Chapter 17

SEVENTEEN

"Wher—"I snapped my eyes shut, willing the room to stop spinning and trying to choke down the bile that rose in my throat. My mouth felt like I'd been sucking on cotton balls, and when I couldn't swallow without making myself gag, I concentrated on taking small breaths instead.

When the urge to vomit subsided, I chanced opening my eyes again. The room came into focus slowly. Too slowly, and the image never quite resolved the way it should. It took me way too long to realize my vision was blurry because my glasses were missing. I tried to lift my hands to rub the grit away from my eyes, but I couldn't move my arms. They were bound behind me, secured to the hard chair I was sitting in with what felt like zip ties covered in duct tape. The sharp edges of the plastic dug into my wrists as I tried to twist them free, and the tape stuck to my skin pulled painfully with every small movement.

Arguably, I had done my fair share of stupid shit in my time on this planet, but not waiting the two minutes it would have taken Cal to finish his phone call was easily one of the dumbest. Maybe it had actually started with leaving the house to get that drive.

Fuck.

Where was the drive?

Panic threatened to overwhelm me, and the desire to scream for help bubbled up from my chest, but I didn't utter a sound. Yelling wasn't how I was going to get myself out of this. And I needed to keep my head even though it throbbed, pulsing in time with the beat of my racing heart and making me feel dizzy and like I couldn't trust what I was seeing.

Taking better stock of my surroundings, I realized I was in a large room full of rusted-out mechanical equipment. Overhead lights barely penetrated the darkness, and the windows were placed high up on the walls, so any light they offered didn't make it down to where I was. Directly in front of me but a distance away was a room or some kind of office up on a catwalk. Lights were on in the room, and I saw shadows as they passed in front of the window that looked down on the abandoned factory floor. Someone else was here.

Someone else who knew who I was and where I lived before Nero brought me home.

Nero.

My mate.

Who I might never see again if I didn't figure out a way to get myself out of this mess.

If I could shift into my otter form, I could easily slip free. I tried to focus on calling my animal side forward, but my otter felt out of reach, and trying to shift was making the pain in my head worse. There were drugs on the market that made it impossible for shifters to take their animal forms—or, in more severe situations, impossible for shifters in their animal forms to return to their human forms. Usually these kinds of pharmaceuticals were used to aid healing, but it appeared my kidnappers had no problem using them for the exact opposite. They must have hit me with a cocktail of some sort of sedative and an antitransmutative.

Which meant until the effects of the drug wore off, which could be another couple of hours or a couple of days, I was fucked.

Unless…

Tugging on my bonds, I tried again to see if I could twist my hands free, but the plastic didn't budge.

But the chair was wooden. Assuming my kidnappers had used what was handy and not brought in their own chair for this particular hostage situation, it stood to reason that it probably wasn't in the best shape. I'd seen enough action movies to know if that was the case and I rocked the chair hard enough and it hit the ground just right, it would break, and I could free my hands.

Shifting to one side and lifting the legs, I learned this was going to be a lot harder than I thought, and having my hands bound made shifting my weight that much more difficult. The legs slammed down on the ground again, and the sound echoed through the cavernous room, drawing the attention of my kidnappers. Exactly what I hadn't wanted to happen.

Crackling feedback pierced the air.

"Ah, Mr. White, you're finally awake."

The factory's old PA system distorted the speaker's voice enough that I couldn't place it, though it sounded vaguely familiar, which made the hair on my arms stand up. The speaker was male, and he clearly knew who I was, which left me at yet another disadvantage.

"I'll cut to the chase. I want the file you stole. Where is it?"

If he was asking, then he didn't have it. His goons didn't see it fall from my hand when they grabbed me from my apartment, which meant I could play dumb.

"Wh—" I tried to speak, but my voice came out on a parched rasp. Clearing my throat did nothing. Rustling and the distant slamming of a door came from the direction of the lit-up office, and then a shadow moved down a creaking set of metal stairs, growing larger and larger until a mountain of a man in a black turtleneck and black pants stood in front of me holding a paper cup. He wasn't familiar.

He held it to my lips, but I pressed them firmly shut and turned my head away, jostling the cup and splashing liquid onto my lap.

Turtleneck grabbed my head, squeezing so it felt like my brain was in a vise and forcing the cup to my lips. "Drink it!" His low rumble of a voice wasn't the same one that had spoken over the PA, and if nothing else, that confirmed that I was outnumbered at least two to one.

Tepid water lapped against my lips, and I parted them just enough to let in the smallest trickle. The water tasted like it had been sitting in old pipes, but after the first sip, I opened my mouth and gulped it down, my throat crying out in sweet relief. When the water was gone, Turtleneck released my head, letting it snap back on my neck, and crumpled the cup in one meaty fist before dropping it to the ground. Then, he spun on his heel and lumbered back the way he'd come.

"Now that you've enjoyed my hospitality, Mr. White, where is the file?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Let me paint you a picture." He cleared his throat, and feedback echoed through the warehouse, making me wince. "Five years ago, a young, cocky hacker took a challenge to hack the FBI on a dare from a dark web forum. That hacker took something that didn't belong to him. Tsk, tsk, tsk. My employer wants it back."

How the fuck could he possibly know that? There was no way.

Unless.

"Yes, Felix White, I know exactly who you are. I know everything about you. I know everything you helped Jordan Banks do." A sardonic laugh came over the PA, and a chill slipped down my spine. "You think he found you by accident? Speaking of accidents, what do you think really happened to your parents?"

Bile rose in my throat again, and for a second, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to choke it back down. This bastard, whoever he was, was implying that I'd been someone's pawn for a very long time.

"It's so easy to create a ‘mechanical issue' on a small plane."

The room spun around me until I thought I was going to pass out. A second later and I might have, but I dragged air into my lungs before panic could drag me under. For the first time since I'd come to zip-tied to a chair, I was actually worried I wasn't going to walk away from this.

"You think it was a coincidence you ended up part of Jordan's Ponzi scheme? I'm the one who told him the kind of asset you could be."

Biting the inside of my cheek to keep from reacting, I schooled my expression into a mask of nonchalance.

"Too bad Agent Stone got to you before I could. She hid you well, but I found you eventually. Took me almost five years, but I did it." Another maniacal laugh. This guy was clearly unhinged. The familiarity of his voice tugged at the back of my mind, but I couldn't pull a face to go with it into focus. My head hurt too damn much, and everything the asshole on the PA was saying was tumbling through my synapses in free fall.

"We both know you have what I'm looking for, so I'm going to give you one more chance to tell me where it is before I come down there and things get a little more interesting." There was joy in his tone that told me things were going to get interesting for me whether I told him what he wanted to know or not.

"I don't know." It wasn't technically a lie. The drive had slipped from my fingers at my apartment. It could be among the remains of my belongings, or, and I prayed this was the case, Cal had gone into my place to retrieve it.

Thinking of Cal made me think of Nero.

My mate.

What would happen to me if I didn't make it home to him?

It didn't bear thinking about.

So I'd do everything I could to make it back to him.

Even if my options were limited.

"Have it your way." The PA clicked off, and deafening silence settled around me, punctuated only by the slamming of a metal door and footsteps on the metal steps leading from the catwalk. The sound of footfalls was muffled as the man behind the voice moved through the gloom toward me.

My heart beat so hard I thought it was going to burst through my ribs, and with every beat, I reminded myself that I could make it through this for Nero, to make it back to my mate.

As the man emerged from the darkness, my breath caught in my chest.