Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
Kayla
When I awoke, there was a weird taste in my mouth, I was dizzy, and everything was pitch dark. It took a few seconds for my brain to come back online, but when it did, my heart began to pound frantically. Where was I? Where had Ghost taken me? Where was Ghost?
My heart began to thud in my chest. Taking a deep breath, I fidgeted against what felt like ropes against my wrists and ankles. Ghost had clearly bound me. And I could only imagine the worst possible reason for why that was.
Too late I realized my mistake. I should have pretended to be asleep to buy myself a few precious moments to think. However, my jerky movements and sped up breathing had alerted my captor immediately to my newly conscious status.
A cold hand stroked my cheek and I startled like a panicked mare. “Easy, Babe,” Ghost soothed, as though anything he said could comfort me. “It’s just me. You’re safe.”
“Safe” was the last thing I was when I was with Ghost. The man was insane if he believed I thought him anything other than a disgusting creep.
“If you’re a good girl,” Ghost persisted, his hand moving from my cheek and sliding down my throat and along my collarbone, “I’ll take your blindfold off.”
Desperate to get some control back, I nodded. My captor stripped my scarf from my eyes and I blinked to compensate for the sudden rush of light.
“There you are,” Ghost said, as though he were speaking to a child. “I missed those pretty brown eyes of yours. You’ve kept them from me for far too long.”
His tone and words made me ill, but I hid my disgust the best I could under the circumstances. “Where are we?”
Glancing around, I gorged on the details of my surroundings to squirrel them away for later. The room we were in was small. So small, I doubted it had ever been meant for a living space at all. It was more like a storage room than anything. Nothing was on the concrete walls or floor but a shabby rug that had definitely seen better days. The spartan furniture in the room was a mismatched nightstand and plastic drawer set marketed for dorm rooms at places like Walmart or Target in late summer for college students. And of course, in the center of the room, which I suspected was in someone’s musty basement, was a queen sized mattress resting directly on the floor.
I knew I’d been on something soft when I awoke. Now I knew it was a bed. Ghost’s bed. A crippling level of terror seized my chest when I realized there was nothing stopping him from enacting whatever twisted fantasy he had in this concrete closet in the basement of some stranger’s house.
“It doesn’t matter where we are,” Ghost told me then, his fingertips tracing the outline of my breasts through my sweater. “As long as we’re together, that’s all that matters.”
Not to me, I thought bitterly. “What are you going to do with me?” I hated to ask, but needed to know.
Ghost smiled, revealing even, white teeth. “Anything I want, Babe. Anything I want.”