Page 27

Fuck.

* * *

The scent of fresh plastic itched my nose as memories shifted through my mind in a muddled mess. Pounding behind my eyes intensified the closer I got to breaching the surface of consciousness. A ragged moan echoed in the distance, slamming the final piece of the puzzle into place.

Caleb, Kenji, and Niko.

The moan was mine, and those three assholes had ruined my night of free booze and food. I mentally took stock of my body. Besides the bitch of a headache and feeling like I had been hit by a truck, everything seemed to be still attached. Including my clothes, based on the feel of soft satin against my skin.

Unlike what was shown in movies, chloroform actually took closer to fifteen minutes to knock someone out. And your victim had to be actively inhaling the poison for it to work, making it a shit method for kidnapping someone. But say you decided to shoot someone up with Rohypnol while a tank of a human held them still…that would fucking work.

After a few seconds of complete silence, I bit the bullet and opened my eyes.

“Motherfucking Russian,” I muttered, my lids slamming shut again. The light from the buzzing fluorescent bulb felt like an icepick was being jammed through my eye socket.

A chuckle came from the corner of the room. Or I thought one had. I was still adjusting to being awake.

“Wow. What a mouth.”

“Yeah, and your mom loves it,” I spat back, testing how tight my wrists were bound to the arms of the chair they’d placed me in. Based on the sultry, smooth tone, I assumed it was Kenji in the room with me. Plus, this was his field of expertise.

Rough fingers dung into my jaw, forcing my head up. I peeled my eyelids back open; it took them a minute to adjust.

I was greeted with a toned chest adorned with hauntingly beautiful traditional Yakuza ink. Kenji was like a human tapestry, and I wanted to drink every part of him in.

Too bad the body belongs to an asshole who’d kidnapped me.

“I’m so glad you’re up. I was worried I’d never get to have fun with you.” Dark eyes felt like they were siphoning my soul, and his smile was downright sinister. The playfulness from earlier was gone. “I bet you bleed so lovely,” he said.

Heat licked across my skin.

Right below my clavicle was the telltale tingle of a sharp blade slicing skin. Blood beaded up along the cut before a tattooed thumb smeared the red liquid across my chest. Anticipation sang in my veins at the sight of Kenji wrapping his mouth around the digit, licking it clean. For some un-fucking-explainable reason, the whole act was incredibly erotic to me.

God, I had issues.

“Want to play a little game with me?” he asked, voice dripping with ill intentions as he lorded over me.

I ignored the moisture pooling at my core. “Like what? Clue?” I canted my head, pulling my lips into a sneer. His slight flinch only made it wider. “That’s easy. The bitch killed him in the torture room with a chair leg,” I answered sweetly, trying to take in my surroundings.

It looked like they were holding me in a basement of some sort. The brick walls were painted over. At one time, they’d probably been white, but now they were yellowed and coated in grime. The space felt like a storage closet, with its singular fluorescent light buzzing above and the lack of windows or furniture. There was a hint of must in the air, but the pungent odor of plastic overtook it. The smell probably originated from the tarp my wooden chair sat on top of.

The absence of a drain and the stinging scent of bleach helped put me at ease.

They didn’t kill in this room.

But they did watch. A camera mounted up in the top corner caught my eye. Someone had taped over the green light to try to hide it better, but it’d been the first thing I spotted.

Kenji let out a genuine laugh, my attention flicking back to him. It was a fifty-fifty shot at him laughing or hitting me. I’d seen him work once. That was how I knew he wasn’t taking this seriously. A big fucking blessing for me because he was a scary fucker when at work.

Chocolate irises traveled down my body, the ring of color disappearing little by little the longer he looked. Did he get this excited over every victim strapped to a chair? Or was this something special for me?

“I’ve never had a woman use talk of murder as foreplay, but I like it,” he said, his tongue swiping across his lips.

“Then you haven’t had a real woman,” I threw back, tracking his movement as he paced before squatting in front of me, twirling a blade between his fingers. The position made it so that I was looking down at him slightly, and images of that black head of hair between my thighs had my pussy clenching.

Fucked up. I was 100 percent fucked up.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, pointing out the laugh I hadn’t realized I had released.