My arms screamed in pain.
I blinked away tears and tried to adjust my position to relieve whatever was causing all my discomfort. My first thought was that Cash had rolled over on my arm while we slept and now the weight of his body had cut off my circulation. It had happened before. We didn’t often sleep in perfect harmony. Usually one or the other of us was making things uncomfortable.
As the room came into focus, so did the memory of how I had gotten there.
I was hanging from the rafters of an old wooden hunting cabin, trussed up like a pig for the slaughter. My hands were tied behind my back, and my legs and shoulders were tethered to the contraption holding me off the floor. The rigging would have put a BDSM rope-play fan to shame.
I didn’t think there was anything sexual about this. They knew precisely what they were doing. When I moved my legs or shoulders, they pulled on each other, rather than the ceiling ropes. I couldn’t separate my hands enough to relieve the rough pressure of my bonds, let alone grab anything. If I moved my head at all, a rope around my neck would tighten enough to remind me it was there.
This wasn’t amateur hour.
“Wilder?” My voice was barely a whisper. I was worried anything else might make the apparatus strangle me.
Micro adjustments were uncomfortable, and rather than relieving any of my pain it just moved the pain to new locations in my body.
Tears sprang up in my eyes, and I tried to blink them away, but they fell, dropping to the dusty floor where a pool of blood had already started to turn brown. My head throbbed from where I’d been hit, but I seemed to have healed. Beneath it was a huge black stain, haphazardly cleaned.
The brown blood was mine, I could smell it.
The black stain beneath it? I didn’t want to think about what had happened to the last person they’d strung up. I just took small relief in knowing it was too old to be Wilder’s.
“Wilder?”
Nothing.
What if he’d been taken somewhere else? It didn’t matter that the blood here wasn’t his. He could still be dead someplace else.
“Wilder.” My voice rose, and just as I’d thought, the rope tightened, rough twine digging into the exposed flesh of my throat. I gurgled and stopped yelling. More tears spilled. I wanted to keep shouting for him until he answered, but logic told me yelling myself to death was a stupi
d way to go.
For once I listened to reason.
Then I got mad at myself for crying and blinked until the tears stopped. I concentrated on the part of me being gnawed at by worry and forced my rage into it. Whoever had hung me here knew what Wilder and I were. If I’d been hung from my arms like every hack kidnapping movie, I’d have been able to rip the hook right out of the ceiling without much traction.
If I tried that in my current situation, I would only succeed in dislocating something on my body or strangling myself.
A door creaked behind me, and I took a deep breath, hoping the smells carried in on the breeze might tell me something. I got a whiff of something human and then sneezed because the magnolia blooms were still too strong in the air.
We hadn’t gone far.
Keeping my body still, I tracked a pair of feet as they moved around me. Dusty brown men’s work boots with scuffed toes. Whoever this was wore paint-stained jeans and smelled male.
I wanted to remember his scent so I’d be able to hunt him down later, but once the aroma of magnolias was gone, it was replaced with the pungent reek of men’s body spray. So much of it, I couldn’t make out his natural body odor.
These guys were smart.
They smelled like sexual predators looking for easy prey on Bourbon Street, but they planned ahead. After he showered I wouldn’t be able to find his real smell again.
The man crouched in front of me, his face hidden behind a black ski mask. Brown eyes that might have been warm in other circumstances met my angry glare without blinking.
He wouldn’t have been cocky if I wasn’t tied up.
“You’re awake. Good. It took a lot of effort to bring you down. I was worried they might have really hurt you.” He brushed my bangs away from my face. I flinched but couldn’t recoil. “You don’t look like much, but you’re a scrapper.”
“You don’t look like much either.” I growled after saying it, in spite of the way my throat protested.
The area around his eyes bunched, and I realized he was smiling.