The pounding of my head wakes me.
The ache in my arms is the next thing I feel.
I’m standing. No… I’msuspended. Arms held up, wrists caught in something, my weight on my knees on a hard floor.
Opening my eyes is harder than it should be. They’re gritty, sticky with sleep, and the room that I see is blurry at first.
Then adrenaline kicks in, and everything sharpens.
Bare concrete walls and floor. A thick rubber mat covering the floor around me. Ropes tying my wrists, pulling my arms up, running through a hook in the ceiling.
It’s a basement, and I’m tied up in it.
And all I’m wearing is my strappy top and panties.
Oh, Jesus fuck.
Terror sends my pulse thudding in my ears, soloud I can barely hear my sobs as I pull at the ropes. They don’t give an inch.
I struggle for almost a minute before I calm myself enough to think. I’m on my knees. All I have to do is stand, and the tension eases. Panic stopped me seeing that immediately, but in my defense, I’ve just woken tied half-naked in a fuckingbasement.
An overridingthirstclaws at my throat, and my desperate struggles have only made it worse. I try to distract myself, taking in the room around me, now that I can see more than my immediate predicament.
The first thing I see is a glass-fronted cabinet against the wall, filled with guns and knives.
Fuck.
Some free weights are stacked in one corner, and there’s a dartboard on the back wall, looking incongruous. Beneath it is a vaulting horse, which maybe explains the rubber mats. My clothes are folded on top of it, my boots on the floor beside.
My jacket’s there. Half relief, half dread; whoever has me has the diamonds and hardware wallet.
I know who has me.
Declan.
He jabbed me in the arm with something in the parking lot. Hedruggedme.
And now I’m tied up byhisgoddamn knots.
Is this what he meant by taking care of me?
The rope runs through an eyelet in the ceiling to a cable drum of the garage door mechanism. That makes no sense. Can I open the goddamn garage by pulling hard enough?
Twenty seconds of trying tells me I can’t, and I stop when my shoulders are threatening to dislocate.
With my hands bound above me, getting a foot beneath me is awkward but not difficult, the tension in the ropes providing the resistance needed. I stand slowly, legs shaky, and the rope goes slack. I have maybe two feet of play. My situation hasn’t dramatically improved. It eases the ache in my arms, but I can’t go anywhere. There’s not enough rope to move more than a foot or two in any direction, still a long way from the knives teasing me with their proximity.
Teasing for now; scaring the shit out of me for what it might mean later.
I can bring my hands down to face-height, enough to see that the knots are complex and there’s no way of reaching them.
It’s fuckingbondagerope. I recognize it.
That bastard.
I bite at the knots, trying to worry them loose with my teeth, but they’re tied too tight and the rope is too strong.
Panic threatens to return, and only forcing some slow breaths keeps me from hyperventilating. What is Declan planning to do with me? Is this just some fucked-up sex game, or something far darker? What is that man capable of?
