Two, I havegotto stop getting kidnapped.
I don’t open my eyes right away because this time is different. This time Iamrestrained. My shoulders ache, and my wrists feel the bite of something tight and scratchy like rope.
“Fantastic,” I slur. “I leave the house twice in one week, and this is what I get.”
My voice echoes slightly, like I’m in an empty room.
I crack one eye open, and yup. I’m tied to a chair in the center of an otherwise empty room with concrete walls, no windows, and overhead lights bright enough to feel as though I’m about to be interrogated bybad cop. My hands are tied behind the chair, ankles secured to the legs.
At least they didn’t duct tape me. I have standards.
Oh, and I have my shoes this time.
I don’t have my glasses, but at least my vision isn’tthatbad.I can still make everything out, even if it is all a bit blurry.
I test the restraints, rolling my wrists and shifting my weight, but there’s no give. My head still feels like cotton, but the fog is lifting fast enough for dread to start stretching its legs.
“Okay,” I say to the empty room, assuming maybe I have an audience like I did last time. “New rule. If this becomes a twice-a-decade event, I get a punch card. Fifth kidnapping is a trip to the Taj Mahal instead of another concrete box.”
The door opens.
Three men walk in, and my spine straightens. The first two are exactly what you’d expect—tall, broad, wearing neutral black. One is bald, and the other has a beard like I could never dream of growing.
They stop about ten feet in front of me.
They step aside.
Then the world falls out from under me.
For a split second, my brain refuses to translate what my eyes are seeing. It stalls, reboots, searches for alternatives. Wrong face, wrong memory, trauma hallucination, drug residue, vision is even worse than I thought.
None of them are right.
Because it’s him.
It’s actually him.
Reese.
He stands a few feet behind them, just a little blurred around the edges, hands casually in the pockets of his black slacks like this is a board meeting and not my second abduction. He looks older. Harder. There’s something colder in the set of his shoulders, in the line of his mouth. His hair is a little shorter than it was the last time I saw him, his jaw sharper. His eyes—
Fuck.
My chest tightens so violently I forget how to breathe.
He’s alive.
He’s alive.
He’salive.
The first instinct that hits me is so visceral it almost pulls me out of the chair I’m still tied to. I want to stand up and grab him. I want to touch him. Touch his face thatisReese’s but also isn’t with how the years have changed him. Touch his arms that peek out from the rolled-up sleeves of his black dress shirt, the sleeve of tattoos I used to spend hours studying.
I want to touch all of him to prove that he’s solid. That he’s real. To prove I didn’t hallucinate seven years of grief.
“Hello, little menace.”
I fucking shatter.
