Chapter Twenty Five

Her head was throbbing with the worst headache ever. Fragmented memories hovered at the edge of her mind and she strained to piece them together. Her aching neck muscles didn’t want to cooperate as she struggled to lift her head from its position drooping over her chest. She blinked slowly, wincing as she struggled to adjust to the dim lighting. She immediately regretted the effort. What she saw was horrifying.

Dirt walls revealed the source of the musty smell that had assaulted her nostrils while her eyes had still been closed. She knew enough to recognize the space for what it was: an underground cellar or bunker of some kind. She also knew there were only two reasons for building one: canning or killing.

Her arms ached and she was sure if she did survive she would suffer with rotary cuff problems into her old age. She was hanging from her wrists and her shoulders throbbed from the excessive strain on her joints. Her toes barely touched the ground and she had to concentrate to stay still and keep from spinning in place.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know she was dealing with one sick fuck. If she was going to survive, she would have to outwit this bastard. The cellar door creaking overhead didn’t give her much time to think about it.

“Well, well, I see you woke up,” Brian said as he descended the steps, smiling as he pulled the string that hung from the single bulb in the ceiling. The additional light revealed the extent of her predicament.

“Why are you doing this?” she rasped, coughing against the discomfort of her dry throat.

“Well, to be honest with you, I would have preferred your friend. That was the original plan, but with Prince Charming drooling over her I don’t see that happening any time soon. So here we are.”

She watched as he pulled back a quilt he was using as a makeshift curtain. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she whispered as she struggled to clear her throat. “You’re going to record this? I don’t know why you’re going to all this trouble. I mean, it was fun joking around with you at the club but this…just no. Seriously, Brian, put the camera away and let me down from here. Something tells me I’m not going to want to relive this night anytime soon. I mean it! My arms hurt!”

He ignored her as he busied himself with logistics for the task at hand. “Let’s see. I’m going to have to lay you down on the cot for what I have planned for us.”

Holy fuck. Poker face, girl. “And just what, exactly, do you have in mind? What is this, some kind of bizarre roleplay scene? I mean, really, have you lost your mind? This is totally unnecessary. You don’t have to do all this. In fact, I really don’t appreciate it one bit.”

“Oh, you’ll see.” He approached her without a care in the world, reached up, and released her cuffed wrists from the clip at the bottom of the length of chain. But she was still not free because her wrists remained cuffed and a short length of chain still joined the two cuffs.

Goldie stood on unsteady legs, frowning down at her cuffed wrists and the chain connecting them. Well, fuck it. She decided in that moment that she’d had enough of this guy’s bullshit. If he was determined to follow through on what he’d started, she was happy to take things as far as she was able.

Before he had time to react, she lifted her aching arms, wrapped the chain around his neck, and pulled it back tight. The move caught him off guard and she easily took him down to the ground.

He pulled hard at the chain against his neck, but the same adrenalin rush that enabled mothers to lift cars off helpless children empowered her to maintain a steady tension on the chain. She continued to pull on the length of chain around his neck until he stopped struggling and she was sure he was unconscious.

Somehow keeping the hysteria at bay, she frantically dug around in his pockets, found his keys to the cuffs, and freed herself.

Even though she was still groggy from whatever sedative he’d given her, Goldie had never run so fast in her life as when she burst through the ground-level entry hatch. She had no idea where she was at first, but at least she was alive. And she was determined to stay that way.

She had no idea if Brian had simply taken a stunt way too far or if he had truly intended to do her harm in his little underground torture chamber, but she wasn’t going to stick around to find out. She had thought she’d seen it all, but apparently not.

If he ever had the nerve to show his face at the club again, then she’d know he was just an overzealous asshole and she’d put him in his place, but it wouldn’t matter. Either way, she wanted to kill the bastard but he wasn’t worth going to jail for and she wasn’t going to spend a single second longer in that hellhole. He could rot there as far as she was concerned.