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And because I was new, I’d also been a little naive. I thought that my reputation and the knowledge that I had a ton of interesting weapons at my disposal would protect me.
It worked well enough for the people in the area, who always seemed to give me a wide berth.
But I had been young and stupid to assume that someone with the kind of history and money as Cain Roth would be intimidated by a single woman with just the barest level of protection. A gun in the nightstand. A deadbolt on the door.
That was the extent of it back then.
And I had one other thing working for me.
I had always slept like the dead.
I figured that had to do with how loud my neighborhood had been when I was growing up as well as my father’s erratic hours, so there was no such thing as quiet to sleep. I had learned to just tune it all out to get the rest I needed.
Which might have been fine. If you were a normal person. Someone not at risk of strangers coming in at night to take you.
I jolted awake only when the tape slapped over my mouth.
Even so, it took a long second for my brain to catch up.
What I remembered best about those first few moments was how quiet it was. No cursing, no talking, no heavy footsteps.
The only sounds were my frantic breath through my nose, and the bed creaking as I was shoved face-first into my mattress, my arms being yanked backward.
The tape bit into the skin of my wrists as the man wrapped it endlessly around, too tight to get out, even if I had known how to back then.
I started to struggle then, rolling onto my back, kicking out my legs.
But the hands merely grabbed my ankles, taping them together. Like I’d just made their job easier.
It was all over so quickly.
One moment I was asleep, the next, my breath was exhaling violently out of my nose as I was thrown over someone’s shoulder, my rib catching their shoulder, and I felt a sharp pain that had me crying out against the tape.
But the man didn’t care.
Neither did his comrades as they all walked silently out of my house, then outside, tossing me into the waiting open trunk, and driving off.
Survival instinct was a strange thing when it was engaged for the first time.
Because I guess I expected to spring into action, to fight my restraints, to be frantic and out of control, animalistic.
In that trunk, though, it was like everything slowed down, calmed, my thoughts a little sluggish.
I cataloged things slowly, methodically.
The tape.
The trunk.
The number of kidnappers.
Three of them. Big. One of me. Very small.
They weren’t good odds.
They had weapons.
I had nothing.
I’d been sleeping in my underwear and a tank top, for God’s sake.
Then I went through the list of possibilities for being taken.
I was young and maybe naive, but I wasn’t stupid. Most women were taken for one reason, and one reason only.
Weak men trying to prove their strength by overpowering women, forcing themselves on them. Then either leaving them to live with their trauma, or killing them to become a cautionary tale to other women.
As if we needed more of those.
My skin grew slick with a cold sweat as I tried to wrap my head around those fates.
I’d been a late bloomer to the whole world of sex and dynamics between men and women. I’d never been good with guys, and if they were interested in me, it wasn’t long before my ‘oddness’ sent them running.
I’d only just begun to have sex the year before. And it had been uncomfortable and foreign at first. But my choice. Who I slept with, what we did, that all came back to me and my interest and willingness.
The idea of any of those things I had started to dabble in being done to me without my permission had my stomach roiling, making me fear I might start to get sick, only to have to swallow it back down because of the tape over my mouth.
They would have to take off my tape to… do things.
That was what my mind clung to right then. I mean, it hadn’t been entirely true, but it seemed the most likely situation.
So if I could just… find a way to loosen my wrists, then I would have control of all of my limbs when they cut my ankle tape.
I wasn’t a fighter.
I was small.
I had never thrown a punch in my life.
I always figured my best self-defense was the fact that I never went anywhere without at least two weapons on me.
But I was quick.
Wiry, even more so in those days.
I could outrun them, maybe outmaneuver them. Then find something, anything to grab hold of. Because one thing I did know from my line of work was just how many ordinary, seemingly innocuous items could be easily used as an effective weapon.
