the moment, I was more concerned with getting something to drink. So I brought the bottle to my lips, sucking liquid from it greedily as the man in black held my wrists together. It would have been kinky if it weren’t quite so terrifying.
Then the ground fell away.
For a second, me, the man in black, the bottles of bleach, and the off-brand sports drink were all suspended mid-air. Then we crashed back down to the floor, thumping at slightly different frequencies. The last little bit of liquid in the bottle splashed all over my already grimy sweater, then trickled to the ground.
“What the shit?” I said before I remembered I wasn’t supposed to talk. “What the hell was that?”
I pushed myself upwards and—idiotically—further back into the closet. I should have used the moment of distraction to try to get away from the guy, to get loose and run out of whatever building we were in, but my lizard brain was yelling that it was safer to cower next to buckets and mops than to brave whatever else was out there. It felt like the ground was still moving with aftershocks.
The guy in black had fallen to his knees during the shift, and when he pushed back up, he straddled my legs and began feeling around for the handcuffs. Desperate to distract him, I kept talking.
“Was that an earthquake? Where the hell are we? And how long have I been out? Did you take me to Japan or something?”
California had plenty of earthquakes, too, but I somehow doubted my abductors would take me back to my home state. A private jet could have gotten me out of Iceland, though, and if I’d been unconscious for long enough, who knew where we might have touched down.
Though for all I knew, we might not even have left the island.
“Does Iceland have earthquakes?” I asked, looking around again as though the dim closet and too bright hallway were going to provide fresh answers.
The guy laughed. Cruelly.
I know that sounds dramatic, but seriously. It was like rocks being poured down a disposal, and he gave me a leer that wasn’t the least bit sexual, but still made my dick shrink ten sizes and sent my balls trying to climb back up inside my body.
“Iceland?” he said, still laughing. “We haven’t been in Iceland for twenty-four hours.”
Fuck. That was definitely not the answer I was hoping for. Not only was I nowhere near my family, I’d been out cold for an entire day.
“Now shut up and let me cuff you again,” the guy said.
Also not words I particularly wanted to hear—at least not in this context. The floor still felt like it was shifting underneath me, and I wasn’t too steady to start with, but this might be my only chance to get away. Summoning up every ounce of my sister Leah’s stubbornness, and my sister Letty’s bravery, I threw myself at the guy, hoping to knock him off balance and get around him.
All I actually did was push him back a few inches for two whole seconds. Then his hands were at my throat. And not to keep beating a dead horse, but I was starting to think that people who got choked in porn weren’t getting choked for real because let me tell you, there was nothing erotic about this. Not in the slightest, not even if the dude had been rawing me and hitting my prostate with every thrust.
I knew I should go limp. That if I stopped struggling, I’d have a better chance of getting his hands off my neck, but I just fought harder. My vision had just started to go dark around the edges when the floor gave way again.
The man in black let go in surprise, and miraculously, my body moved when I told it to. I was up and shoving past the guy while he was still lying on his back. Even more miraculously, I had the presence of mind to knee him in the balls as I went by.
The guy moaned as I scrambled over him, out into the bright lights of the hallway. The hall was way shorter than I’d expected and led to a closed door on either end. Turning left for no reason other than that the ground pitched me in that direction, I sprinted—well, wobbled—down the hall and threw the door open to find a set of steps.
There was a door at the top, and I could hear howling wind on the other