.”
“Fer now,” the grunter chimed in with a cruel laugh. “Afterwards, boss said we get’im and then there won’t be ‘nuff left to feed to the dogs.”
“Hush!” Nasally voice snapped.
“He can’t hear us,” grunter whined. “I tested those muffs myself. Can’t hear a damn thing with them on.”
“Maybe we should take’em off fer a bit,” Nasally said with a snort. “Let him beg for awhile.”
I felt air start moving quickly and imagined that the grunter was shaking his head. “Naw. Boss said if we didn’t do exactly as told we could kiss our balls goodbye before we got tossed off the mountain, remember?”
