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20
Annie
Iwoke to the sound of the mockingbird.
My first thought was a kind of confused joy. The second was outright terror. I couldn't remember the last couple days. They were a haze of searching and riding the Harley all the hell over the damned desert, then holing up in a hotel room and subsisting on booze, Cheez-Its and fet until the world started to spin.
Then there was a long blank, black patch.
Now. Here. Wherever here was.
I pushed myself up in the bed. Comfortable. Smooth sheets. Good temperature in the room. A glass of ice water near the bed with the ice unmelted, which meant somebody had been in here recently.
There was the small matter of the shackles and the long chain connecting me to the bed.
Oh-kay. Maybe a hospital? The room I was in was certainly white enough and smelled of clean. But there was no equipment attached to me or beeping in the room and there was no sound of nurses rushing around being loud, which I definitely associated with hospitals after visiting my dad.
I shoved the idea of my dad out of my head and listened hard. Nope, no beeping monitors. No swishing nurses. No sound of people talking in other rooms, using hushed voices, or of competing televisions showing different shows.
I did a visual scan of the room and on the second time through saw the camera up in a corner. I gave it a long look. I was dressed in a long white t-shirt and nothing else. The scan of the room hadn't showed me anything like my clothes. Or shoes.
Or gun.
At a guess? Cole St. Martin had been looking for me, too. I didn't know how much he'd paid Samuels for "selling" me to him, but he didn't seem like the kind of man to let his investments just take a walk. In the back of my mind, I'd always figured no matter how long or invisible it was, there was a leash on me after he let me go.
I took inventory of the room. Camera. Right. Clean, white t-shirt. Shackles. Camera.
I waved at the camera. No clue if it would pick up sound. "Hello? I'm awake. Anybody out there listening?"
Almost at once there were footsteps in the hallway outside the closed door to the room I was in. My heart started pounding and I found myself, unbelievably, hoping beyond hope it was Cole who had me. There were other, less tenable possibilities. Cole St. Martin wasn't the only man in the world who traffics.
The woman who stepped inside was unfamiliar. She wore a white nurse’s uniform and she probably was a nurse, but she wasn't currently working in a hospital.
"Where am I?" I demanded. "What are these for?" I shook the shackles, reminded with an unexpected pang of Mark cuffing me to our bed with my own cuffs.
"Your questions will be answered later. You're in a holding cell before you're taken where you're going. Now you're awake, I'm going to strip search you and then you'll be transported."
"The fuck you are." That seemed like the right response until the men holding guns came into the room.
Whether the nurse was really a nurse I didn't know but she was determined and thorough. In short order my shackles were taken from the bed and attached to a hook in the ceiling. The big white t-shirt lay in pieces on the floor. Her simple expediency was to cut it off.
The guards took up positions on either side of me, guns actually pulled and leveled at me.
When I’d ridden with Jesse I was unarmed because Jesse's woman didn't ride armed. If I needed protection, Jesse would protect me.
When I was with Seattle PD, which I was rapidly starting to wonder whether I still was or would ever be again, I'd pulled my service weapon exactly once during my tenure.
Here, the guards automatically drew down on a naked, apparently unarmed woman, then stood at attention, obviously fascinated by what the nurse was doing. Humiliation raged through me, turning my face and neck totally red. She ran her hands through my hair, her gloved fingers into my mouth until I gagged on the invasion. She felt under my breasts and then for no reason I could determine, squeezed them and drew her hands down each until she pinched the nipples and released.
Did she think I had sewn weapons into my own boobs?
I might have, had I anticipated this.
She moved down my body, performing a complete cavity search as the guards, nowhere near uninterested enough, looked on. My face was still flaming and my fury still peaked when she ordered me to follow her. Behind me, one of the guards made a sound like a muffled laugh.
I swore to myself one day I would kill him.
It wasn't a surprise when she said I should follow her to the main house. The sounds around the place proved at least that I was in the same place I had been before. I was getting an idea how huge it had to be since the "holding cell" was an entire suite and apparently was a building that stood alone. How many buildings must he have and on how much property were they located?
