With that in mind, I rolled over onto my knees, trying to ignore the way my head spun and a sick feeling rose up my throat.
I leaned at an angle and tried to raise my arms. Only to find them lead-like.
Which couldn’t be explained by a blow to the head.
Connecting the dots with this new information produced a different picture.
Drugs.
I’d been drugged.
As crazy as it was, I was actually slightly more okay with that. At least there wasn’t some untreated injury I was dealing with. Drugs sucked. Instead of minutes, like with a blow to the head, I could have been dealing with the impacts for hours.
Judging by how I felt, I would bet good money on it being at least five or six hours. I was still weak, feeling hungover, dizzy, all the things, but I was able to think clearly. My vision was clear.
If it was that far out, I could only hope that the club had found Caymen. And that they were all working on leads.
But I wasn’t going to put my faith to rest in that.
Focusing on my arms, I forced them up, then brought them down as hard as possible onto my ass.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
The thick plastic bit into my wrists, but to no avail.
“Okay then,” I grumbled, sitting back on my heels.
With a sigh, I dropped my wrists down below my ass and then sat on my butt.
Then it was the short, painstaking process of trying to work my arms down toward my feet.
My shoulders screamed, and I needed to bite into my lip to keep from crying out. Risking dislocating your shoulders was not ideal. But staying completely bound was worse.
I pulled my legs in and yet again said a silentThank youto my Pilates and yoga classes, as well as the genetics that made me slightly more bendy than the average person, when I finally, finally got my bound wrists around my feet and up toward the front of my body.
I was drenched in sweat and panting. My shoulders ached. But I was pretty sure I’d managed not to actually injure myself.
With my hands in front of me, I raised them toward my face, snagging the knot on my bracelet with my teeth and working it until I felt it loosen, then release, dropping a few feet of high-quality nylon rope into my lap.
When carefully wrapped up, it just looked like a neat, albeit slightly masculine, bracelet. When what it was, in practice, was a tactical escape option.
Everything felt unbearably slow as I worked with my bound wrists to form a loop with the cord, then another.
I put one loop around my wrist, wrapped the cord around the flex cuffs on my ankles, then put the other loop around my other wrist.
With that, I did a sort of ax-chopping motion over and over and over. Until, with a loosening, then a snap, the cord sawed through the flex cuffs and released me from them.
“Thank God,” I hissed.
I frantically moved the loops from my wrists to each of my feet, then dropped down onto my back, putting my legs up in the air, and doing a bicycle motion with them so they could saw through the cuffs at my wrists, doing my best to ignore the screaming pain up my ankle. Because there was no other way. I just had to grit it out.
They released with a flourish, making me fall back, arms and legs spread, as I panted for breath.
I needed to buy a hundred of those damn bracelets and pass them out to every woman I met.
