Love Set Free

Chapter One

Phoenix

“Psst. Psst. Hey. Hey you. Are you… Is somebody there?” The voice is a sweet, masculine, low drawl, even with the obvious shaky panic in it. It quiets to a murmur as he pleads, “Oh, please, let there be somebody there.”

I can’t quite place the accent. It seems southernish; not that I’m an expert of accents outside of the various New England states I consider my stomping grounds. It isn’t bringing to mind the sharp twang that comes with guitars, boots, tight jeans, and shitty songs about dead dogs and big-haired, cheating women. No, this voice brings to mind hot, lazy afternoons drinking sweet tea on a veranda. That’s a thing, right? Sweet tea? And I’m pretty sure that verandas are a thing. Like a big porch where you spend time rocking in an old, beat-up chair and swatting away mosquitos.

“Are you… Hey, are you there? Are you awake? Can you talk?” The questions come faster and with an increasing edge of panic.

And need. I can hear the guy’s need for any sort of response loud and clear.

Normally, I wouldn’t give a shit. What did it matter to me, what other people wanted or needed? But something about that voice… And let’s face it, even before I pry open my crusted-shut eyes, I already had the sense that whatever is going on…this isn’t the time for ‘normally’.

“Yeah. I’m here.” The ragged croak of my voice hurts my throat and causes a sharp jab of pain to spear through my head.

Fuck, what sort of bender had I gone on? I couldn’t recall much of anything in the past…the past… Actually, I have no idea how much time I’ve apparently lost to…whatever this is. My last memory is a hazy recall of snapping at the flight crew of my private jet for their feeble and covering-their-own-asses apologies and explanations about some sort of bureaucratic hold-up at the small airport just outside of Rio that was preventing them from immediately unloading my things.

After that…

However much time has passed and whatever has gone down, I am not reassured by what my present circumstances look like once I get my eyes open.

Oh, God. There are bars. Rough, black, metal bars. My eyes flit frantically in every direction, but all I can see are bars. In front of me, next to me, behind me. Bars, bars, and more bars.

The floor…the floor I’m sitting on, well, more like sprawled across, is either made of or covered by a sheet of plywood. While the metal bars look like they’ve weathered their fair share of days, the plywood looks and smells new.

And all I can see, when my panicked eyes look beyond all those bars, is peeling, flaking, dingy and graying paint on cement walls. The walls butt up right against three sides of the metal enclosure—alright, might as well call a cage, a cage—while the one I’m currently facing seems to be further away. Am I… It’s almost like I’m in some sort of cage that’s been placed within an alcove within a larger space.

“Oh, thank God. Who are you? What’s your name? How’d you get here? Do you know where here is? Can you… Are you blindfolded, too?”

I’ve been ignoring the guy’s questions while I take in my surroundings. At least, what all I can see. However, his last question snaps my attention back to him. Because…no. No, I’m not blindfolded. I can’t see much, but I can see something. Is he… Does his question mean that he’s blindfolded? It must, right?

Not that I’ll be able to know for sure because I can’t see him. I can hear him fairly clearly and he sounds like he’s close by, but wherever it is that he is within this gloomy cement space, I can’t see him.

What the hell is going on here?

But just because his voice sounds warm and nonthreatening doesn’t mean I’m going to automatically trust this random stranger and give him any sort of honest answer. After all, I have no fucking clue what’s going on.

Although, as the only son of a man who owns more businesses than I care to count and has more personal wealth than many a small country, I have a strong inkling of what a few of the possibilities might be. And there is no way in hell I am going to trust anyone if what is happening here is what I’m afraid it is. Besides, a lie could give me some sort of intel as to whether this guy is part of the cause of my current problem or an equal in the we’re-really-fucked lottery.

“Yeah, I…I think I am,” I finally answer him, injecting it with a quavering, shaking uncertainty and fear that I, unfortunately, don’t have to fake all that much. “I can’t see a thing.”

There. The lie is out there. Now to see if he takes the bait to either berate me because he knows I’m lying or sounds insincere as he plays along with my lie. Either reaction will show me that he’s one of the instigators of my situation. Or I’ll see if he sounds truthful as he commiserates with me.

“Ah, day-ahm,” he swears, the drawl of his voice adding all sorts of slow, syrupy syllables to his profanity.

It’s totally not the time or place to be thinking this but, fuck, what I wouldn’t give to have that voice groaning that word to me, in a similar way, across the expanse of a pillow. Obviously, under much better circumstances. The man has a voice straight out of a goddamned sweaty, pulse-pounding, body-writhing, filthy fantasy.

He sighs and I can feel his disappointment in my very bones. “I was hoping you’d be able to see something so you could tell me more about where we’re being held.”

Either he’s a really good actor or else he’s as much a captive as I am, because I don’t hear any sort of disingenuousness in his voice. I let a small ribbon of trust unfurl in my chest. I’m ready to snip it if it turns out this stranger doesn’t deserve it, but I need the selfish comfort of thinking I’m not alone in this crappy situation.

“You don’t know anything?” I ask. “Nothing at all? Have you been blindfolded the whole time you’ve been here? Wherever here is,” I add, muttering to myself. The fluttering stirrings of curiosity surprises me, but I can’t help inquiring, “How does that work? I mean, what about…eating? Bathing? Going to the bathroom?”

My questions come fast, hurled out at him without even giving him a chance to answer before I ask the next. But I want to know; I’ve never given much thought before to how somebody would manage everyday, innocuous tasks while wearing a blindfold.

A soft grunting noise accompanies the rustle of him shifting around. I didn’t hear any sort of metallic rattling or clanging as he moved, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he isn’t caged the same as I. On the other hand, my paranoia that he might be playing some sort of game with me still runs rampant.

“I’ll tell you everything I can, I promise,” he says. “But first… Why don’t we start at the basics? What’s your name?” After a momentary pause, he hurriedly adds, “I guess you don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to. But if you don’t, just know I’ll probably start calling you ‘dude’ or I’ll make up a name for you.”

I’m almost curious enough to withhold my name if only to find out what name he’d make up for me. But I figure there wouldn’t be any harm in giving him my actual name. Again, either he’s working for whomever engineered my current circumstances, in which case, he already knows my name. Or else he’s a fellow captive and deserves the measure of respect and kindness of the truth. My first name is unusual, but not unique. At least, not until it gets paired with my last name. So, just my first name won’t be enough to tell him exactly who I am, if he isn’t already aware of it.

“Phoenix. My name is Phoenix.”

“No fucking shit!” he exclaims. Whoever he is, he seems delighted by this small bit of information. “Seems like we’re both named after places. My name is Jackson. ‘Cause that’s where I was born. Jackson, Mississippi.” He gives a small laugh before he clarifies, “That’s where I was born, not my full name. How horrible would it be if my name were Jackson Mississippi?”

What the fuck is up with this guy? He sounds as cheerful and chipper as if we’d just bumped into each other at a cocktail party. However, it doesn’t escape my suspicious mind that he hadn’t offered up what his last name is.

“Not that I lived there for very long,” Jackson continues. “In Jackson. But at least we weren’t living in Biloxi yet when my mom had me. Not sure I’d want to go through life being named Biloxi. Although I’d probably just have people call me Bil. Or Bix? Loxi just sounds weird…” Jackson’s voice trails off, but then he adds, “Macon might not have been too bad. We lived there for a little while. Or Charleston. That could make for a sort of distinguished sounding name. Not that I’m a distinguished sort of guy.”

It occurs to me that maybe captivity has done something to scramble his brain. This is clearly not the time for some friendly, get-to-know-you chit chat, even if that is what’s spilling out of Jackson’s mouth. I’m locked in a goddamned cage. And if I allow myself to believe the obvious conclusion, he probably is too. I’d be the first to admit that I might have gotten up to some wild shit when I break away from my work—I’m always of the mind that ‘work hard, play hard’ makes a good life philosophy—but I can honestly say that this is the first time I’ve been locked inside a fucking cage.

I’m bewildered and a bit bemused by the tangent Jackson has gone down detailing some of the places he’s lived and analyzing their suitability for being a person’s first name. But even though it doesn’t make any difference and I’m not normally one for being a stickler to details, I feel compelled to correct Jackson’s assumption about the source of my name.

“I wasn’t named after the city of Phoenix,” I tell him.

“Oh. Well, um…okay. That’s uh…”

Damn it. I don’t even know the guy and now I feel bad that he no longer sounds excited over thinking we have something in common. And naturally I’m the one who’d crushed his excitement. Which is stupid. Why should his feelings have anything to do with me? They’re his feelings; I have no duty to be responsible for them. And he’s the one who’d leapt to the conclusion he had anyway.

That doesn’t stop me from feeling like a jerk who’d just thrown a ball completely out of reach of a puppy though.

“It’s just a name my mom saw somewhere when she was pregnant with me and liked enough to give me it.” I offer the additional detail as a paltry compensation for stomping all over Jackson’s attempt to forge a bond of commonality between us.

“Well…it is a good name,” Jackson replies after a moment. “And, uh, it’s still kind of cool…the coincidence that we’re both named for cities. Even if, you know, yours wasn’t intentional and all, like mine was.”

A silence falls between us after that comment. Not like an awkward silence or as if Jackson is upset with me. More like we’ve both retreated inside our own heads as we reflect on what the hell is going on. Trying to make sense of it all.

I shift my body and sit up, a movement that causes a renewed spike of pain to lance through my head. But for once I’m thankful for my frequent prior experiences with needing to be functional through the pain of a hangover. I’m not convinced a hangover is what’s causing my head to throb and ache, but the pain does feel similar. Who’d have ever thought that particular skill would now be so beneficial? Right now, it’s allowing me to compartmentalize the pain and ignore it while I take further stock of my surroundings.

Unfortunately, there really isn’t anything to see other than what I’ve already observed. The back, sides, and ceiling of my cage butt up against cement walls, painted a similar flaking dark gray as the blank wall I can see across from my cage, as if the cage had been slotted into a custom-made nook. Scooting to the front of the cage, I peer through the metal bars and realize that my plywood floor isn’t the actual floor; that the cage is somehow suspended in the air. The bottom edge of my cage seems to be several feet off the dusty, paler gray concrete floor.

Jackson’s voice had come from somewhere to the right of me. I think. Maybe not. My heart thumps rabbit-fast and my breath saws in and out with great, rasping pants. With the pain in my head, not knowing what was going on, and the fear and disorientation running rampant through me, it’s hard to say absolutely anything right now with certainty. Either way, I can’t see around the protrusion of the cement wall that makes up that side of my fun, new habitat, so there’s no way for me to know if he is also a captive and caged, or if he’s just screwing with me for whatever purpose.

When he speaks again, his voice is quiet as he asks, “What was the date…when you were taken? I can’t tell you how much time has passed or whether it’s still the same day but… What was the date?”

“February 2 nd ,“ I reply. Huffing a small laugh, I sardonically add, “Fucking Groundhog Day.” I’m sure that, like a lot of people, the only reason that pointless and minor holiday even pings in my consciousness is because of the Bill Murray movie. Remembering the plotline of the movie, I couldn’t help muttering, “Goddammit, I hope I’m not stuck reliving this day for-fucking-ever.”

Very faintly I hear Jackson sniffle. Or perhaps it’s a whimper. His voice is hollow as it floats over to me.

“Two weeks. I’ve been here…two weeks?”

A low, keening cry seems ripped from him. But then…nothing. Not a sound.

For minutes, not a sound.

I shouldn’t care that this man is clearly hurting. I shouldn’t. I have more important things to worry about. Like where I am, who it is that has taken me, and what they want. Although, money seems the obvious answer to that last question. I should be trying to figure out if there’s a way out of this goddamned cage so I can escape before my father has to pay to get me out of it.

Frankly, I should be most concerned with what extremes my kidnappers are willing to go in their pursuit of a payday. A ransom note or some videotaped plea is one thing. Having them drive home their seriousness by shipping off little bits and pieces of my anatomy to my distraught parents would be some other level of hell I have no desire to experience.

That’s what I should be thinking about right now. Myself . And this fucked up situation I’ve found myself in.

But instead, I’m straining against the bars along the front of my cage, my hands clenched tight around them, the rough and raw texture of the metal snagging and scratching against the skin of my fingers and palms while I try to gain any sort of view of Jackson’s cage. If he is in a cage. I’m still not completely sold on him being a fellow captive and not a decoy of some sort that’s involved in the conspiracy of my kidnapping.

Money makes for a strange reality. And lots and lots and lots of money—the kind of money my family has—can make for a really strange reality. Just because it seems farfetched and overly convoluted doesn’t mean that my kidnappers haven’t deliberately presented Jackson to me as someone to befriend while they hold me; somebody who could encourage me to cooperate with them, do what they want, all while reporting back to them with any other sort of information I may divulge which they could then use against me or my family.

The walls surrounding my cage extend a few inches past the edges of it and completely block my view of what’s to either side of me. No matter how hard I strain, pressing my whole chest and face against them, the bars are a firm barrier keeping me from gaining the angle I would need to see around the stupid cement walls. But I try anyway. Again and again. My fear and worry won’t let me stop. But it’s pointless.

And in between my attempts, I call out to him.

“Jackson? Jackson?” And when that produces no response from him, the words “I’m sorry” tumble from my mouth.

I don’t even know why I’m apologizing. Or am I trying to tell him I empathize? I can’t, not entirely. I’ve only been here for… hours? A day? I don’t know. But it certainly hasn’t been the two weeks Jackson concluded he’s been here.

Not that it matters. Jackson doesn’t reply to my words. There’s still no further sound from him. Oh shit. What if…

I’m pretty confident that I’m relatively unharmed. Pissed off and inconvenienced, definitely freaked out and scared, but unharmed. What if Jackson isn’t? What if he’s just beyond my reach and my sight and…hurt? Severely hurt. Dying. Could he be dying ?

A surge of panic sweeps through me. Some of it’s because if Jackson isn’t there, that would leave me stuck in this nightmare by myself. Selfish, I know. But also because, even though we’ve only just sort of met, I don’t want the man to die.

“Jackson? Jackson!” I cry.

Even though I yell loudly, there’s no sound from him.

My body crumples to the floor of my cage. My hands are still tightly wrapped around the metal bars, which are the only thing keeping me somewhat upright.

Fuck.

“Jackson…”