When I came to, I saw darkness around me. My ankles were bound and my wrists were pinned behind my back with duct tape. I screamed and kicked, tossing and turning in the enclosure, but got nowhere.

A strange humming noise seemed to penetrate through the walls of my prison, vibrating my entire body as the seconds ticked by. The noise filled my ears and the vibrations chattered my teeth.

I was in a car, I realized. The trunk of a car. I thrashed around again, trying to break free. Nothing.

Derrick. Derrick had done this. He must have choked me out back at my house, then brought me out to his car and stuffed me in the trunk.

No, that didn’t make sense. He didn’t drive a car. He drove a jeep, like a lot of the other guys around town. Said he liked the Colorado air conditioning during the summer, where you wore shorts and got a nice breeze up the leg while you were whipping down the highway.

My car, then? My trunk?

I thrashed my head around some more, felt my hair entangle in my jumper cables, right where I’d left them.

My trunk, definitely.

I swallowed hard, trying to process everything that was going. Derrick, my best friend ever since high school, had just knocked me unconscious and stuffed me in the trunk of my car. Okay.

My stomach dropped and I immediately felt like puking.

Out of the three men I trusted most in the world, one of them had just knocked me out and stuffed me in the trunk of my own car. This was after another one of them, my adopted father, was put in prison while he awaited trial for arson. And the final one was out doing God knows what, maybe lying dead somewhere in a ditch. And, on top of that, he was going to be the man responsible for keeping my Uncle Zeke in prison.

The tears began to spill out and my sobs came out unbidden and full-throated as I cried out to the heavens for some kind of relief. Why the hell was all of this happening to me? I hadn’t done anything wrong, had I? I’d led a decent enough life. Sure, I wasn’t fucking perfect or anything, but who was? Why was my world being forced to crumble down around my ears?

“You awake back there, Becks?” Derrick called from the driver’s seat as we continued down the road, his voice calm as a crystal clear lake.

“Derrick?” I called back through my tears and sobs. “I don’t know what’s going on, but you can stop this right now. Just let me go, and no one ever needs to find out what you’re trying to do.”

He just laughed. “What I’m trying to do?” he asked, laughing again. “Come on, Becks, we’re just going for a little ride here. No biggie.”

God, what was he trying to do? Was it this thing I’d kind of started with Matthew? Had he gotten jealous of his firefighting buddy, and now he realized he wanted me all for himself? Because that wasn’t going to happen. Ever. Not willingly, at least. I tried to shift around, to get my arms at an angle where I could clasp the emergency interior latch for the trunk. When I failed, the tears came down faster and heavier, my voice a wail as I struggled to grab the release.

“Oh, Becks, don’t act that way. Your little field trip will be over soon.”

“Where are you taking me?” I asked, still crying as I called again through the backseat.

“To see someone. Someone you probably haven’t thought about in years, but I’ve had to think about everyday.”

I lay there, trying to parse through his cryptic response, my mind clouded by the tears and terror engulfing my psyche. None of this made any sense. Why was he doing this? Why was he hurting me this way?

Then it dawned on me.

Was he tied to the framing of Zeke somehow? To the mafia men who’d been threatening the small business owners all over town? Was he helping them somehow?

“Derrick,” I said between sniffling back my tears, “I thought we were friends.”

“We were,” he said matter-of-factly. “Back in high school.”

Realizing what he’d meant, I began to cry harder. Those days were all gone, all over. The friendship, the relationship he and I had back then wasn’t the same as the one today.

“Oh, and that boom of thunder you heard earlier?” he asked, a knowing smile in his voice. “That was your boyfriend Matthew Jones. I blew him and the fire engine he was riding on straight back to hell.”

And then he turned the radio on and cranked up the music, blasting my ears with whatever pop song was on the radio. At that volume, it didn’t matter what it was. It was just loud, and my eardrums felt like they were about to explode.

Tears of agony, both spiritual and physical, streaming down my face, I began to scream again as I kicked at the backseat.

That was what I’d felt earlier. That was the gut-wrenching feeling while I was still back at my house.

It was Matthew Jones, the love of my life, being wrenched from this existence.