Page 11 of One Second After Another

He was going to be lucky to escape this without catching a fucking cold, let alone with his life.

It didn’t help that his arms had been tied at his back with zip ties connected to a metal bitch link protruding from the cracked cement. He couldn’t even use his hands to warm his own body, and the hard floor wasn’t doing anything for his aching muscles.

Every part of him hurt. The rusty metallic tang of old blood lingered on the back of his tongue every time he dared to lick his chapped lips.

The worst part?

Luca couldn’t tell time—he had no idea how long he’d been there stuck in the cement room with no windows to see the rising sun to say another day had come and passed. Only a bare bulb with a long, thin chain hung from the ceiling to provide light.

It had yet to be shut off.

Even when he did fall asleep—though he seriously doubted it was for more than a few minutes at a time with the way his mind felt slow and tired—he could see that goddamn light in his dreams. It was just there ... shining bright in the background like it was fucking taunting him or something.

What was happening?

That’s all he wanted to know.

Anything.

He’d take anything now.

Luca was close to drifting back to a hellish dreamland—if one could even call it that—when an echoing beep had his eyes jerking open. Metal clinked, then, and in the next second, the double doors at the far end of the room with the squeaky hinges opened without the prompting of the man who waited on the other side of them.

Over the doors sat a camera. Pointed and trained on him, the red blinking light over the lens was yet another thing that continued to haunt his waking dreams.

“You’re looking ... well,” Cree murmured when he stepped inside the room.

Luca had every urge to tell the man to go fuck himself, but he held back. Barely. Cree could have been less kind given Luca’s current circumstance, but he wasn’t. Not intentionally, anyway.

He didn’t bother replying to Cree’s first comment, instead asking, “Have you found her?”

Penny, he meant.

He didn’t need to say her name. He bet every single person in this building—however many there were—knew exactly why he was there.

Cree came to a stop in the middle of the room still ten feet away from a bound Luca. At least, they let him keep his boots even if they did rip the laces out of them. His ankles weren’t tied, so that was something to be thankful for, too. If only he could get his wrists undone and out of the strange room, then he might be able to—

“No, we haven’t,” Cree finally replied, interrupting Luca’s thoughts. “Do you feel betrayed because of what she did?”

Luca’s brow dipped. “What did she do?”

Cree raised a single, thick brow high. His dark eyes nailed into Luca like he was trying to decide whether the man had lost his mind or was just stupid.

Frankly, even Luca didn’t know the answer to that one. Not now.

“She brought you here,” Cree clarified, “and decided you could be used as a good distraction for the rest of us while she headed off to do her own thing. As for you, well, you followed right along.”

Huh.

“That’s what she did?”

That’s why Penny let him follow her to Nevada?

He didn’t think so.

Not entirely.

“That’s what she did,” Cree echoed.