I felt the embarrassing sting of tears in my eyes as I finished off the last of my vending machine coffee, tossing the cup, and making my way toward the exit of the building, intent on getting some fresh air while also saving myself the humiliation of crying in public if that proved unavoidable.
Fresh air proved to be a pipe dream as I took a step outside, the humidity assaulting me immediately, making my skin feel sticky within seconds, causing a little trickle of sweat to move down between my shoulder blades as I took a few steps to the side to get away from the valet area.
How the hell was I ever going to go back up there and face him again?
He'd want to talk about it, too.
He was that kind of person.
Not like me, the kind who just pushed, pushed, pushed things down, dealt with the side effects in private.
I hated those conversations.
The ones involving feelings, hopes, fears, disappointments.
I had this humiliating tendency to get choked up when I talked about important things.
I'd just as soon avoid that happening in front of anyone.
Especially someone who I would have to face professionally every day until, well, I didn't even know.
But I would have no choice but to go up there and face him.
Whether I was ready for that or not.
Or so I thought.
The blow came out of nowhere, the pain at shattering thing for the barest of seconds before I felt nothing at all.
Because the world went black.
-
Consciousness was a mere suggestion at first, a sliver of light in a world of darkness. But it felt far away, like it would take too much energy, too much effort to drag myself toward it. So I swam in that nothingness for a while, grumbling at the light that seemed to shine a bit brighter with each passing moment.
A low, pained sound escaped me as I made my way toward it, feeling as though it took every store of energy in my body to do so.
And as soon as I got there, launched myself into the brightness, my world was full of pain.
It was nothing short of a crippling migraine , the likes of which I had never experienced before - and I was experienced in the awfulness of migraines - immediately overtaking my whole head.
It started as a piercing at the back right of my skull, but wrapped its painful grip all the way around, making it pound behind my eyes, in my temples, made an aching tightness overtake my neck and jaw.
It hurt everywhere at once, making it impossible to do anything but experience it, fight back the wave of familiar nausea.
My knee-jerk reaction was to raise my hands to cradle my forehead, the pressure the only thing that could stave off the worst of the pain.
But as I tried to do so, I felt the pull preventing movement.
A pull.
And a burn.
I didn't have to have experience with it before to know the sensation.
Rope.
Around my wrists.
Pain momentarily forgotten, my eyes flew open, finding myself in mostly darkness.
But there were things I could see thanks to a small window letting in a slit of moonlight.
A bathroom.
I was tied up in a bathroom, my wrists bound under a floating sink. I could feel the cold, unyielding underside of the sink against my temple, my neck cocked awkwardly to the side to accommodate it.
"Ow," I whimpered, trying to think past the screaming inside my skull, the aching in my shoulders, the crick in my neck.
Kidnapped.
Someone kidnapped me.
The hysteria bubbled up, rampant as a wildfire hellbent on destroying a forest.
I took a deep breath, banking it down, forcing myself to focus, to think, to be objective.
A surefire way to ensure your own demise was to panic in a life-or-death situation.
And a kidnapping, even if you had no idea the motive, was always life-or-death.
Because even if their intent from the get-go wasn't murder, it would be the inevitable outcome. I'd see a face, hear a voice, notice distinguishing characteristics.
Any young guy wet-dreaming about crime in his bedroom at night knew from a few Cold Case episodes that witnesses could be their undoing.
And semen.
Semen was usually their undoing as well.
But I couldn't let my mind go there.
Not then.
Not even if that was the logical worry to have.
Rape.
Because why else would men take women off the street?
But I couldn't get so hung up on the terror of that that I couldn't think straight, couldn't stay in the moment.
The moment where I was alone in a bathroom.
Who knew how long I had.
Minutes.
Hours.
But it was time.
Time to think.
Time to plan.
Time to try to escape.
My fingers curled upward at my bindings, looking for the knot, the edge to try to grab, pull, work the restraint free.
If I could get the rope off, I could haul myself out that window.
It was small, all bathroom windows were. But I was slight. I could shimmy myself through.
I could get myself out of it.
To what? I had no idea.
The ground?
Nothing but open air?
Hell, I might be willing to jump, take my chances at shattered bones - or even death - than the fate that might befall me at someone else's hands.
There were things worse than death.
Working at Quin's for as long as I had, reading the true crime I had an insatiable appetite for, I understood that. Viscerally.
I'd rather end up with every bone in my body broken by my own choice than be held down and gang-raped by men who got off on pain and power.
I would make that choice if I had to.
"Ugh," I growled after what felt like ten long minutes of trying to find the edge to the rope with no luck.
My arms arched further up, making me suddenly thankful to Gemma who dragged me to yoga any chance she could get, making me able to twist my body in interesting ways. It was something that proved completely useless most of the time, but just this once, just this once it could help save my life.
Once I got out of here, I was going to treat myself and Gemma to a year of twice-weekly yoga sessions. And I wouldn't back out just because of work.
My wrists turned, letting my hands reach around for what I was attached to, feeling a rush of victory when I felt something other than what I had been expecting - and dreading - a metal pipe, but instead some sort of curved metal tube thing that, while not exactly pliant, could absolutely break. Likely from where it had to be connected to the actual pipes, probably held there by a washer and some glue. If I could just get my arms up a bit further, I would try to work the washer free.
But even as the thought - and subsequent relief - formed, I heard it.
Footsteps.
Slow, steady, like they had all the time in the world, like having girls tied up in the bathroom was no cause for concern, and certainly not for a quickened pace.
Dread worked its way up my thought at the possibility that that was the case. That this was no cause for alarm because this was the norm. That maybe I was at the hands of some psycho serial rapist murderer.
Granted, I hadn't heard of any, and I was pretty up on current events. But this wasn't New Jersey. This was Connecticut. Different state, different crimes, different psychopaths behind them.
Who knew what kind of crazy resided in the Still Revolutionary! state.
I had a feeling I was about to find out though.
Panic gripped my system, compressing my rib cage, crushing my heart and lungs, everything that made breathing and life possible as my arms pulled frantically against the binding,my body scooting forward, giving me more leverage as I yanked until my arms screamed, until my shoulders threatened to break, feeling uselessness and hope
lessness overwhelm me as I felt no budging at all.
There was a hand on the knob.
A turning.
More light streaming into the room.
On a choked sound I knew I would berate myself for if I lived through this ordeal, I gave it one last desperate yank.
And flew forward a foot as the tube gave, as freezing water started spurting everywhere, covering me, soaking through the material of my dress before I could even wipe the water out of my face enough to see who had moved into the room.
I didn't need to see, though, as things would turn out.
Because I could hear just fine.
"You always were a lot more trouble than you were worth."
Gary.
I shouldn't have felt shock, a punch to the gut sensation I really had no right to feel.
Because, of course it was Gary.
I mean, sure, a lot of crime was random.
A lot of women taken were taken merely because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time while being the wrong gender.
It came down to that a lot of the time.
But in my case, this was the most logical outcome.
I had been actively seeking out a man who had clearly been a skilled conman, intent on stealing back the money he took from me after a long job that had him playing my boyfriend. And fiancé.
It would have been naive to think he would just... let me do that.
But, in my mind, it wasn't just me.
It was Kai and me.
And if we ran into some serious trouble, it would be me and Kai and Quin and Gunner and Miller and Smith and Finn and Lincoln and Ranger.
So I wasn't alone.
I wasn't working alone.
And because of my backup, I had felt stupidly invincible in the whole endeavor.
And maybe, just maybe, there was a naive little part of me that didn't think Gary was capable of kidnapping me, of... what? Killing me?
But that was naive.
Because this man had lied to my face almost every single day for years. He had used my body. He had stolen my trust. He had ripped away my security.
He was capable of many things I never would have been able to reconcile against the man I thought I had been sharing my life with.
Had I been thinking clearly instead of fighting through the pain racking my system, instead of trying to escape, maybe I would have come to this very logical conclusion.
That of course if I was being kidnapped, it would be by the man I was trying to track down.
"This is a stupid move, Gary. If that is even your name."
"Of course it's not. Just like it wasn't true that I hated TV and loved healthy eating."
He looked different.
It took me a long time to decide if that was just because the rose-colored glasses were off, was because all I could see when I looked at him were eyes that looked into mine while he lied to me, hands that touched my sister, a body that had used mine.
All that was surely a factor that somehow made me not realize before that his eyes were just slightly too wide set. Which they had to be to accommodate the broadness of his nose - not obnoxiously so, but enough that it couldn't truly be called classical, Roman, but that wasn't all of it.
He looked different because he was different.
The face he kept shaved had a couple days' worth of stubble. His eyes were a deep brown color. I had no idea if the color I had always known was the fake color, or if this was. His hair was darker. And his clothes were no longer what I was used to - the uniform he had used to fool me, based on my personal preferences. No. He looked like some wannabe surfer dude in wine red board shorts and an ill-fitting white tee, the V of the neck pulled wide from over wearing it. You could see chest hair. Some medallion - cheap and golden - was nestled there as well. It was something I had never seen before, but something that looked worn, soft from age around the edges, whatever pattern had been pressed into the surface rubbed nearly invisible.
I didn't know a damn thing about this man standing before me.
And he knew damn near everything about me.
That was a humbling sensation, one that chafed, one that overwhelmed me completely, made me oblivious to the way the water continued to soak through me, made my thoughts too slow to realize I should have been using the time to try to work the rope off my hands now that they weren't tied to another object.
But all I did was watch as he went so far as to turn his back on me to bend down and shut off the water to the sink, soaking through his white tee in the process.
It wasn't until he turned again, face full of disgust - a feeling he was not entitled to because that was mine goddamnit, that I could feel my thoughts coming back, that I started working at my hands, finding the rope slipped without burning thanks to the frigid water.
"You could have walked away from this," I told him, angling my chin up, feeling my teeth ache from how tight my jaw was clenched. "If you just gave the money back. They'd have let you go. Move on to con some other poor woman who was too blind to see you for what you truly are. But now? Now, that won't be an option."
"They?" he asked, sneering. "I believe you mean he. That poor sap who has been mooning over you for years, and has no idea how fucking dull you are. Think his interest would fade in a flash if he had to sit around and watch you speed clean your already clean apartment every single night of the week."
It shouldn't have hurt.
After everything else, there shouldn't have been anything left that he could use against me to wound me.
But that was the terrible beauty of this, wasn't it? He knew me well enough to know exactly what to say to pry my rib cage open and beat my already bruised heart.
The pain was a sharp and throbbing thing, stealing my usually quick wit, preventing me from finding anything to say to hurt him back.
"What'd you do? Bat your wet eyelashes at him, and he swore he would move Heaven and Earth to get your money back?" He asked, again making it impossible to say anything. But this time, because there was nothing to say. That was - whether I had purposely batted or not - exactly what had happened. "Didn't anyone ever tell you it was cruel to lead a man around by his dick?"
To that, I felt myself snort even as the cold started piercing in through my layers of skin, sinking into bone-level, making me wonder if I could ever feel warm again, cursing myself for the shivers that racked my system. "Who are you to lecture me on being cruel?" I asked, eyes shooting daggers at him. I refused to say the words, but he knew them regardless. After you slept with me, kept a record of all my intimate secrets?
"I'd say 'Nothing personal,' but that'd be bullshit. It was personal. And, personally speaking, you are a dead fucking fish in bed."
It should have been rage I felt.
He, after all, had no right to even mention the sex that had been nothing but a job to him.
But rage wasn't what I felt.
It was hurt.
And, incredibly, guilt.
Because there had been niggling thoughts in my head right along those lines. Because I hadn't been able to orgasm. Because I knew he knew fireworks hadn't gone off for me. And I had felt this overwhelming sensation of brokenness, of ineptness, like I wasn't woman enough, like I wasn't good enough if my body wouldn't work like it was supposed to, how I wanted it to.
I forced back the hurt, and shot back at him with pure bitterness instead.
"Maybe if you hadn't insisted on fucking me from behind like a dog all the time, I could have mustered up some enthusiasm for you. And, while we're on the topic, my clit is about half an inch higher than where you thought it was."
If he wanted to go low, I could go lower.
And I knew I had landed a good blow when his eyes slitted low, his back tensed. "Never heard any complaints."
"Because I was too busy praying for it to be over."
The next moment would prove to me what a great actor he had been all the time I had known him. Because I had never seen even a hint of violence i
n him before.
But as we sat in the flooded bathroom, his hand shot out, closing around my throat, fingers sinking in at the sides, cutting off my protests, my air, then dragging me onto my feet by my neck, pulling me off my soles entirely, dangling like a rag doll, like a convict in the gallows.
"Careful," he growled in my face, voice vehement enough to make the words spit onto my skin. "You're not in fucking charge here, Jules," he added, slamming me back against the wall hard enough for my teeth to crack together, for another wave of pain to overtake my skull.
This time, a wave of nausea accompanied it, making me wonder how I could throw up when I couldn't even breathe. My lips were tingling. My head getting fuzzy.
Just when I thought oblivion - both welcome and horrifying - would overtake me, his grip loosened then slid backward, sinking into my hair, yanking viciously, hard enough that I couldn't keep in the whimper, not even to save my pride.
"Yeah, bet that is hard for a control freak like you. But this is my world now. I'm in fucking charge here."
"What's your endgame then?" I asked, fighting back the tears the crippling pain in my scalp was causing. "You know Kai is going to figure things out eventually."
"Yeah, that puppy is the least of my concerns."
That puppy walked into heavily guarded compounds, told men toting semi-automatic weapons that, sorry, but they can't have back their wives, children, key witnesses in their murder trials.
That puppy stared down men and women far more ferocious than this man before me.
That puppy cared about me, would go to war for me.
That puppy still snarled when you rattled his chain.
I felt a sick, sordid, gruesome need to see him when he broke off said chain, when he lunged at my ex, as he ripped out his throat with his teeth.
"That puppy is part of a pack," I reminded him instead, not letting him know how big a threat I thought Kai could be, not wanting to put Kai in danger until he knew to be on the lookout for it. "They could rip you apart and not leave a trace."
"Luckily, that won't be a problem," he declared.
I didn't know his exact intention until it was too late, until I felt myself jerked forward off the wall, then slammed face-first into the jamb of the door.
The Messenger (Professionals Book 3) Page 12