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Ryder

I jolted awake with a start, the nightmare playing in my head finally dwindling to a close. I was curled up in the fetal position, shivering, and even though I didn’t want to go back to sleep, exhaustion clawed at my brain. It pulled me back down, but I struggled against it. I didn’t want to feel that sharp sting and the pavement rising up to meet my body, the harsh touch of men I could see only in flashes and glimpses.

My head was spinning, and no matter how hard I tried to open my eyes, they just wouldn’t seem to cooperate.

I grasped for the wall beside my bed, but there was nothing there. Had I curled up the wrong way?

I groped for any wall, and I found… cement? It was cold and harsh to the touch, nothing familiar.

That realization was enough to send me into a panic, enough to where my eyes finally opened halfway, and I could see that I wasn’t in my room. What the fuck? I didn’t drink because of this. I’d had too many blackouts in college, and I was tired of waking up in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people, wondering what I’d done .

So why was I here?

Why were there three cement walls and a…

I had to squint, my vision so blurry everything tried to multiply, but I realized dimly that there was a cell door there. Metal, with thick bars that flashed in the dim light and hurt my eyes, just like prison cells in the movies.

Jesus Fucking Christ, how much had I had to drink?

If I couldn’t even remember drinking, it had to have been bad. Fuck.

“H’lo?” I called out, though the word sounded distorted and thick even to my ears. I grimaced, but I tried again. “Hello? Anyone…” My voice rasped over the words, and I drew in a deep breath in frustration. Someone had to be around to explain to me what was going on and what I had done in my drunken stupor.

My girlfriend was going to have to be my one call out of this place. Maybe she’d wait until she got me home to kill me for doing something this stupid when I’d promised I wouldn’t drink again.

“Shit,” I mumbled under my breath.

It seemed to take forever for my vision to clear enough for me to take stock of the situation and for my mind to understand that while there were walls, I wasn’t close to any of them. I was damn near in the middle of the cell, and I hadn’t been sleeping on a bed.

At least I was still dressed, which was an improvement to some of my other situations in the past, but there was some weird pillow thing under me and the blanket over me was thin.

I licked my dry lips, trying to swallow over the lump in my throat that told me this… might not be what I thought it was.

But what it was, exactly — that, I had no idea .

My lungs suddenly felt like they couldn’t draw in air. I was going to end up having a panic attack before I even figured out what was going on, and no one was around to talk me down.

Hell, no one was around at all, and my chest felt tight, painful, as I struggled to breathe. Struggled, fought, and lost.

The light above was so dim that I could barely see anything, and there were only shadows beyond the metal bars of the cell. I trembled, and the more it sunk in that this was not some ordinary prison cell, the less I could catch my breath.

I gasped, hand going up to my chest, and I tried to remember everything I’d been taught about how to deal with these. It had been a long time since I’d had one, and I—

“Breathe, Toby,” a voice came from the other side of the bars. “Count your breaths and breathe.”

What the ever-loving fuck?

Who the hell did he think I was?

It felt even harder to draw breath through my constricted chest then, like the command worked as the counterpart instead of as the actual order.

“Who’re you?” I slurred, my heart pounding so hard and fast that I might as well have been a cornered rabbit.

My heart was going to burst — or I was going to piss my pants — if I didn’t figure out what was going on.

“Your new master.”

I wheezed as I got caught somewhere between a gasp and a laugh, choking on the sound. I wanted to ask who thought this was a good joke, but I knew better. There was something about this that was far, far too intricate for a prank. I could barely even catch a breath just sitting there, let alone when I was trying to talk. I needed to calm myself down before I started asking questions.

I had a feeling they needed to count.

The lights finally started to brighten, and I winced, bringing one shaking, weak hand to the side of my head. It pounded beneath the sudden increase in sensations. Christ, wasn’t a panic attack bad enough? Did I have to have dry mouth, a headache, and… Was I hallucinating?

Maybe I was still drunk. Maybe I was sick, and I was delirious, and this was some fucked-up dream.

I knew I shouldn’t have read those books, no matter how many times Oscar had tried to foist them on me.

I closed my eyes, counted to five silently, then opened them again. This time, I could see someone there. Dim LED lights lined the sides of the room like we were in a movie theatre, and it provided just enough light on the other side of the illuminated cell for me to see that there was a figure. Not much else, not when it was bright on the inside and so dark out there, but it was a man.

Obviously. The sound of his voice had given that much away.

My brain felt like someone had stuffed cotton inside of it, making it difficult to make sense of anything that was happening. I was still caught up on the whole “having too much to drink” thing, but there was a part of me that knew better.

“No, seriously. Who are you?”

“I already answered that question,” he said, stepping into the light to give me a full glimpse of him in all his… scarred glory.

Something tugged at my memory about the way he looked, but I couldn’t put together the pieces.

I shuddered as my eyes slid from the top of his head to his almost melted-looking half of a face down to the casual t-shirt and jeans he wore to his shoes.

His eyes narrowed, and I knew he’d seen the way I’d recoiled from how he looked.

Who wouldn’t? It was human nature to hone in on imperfections, to know when people just didn’t belong with the rest of the pack. And this guy? He definitely didn’t belong anywhere near it.

“Whoever told you I’m into some Master/slave shit totally trolled you, man,” I said. My heart fluttered oddly as he put his hands into his pockets and just… watched me. “So there’s the whole kidnapping thing. People are going to miss me.”

“People are going to notice you’re gone, you mean.”

I scowled at him, lifting my hand to my forehead as it swam from the volume of his voice. “Same thing.”

“No one misses entitled brats like you,” he said, lip curving into the beginnings of a sneer.

“Entitled… What the fuck, asshole?” I demanded, only to cringe again. I made my voice quieter before I punched out my own eardrums with the pounding of this headache. “Of course they’ll miss me. My parents, my girlfriend, my frat, everyone. It’s not like I’m someone you can just make disappear.”

“Except I have,” he pointed out. “You’ve vanished without a trace, and no one’s going to look for long.”

I ugly-laughed. “All right. This isn’t funny. Just open the fucking door and help me out of here.”

Because my legs sure as hell weren’t going to support me, not with whatever was running through my system. They had me trapped firmly in the tiny bed-thing, where I could do nothing but snark off to him — and I couldn’t even do that well, considering my brain was still trying to catch up to what was happening.

I wasn’t sure it even could. This just seemed like one of those impossible scenes in a movie, where some kid got taken and their badass parents rescued them. Except I didn’t have badass parents. My mom was an investment banker, and my dad was a retired lineman. Plenty of money, but not so much with the personal badassery.

“You’ll understand better when the drugs wear off,” he told me, hands finally coming out of his pockets as he got closer. His fingers gripped the bars of the cell, and it was clear that thing wasn’t going anywhere. There was no simple sliding lock. There wasn’t even anything I could see that made it open or close.

I’d have to get up and look when I could.

This was also the part in the movie where I figured out how to disengage some mechanical lock using the zipper of my pants or something.

“Now it’s time for your first lesson.”

I stared at him, incredulous. “Even if I was going to listen to you, I can’t even move. Your goonies pumped a little too much into my system.”

Or I’d given myself too much to drink — tomato, tomahto.

“You can do this task,” he told me, his voice low in the darkness, but somehow taking on this cajoling property I recognized as the one I used when talking to my fucking dog. “It’s just something small, and I’ll give you a blanket when you do it.”

When. Not if.

This guy needed to find himself some help, stat.

“It’s going to get cold in there soon,” he warned me, crossing to the thermostat on the wall — nearby, but not close enough for me to reach by far. He pressed a button several times.

I stubbornly shook my head, only to regret it when the world began to spin all over again. I groaned, bringing up my too-heavy hands to the sides of my face and trying to make everything stop moving.

“All you have to do is take off your shirt. I’ll come get it and give you a blanket.”

I dimly noticed he didn’t say he’d turn the temperature back up, which made me wary. It could get really fucking cold in here, and it was becoming a cement prison… becoming?

I almost had to laugh at myself, and if it hadn’t hurt to, I might have.

“Fuck you.”

He shrugged, not even batting an eye — like he knew I was going to refuse and had already planned on it, which was somehow creepier than his face. “I’ll be watching you.”

Like that wasn’t worse.

“When you’re ready to cooperate, just let out a little bark.” His lips twitched into something resembling a smile, one corner tilting up a bit oddly because of the way his cheek was stretched. “Then take off your shirt and toss it as far as you can so I know you’re serious.”

“I’m not going to bark,” I told him stubbornly.

“You will,” he told me. Another one of those careless shrugs, the ones that meant he thought I’d already lost.

I hadn’t, though, and I wasn’t going to give in that easily. He’d have to take my shirt off me himself if that was what he wanted so bad.

I’d fight him as long as I had to.