Page 24 of Stolen Faith

“Fuck,” he moaned in the quiet room. That second dose of tranquilizer left him aching all over.

He tried to move and hissed in pain. His neck was killing him. He was lying on his side on a rough wooden floor, but now, unlike at the mansion, his arms were tied together behind him. His ankles were also bound. He was facing what appeared to be the front door of a log cabin.

So no more mansion.

What did this mean? How did their transportation to a second location advance the plot? Thematically, what was the significance?

Brennon snorted in amusement at himself, even as his muscles screamed.

Someone had dumped him just inside the door because the majority of the room was at his back. He tried to look over his shoulder, but his neck said a big hell no to that, a sharp pain shooting down his spine so intense that he turned to face the door again, gritting his teeth until the aching subsided.

No one replied to his curse, which was both a good thing and a bad thing. Good in that perhaps that meant the bad guys weren’t around. Bad in that neither Rowan nor Izabel replied, which meant he was either alone, or they were still unconscious. Or maybe they were…

Nope. Nope. Fuuuuck nope.

Not going there. Not thinking that.

Brennon lay there for a moment or two longer, slowly stretching his neck, trying to work out the kinks. He also fought the bindings at his wrists, but to no avail.

Lying on the floor made him feel vulnerable, so he struggled to push himself to a seated position, the task made harder by his bound arms and legs. No doubt he resembled a turtle on his back, fighting to flip over, that image making him chuckle.

At least he hadn’t lost his sense of humor.

He made a mental note to up his core exercises if—when—he got out of here.

Finally, he managed to get himself onto his ass. A length of rope stretched from his bound wrists to the corner of the room, where it was looped through a large ring bolted to the floor. Okay, then.

Using his bound feet, he scooched himself around in a half circle until he was facing the room rather than the door.

“What in the Blair Witch fresh hell is this?” he murmured, suddenly wishing he’d stayed down on the floor.

On the plus side—and calling it a plus was a stretch—he wasn’t alone like he’d feared. Izabel and Rowan, both still unconscious, were there. While their captors had elected to tie him up with a coarse rope that was scraping the hell out of his wrists and ankles, he was faring better than Rowan, who was restrained by heavy chains. Back at the mansion, he’d had on cuffs that looked like what prisoners wore when they went to court—wrists and ankles hooked to each other with a chain between them and one around the waist. But in Rowan’s case, they’d put his wrists behind his back.

Now…Rowan’s body was crisscrossed with heavy chains, the kind used to hold gates closed. His arms were behind his back, his legs wrapped in chains from ankle to knee.

That was overkill. Though Rowan had fought back a bit in the mansion, so maybe that was why?

Izabel wasn’t on the floor but was instead strapped to a chair with heavy-duty zip ties, her head drooping forward at an uncomfortable angle. The only non-dusty item in the room—a video camera on a tripod—was situated just in front of her chair.

Brennon called their names quietly, but neither of them stirred, so he forced himself to study their surroundings.

Given the fact he couldn’t see a damn thing outside the lone dirty window in the room besides the endless line of tall trees, it was safe to say they weren’t in Boston anymore. It was daytime too.

Someone had sedated them and then transported them to this cabin, which could be located anywhere in bumfuck America, because Brennon had no idea how long they’d been knocked out. At least seven or eight hours had passed because it had been the middle of the night when they were taken, and now it was day. Then again, it could be days later…how long had they been in the mansion room?

Glancing around, he tried to restrain a shudder. There were so many horrifying things to take in, he wasn’t sure where to start. His gaze bounced from the roughly hewn log walls to the scuffed plank floor that was so dirty, he wouldn’t have known it was actually made of wood if he wasn’t sitting on it. There was a fireplace, filled with ashes, but sadly—as he took note of the chilliness of the room—no fire.

The furniture, what little there was, looked like it had been through a couple of wars. The fabric on the arms and back of the couch was so ripped and shredded, stuffing was sticking out. There was a rickety rocking chair that didn’t look like it could support anyone’s weight, a crooked coffee table covered in ring marks from people who clearly didn’t believe in coasters, and a couple of dusty lamps that looked like something his great-grandma would have sold in a yard sale for twenty-five cents apiece back in the seventies.

Those things he could have dealt with on their own, but when paired with the eight—EIGHT—dead animal heads mounted on the walls, the glass eyes of deer, antelopes, and a black bear staring down at him, it was like he’d woken up in one of his worst nightmares.

Perched next to the fireplace was the full body of a stuffed fox, posed to look like it was mid-run. The most disturbing of the mounted carcasses was the head of a rabbit, which someone had clumsily glued antlers onto, as if it added humor to the fact they’d killed a defenseless woodland creature.

What kind of lunatics lived in a place like this?

Probably the same kind of lunatics who kidnapped people. Right…

A slight shuffle drew his attention to the floor near him, where Rowan was slowly stirring. Unlike him, his fiancé didn’t need time to recall where he was. Rowan came awake with a start, and despite the heavy links crossing his chest to hold his arms in place, he had no problem pushing himself to a sitting position. Rowan did not neglect his core exercises.