Page 67 of His Captor

I scrambled to my feet. Well, as much as I could scramble with my enormous belly and the tension of an impending contraction. I doubted I’d be able to just walk out the door, especially since I could hear Colin and his friend arguing on the other side. There had to be something in the bare room that could help me, though.

And then I saw it, as if some miracle had sent me exactly what I needed. Colin the Idiot had left his cell phone on a plain, metal desk on the other side of the shelves from the mattress. I let out a strangled laugh at my stroke of luck and waddled as fast as I could to grab the phone.

Of course, once I had it, it struck me that I didn’t know Mace’s number. I didn’t know anyone’s numbers. The only number I had memorized was my parents’ house, my childhood home.

It was better than nothing, so I dialed, then grimaced as another contraction started. Were they supposed to be this close together so soon? I braced a hand on the desk, then leaned hard to try to stop everything that was happening.

“Hello?” Simon’s voice sounded from the other end of the call.

“Simon!” I shouted, gasping. “Thank God it’s you and not Dad or Papa.”

“Hayden? Is everything alright? You sound?—”

“I’ve been kidnapped,” I blurted over him. “For real this time. By Colin, Mace’s ex business partner.”

“What? What the heck? Where are you? What’s going on?” Simon instantly went into a panic.

“I don’t know where I am,” I said, glancing to the door as the shouting in the hall grew pitched. “I was at the Grand Hotel with Mace for a fundraising dinner. Colin injected me with something to knock me out, but I don’t know how long I was out or how far he dragged—wait! What time is it?”

“Almost ten,” Simon said. “Where is Mace? Is he there with you?”

“Ten!” I gasped in relief. “That means I wasn’t out for much more than an hour or two. I don’t think Colin took me that far from the hotel. In fact, maybe I’m still at the hotel, I don’t know. I’m in what feels like a disused storeroom. It’s all concrete, there are metal shelves with a couple boxes of paper towels and toilet paper, and there’s a fairly nice mattress on the floor.”

“Did you call the police? Does anyone know what’s going on?” Simon asked in a panic.

Okay, maybe there were two stupid people in the room. I should have called the police first, not my brother. I’d make sure to do that next time I was kidnapped.

“I don’t know if?—”

The storage room door banged open a second later, and Colin marched back into the room, seething with almighty fury. “What are you doing?” he demanded, raising his gun to me. “Put that down.”

“He’s got a gun and it’s pointed at me,” I said, my voice thin and terrified.

“What? Hayden, you’ve got to get out of there!” Simon shouted, “You’ve got to?—”

His words turned indistinct as I put the phone down. I deliberately didn’t end the call, though, and I hoped Simon wassmart enough to go quiet so that he could stay on the line and hear anything else that happened. I even moved quickly away from the desk to distract Colin from the open call.

“Did you and your buddy sort things out?” I asked, hoping to distract him further. “You good?”

“Get back to the mattress,” Colin ordered me. “None of this is any of your business.”

He headed for the desk, like he had noticed what I was doing by keeping the call going and intended to stop it.

“Alright, alright, I will, but?—”

I let out a cry and gripped my belly as a sudden gush of wetness spilled out of my ass, wetting my trousers.

“Shit,” Colin said, eyes going wide.

“No, amniotic fluid,” I groaned, continuing gingerly toward the mattress. “I told you I was going into labor.”

“You can’t,” Colin insisted. “Not now. Not here.”

I cursed inwardly as he made it to the desk to grab his phone and tapped to end the call. I just hoped Simon had gotten enough to figure out where I was. Although it wasn’t like Simon had any sort of fancy tracing equipment like they had in the movies.

By the time I made it to the mattress, that was the least of my worries. I wasn’t even overly concerned that Colin still had his gun as he followed me to the mattress.

“Stop!” he shouted at me as I sank to rest on my hands and knees on the marginally softer surface. “You can’t have a baby in here, right now.”

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