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But then her heart stopped. Sitting at a table in the back corner beside the window, reading a paper... was him. She turned around and ran out of the restaurant. She didn't stop running until she reached her car.
Claire sat in the driver's side, her keys clutched in her hands, shaking, tears streaming down her face. It was him. She knew it was him. He had that long sun-streaked hair, broad shoulders, that hard warrior look.
But what she felt, sitting in her car clutching her keys while her knuckles turned white from her death grip, wasn't what she expected. It wasn't the terror she'd expected if she ever saw him again. It was pure, unadulterated rage. The anger bubbled up from somewhere deep and primal inside her, and she felt something snap and twist inside her soul. And suddenly, all she wanted, was revenge.
20
It was mid-December and the holiday bustle had reached a fever pitch. Now that all her plans were finalized, it would be so easy to pull this off. Everyone was in that friendly helping holiday mood, swept up in the spirit of the season. And if they weren't swept up, they were too stressed and distracted to care about anything going on around them.
It had been two months since Claire had first seen her captor again, living carefree, eating his fucking sandwich in the new bistro beside the window. Not a care in the world. The next day she'd gone again at the same time not expecting him to be there two days in a row, convincing herself she was just there to get the sandwich she'd missed out on the day before.
But there he was in the same place as if he hadn't moved an inch from the last time she'd seen him. And again she left before he could glance up to see her.
Then she went the next day and the next. Always there. Always at that back table, sitting by the window reading a paper and eating a fucking sandwich. Every day that she went and saw him—but he didn't see her—gave her a hard surge of adrenaline as if every day she cheated death by being so near to him. It was addictive.
Over time, a plan began to take shape. Suddenly Claire didn't have to motivate herself to get out of bed in the morning. She lived now with a single-minded focus: making that son of a bitch pay for breaking her like this. Soon he wouldn't be casually eating that sandwich with the morning paper, he would beherprisoner.
She spent weeks figuring out how she would capture him, how she would transport him. He was big, even for a man. Tall. Broad. She'd need help—unsuspecting help. She would follow him when the time came. She would risk the night because she could hide in the dark if she knew where he was... if she was the predator instead of the prey. She would drug him. Then she'd get someone to help her move him. “He's my boyfriend. He's drunk. He's on parole and has a curfew. Please, I need help getting him home.” The script already came alive in her mind.
She needed to get the right drugs. How? Where? From whom? She needed to find the right location. It had to be far from her apartment. But she'd need a space where she could stay until she was finished. It would be foolish to go back and forth from her apartment to the location she kept him at. Too many ways she could get caught.
She needed to set it up right, cover her tracks and identity. But she had the resources to make this happen, if she could only be smart enough to pull it off. This motherfucker would regret the day he took her.
Ari woke,groggy and disoriented, lying on a hard surface wearing only his jeans and boots. No shirt. What the fuck? He felt weak and so thirsty. He tried to remember where he'd been, what he'd been doing. Fragments of his most recent stretch of consciousness started to reform into a memory.
He'd been at a bar drowning his sorrows over Holly. The brat. The one he didn't want. She'd been gone almost three months, and he'd thought he was over her, but the loneliness still cut into him in the weaker moments.
He'd been so close to telling Kane to do it... get him into this Pleasure House inner circle, let him buy someone who couldn't leave. But he hadn't done it. It wasn't in him no matter how simple it seemed or how much he wanted it. Instead he'd ended up drunk off his ass in a downtown bar drowning in his own pathetic self-pity.
He hadn't gottenthatdrunk. But he had been drunk enough that someone could have put something in his drink.
Fuck.
He shook off the grogginess and took in the cell he was in. That was the only word for it. A cell. Four concrete walls, a concrete floor, ceiling material unclear. Heavy chains were bolted into the wall behind him and on the floor next to him. There was a big round black thing in the center of the ceiling. Maybe a camera, but it looked more like a speaker. No, he thought, spotting something round, black, and shiny angled down on him from one corner. There was the camera. And then a second camera to cover any blind spots from the first.
There was a toilet and a drain in the corner under one of the cameras. The ceiling was high, so high that his six-foot-five frame couldn't reach it even if he were to stand on the toilet. Whoever had installed those cameras had used a high ladder to get up there.
There was a single steel door but no doorknob on his side. There was a thumbprint keypad though and a big slot in the wall, presumably to slip food through. A steel table was bolted into the floor just underneath the slot. Holy fuck, who had him? Who exactly had he pissed off? Clearly someone with some money.
Ari banged on the door and shouted. “Hey, you cowardly motherfucker, I will fucking kill you when I get out of here!”
There was a crackling sound from the speaker above his head.
The voice that spoke, was unexpected. Soft, alluring, female, and sexy as hell.
The voice spoke calmly. “I'm not a motherfucker. I'm the mother that gets fucked. And you are going to wish you hadn't fucked me by the time we're finished here.”
He stared in confusion at the camera. Some woman at a kink club hadn't liked something he'd done? He hadn't exactly been himself lately, so it was possible. Or someone didn't like that he hadn't called her back? This was a level of crazy he hadn't been prepared to deal with tonight.
Though it wasn't his first encounter with an unstable woman. He looked down at the long knife scar slashed diagonally across his chest, a harsh reminder of a foolish mistake. It was the one and only time he'd ignored a safeword. He'd been a regular boy scout since then—even with his less than sparkling personality of recent months.
“Who's helping you?” Ari asked the camera.
The crackle again. “No one is helping me. This is between me. And you.”
He laughed at that. “Sure, sweetheart. Nobody helped you capture me. You did it all by yourself. Go girl power. What are you, a buck twenty dripping wet?” He hadn't seen her, but that voice... it seemed impossible to him that that intoxicating voice could belong to someone who wasn't just as alluring in person.
“A couple of dumbasses helped me get you near the door, and I took it from there using my own creative methods. That's all you need to know.”
