The Hero and the Hidden Royal - Renae Kaye Page 0,48
it now? The why gave Derek the greatest amount of fear. The who he could guess at since the same man who attacked Sam was involved. What time was it? Derek patted his pockets, automatically looking for his phone, but it was gone. He remembered they’d used what he assumed was chloroform on him. Chloroform used to be used on people for surgical operations, he recalled vaguely. It shouldn’t have put him out for long. Not unless they used some sort of other agent on him while he was unconscious. He couldn’t see his arms, but he touched them to see if they appeared to have been injected with something. Nothing. He mentally scanned himself. He felt a little bruised and roughed up, but nothing hurt, broken, or bleeding.
The man on the chair, obviously satisfied Derek was safely imprisoned, casually got up, retrieved his weapon, and strolled towards the cage, stroking the barrel of his rifle idly. He checked the large padlock on the outside of the cage by giving it a rattle.
“What do you want with me?” Derek asked with a tremor in his voice.
The man ignored him while he stared into the cage, then held up the mask again to view Derek kneeling inside. “Fuck. That’s so cool. I wish I could go invisible like that. Imagine all the shit you could get up to while you’re invisible.”
Childishly, Derek stuck up a middle finger at the man. It didn’t bother him. The man chuckled and lowered the mask. “Please tell me you can do some awesome shit while invisible. Imagine how much pussy you could be near and touch. You could just sneak into the women’s changing rooms and sit there to enjoy the view.”
Derek rubbed his face and wished it were a bad dream. “I’m gay,” he said shortly, not wanting to get into the physical impossibility of sneaking into a changing room let alone the morality of it. “Why did you kidnap me?”
Infuriatingly he was ignored again. “Gay?” the man snorted with disgust. “What a fucking waste. I guess I should’ve realized that. That’s how we found you. You hanging around that ape who was always asking questions and spying on us. I wish I’d hit him harder that night in the alley. Asshole, sticking his nose into our business and then coming and interrupting a job.”
A bolt of fear went through Derek. “Sam?” he asked urgently. “You know Sam?”
“Sam? Is that the name of the delivery driver ape who thinks he’s better than us?”
He was talking about Sam. Derek desperately tried to make sense of it all. “What do you mean, that’s how you found me? What do you want with me?”
The man was arrogant, his belief in his own superiority and safety making him talkative. He smiled as if he were congratulating himself as he wandered the room, fiddling with the mask in his hand, the rifle held loosely in his left hand. “Of course that’s how we found you. The big ape was being a nosy shit and needed a thumping to tell him to mind his own business. So Joe had him watched. I didn’t believe it when Pav came back and reported Sam’s little boyfriend could go invisible.”
The gang had been watching Sam and him? His skin crawled.
“That doesn’t explain why you saw the need to kidnap me,” Derek spat back. It didn’t faze the man keeping him prisoner.
“Well, you see, Joe had two big headaches. The first headache was that the ape was asking too many questions. The second headache was that we had ourselves a pet superpower that helped us out from time to time, but he went and got arrested, didn’t he?”
“A pet supo?” Derek asked in astonishment.
This was highly amusing to the man who turned back and grinned at the cage as if he were the champion of intellectual studies. “Yep. FedEx. Not that Joe would ever call him our pet to his face. Nah. Joe’s smarter than that. That pet thought he was equal with us—just as big of a bad ass as we could be. Fucking idiot. We just used him, you know? He helped us break into a couple of places to get our payment and Joe gave him a cut.”
FedEx? The moniker rang a bell. If there was a supo who was using his powers to commit crimes, Sylvie needed to be told. The Ministry of Power would get involved, too. Derek knew he had to find out who it was.
“What did this