Page 118 of Dangerous Mission
Chapter Fifty-Eight
What the hell is that noise?
It’s a ringing phone. Not mine. The ringtone is some song. I open my mouth to grouse about the interruption to my long needed sleep, but my lips won’t part. Fuck.
My head is heavy… and there’s a piece of tape?—
No!
No! No! No!Fuck no.
I shake my head as I force my bleary eyes to focus.
I’m in the bedroom. The bed is empty. It’s night.
I’m naked and bound to a chair.
Aria.
My chest nearly explodes from the sudden thrashing behind my sternum.
Goddamnit. No.
Jerking one hand, then the other, I test the tapearound my wrists, bellowing against the duct tape on my mouth like a raving lunatic.
I’ve never seen red so dark. So consuming. I’m alive with rage.
The chair scrapes against the floor with every jerk, but the tape holds.
Mother fuckers. Someone used a whole damned roll on me.
Blood. There will be lots of blood for this.
I throw the chair over onto the floor, crashing on my side and begin thrashing like a wild animal against the tape around my ankles.
This. Goddamned. Chair. Is no match for me.
Gathering a head of steam and feeling the strength coursing back into my body, I buck wildly and snap one of the legs off.
One more wild thrust—channeling a kicking mule—I splinter the other side of the chair.
I’m coated in sweat by the time I get to my knees. An oily feeling churns in my gut. Fucking poison. Probably some cheap date rape drug, or tranq.
As I climb to my bare feet, the remainder of the chair clings to my back held by the tape around my wrists.
Panting through my nose, I ram myself into the wall, over and over until the wooden chair splinters into jagged shreds.
A chair arm dangles from each of my wrists, at last allowing me to tear the tape off of my mouth.
For a few seconds, I gulp air that’s scented with Aria’s sweet scent, our sex, and the rinds left from the fruit we shared hours ago.
With every breath my head gets clearer. The fruit musthave been tainted. We shared every item, so she would have been poisoned too. She’s much smaller. She could still be unconscious.
They could be doing god knows what to her right now.
I tear the room apart looking for my phone and my sidearm, but they're gone. Whoever did this made sure I wouldn’t be a problem.
The phone that woke me is ringing somewhere in another part of the house. It takes me several moments to find it in one of Aria’s bags.
