1
Ryder
I jolted awake with a start, the nightmare playing in my head finally dwindling to a close. I was curled up in the fetal position, shivering, and even though I didn’t want to go back to sleep, exhaustion clawed at my brain. It pulled me back down, but I struggled against it. I didn’t want to feel that sharp sting and the pavement rising up to meet my body, the harsh touch of men I could see only in flashes and glimpses.
My head was spinning, and no matter how hard I tried to open my eyes, they just wouldn’t seem to cooperate.
I grasped for the wall beside my bed, but there was nothing there. Had I curled up the wrong way?
I groped for any wall, and I found… cement? It was cold and harsh to the touch, nothing familiar.
That realization was enough to send me into a panic, enough to where my eyes finally opened halfway, and I could see that I wasn’t in my room. What the fuck? I didn’t drink because of this. I’d had too many blackouts in college, and I was tired of waking up in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people, wondering what I’d done.
So why was I here?
Why were there three cement walls and a…
I had to squint, my vision so blurry everything tried to multiply, but I realized dimly that there was a cell door there. Metal, with thick bars that flashed in the dim light and hurt my eyes, just like prison cells in the movies.
Jesus Fucking Christ, how muchhadI had to drink?
If I couldn’t even remember drinking, it had to have been bad. Fuck.
“H’lo?” I called out, though the word sounded distorted and thick even to my ears. I grimaced, but I tried again. “Hello? Anyone…” My voice rasped over the words, and I drew in a deep breath in frustration. Someone had to be around to explain to me what was going on and what I had done in my drunken stupor.
My girlfriend was going to have to be my one call out of this place. Maybe she’d wait until she got me home to kill me for doing something this stupid when I’d promised I wouldn’t drink again.
“Shit,” I mumbled under my breath.
It seemed to take forever for my vision to clear enough for me to take stock of the situation and for my mind to understand that while there were walls, I wasn’t close to any of them. I was damn near in the middle of the cell, and I hadn’t been sleeping on a bed.
At least I was still dressed, which was an improvement to some of my other situations in the past, but there was some weird pillow thing under me and the blanket over me was thin.
I licked my dry lips, trying to swallow over the lump in my throat that told me this… might not be what I thought it was.
But what it was, exactly — that, I had no idea.
My lungs suddenly felt like they couldn’t draw in air. I was going to end up having a panic attack before I even figured out what was going on, and no one was around to talk me down.
Hell, no one was around at all, and my chest felt tight, painful, as I struggled to breathe. Struggled, fought, and lost.
The light above was so dim that I could barely see anything, and there were only shadows beyond the metal bars of the cell. I trembled, and the more it sunk in that this was not some ordinary prison cell, the less I could catch my breath.
I gasped, hand going up to my chest, and I tried to remember everything I’d been taught about how to deal with these. It had been a long time since I’d had one, and I—
“Breathe, Toby,” a voice came from the other side of the bars. “Count your breaths and breathe.”
What the ever-loving fuck?
Who the hell did he think I was?
It felt even harder to draw breath through my constricted chest then, like the command worked as the counterpart instead of as the actual order.
“Who’re you?” I slurred, my heart pounding so hard and fast that I might as well have been a cornered rabbit.
My heart was going to burst — or I was going to piss my pants — if I didn’t figure out what was going on.
“Your new master.”
