Page 12 of Missing Piece (Neon Scars #2)

W hen Vincent didn’t come back into the room after his abrupt exit, Adam tried to pretend he wasn’t somewhat disappointed.

He instead focused on different ways he could try to seduce Vincent now that he had seen a bit of vulnerability in him, listening to the muffled sounds outside his room, the opening and closing of what sounded like a very old and creaky storm door.

He tried to formulate a plan, but that quickly fell to the wayside when he realized he had no way to tell what time it was, or what day it was.

By the third meal—his only way of marking time—Adam had begun to wonder if Vincent intended to starve him of human contact entirely.

When he woke from what felt like his dozenth boredom-induced nap, a tablet and charger waited on the nightstand like a peace offering.

He knew it was dumb to hope that the device was connected to the internet, but the disappointment hit him hard when he saw that he was locked out of accessing anything online.

He managed to hobble to the bathroom to splash his face with water and convince himself that crying wouldn’t help anything.

He needed to be strong. Men don’t let their emotions get the best of them , his father always said to him .

Adam could admit those first few days with the tablet had helped occupy his mind.

It had a lot of very stupid games and what appeared to be an illegally downloaded collection of classic novels.

He was never a fan of literature in school, but when it was just him, his thoughts, and the empty room, he supposed he could finally give Dickens or Tolstoy a chance.

Which was a mistake, because those books were boring as fuck.

Three days after getting the tablet, he was getting ready to climb the walls.

Whichever one of the kidnappers was dropping off food for him, they always seemed to wait until he was asleep to do it.

Other than the squeaky door, he couldn’t really hear anyone either, though he could have sworn there was a woman with a very high-pitched voice in the house the day before.

He had even gotten pretty good at hopping to the bathroom, grabbing the furniture he could reach along the way while he prayed his bladder would withstand all the jostling.

But between eating, bathroom trips, and straining his eyes after hours of staring at the tablet, the room was suffocating him.

Even trying to sleep had become restless.

When his mind wasn’t forcing him to relive his biggest regrets, it was conjuring up dreams that involved Vincent.

Sometimes they were terribly violent, waking him in a cold sweat while he grabbed at his neck to make sure his throat hadn’t really been ripped out.

The rest of the time, they involved the vampire in various states of undress.

In bed. With Adam. He tried to not think about those dreams as much as he could, but there were weirdly intimate dreams where he could swear he could still feel Vincent’s fingers stroking his face when he woke up .

He wished they would at least hit him with the ketamine again.

That would have killed some of the time for him, or at least made it so he wouldn’t dream about doing the Devil’s Tango with a vampire.

Or they could throw some OxyContin his way.

He could spend days doing nothing if he could get high.

Just nodding in and out, not a care in the world for things like the passage of time, food, family, whether or not he was being held captive by a weirdly attractive strip club owner.

You have over thirty days clean, why would you ruin that willingly?

If he had still been using, he wouldn’t have been in this situation at all.

He’d be in jail drinking toilet wine with the other county degenerates.

That almost sounded nice, except for the fact he was trading one type of imprisonment for another.

At least the food was nicer here.

But he was getting desperate enough for human contact that he considered yelling for one of them to come into the room and just talk to him.

Hell, he’d even let Vincent touch him again if it meant not being alone with his thoughts.

Convincing himself not to wander down a rabbit hole of bad memories and the part of himself he spent years trying to bury under enough pills to kill a circus elephant got more difficult.

Even passing notes back and forth with Matteo would help him stay out of that place in his mind.

What sort of game were they playing at? Was this some sort of mind-breaking technique? Because it was working.

More than once he had opened his mouth to yell for one of them to come in, only to snap it shut when he realized they likely wouldn’t respond, either because Vincent was ignoring him on purpose or because the seemingly nice one was deaf .

The only thing keeping him sane was keeping track of the times that he heard the storm door opening and closing.

He realized if it took more than two seconds to hear the door shut, that meant more than one of them was leaving at the same time.

At least two of them always left the house at six o’clock, and someone always left or entered right around ten at night.

The door wouldn’t creak again until four in the morning, and that one always took more than 2 seconds to shut, so that meant whichever two left around six were coming back.

There were at least two cars on the property he could hear.

One had a terribly loud beep when it was locked and unlocked, and the other was something whose engine sounded like it was on its last leg.

The door would creak, there’d be a bit of silence, and then either the beep or the rumbling engine would start.

That gave him a window of possibly six hours—ten at night to four in the morning.

He just needed to wait for a day when that door creaked twice and took longer to close both times.

Or at least that’s what he convinced himself of.

Even though it meant freedom, he wondered how often they had all left the house with him alone in the room.

That was terrifying. God, what if a fire broke out?

He’d be burned to a crisp before they came back.

It’d serve you right, that kid got burned—

“No, no, not thinking about this today,” he told himself, shaking his head and burying his face in his hands as though he could make the memory disappear forever. Then when? When do you make up for it? You lost a foot, he lost so much more. He doesn’t get to hide the consequences of your actions.

He squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head again. “Stop it,” he said to himself, slamming his fist into his thigh.

“You’re a noisy thinker,” Vincent’s voice drifted across the room.

Adam couldn’t hide his startled reaction as he pressed himself back against the headboard.

He didn’t even hear the door open. He balled his fists at his side as Vincent strode over to him, his heart in his throat as he tried to remember what exactly his plan was.

He spent hours repeating it to himself, so why the hell was his mind blank all of a sudden?

Maybe it was because of how God damn happy he was not to be alone anymore.

That’s not good. I shouldn’t want Vincent here with me.

“You’re not eating?” Vincent asked, eyeing the untouched plates on the nightstand.

The accumulated plates held food that looked perfectly prepared yet utterly unappealing.

Vincent looked disturbingly comfortable in a pair of flannel pajama bottoms and a plain white shirt, and the longer Adam stared at the outfit the more he wanted to laugh.

Vincent had looked like every vampire movie stereotype when they first met.

Dress pants, nice shirt, suit vest. But this look was something he had never imagined. A vampire in pajamas.

“Do you sleep in a coffin?” The words came out of his mouth before they hit his brain.

He dug his nails into his palms. Usually, his thoughtless, straight to speech insensitivity to others helped keep people away from him, particularly when he wanted to be alone at the height of his pill popping, but now he wished he learned to control it.

His face still hurt from running his mouth to Vincent before and he wasn’t sure his cheek bone could take another hit like that.

Much to his surprise, Vincent grinned as he shook his head. “ No, we don’t sleep in coffins,” he said. “Now tell me, why aren’t you eating?”

The smile transformed his face completely. For just a moment, Vincent looked almost human—approachable, even kind. It was unsettling how attractive that made him.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You know I can hear your stomach when it growls, right? The walls in this house are old and thin.” Vincent cocked his head, seeming to consider a thought for a moment before shrugging and sitting on the edge of the bed.

He was close enough that if Adam wanted, he could reach over and choke him out.

Well, if Vincent wasn’t a disturbingly fast blood-drinking monster, he could have.

Play nice. Stay alive. He tried to convince his heartbeat to slow down as he slowly unclenched his hands.

Those blue eyes stared into his soul, and while Adam usually hated prolonged eye contact like that, for once it did not seem like an interrogation.

As if Vincent was searching for something, and for some reason, Adam wanted him to find it.

Maybe he had been without contact too long.

“Why aren’t you eating? Do you think if you’re malnourished, I won’t feed on you? Because I can assure you, that is not the case, and you’ll just make this arrangement more difficult on yourself.”

“How many people have you done this to?” Adam asked. He supposed he didn’t want to hear the answer. Or better yet, he should have asked how many were still alive afterwards. But knowing that answer might destroy his ability to keep his cool.