Page 65 of His Captor

“You have to trust me,” the voice said, just as annoying as the lights. “Thiswillget results.”

I blinked a few times to try to clear my vision. The room was bare, with just a few metal shelves with barely anything on them. I lay on a bare mattress. It wasn’t a half bad mattress, either. I kind of wanted to close my eyes again, ignore the persistent pain in my gut, and go back to sleep until whatever weird fantasy I’d signed up for ended.

But it wasn’t a fantasy, my brain told me, cutting through the lingering effects of whatever I’d been injected with to knock me out. That part of the whole thing came back to me and made me restless and motivated to pull myself together enough to sit up. I’d been fake-kidnapped plenty of times, but I’d never had the alpha drug me to knock me out so he could move me.

I’d been kidnapped for real. That thought almost made me laugh out loud. I kept my mouth tightly shut, though. Because I’d done this before in make-believe form, and I knew that staying quiet and drawing as little attention as possible was the safest way to go.

“Nothing is wrong with him,” the angry voice said again. “He’s fine. He’s sleeping.”

Another pause as I pushed through the fog to sit.

“Just sleeping. I don’t know. He’s pregnant. Maybe omegas just sleep a lot when they’re—don’t talk to me like that! I told you I would convince Canton to close up shop and sign on with us, and—no, I haven’t approached him directly, do you think I’m?—”

I nearly laughed again as I managed to get my body upright. Whoever was on the phone was getting his ass chewed out, and not in a good way.

It was still a little hard to think, but I knew enough from playing with this scenario to know that thinking was the best way to get out of a kidnapping situation. So I scanned the room, looking for the door—it was all the way over on the other side of the room, and it didn’t have a window—and searching for anything that I could use as a weapon if I needed to defend myself or fight my way out.

There wasn’t much. If I’d had time, I would have tried to take one of the metal shelves apart, but without tools, I didn’t think that would happen. A few of the shelves had cardboard boxes on them, but from their markings, it looked like they contained paper towels and toilet paper. I mean, if there was a mess that might come in handy, but I wasn’t exactly going to be able to wipe the angry guy to death.

“Fine, send someone,” the angry guy huffed at last. “Maybe then you’ll see that I mean business.”

From the sound of things, he ended the call and wanted to throw his phone across the room. He huffed out a breath then muttered something under his breath. Then he stepped out from around the corner of the shelf and into my line of sight.

For a moment, his eyes went wide when he saw I was awake. “Don’t even think of trying to escape,” he said.

I could have laughed. Junior shifted, like he wasn’t amused. A twinge accompanied his movements that had my heart racing all of a sudden.

“You’re Colin, aren’t you,” I said, catching my breath and trying to shift to a more comfortable position. Nothing seemed comfortable at the moment, though. “I’ve seen your picture,” I went on.

“You will call me Mr. Gregory,” Colin snapped, striding closer to my mattress. “And unless you help me convince Mace to end his start-up and hand over his research and contracts to me, you won’t be calling anyone much of anything.”

I could only stare at Colin as he came to stand towering above me by the side of the mattress. He wasn’t naturally intimidating, but I broke out into a sweat anyhow and winced as I tried to sit still.

Think. Thinking was the only way to get out of a kidnapping.

“Let me get this straight,” I said, holding up one hand, like the two of us were having this little chat over ice cream. “You want Mace to close up Canton Enterprises and, what, go to work for you?”

“Not for me, for the people I work for,” Colin snapped.

“Victory Holdings,” I said.

“How do you know—” Colin stopped, pressing his lips together.

Okay, so I was dealing with a kidnapper who wasn’t particularly bright. I tried to remember anything and everything Mace had told me about his ex business partner. They had met in grad school and hit it off at first. They had gone into business together, but Mace had ended up doing all the work. Colin was interested in money above all else. And he had an ex-wife and kids, but that probably wasn’t relevant, except that it showed he was a jerk.

Grad school meant he was intelligent, but the pistol he had tucked into the waistband of his jeans said he was very, very stupid. No one who actually knew how to handle a gun stuck it in their jeans. Colin likely had no training with weapons, he’d just watched too many movies.

All of that added up to the terrifying fact that the angry man in front of me was probably the most dangerous person I’d ever found myself trapped in a room with. He didn’t know what hewas doing, which meant everything could and probably would go wrong.

My insides twinged with pain again as I shifted to find a better position. “Okay,” I said, glancing up at Colin and trying to stay calm, though I felt anything but calm. “You want Mace to come work for you guys.”

“He owes it to me,” Colin said. “He had no right to back out of our partnership.”

Stupid and with a chip on his shoulder. Great.

“And you think that kidnapping his pregnant omega is going to convince him to go back into business with you?” I asked, trying not to let on how idiotic I thought he was. Never tell a man with a gun you think he’s an idiot, even if that gun is pointed directly at his own junk.

“It’s his research I want,” Colin said, shifting restlessly, opening and closing his hands like he wanted to strangle someone. “I’m entitled to half the profits of everything we worked on together.”

---