His Secret Desire (18 page)

I could feel a mattress beneath me and when I looked around, we were in Alex’s bedroom. The last remnants of the orgasm were falling away, and Alex slowly slid out of me. I laid next to him, rubbing my hands through the small patch of trimmed pubic hair that adorned his slowly falling penis. I ran a single finger down the shaft of his cock, still large and captivating, despite falling down to its flaccid state. Alex let out a small moan and I kissed him.

“This doesn’t have to end,” he said.

I looked over to the bedside table and I saw that the clock was running through numbers as if time was racing forward at a breakneck speed. When I looked back to Alex, he was asleep. Then the clock began to shriek a loud buzzing sound, and the room dissipated, along with Alex.

I awoke, startled. The dream was swirling down the drain of my consciousness and when I tried to close my eyes to chase it, the buzzing sound filled the room again, destroying any hope of returning to the wonderful dream of Alex.

I rose out of the cot and tripped over the blanket, alarmed over the buzzing sound. It was as loud as a jet engine and I put my hands to my ears to protect them, but the buzzing penetrated every pore of my body and vibrated through me. I screamed for it to stop.

The buzzing stopped so abruptly it startled me.

“Do you know why you are here?” asked the electronic voice. I turned to face the two-way mirror, suddenly very aware that someone was watching me.

I made no move to answer at first. I calculated my response carefully. This was the first opening into why I had been contained in this prison, and I did not want to steer the conversation awry or answer incorrectly. I wanted the answer to the question, badly, but I did not want to show it. It was purely instinctual.

“I’m here because of my job at Strauss Engines,” I said flatly. I pulled the chair out and sat down. There was a bowl of noodles on the desk, still warm. I tried to remember if it was morning or afternoon and could not. There was just no way of telling anything down here. With the lights on all the time, it was high-noon always.

“Correct,” the voice said.

I waited. I began to eat the noodles slowly, acting as if I was disinterested in what the voice was saying. I noticed the noodles were a little saltier this time and I drank the broth greedily. Either my taste-buds were adjusting to the blandness of the food they gave me or they were putting a little more flavor in the food. Either way, I ate without relish and waited for the voice to continue.

“Do you think that your boss is coming to save you?”

I paused, a noodle hanging comically from my mouth. If I hadn’t been so alarmed, the scene would have looked funny. Instead, I let the noodle fall back down into the bowl and I choked on the noodles in my mouth, refusing to spit them back into the bowl and give the voice the satisfaction of seeing me that startled. The noodles slumped down my throat and sat in my stomach like a brick. My stomach tightened and I felt like vomiting them up. I drank a sip of water and calmed myself.

“Someone will come,” I said casually. “Or you’re going to take me somewhere. Why else would you bring me here?”

The room was silent for a full minute. I began to feel a sense of triumph in the conversation, that I had somehow struck a nerve or that I had been right. Still, I did not have the information that I desperately wanted, so the victory felt short-lived.

“No one is going to come for a harlot like you.”

Through the electronic distortion that masked the voice of whoever was speaking, I could hear the disgust when the word “harlot” came over the loudspeaker. It was such an odd choice of words.

Practically no one used the word harlot. It was always whore, skank, or slut. Harlot was only one step above floozie. Yet my mind reached through the dark caverns of my memory and made a connection. I knew someone who had used that word recently. More than that, that person had called me a harlot.

And that person had reason to kidnap me.

Henderson.

I was positive it was him. Yet I made no move to identify him. If I addressed him as Henderson, maybe he’d have me killed outright. He’d already kidnapped me, and that was a serious offense in the judicial system. I racked my brain through all the Law and Order episodes I had watched in the background while studying for finals for just how serious a crime kidnapping was and decided that it was definitely close to murder. If it really was Henderson behind this, and I was now positive it was, and he knew that I knew it was him, he’d have me killed to save his ass.

“Then you’re going to trade me away, right?” I asked, trying to move forward in the conversation like I had not just had a major revelation as to who had thrown me into this prison.

Something clicked audibly through the loudspeakers. A phone was ringing. I listened with a growing sense of anxiety in my chest. Then another click as someone on the line picked up.

“This is Alexander Strauss,” Alex’s voice said through the loudspeaker.

My heart practically exploded in my chest. I was filled with so much energy that I felt like I could have jumped right through the two-way mirror and taken out every one of my captors. It was really his voice, strong and assertive. I was lost in the moment and I cried out for him to hear me.

“Alex! You have to help me Alex!” I cried loudly.

“Mr. Strauss,” the voice said. “I believe you are missing something.”

“Alex!” I yelled one more time. They never would have risked letting me talk to Alex, he probably could only hear the electronic voice through the phone.

“Oh,” Alex said coolly. “And what would that be?”

I picked apart every syllable of what he said instantly in my mind. He sounded annoyed, as though he was being taunted by an arrogant chess player who had gained the upper-hand and now he was telling him to just move already. There was no distress in his voice. No real sense of urgency or dismay. Shouldn’t Alex be freaking out that I’ve been missing for this long? There was no way that Alex was unaware at this point. Whether Gary was alive and well, which I dearly hoped for, or injured, the news would have gotten back to Alex.

“A pretty little blonde who’s made some public appearances with you lately. I believe her name is Samantha. Maybe you have a nice little pet name for her, but most people address her as Samantha Dubois, am I correct?”

“Is she dead?” Alex said flatly.

My heart sank so low in my chest that I felt like I could have fallen into a heap on the ground. It was worse than when the son of a bitch who tweaked my nipples punched me in the stomach. There was nothing in his voice at all. He was devoid of emotion. It was like he was asking what the weather was outside, knowing that it was probably raining.

“No, she is very much alive. She’d come to the phone if she could, but she’s indisposed at the moment,” the voice teased.

“You bastard!” I yelled out. “Fucking bastard!”

The voice made no notice of me and said nothing.

“Did you hurt her when you captured her?” asked Alex. His voice remained calm and cool. I felt like vomiting.

“Nothing permanent. She’ll live. For now, at least.”

I felt a pang of fear at the last part of what the voice had said. I knew it was a deliberate way to goad Alex, and maybe even get me at the same time, but it put this whole thing back into perspective. I was kidnapped. I could be murdered at any time. Nobody knew where I was. I had suppressed those facts from my thoughts since I had arrived, but now I felt a whole new wave of terror.

“How many of your men were hurt in the operation? My driver told me that he connected with at least three of your men. Witnesses at the scene reported that two of them were dragged away by the other men. Are they alright?” asked Alex. His voice remained calm, but I could tell a hint of sarcasm peppered it. “You can tell them that Gary is just fine. He’s got a black eye that looks rather nasty, but other than that he’s fine. Just fine.”

The voice didn’t reply to this. I felt a wave of relief at hearing that Gary was alright. The feeling in my stomach abated slightly and I now felt a wave of nausea pass.

“We have the girl. But we’re willing to do business. A trade. You trade us something we want and we give you the girl.” The voice was flat. Harsh.

“Yes, but in order to have it be a fair trade, you’d have to have something that I want,” Alex replied.

I grew dizzy. My whole world was falling apart around me. I walked over to the cot and fell back onto it, sitting down. Everything was spinning and I braced myself with my hand on the wall. There was no way Alex could mean what it sounded like.

“We have Samantha. If you ever want to see her again, you’ll give us what we want.”

“Samantha Dubois is an assistant of mine, nothing more,” Alex said, piercing my heart with every word. “I could buy and sell twelve assistants just like her and it wouldn’t even begin to impact my wallet. You really think I’ll give you what you want for her?”

“You do realize what will happen if you refuse?” ask the voice.

I felt numb. I would have expected to be weeping, or crying out for Alex to think about what he was doing, but instead, I just sat there. It was like all the emotion had been drained out of me.

“Samantha can fend for herself.”

There was nothing more. The speakers fell silent and I was left in the wake of what Alex had said.

Chapter Eighteen

I sat on the cot for what seemed like hours. Everything was lost. Alex had abandoned me completely to the fate that awaited me in this prison. No one was coming. I was on my own.

Bitter tears formed in my eyes and I bit down on my lip to fight them back. I began to think about how I had been played. Alexander Strauss had used me as much as he could and when I became more hassle than I was worth, he had discarded me like a piece of trash. More than likely Henderson had kidnapped me in an attempt to gain something from Alex, and whatever it was, Alexander Strauss had valued it more highly than my life.

I wondered how long it would be before men came to get rid of me. I held on to a dim hope that maybe they didn’t have the stomach for murder, and that they’d just let me go. I hadn’t seen anybody’s face and I certainly didn’t know how I had gotten here. But when I thought about it further, it just didn’t seem likely. I was way too much of a risk now. I was going to killed.

The tears dried in my eyes which now burned. My hands shook, although I couldn’t tell whether in anger or fear. I looked down at my grey sweatpants and brand new tennis shoes and thought that it was a shitty outfit to die in. This prison cell was a shitty place to die in. I could only hope it would be quick.

I started to smell something. Smoke. I could smell smoke. I looked around for the source, but I didn’t see anything. And the smoke was acrid, nasty smoke. It wasn’t like smoke from a fire. It made my eyes burn and when I breathed it in, my throat lit up like I had inhaled acid. I covered my face with my sweatshirt and tried to slow my breathing so I wouldn’t breathe any more of the stuff in.

They’re poisoning me! I thought wildly. This isn’t a prison cell. It’s a fucking gas chamber!

I threw myself at the door and started to bang my fists with all my energy. I had to stop every few moments to cover my face with my sweatshirt so I could take a deep breathe and hold it while I threw myself at the door.

“Let me out!” I yelled. “Let me out!” I pounded at the door in a panic.

Looking around the room I tried to think of a way to escape. I picked up the chair and threw it at the two-way mirror with more strength than I thought I had. Adrenaline was flowing through my veins and I was in a full-on panic. I had to get out of this room. I had to clear the acid smoke that was slowly killing me.

I struck at the mirror at the same place I had first thrown the chair and a small crack enlarged by an inch. Not good enough. The chair vibrated in my hand like a painful jackhammer that wanted to dance away, but I held tight. My arms were sore with the recoil, but I didn’t relent. I smashed the chair into the mirror again and another crack grew from the small crack that was already there.

By now, the air was vile. I was coughing. My efforts with the chair were going nowhere. At the rate I was cracking the glass, it would have taken me a full day to make a hole to even breathe through, let alone escape through. I was going to die in this cell, poisoned like a rat.

I wrapped myself in the sheet from the cot and breathed through it. It helped, but only marginally. I ran the faucet on the sink at full blast and dunked my face in, trying to clear my eyes of the burning sensation that felt like someone was rubbing glass in them. I coughed again and when I tried to breathe, everything hurt.

Then I heard the door begin to open.

They were coming for me. I wasn’t dying fast enough and they were coming to finish me off quickly. The door was opening now and I had the metal chair in my arms.

I took a deep breath from the blanket and stood by the wall, trying to be as hidden as possible in the tiny room. At the first sign of footsteps, I was going to jump out and strike with the chair. Even if it proved futile in the end, I would at least wound one of these bastards. I steadied myself and waited for my cue.

The door swung wide open and three men burst in the room. They spotted me immediately. In the moment before I swung the chair, I saw men in full body armor. They wore gas-masks that covered their faces completely and two of them had pistols. The one man leading the charge had no weapons at all.

I swung the chair with the last vestige of strength I had. The soldier leading the pack to murder me ducked. The chair went high and connected with the wall. It flew out of my hand and I cried out of pain and defeat. Then I collapsed.

I looked up the men suited up in body armor and resigned myself to my fate. Surely it would be quicker and more painless than the torture of this gas. I would be shot in the head. Lights out, show’s over folks.

Hands lifted up my head and something slipped around my face. I started to fight before I realized it was a gas mask. Confused, I stopped resisting and looked closely at the soldier strapping the gas mask on me. Behind a pane of a plastic guard around his face, I could see a set of piercing blue eyes that I knew well.