Devil stood and grabbed hold of my hair, yanking my head back. I swallowed tightly and tried to focus on breathing. His hazel eyes, like two bright sunbursts, caught my notice. How could something so beautiful belong to someone capable of such ugliness?
“Wrong answer, dude. We’ll try this again later.” The smack to my cheek was so hard, he knocked both me and the chair over. I hit the floor with a grunt, and my shoulder took the brunt of my weight.
They all left the area again. Only this time, they switched the lights off, and I once again found myself in pitch-black darkness. Tears rolled down my burning cheek, prickling against the white-hot heat that spread over one complete side of my face. It pulsed and hummed with pain, like a bad sunburn.
Several hours later, I awoke with a start. I was upright in the chair again, and every single inch of my body ached. My shoulder was on fire. Even my heart hurt, though that was mostly because I didn’t know if Kellen and Blaine were okay. Were they here somewhere too? Or were they home, wondering where I’d gone and looking for me? Had anyone else from the party been taken? And why me?
It wasn’t completely dark, but the lighting was again dim. I could sense another presence in the large room. “Look at you now, Graysin,” a deep voice taunted from somewhere behind me. It was Demon. I could distinguish his voice from the others easily since I’d spent the most time with him so far. “Loss of agency sucks, doesn’t it?” he said flatly.
Goosebumps prickled over my skin. “What do you want?” I tried to sound big and bad and demanding, but my voice trembled. “I have money. Is that what you want? Ransom money? My family will pay.”
“Your grandma might, but I don’t think the rest of them give a rat’s ass about you, kitten.” How did they know my parents had pushed me away, and my grandma was my only family? The fact that they knew personal information about me was unsettling. This wasn’t some random “wrong place wrong time” kind of kidnapping. I wasn’t sure what that did to my chances of survival. “Besides,” he continued, “we don’t want or need your money.”
“Then whatdoyou want?” I could have heard a pin drop in the silence as I waited.
“We want the truth, Graysin,” Demon finally replied. “It’s as simple as that. You give us the truth…”
“…and you’ll let me go?”
“That’s the general idea.”
I wracked my brain, but I could not for the life of me figure out what “truth” they wanted. My pulse raced as my frustration increased.
“I’m not in the habit of lying about shit. Can’t you ask me some direct questions and I’ll tell you the answers?”
“Oh, kitten,” he said, then made atsksound. “That’s a lie right there. But to be honest, while I’m disappointed in you, I have been looking forward to punishing you.”
I turned my head sharply, following the sound of his voice as he made a half circle. I closed my good eye tightly to block out the demon mask, but unfortunately, when I did that, the scarecrow mask popped back into my head, jacking my heart rate up again.
Demon walked around me, dragging a finger along my collarbone. I hated myself a little bit because visions of what he’d done to my body—before it had turned into a shit show of kidnapping and torturing proportions—stole my breath. What was wrong with me? This was not normal. He licked his palm and grabbed my soft cock, which began to stiffen in his hand.
“Well, isn’t that interesting?” He peered down, squeezing and waving it gently, and scrutinizing it like I was some sort of science experiment. The fact that I responded to him at all now made me want to shrivel up and disappear. “Didn’t expect it to work quite so quickly.” He spit on my dick. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to ignore the sensations as he jacked me off. I tried and failed to hold back the small moan that slipped from my lips. It shouldn’t have felt good. I clamped my mouth shut, biting into my lip until I tasted blood. “You are a bit of a wild thing, aren’t ya?” He brought me to orgasm in an almost clinical way, wiping the cum on a tissue he pulled from his pocket afterward. “Sorry it was just me this time.” There was laughter in his tone, and my cheeks flushed as anger burned in my gut.
“Fuck you,” I spit out.
He grabbed my hair and tugged my head back. “No, kitten.” The jokes were gone, and pissed-off Demon was back. “We’ve already established that I fuck you, and that you spread your legs faster than melted butter.” He released my hair and knocked on the top of my head twice. “Now be good, otherwise you may disappear down the trash compactor chute.”
* * *
Next up to try to get me to confess to some hypothetical sin was Wolfie. Of the three men, he seemed the calmest, if that was even a valid way to describe a kidnapper. He came in, pulled a chair over, and sat down. I looked up at him. He had the same dark eyes as Demon.
“Would you like to go use the restroom?”
“Yes, please.” I was cold, tired, sore, hungry, thirsty, and really had to use the bathroom. And my wrists and ankles hurt from the restraints.
“Great,” he replied. “First, all you have to do is confess.”
“As I have stated several times now, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t done a damn thing!” The pitch of my voice rose as I continued. “You all, on the other hand, you’re stripping me of my basic human rights. And you keep your faces covered with those masks, like a bunch of cowards.”
He shrugged, seeming unbothered by my accusations and insults. However, not long after he left, he returned with a blanket and a bucket. Inside the bucket was a roll of toilet paper, several bottles of water, and a few granola bars. He also unhooked my restraints from the chair and moved me to the side of the room, securing the hand restraints to some metal jutting out of the wall. He removed the lock that kept my feet bound together, swapping those restraints for a pair with longer chains. He secured them separately to the same metal in the wall.
I could now move around somewhat, and I was thankful. “Clothes?” I asked as he walked away. He shook his head without turning around. I supposed the blanket was better than nothing. “Thank you,” I called out after him.
* * *
After another two days—I was guessing because I had no clock—the men started to get impatient. They argued with each other more and more. Fifty grand said they were not professional criminals. Not that I knew what a professional criminal looked like, but this wasn’t it.
“Okay,” Devil said as he stood in front of me. “It’s become obvious that you need some motivation to start talking. So, we figured what better way to get you going than a little visit from your boyfriend?” He pressed a button on a remote that he held in his hand, and a screen I hadn't noticed before lit up on one wall. It was dingy and dust covered, but I could make out what appeared to be a video feed of another area of the warehouse as it came into focus.
