Page 121 of Wild Thing

I shiver, looking down—I’m wearing only a tank and shorts—then study my arms, then register a sharp prickle in my neck and touch it—swollen.

“Let me see,” I tell Archer, gently taking his head and turning it so I can inspect him.

“We’ve been drugged,” I say as I find a swollen syringe puncture on the side of his neck.

“Fuck,” Archer grunts, then brings both hands to his hair and rubs it, hissing from pain. The metal chains rattle.

“We could’ve been out for hours. Or a day,” I say.

“What the fuck is this?” He looks around.

“Give me a minute,” I say and study our surroundings.

We’re in a forty-by-forty concrete room, musty and lacking oxygen. The concrete floor has damp spots in the corners and the seams. My bare feet are freezing.

“We are underground,” I murmur.

There’s nothing on the walls, only a light bulb hanging off the center of the ceiling, lighting the room with a low glow.

No cameras. Good. So we’re not being watched.

“These guys are not pros,” I say, mostly to myself. “Whatever the reason for them taking us, we might be in transition. This”—I nod around—“is not planned out properly. If it were Butcher’s job, we would be in a more secure place and under surveillance.”

“You don’t know what’s outside.”

“True. But there’s no camera. No peephole in the door either. Strange. Look at the door.” Wincing through pain, I get up and walk toward it, only to halt several feet before it—the chain is not long enough. “It’s like it was brought from some other building. The gap under it—see?”

Archer grunts as he gets up, then leans with his hands on his thighs, moving his head slowly. “Butcher is not exactly a sophisticated guy.”

“He’s better than that, trust me. Considering it’s you, he would’ve made sure he had better surveillance. Unless he’s hired some thugs and they are laying low for now before they take us to him.”

I might be wrong, but that’s the first step in assessing a situation—creating the most logical scenario and going from there.

I look down at the cuffs. They are not sophisticated but old, rusty, bulky things with a half-inch keyhole.

“I got this.”

Fuckers. Try this with someone else, morons.

Archer straightens up and studies me with curiosity as I lift the hem of my tank and unpin a safety pin.

“Why do you have that there?” he asks.

“Old Eastern-European superstition from jinxing. Mom used to pin safety pins on half of my shirts. I still do it. They come handy in camping or rolling joints.”

I smile as I carefully insert the pin into the keyhole, feeling for the latch.

The loud sound of rusty hinges from somewhere above makes me freeze like a deer in headlights. Two pairs of heavy footsteps make a descending sound, approaching on the other side of the door.

“Shit,” I murmur, fist the pin in my hand, and retreat farther from the door as a precaution.

Archer balls his hands into fists.

“Archer, don’t do anything reckless, please. They might be armed.”

They fucking are.

The door opens slowly, and the first thing I see is the barrel of a gun as two men walk in, guns raised at us.

---