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"Where am I?" I asked, tension uncurling in my stomach.
"Ah, what did they say? Utah, I think," she said, seeming confused by the word.
Of course we were in Utah.
"What is this place?" I asked, eyes begging her to understand.
"Oh, a house. A rental house," she added, giving me an encouraging smile. "You had a bad fall. You cut your forehead," she told me. "I cleaned it out and packed it with a poultice."
A poultice?
Who even used that word anymore, let alone knew how to mix one together?
The part of me that had spent a lot of time learning proper wound care by our modern standards was having a mild heart attack at the idea of some hippie woman playing herbalist putting God-knew what herbs or leaves or spit in my open wound.
But there would be time to worry about that later.
After I got myself free, got away, got some help.
Maybe this woman could help.
But it was right about then that a strange noise sounded from behind me. A muted, shrieking sound, something that immediately put me on edge as I turned, looked back, and found a large bed behind me.
With a mostly naked woman on top.
Completely covered in blood.
With a gag in her mouth.
There was a knee-jerk, selfish moment where I worried about that being me, that I was maybe taken to replace her when he was done with her very badly abused body.
The thoughts were replaced almost instantly, though, with concern. For her. For her wellbeing. For her obvious pain as she screamed against her gag.
"What happened to her?"
"I, ah, I can't tell you that," the woman said, shaking her head.
"What do you mean you can't tell me? Who did that to her? Who are you protecting?" I demanded, voice rising.
Let's just say that I had seen far too many women come into the hospitals I'd worked at with clear signs of abuse from men who'd driven them in for care. And despite trying my best, sometimes, I could never get through to the women, could never get them help.
And it made me have a hair trigger when it came to abusers. And those who enabled them through inaction.
"Lower your voice," another voice joined the conversation. Lower, deeper. Masculine. "Or I will have to put the gag back on you," he added as my gaze lifted, finding a man standing in the doorway, swallowing up the whole space.
He'd had a mask on, of course, but his size was familiar. Tall, strong but not overly bulky. I felt reasonably confident saying this was the man who had abducted me, who had wrestled me into his car, who had cuffed and gagged me, who had chased me until I fell.
Then, apparently, dragged me inside and sicced his brainwashed female friend on me.
"How about no?" I shot back, jaw tight.
I should have been scared. But I found a surprising amount of anger coursing through my system, making my skin feel electric, my jaw tight.
"What are you going to do? Hit me again?" I added.
"You hit your own fucking head," he reminded me, looking infuriatingly amused by that fact.
I didn't want to think it, but it was impossible not to notice, even in this situation.
The man was gorgeous.
Like Adonis, Greek sculpture, belongs in an art gallery or fancy cologne ad kind of gorgeous.
It was the perfect, classical bone structure with a chiseled jaw, a Greek nose, a high, proud forehead, and stern brows over ice blue eyes that almost seemed to have flecks of a different color in them, but he was too far away to make them out.
His hair was blond and perfectly styled even after having worn a ski mask to kidnap me.
He was dressed like he was planning on spending time outdoors with a tan grandpa sweater over a hooded sweatshirt.
It was hot in the house. Like uncomfortably so. How he wasn't sweating like crazy was beyond me.
"Maybe I wouldn't have hit my head if I wasn't trying to escape a violent psychopath kidnapper," I said, shooting him my best mean face.
He completely ignored me, looking over at the other woman instead. "Lenore, go on. Ly has been waiting impatiently in your room," he said as the woman gave me one last long look before moving away.
"Let me go," I demanded, trying for strong, but with the absence of the woman, I was feeling a lot less comfortable.
Why would he send her away?
So he could do terrible things to me without an audience?
"No," he said, moving over toward the bed, looking down at the woman there.
"What did you do to her?" I demanded, anger rising again as she writhed in pain.
"Nothing."
"Oh, so she hit herself all over and cut herself all over too?" I asked. "How coincidental that things like that keep happening around you, huh?"
"You're not here to run your mouth," he informed me in that cool tone of his.
