Page 30 of Coach (Shady Valley Henchmen #8)

“Oh.” He looked at me then like he just realized how messed up I looked. “Okay. Yeah. Sure. I got the sports drink you like too! Blue.”

“The only color worth buying.”

“I’ll be right back with the medicine. Then maybe we can talk some more.”

“Maybe after I rest for a little bit? Just until the headache subsides a bit. Right now, it hurts to think.”

“Oh.” He was disappointed at that, but he was fighting his greater and lesser angels over it. He’d been planning and preparing for this for so long. And I was asking for time. “Maybe a short one.”

“That would be great. Thank you so much.”

With that, he was off.

Alone, I buried my face in my hands for a second, letting myself sink into the misery for a moment. I hadn’t been lying about how much it hurt to think, to speak, to just breathe.

“Do you get headaches a lot?” George asked when he came back with the bottle of meds and the sports drink.

“Only when I hit my head.” And have my brain deprived of oxygen to the point of unconsciousness.

“Good. Because we have a lot of… catching up to do.”

“Definitely,” I agreed, taking my pills and sipping my drink. “I’m just going to rest my eyes for a little bit.”

“Okay. And when you get up, we will have dinner.”

“You cooked?”

“You’re going to cook.”

“Oh. Uh. Okay. Down here?”

“I made you a kitchen.”

“I see that. That was… thoughtful.”

If I was expected to cook, my hands and feet would have to be released, right? And depending on what I was meant to cook, there would be knives. Maybe, if I was really lucky, a cast iron skillet.

I just had to keep him unsuspecting, make him think I was playing along, feeding into his fantasy.

After my migraine eased a little.

“I’ll be right here,” George said, making his way over to the dining set.

Lovely.

He was going to watch me while I rested.

Could the guy get any creepier?

Much to my horror, between the adrenaline, fear, and pain, I went from just trying to rest my eyes to drifting in and out of sleep.

It was that same heavy clanging sound that had me snapping fully awake. I jerked upright, the movement making my head spin, my vision swim.

My heartbeat ratcheted up, pulsing everywhere at once as I scanned the room, trying to locate my jailor.

But he was gone.

Judging by the footsteps above me, he was frustrated—clomping around the room, probably mad that dinner wasn’t on the table.

The basement was disorienting. There were no windows, no clocks, no way to gauge if it was the same night, if it was morning already, how much time I’d lost.

Was Trix better yet? Was she missing me? Had Saul taken her back to the clubhouse? Was he maybe looking for me to update me on her?

No.

No, I couldn’t let myself start hoping.

Hope was dangerous.

It might prevent me from doing what was necessary to get myself out of this situation.

I’d survived the past ten years without someone else coming to sweep in and carry me off to safety. I could get free again.

Even if, in my heart, I wanted him to be looking for me. Because he cared. Because he wanted to know what happened to me. Because he knew me well enough to know I would never willingly leave my dog that way. That I wouldn’t leave him that way.

Tears pricked my eyes, and I fought hard to keep them back as something upstairs slammed.

My heart lodged itself in my throat, worried that George was losing it, that he was getting pissed off at me and throwing things, breaking things.

Was I next?

Turning so my legs were over the edge of the mattress, I started scooting until I was on my knees on the hard floor once again.

It was true that the windows were boarded up, but I knew they existed. So did, I remembered, an exterior access door. Those big ones that had a staircase and double doors.

I just needed to orient myself, try to figure out where they were in the layout. Then I could, I don’t know, tear down the damn walls if I had to.

But what if the doors were barred from the outside?

Could he have prepared that much? Anticipated every attempt to escape? Or would he have assumed I would just accept my imprisonment?

I’d kneed my way over toward the dining table when there was another crash upstairs, making my belly twist.

He was really, really angry.

I did not want to be the punching bag for all of that.

Closing in on the kitchen cabinets, I brought my bound wrists up, yanking open the drawers and digging around in the contents, looking for anything I could use to free—or defend—myself.

Any hopes for knives faded. Not even a single butter knife was in one of the drawers.

With a frustrated growl, I inched my way across the room toward the bathroom cabinet.

There was a loud thud above me, and I could have sworn that was the sound of a grown man falling.

Good .

Maybe he’d knock himself unconscious, and I’d get more time to work on an escape plan.

“Yes!” I cheered when, in the back of the drawer, I found something sharp.

Okay, fine. It was a pair of nail clippers. And not even a full-sized one—just one of the tiny travel ones for your purse.

I didn’t care.

It was something.

I dropped down onto my butt, pulling my legs in as close as possible, then sliding the zip tie into the loop.

I clipped across the thick plastic millimeter by millimeter, praying to at least get through one of the cuffs so I could stand and walk around.

“No, no, no, no, no,” I cried as I heard the groaning sound that must have been some kind of door blocking the basement staircase.

I snipped again, and the loop cut free.

But the clippers slipped from my fingers, shooting halfway across the room in the process.

Okay.

I needed not to panic.

I could just tell George that I had to pee, that I didn’t know what else to do but try to free my ankles.

If he tied me up again and tossed the clippers, I could find something else. Not to cut. He probably wouldn’t be that stupid again. But zip ties could be taken off without cutting them.

My grandfather had been frugal about them, refusing to buy new ones if he could pull ones off an old project.

“You just need a shim against the pawl here,” he’d tell me as he demonstrated the movement. “And it pulls right out.”

If George didn’t know a lot about tools, I was sure he didn’t know much about zip tie functions. He probably just knew what he saw criminals and cops doing on TV to use them to restrain people.

It wasn’t hopeless.

Not even as he was coming down the stairs.

I braced myself to throw myself at his mercy.

“Este!”

Saul .

He’d come to save me after all.