Page 103 of Love is Angry

I don’t like what remains.

Getting up, I decide to look for her myself. But my head feels like a barrel full of chowder. My skull rings like a fucking toll bell.

“What the fuck?” I mumble, licking my lips. They’re dry and chapped, like they’ve been starved of hydration for the better part of a decade.

“What the—actual—fuck,” I say once more as I realize that the sun isn’t rising. It’s setting.

It’s the afternoon shimmer that warms me up. It doesn’t make sense. Maddie and I haven’t left the bed since last night. We were exhausted, our bodies and spirits humming in the afterglow of what I can only describe as shattering sexual transcendence. It should be morning.

I check my phone on the nightstand, first. A few missed calls. Nothing out of the ordinary with that. Of course I didn’t hear a thing, I left it on silent. There are some messages, too, but nothing important at first glance. Not a sign from Maddie, either, so maybe she’s still here.

“Maddie?” I call out a third time and listen closely.

Something is off. It’s too quiet.

I take another step, wobbly on my feet. This is weird. Suspicious. Alarming, even. I’m not supposed to feel like this, after only a sip of wine.

I rub the back of my neck in a bid to relieve some of the tension and immediately cringe. There’s a tender spot there. Tender and just a bit painful. There’s a tiny lump just under the skin, too. I rub at the spot again, prompting the same reaction as the first time.

A swarm of ideas pump through my mind, filling me with the kind of paranoia that I don’t need right now. I try to reason with myself. Try to calm myself down. I need to find Maddie, get some coffee in my system and wake the hell up.

“Maddie,” I call out again, rushing through the house.

I check the bathroom first. Empty. In fact, there is no sign that Maddie was here. Not in the bathroom and not in my apartment in general. Her dress is gone from the living room. Her shoes gone from the hallway. And I know, it’s one hundred percent possible that she just woke the fuck up and strolled through the door, but--she would have left me a note. Or called. Texted. Something!

I reach for my phone. Logical thinking, logical acting. I scroll through my call records and tap her number. I wait for it to ring. Okay, her phone’s on. It rings once. Twice. In parallel, I hear a buzzing sound somewhere in the house.

It doesn’t take me long to find Maddie’s phone under my bed.

I’m so confused right now.

So fucking confused.

If she left her phone here, where is she? After how terrified she was when I found her last night, I doubt she trekked back to her apartment.

I check the front door. It’s locked. The deadbolt is still in place.

Dread takes over as there is no other place for me to check.

“What the fuck is going on here?” I ask myself, increasingly frustrated in the absence of an answer. Madison’s phone buzzes. I’m not the one calling, this time.

It’s a text message.

I swipe a finger across the skin, surprised to find there’s no security code. A shiver travels from the back of my neck and all the way down my spine as I open the message. Maybe I shouldn’t. It’s Madison’s phone. Privacy and whatnot. It’s not right. But the message contains a photo attachment of someone familiar.

The text is simple.Hey there.

“What the…”

Someone took a photo of Madison and texted it to her number. She’s wearing last night’s dress, and she’s bound to a chair. Gagged and, by the looks of it, unconscious, too.

“Fuck. FUCK!” I snarl, milliseconds away from smashing the phone against the wall, only to make the image disappear. Except I can’t. I need it, that much is obvious.

Someone got in here, somehow. They left the door locked, yet they got in. By the way that I’m feeling; the ache in my neck, the fuzziness in my brain, the fact that I slept through the entire fucking day, I don’t think it’d be a stretch to assume that they did something to me.

Urgency washes over me like ice water, pumping my blood hard and arctic through my veins. The implications of this unexpected situation transform last night’s dream into an ugly, vicious nightmare.

Chapter 46