The Ruckus

Which was good, because the thought of letting Randy see me cry was almost as bad as the thought of dying with him in his stupid pickup truck.

Almost.

And then, just as suddenly as he’d turned off the road for our hellish drive through the woods, he came to a stop beside a small cabin nestled into the trees.

“Honey, we’re home,” his voice rang out, loud and abrasive, as it cut through the sudden silence that was all around us. “Hope you like it. It’s the only place you’re going to see for a while.”

I took a moment to look around while he stepped out of the truck and made his way to the passenger side. I had no idea which direction we’d been traveling, but I knew from how long we’d been driving that we must have been deep in the woods.

My stomach sank with the realization that even if Axel and Micah had started looking for me within a few minutes of my abduction, they still might not ever find us way out in the middle of nowhere.

And that was assuming they were still alive and able to move around. Or that they’d regained consciousness relatively quickly. For all I knew, they might have still been knocked out on the floor of Axel’s studio, waiting for someone to come rescue them. But no one else knew to search for any of us.

Randy opened the passenger door and pulled me by the restraints around my wrists. “Come along, love. Let me show you to the honeymoon suite.”

Love?

Honeymoon?

He was even crazier than I thought if he expected me to respond well to those words. And he was seriously going to make me throw up.

Pain shot through my shoulders as he pulled my arms back at an awkward angle, but I somehow managed to keep from falling as he dragged me out of the truck and up toward the cabin.

Up close, I could tell that it had been constructed well. The boards were old and weathered so that they blended in with the surrounding trees, but there was no mistaking the quality craftsmanship.

Lots of families had deer blinds out in the woods, and some even had small shacks that were better suited for longer-term hunting trips. But leave it to Randy’s family to have a full-sized cabin for their use. The place probably even had indoor plumbing and electricity, knowing them.

His parents had more money than good sense, as my mom liked to say, and that cabin was the epitome of lavish living when it was probably only used for a handful of days each year, if that.

He opened the door and shoved me inside, leaving me scrambling to stay upright as I coughed and sputtered through the cloud of dust that we’d kicked up around us.

Okay, so the place hadn’t even been used for a handful of days like I’d imagined. It looked like some kind of time capsule from the pioneer days, a place nobody even knew existed anymore.

Which was probably my overactive imagination tugging at my worst fears, but still. Those fears seemed pretty valid the more I looked around.

“What do you think?” he beamed, leading me toward the back of the cabin without giving me time to answer. “Not too shabby, huh? We could probably even raise a family here together.” He paused to spin me around until I was face to face with him. “If you’re lucky.”

Those last words were enough to make me recoil. I hated that I’d given him the satisfaction of seeing me flinch, but I hadn’t been able to stop myself. I needed to put some space between us for my sanity.

“What are you going to do?” I swallowed hard and fought back another coughing fit. I didn’t want to spend five minutes in his dusty, old cabin. If he thought I would stick around and live out some homestead fantasy with him, he was sorely mistaken.

He could hurt me. He could kill me. But he had to sleep sometime, and he couldn’t keep me tied up forever. As long as I was able to move on my own, there would be a possibility to escape. It was the one thing I had to believe in; I still had a chance to survive this ordeal.

His hand reached out for me and caught my arm. “Yeah,” he sneered. “You’ll do nicely. Been waiting for this day for a long, long time. And I know you’ve wanted it, too. You were playing hard to get, but that’s okay.”

Oh, God. He was fucking deluded.

There was no doubt in my mind about what he intended to do as his eyes roamed over my body, and I wished I had something more than a flimsy sheet wrapped around me—something that would slow him down, at least.

But instead of attacking me, he pushed me down onto a dirty mattress on the floor, sending a cloud of dust up around me and startling a strangled cry from the back of my throat, which evolved into a coughing fit.