Page 59 of The Big Fix

My knees ached where I’d taken the brunt of the impact of the fall, but I hadn’t been seriously hurt. Apart from the pain, I was intact. I started to rise, and once I was standing, I grabbed the blindfold and ripped it free from my face. Turning, all I saw was the door shutting, and then bolts banged home from the other side.

Rushing to the door, I slammed my fists against it to both test its strength—solid steel—and to restore my sense of balance. The room didn’t spin, which was good. I was fine. I blinked once, twice, taking a few seconds to adjust my eyes to the dark, dank cell.

It was a dungeon, plain and simple, measuring not more than twelve by twelve feet. The door I’d been pushed through was the only way in, which wasn’t great. The ceiling was low, at about seven feet. Along one wall there was a small collapsible chair, and a murky low-wattage bulb burned in a bracket on another. Straw was strewn about the room, and there was a bucket I was guessing served as the toilet.

“Well, so much for hospitality,” I grumbled.

“Who’s there?” a thin voice asked from the shadows.

As my eyes grew used to the dimness, I noticed a dark shape on a cot with a thin bed roll next to another wall. It started to move, then sat up. It was a man.

He cleared his throat, which made the voice stronger, deep and husky. “Is someone here?”

“Owen?” I rasped.

Loud gasp. “Jared?”

I was moving, he was moving, and we crashed together in the middle. I clutched him tight, marveling at the feel of him back in my arms.

The tears were of no consequence.

“I knew it,” he whimpered, hugging me back, his breath hitching as he tried to press tighter, burrow under my skin. “I knew you were pissed at me from that last text message,” he said with a chuckle that was wonderful to hear, “but I knew it wouldn’t stop you from coming to get me.”

“Never,” I husked, pushing my face into his hair. “I would never leave you.”

“I know,” he murmured, leaning back to look up at my face. “And we’re going to have to sort that out, but at the moment, we need to figure out how to get out of here, unless you brought a small army with you?”

“They couldn’t come with me, or I would have never made it this far. But I’m hoping they’re on their way.”

He nodded, leaned back in, and coiled his arms around my neck. “I never doubted you,” he said with a shudder. “Could you hold tighter, please?”

So I did, and his long sigh of contentment was the sweetest sound I’d ever heard.

Once I could really look at Owen, I realized how pale and gaunt he was, as if he’d neither eaten nor slept during his days in enemy hands. His face was battered, the bruising livid, but his cuts and scrapes were only superficial.

“Have they been torturing you?” I asked as we sat together on the cot.

“No. Just knocked me around a bit.”

It was more than a bit. I could see that clearly. He was downplaying the damage because he didn’t want me upset.

“The thing is, though, they never ask me any questions, except…about you. They ask me a lot of questions about you.”

“What about me?”

“General stuff. Where you live, what you do, if I thought you would come.”

“They asked you if I would come for you?”

He nodded.

“What did you say?”

“I knew you would, of course, but I didn’t want them to know that in case that was the whole point of this. Like, why take me? I’m nobody. The only important thing about me is how much I mean to you.”

“I promise you, you’re—”

“Yes,” he groaned, “I know. I’m not fishing here.”