Chapter 3
XAVE
“I gotta go.”
Helix’s voice is panicked, but his words sound wrong, like I’m hearing them through a filter.
“Wait.” I reach out into the dark in an attempt to stop him, but I grab at nothing as the thump of his boots on the concrete floors mixes with the soft remnants of the heavy bass of the music outside in the main room.
A strange shiver ripples through me, like a current of electricity that starts in my chest and radiates out into every part of me. My limbs are getting heavy, and it feels like I’m out of sync with the world. Like I’m slowing down while everything around me is speeding up.
“Wait,” I rasp, my throat tight as my mouth goes bone dry.
Something is wrong.
I’ve only had two drinks since I got here, and nothing in the last two hours. There’s no way in hell I should be feeling anything considering my size and tolerance.
Did someone slip something into one of my drinks? Was I drugged? And if I was, why?
The door slams open, and a cacophony of noise and light invades the dark room as strobe lights blink through the door.
Through blurry eyes, I’m able to make out Helix as he staggers out of the room.
He was walking and talking fine before we came in here, and I didn’t smell any booze or anything on him when we were getting up close and personal a few minutes ago.
Was he drugged too? Or maybe he took something, and it’s just kicking in now?
The door swings closed, plunging the room back into darkness, and the loss of my eyesight is so disorienting I almost fall over, even though I’m still leaning against the wall, as it feels like the entire world tilts hard to the left, and I lose sense of which way is up.
Mustering the little bit of coherent thought I have left, I shove off the wall and half run, half stumble, in what I hope is the general direction of the doorway.
By some miracle, I hit my mark, and I immediately slide my hands over the cool metal of the door, searching out the handle as my thoughts slow down even more.
The strobe light isn’t flashing when I get the door open, and I stumble outside, my head and ears ringing from the music swelling around me.
Reflexively, I scan the area around me, searching out any sort of threat as I use my finely tuned instincts to gather as much information as I can.
Or at least that’s what I would be doing if I could see anything other than blurbs and blobs as my vision goes in and out, like a camera auto-focusing on something that’s too close to it.
In a moment of clarity, my gaze lands on Helix as he staggers toward the projection screen, his arms out in front of him like a zombie.
Just before he reaches the screen, he makes a sharp turn and stumbles away.
Everything goes blurry again, but not before two men step out from the shadows next to the projector screen and grab him.
The world tilts hard to the left again, and I fall against the wall next to the door as the two men drag Helix’s still body behind the screen.
Without thinking about what I’m doing, I lurch and stumble along the wall, my blurry eyes fixed on where Helix and his captors disappeared as reality starts to phase in and out.
The music sounds like it’s coming in waves, and everything around me is a blurry mess of shifting and moving streaks of light and color. My heart is beating so hard I can hear it, and my vision dims in time with the rapid thuds.
I can’t think, can’t process, and I don’t even know if I’m moving anymore as two dark figures seem to melt out of nowhere and strong hands grab my arms. Or at least I think they grab my arms. I can feel the pressure of their holds, but at the same time, I have no feeling in my arms, like the limbs have been treated with Novocain.
A bright flash of light takes over my vision, and my knees buckle as everything goes completely dark.
“Help.”
A distorted, faraway voice invades the cocoon of darkness I’m cradled in as I’m slowly pulled out of nothingness and into reality.
“Help,” the voice croaks again.
It takes more effort than it should to open my eyes, only to find more darkness.
I lay there for a few beats as it feels like my body comes back online part by part, and the first thing that registers is the strange tightness around my wrists, and the sensation of thin strips of plastic holding them together as they dig into my skin.
Are they zip-tied?
I try to pull my hands apart.
Yup, they’re zip-tied. I flex my feet just to be sure there’s nothing binding my ankles, and the person on the other side of the room makes a startled sound when I make a weird noise, almost a cross between a grunt and a heavy sigh.
“Who’s there?” The voice is scared now. “Hello?”
Another groan escapes my lips as the reality of the situation hits. I’m zip-tied in complete darkness with a stranger, and I have no idea how I got here.
“Who are you?” The voice is high and raspy. Whoever it belongs to is terrified.
“What happened?” I manage to croak through my parched lips.
I try to clear my throat, but the scrape of pain makes me gasp. My mouth and throat are so dry it feels like I have strep, or maybe tried to breathe fire, but that’s impossible. There’s no way I’ve been out long enough to get sick, right?
Groggily, I pat my pockets, moving awkwardly with the ties holding my hands together. My phone and cash are gone, exactly like I figured they’d be.
“I don’t know,” the voice says, sounding a bit calmer. “What do you remember?”
“Not a lot.” I groan again as I push myself into a sitting position. “Are you zip-tied too?”
“My hands are.”
My body feels weird. It doesn’t hurt, not really, but every one of my muscles is tight and tense, and it doesn’t feel great now that they’re relaxing.
“I was…” I try to think back, cycling through the mess of what I think are memories spinning around in my head. “At a rave.”
“Rave?” he asks, sounding both hopeful and terrified.
“Yeah.” I clear my throat again and wince. The pain is getting better, but what I really need is water. “I started to feel weird, and…” I let out a frustrated huff. “I can’t remember. I think I was grabbed? It’s all a blur.”
“Yeah,” the guy says dejectedly. “For me too.”
“What do you remember?”
“I was at a rave too—”
“Where?” I cut in. Were we taken from the same place?
“An abandoned warehouse.”
“Helix?” I ask, the name slipping out as a flash of what could be a memory hits out of nowhere. Did I see him getting grabbed? Or did my brain make that up?
“Yeah.” He sounds surprised. “How did you know that?”
“I was there too. I saw you get grabbed, I think.” I shake my head as another cluster of fragmented memories hits.
A dark room, and a hard, strong body against mine. Soft sighs as I run my fingers through silky hair. A wet, hot mouth wrapped around my dick, and a big hand stroking my cock.
Did that actually happen? Did I really hook up with Helix? Or did whatever I was drugged with make me hallucinate all that?
“What else do you remember?” I prompt when he stays quiet.
“Not much. I started to feel weird too, and I remember I was…”
“What?”
“I went into one of the rooms with someone, and we…did stuff. But then everything started to feel weird, and the next thing I remember is two guys coming at me, then nothing until I woke up.”
“How long have you been awake?”
“No clue.” He huffs out a sigh. “It feels like forever, but it probably hasn’t been that long.”
“This might sound weird, but the person you went into one of the rooms with, was it a guy by any chance?”
“Why?” His voice is suspicious again.
“Because if it was, I think it was me.”
“Xave?” he squeaks.
“Yeah.” I pause. “Wait, did I tell you my name?”
“Yeah,” he says quickly.
“Shit.” I stretch my legs out in front of me to help loosen them up. “I used a fake name to get in; I must have been really out of it if I blew my cover and told you my real name.”
“I think we were both out of it.”
“Yeah, probably.”
The fact that I went into the smash room with a guy is strange, but it’s not freaking me out. I’ve never hooked up with a guy before, and never met one I’ve wanted to mess around with, but it’s not like I haven’t thought about it.
Most of it was curiosity after my cousin Killian hooked up with his stepbrother Felix, who’s now his boyfriend, and even though I’m straight, I can see the appeal of being with a guy.
Going into a smash room to hook up with a mysterious DJ I was fangirling over is out of character for me, and I have no idea if it would have happened if I hadn’t been drugged, but it’s not a big deal.
And the pieces of my memories I do have lead me to believe I enjoyed what went down in the smash room, so whatever.
It’s not the craziest thing I’ve done, not by far.
Carefully, I feel around where I’m sitting to try and figure out where we are and orient myself in the room, or wherever we’re being held. The floor is smooth and cold, but the type of cold that comes from being underground and exposed to the elements.
Are we in a cellar of some sort? Or maybe an unfinished basement?
“Did you have anything to drink when you were working?” I ask.
“Just water. I only drink water when I’m at gigs.”
I tilt my head in the general direction of his voice. The dark is disorienting, but it doesn’t sound like he’s too far away.
“From bottles?”
“Yeah. Having open cups around that much equipment is a rookie mistake.”
“Were the bottles sealed when they gave them to you?”
“I think so?” He makes a frustrated sound. “I can’t remember, but that’s not really something I worried about before, so it’s possible they were already open. You’re thinking we were drugged?”
“Yeah. I don’t get more than mildly tipsy when I’m alone.
I can’t remember how many drinks I had, but it wouldn’t have been more than a couple.
” Moving slowly, I drag myself across the floor and toward the sound of his voice.
“I’m coming over to you, so don’t freak out,” I tell him. “Are you near a wall or anything?”