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“Alright.” He kissed me on my way by, a long, lingering kiss. I pulled away, but he came with, peppering my lips with kisses despite his devilish smirk. Seizing his jacket by the lapels, I kissed him hard and deep, shoving away at the last second with a wolfish grin. “Goodbye, already.”
Ducking out the front door, I jogged down the steps and slid into my car.
A quick jaunt across the river and up the hill and I was back at the mansion. I navigated the car through piles of lumber and stone the construction crew was using and parked around the side of the house.
Hopping out again, I headed for the back stairs, looping my keys around my index finger.
A second too late, I caught a whiff of cheap aftershave.
An arm shot out of nowhere, catching me in a headlock.
I stepped behind my assailant’s left leg with my right and threw my arm across his stomach, knocking him off balance. As he fell, I caught his wrist and twisted, putting him into an arm bar behind his back. He landed with a grunt, face-first into the brick driveway.
“What do we have here?” I asked, taking a second to assess him. Overweight. Scruff. Most importantly, no badge or gun. “Can I help you with something?”
“Fuck off!”
“Rude. Who sent you?”
Silence. Well, not total silence. He grunted now and again but nothing I could use as an actual answer.
“Have it your way.” I kicked out to the side, connecting with his elbow and snapping it like a chicken wing. Between the dislocated shoulder joint and his broken elbow, his arm flopped to the ground while he howled.
Before I could ask my next question, there was a loud crack behind me. Two red-hot barbs lodged into my skin — one in my shoulder and the other in the small of my back. In the next heartbeat, thousands of volts of electricity shot through me. My muscles seized with a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. Collapsing to my knees, I gritted my teeth against the pain and tried, stupidly, to fight the immobilization.
The ‘tick-tick-tick’ from the taser was unrelenting. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move until gravity took over and I slammed face-first into the driveway, throwing a whole new shock of pain into the mix.
Chicken-wing was off the ground, holding his broken arm. He dug around in his canvas jacket, withdrawing a needle and syringe. With all the gentleness I’d expect of a man whose arm I just violently snapped, he jammed the needle into the side of my neck.
I’d barely made it through my initial string of curses when the drugs kicked in.
* * *
My back hurt.
My head hurt.
My fucking neck hurt.
Round Two of riding the lightning was only slightly better than the first time. I didn’t smell my own flesh burning, for starters. But I did smell blood. And dirt. Not clean, garden dirt — old, nasty dirt.
I tried to lift my hands, but got zero response. Besides being twisted behind my back, they’d gone completely numb. I pushed against the restraints, trying to get a feel for what it was. Hard, thin plastic. I sighed. They were zip-tied together.
Lifting my face from the cold, dirty concrete, I exhaled a steady breath and rolled on to my back, wriggling my hands under my ass. A couple more shimmies and they popped up in front of me. The returning blood flow made them tingle painfully, but I didn’t care. Gingerly touching my eyebrow with my fingers, I hissed the second they made contact with a cut. With my luck, it was probably going to get infected if the grime on my hands was anything to go by.
I’d worry about vanity later. First, I needed to get the hell out of here. Whereverherewas.
I tucked my legs beneath myself and counted down in my head before springing upward to my feet.
Now for the restraints.
Biting the edge of the plastic tail, I tugged the zip-tie to the side, sliding the locking mechanism to the center of my wrists. Adjusting my position, I bit down further on the excess zip-tie and pulled at it, tightening the little ratchets as far as I could, despite the sharp plastic digging into each wrist.
Once everything was in place, I raised my arms above my head and threw my elbows down sharply. The plastic gave way and my would-be restraints fell to the ground.
“Amateurs,” I muttered. Rubbing my wrists gently, I glanced around the dirty little room. Now that I was untethered, I could focus on the next step — escaping.
The floor was concrete; the walls were cinderblock. A basement, clearly. Residential, not commercial. Other than the old, metal piping that ran along one wall, there wasn’t anything else in the room.
