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 be her prisoner.
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 gotten that drunk. 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.”
“So what did I do? Did I break your heart, cupcake? This psycho-routine is not a good look.”
“You KNOW what you did!” she shouted, with so much menace he forgot for a moment he was dealing with someone probably less than half his size. “And now it's time to pay for it.” Her voice went softer, but no less menacing on that last declaration.
Ari shook his head. “Look, I'm sure this is all some misunderstanding. If you release me now, I'll let it go, okay? I won't hurt you or call the cops.”
She responded with a dark laugh. “No you won't hurt me or call anyone because you will die in that cell. As soon as I'm done playing with you.”
For the first time since realizing his captor was a woman, his blood ran cold, and he realized he may actually be in some danger here.
“Let's go over the rules,” she said. “I will feed you three times a day. One of those meals will be drugged, and you won't know which one. You will eat them all. If you don't eat, you will be punished. When you're sedated, I will chain you up to play with you until I get bored. Then I'll sedate you again before unchaining you. You will be left water and a sponge to bathe. If you get any ideas about breaking apart the toilet to break the cameras, I'll just leave you to starve to death. I'm killing you anyway. Do you understand these rules?”
“Yes,” he gritted out.
“Good boy.”
Minutes of tense silence passed and a tray of food came in through the slot. It was beef stew. The kind that came in a can. He stared at it for a long moment.
The crackle. “Be a good dog and eat,” she said.
“Fuck you. I'm not letting you drug me so you can play with me,” Ari said. He didn't want to know what that meant. At the same time, he was wildly curious to know who had him. Maybe if he could see her, he'd remember what this was about. Maybe he could talk her down or convince her to take her meds.
“If you don't eat like a good puppy, I'll have to punish you,” she replied. “The punishment will stop when you eat.”
Ari laughed. “And how exactly are you going to punish me when I'm in here and you're out there? Seems I found a loophole in your evil villain plan.”
In response, death metal started to pound through the speakers at an ear-splitting volume. Ari covered his ears. Fuck, this fucking bitch!
Fine. He would eat, let her drug him so he could size her up, and figure out how to get out of this shit. It would also be great if she thought she could break him this easily. It would give him an advantage.
The food was hot and not that bad. He finished it, but now he was even more thirsty than he'd started out from the salty stew.
“Good boy,” she purred over the speaker.
Ari didn't remember falling asleep; the drug had worked fast. When he woke, he was shackled to the wall. There was just enough give in the chains for him to stand, but he remained sitting on the ground, facing the one exit. Waiting.
Soon enough the steel door slid open, and she walked in. Ari's breath hitched in his throat, as an involuntary reaction tightened his pants. She had long, wavy golden blonde hair and the most striking green eyes he'd ever seen. She wasn't wearing any makeup, but the healthy flush of color in her lips and cheeks made it hard to tell at first.
She was delicate, almost breakable by the look of her. Willowy limbs—like a dancer. And she moved that way, too. She wore jeans and a T-shirt—not one of those scoop-necked tops that let a man have a peek at cleavage. This shirt was modest. She wore no shoes and had a light pink polish on her toes.
She appeared sweet in a way that was almost painful to look at, and Ari couldn't stop the image of her on her knees from flitting through his mind. The phrase Don't stick your dick in crazy came to him as a sharp warning. But he didn't recognize this girl. Whatever offense she may have taken at something he'd said or done, he didn't remember it.
Which seemed impossible. Because if there was one thing he would remember, it was this girl.
She carried in a few plastic bottles of water which she left underneath the metal table beside the food slot. She went out again and came back in with a large bucket of water that she had to drag across the room because it was too heavy for her to carry. Some of the water sloshed over the sides. Then she brought a bar of soap and a sponge that she left with the bucket beside the drain in the corner. Each time she went out, she pressed her thumb to the keypad on the wall. There was no code, only biometrics.
The last time she entered the cell, she carried only a beer. She took a bottle opener from her pocket, flicked the cap off, and took a long drink. He couldn't decide if she was drinking to taunt him with something he couldn't have but could definitely use right now, or to calm her own nerves for whatever she had planned next.
She had to know there was no coming back from this. She had to know she was going to prison for a long time.
She shoved the bottle opener and the cap back into her pocket.
“The water will be cold by the time you bathe, but if you don't use it, I will punish you,” she said matter-of-factly as if she were speaking to a small child.
“More death metal?” Ari asked nonchalantly. If he had to hear that music for more than a few minutes at that volume it would be a kind of torture, but he wasn't going to let her know he felt that way.
“If you don't like the playlist, I can change it. I have an entire two hours of harsh metal gears grinding. I could play that for you at the same volume if you prefer.”
“Don't put yourself out,” he replied.
Her eyes narrowed as she took another long drag of the beer. “Do you think this is a fucking game?”
“No, I think you're ill. I think you need help. Now unchain me, and I will see to it that you get the help you need.”
She moved swiftly toward him and slapped him hard across the face. Some of the beer escaped the bottle to hit the floor.
“Don't you dare!” Her expression morphed into something so deadly in that moment it was hard to remember he'd found her cute and disarming only minutes before. “Don't you dare pretend like I'm the crazy one. You psychopathic piece of shit.”
“I've never seen you before in my life,” Ari said.
“No! You will NOT get inside my head. You know what you did. You know. You don't get to play the innocent victim. You know why we're here.”
“Refresh my memory.”
He jerked back when she bent and ran her fingertips over the scar that slashed across his chest.
But she ignored his question. Instead she rose back to stand and paced the floor, staring at the scar like it would leap off his skin and attack her.
“Why me? Why did you take me?” she asked, still pacing. Her voice trembled, and he couldn't tell if it was from fury or fear. Or a deadly cocktail of both.
When he finally decided what to say, he spoke slowly with a soothing tone. “I don't know what you're talking about. I think you're confused. I didn't take you. You took me. I'm the one in the chains, remember?” He rattled them as if to remind her.
“I mean BEFORE!” she shrieked. “Three fucking years ago? What you don't remember? How many women did you keep in that basement? How many did you kill? And you can't remember the one who got away? Bullshit!” She spoke so fast he could barely keep up with her words.
She raised an arm and slammed the beer bottle against the wall, sending beer and glass flying. She advanced on him in a blazing rush, holding the jagged broken bottle under his chin.
“I could slit your throat right now, so you better fucking start admitting to your crimes. Your amnesia act isn't amusing me.”
Ari's eyes widened. Things were escalating far too quickly, and he didn't know what to say to keep breathing. Anything could set her off. He sure as shit wasn't going to admit to any crimes he hadn't committed. For all he knew she had recording devices. Such an admission could land him in prison.
She backed off him and tossed the bottle on the floor. Then she went over to the door and put her thumb to the keypad and calmly walked out as if nothing had happened.