The feeling I woke up with now?
Unknown.
A complete mystery.
Also unknown – was where the hell I was. Forget how did I get here.
For someone to regain consciousness behind a dumpster, or in a strange hotel room, or in the backseat of a driverless car in a Walmart parking lot (not that I'm speaking from personal experience or anything) was disconcerting enough.
To come back to a semi-lucid state of awareness outside, under the stars, with the earth swaying back and forth beneath you…
It wasn't an earthquake. It was too gentle. As if I were being rocked in the world's biggest cradle. And, water. The sound of water. Splashing against the side of… something. Like, a boat.
A boat?
There was no way.
My eyelids felt heavy, like they weighed a couple of pounds. It was hard to open them, and I put off what seemed to be a herculean task for a moment until I got my wits about me. If I still had wits, that is.
I felt so weird. Part hangover without the headache, part influenza without being sick. My mouth was drier than a cotton ball, too, and my tongue made an audible click when I moved it around my lips.
I wanted something to drink, so badly that I would sell everything including my soul to wet my tongue. When was the last time I had something to drink?
It was...this morning, and it was a smoothie. A papaya smoothie.
Laced with Rohypnol.
Son of a fucking bitch. I knew it. The bastard slipped me a mickey, without slipping it to me at all. He'd forced it down me, that's what he did.
I reached into my memory, pulling up what happened the last time I remembered being conscious. I was sitting on the toilet, he was sitting on me, crushing me. I couldn't breathe, and the only way I could breathe was if I drank his goddamn papaya smoothie because Mexicans like papayas. Fucking racist bastard.
It was starting to come back, but not all of it. Some of my friends in college who'd been fed the magic date-rape pill couldn't remember anything of their assaults. The only clue something had happened to them at all was a sick, sticky feeling between their legs, and the smell that comes with it.
Everything from the papaya on was blacked out from my mind. Amnesia is a common side effect, this much I knew, but since I'd never been roofied, I didn't know how I was going to react. How much I'd actually remember. Or not.
The important thing was, I had to assess my current situation. My body was going to be tired, so no tricky clever moves on my part right now. I also needed to determine if I had any assets at my disposal. Aside from my brain, I didn't think I had any.
I heard a distant call of a seagull. The saltiness of the air was oddly invigorating, and the water splashing on the side of the boat had a hisss to it, which I took to mean that we were moving forward.
I wondered if Maddox was piloting – playing sea captain with a fucking sailor hat on his stupid bald dome, a pipe in his teeth and a parrot on his shoulder.
Whatever fucked up role playing game he was entertaining himself with now, it was taking place at sea. Where no one could hear me scream.
Concentrate, girl, I told myself. The number one rule was not to panic. Evaluate the situation, and take it step by step from there.
If I could somehow knock him overboard…
That's not concentrating. It's good to have a goal, but let's see how we can get there from here.
And I had to do all of this with my eyes closed. If Maddox was around here, and I was sure he was, he couldn't know I'd come to. He'd still be under the impression that I was in the throes of a spiked papaya smoothie. Good.
He also liked bondage. I moved my right hand, then my left, very slowly, and found that my wrists were not cuffed, or tied. Also good.
I wiggled my toes – there was nothing securing my left ankle. My right, however, was a different story. Something thick, leathery. A belt? No, too wide. Maybe four, five inches of padding, like sheepskin, just above my foot.
God dammit.
This was a big, big chance I was about to take, but I had to know. I opened my eyes, barely. Just to slits, but I was laying on my left side so I may be able to see how I my right foot was shackled. And where, exactly, I was.
A deck lounger, on the stern of what was most likely an insanely expensive boat. Or, yacht, as I think all the rich boys like to call them. A million stars dotted the black, cloudless sky. Around my ankle was a restraint that looked a lot like a dog collar. For a very, very big dog. Chain was laced through its iron loops, and the other end was padlocked to the leg of the deck lounge. I estimated about a yard of walkabout freedom. Certainly not enough to do any worthwhile damage to Captain Petersen.
No way to wrap the chain around his throat and strangle the life out of the fuck. The lounger was too far inboard for me to give him a swift kick in the ass and let the sharks take care of the rest.
There was nothing I could use as a weapon, either. Maddox was a moron, yes, but not even the likes of his substandard intelligence would leave anything around for my semi-secured self to hurt him with. He'd probably learned his lesson with the Waterford.
I almost smiled. I'd gotten him good. I just didn’t get him
