Mitch had almost closed the door to his car when I flew down the steps and b-lined it for the driveway.

"Porter!" he yelled, "What's going on?"

"Get inside with Becks!" I yelled back as I climbed behind the wheel and threw my phone across the cab as my Land Rover roared to life and peeled out of my spot in Holly's driveway.

I had eighteen minutes to get all the way across Los Angeles County.

The world around me blurred as I slammed on the gas pedal and tore through the neighborhood.

Seven minutes.

The stench of old motor oil and sawdust hung so heavily in the air that I had to fight the urge to gag. I knew I was close to the ocean because I could taste the salt, thick and briny on the air. It felt like there was a pillow pressed over my face though, so none of my senses were clear. It was all a ma.s.sive, awful jumble.

Someone nearby was slurring and groaning. The pitiful sound echoed off distant walls and high ceilings, further disorienting my groggy brain.

Eyes, Holly. You have eyes. Use them.

I focused every iota of concentration I had into opening and focusing my abnormally useless eyes.

I felt them flutter open, my brain told me they were open, but I couldn't see anything.

Dammit, Holly. You've gone blind. You couldn't have picked a better time to lose the use of your eyes?

My eyes weren't the only things that had stopped operating properly. My arms and legs didn't seem to be communicating with my brain either.

Was I in a horrible car accident? Am I a half-deaf, fully blind, quadriplegic woman now? Wait, am I drooling?

A sharp slap across my cheek cleared some of the cotton in my brain and the brilliant bursts of color that erupted in the darkness forced me to question whether or not I had actually gone blind. The cogs in my head began to turn again, informing me that my arms and legs did in fact still have feeling in them. I could feel the rope that fastened me to the chair cutting into my wrists and ankles.

Hearing came next. It became painfully clear to me that the pathetic noises filling every inch of spare s.p.a.ce in my head were coming from my own mouth. What's worse is the fact that I was uncontrollably begging some invisible a.s.sailant to let me go.

"You're not going anywhere," a quiet voice hissed in my ear. Those four words snaked around the inside of my skull like an electric train on a track. With each pa.s.s they grew louder until they became a dull roar that nearly drowned out the sharp click of receding steps.

All at once, my senses came into sharp focus and my brain finally received the messages my extremities were sending it.

I was tied to a chair, blindfolded, covered in bruises, and I had, in fact, been drooling on myself. Waves of nausea rolled through my stomach and sharp jabs of pain tore through my entire body.

I peeled my sandpaper-dry tongue off the roof of my mouth and formed what sounded to me like a complete sentence. In reality, it was a bunch of indistinct slurring with one clear word thrown in for good measure: "Why?"

"That," my captor screeched, "is the million dollar question, isn't it?"

The clear sound of stilettos clipping back in my direction added a spark of terror to the agony I felt in every inch of my being.

My head was ripped backwards by my hair and before I could scream, something was stuffed in my mouth and tied in place.

"You don't get to speak to me you f.u.c.king s.l.u.t!" Another slap across the face punctuated the tantrum, effectively driving her message into my brain like a railroad spike.

"In brighter news," her voice went from psychotic to almost amicable, "he hasn't shown up yet which proves my point that he really doesn't care if you cease to exist. Conveniently enough for me, I would really like to see you not exist anymore. My only hurdle now is deciding how to make that happen. I think I'll give him a little more time while I make up my mind. There needs to be some kind of incentive that will both encourage him to show up and keep me entertained enough to keep you alive. He needs to see the end of you. For the sake of motivation on all sides of this triangle, I have informed him that for every five minutes he's late, I will be breaking one of your fingers. If I run out of fingers, you run out of time. Oh look, four minutes have gone by already. Which finger would you like me to start with?"

I tried to plead with her through the cloth gag in my mouth as she ran a single, slender finger down each of mine. It was like a twisted game of This Little Piggy.

"Let's start small," she whispered. Her mouth was so close to my ear I could feel her breath as it brushed over my cheek.

She pried the pinky finger of my right hand out of its balled position and held it wrapped in her palm for a moment, "This is probably going to hurt."

I could hear the cruel smile in her voice as she said the words and I screamed as loud as my hoa.r.s.e voice would allow. She stood there, my pinky in her hand, silent, until I stopped wailing and broke down into sobs.

Then there was a sudden pressure accompanied by a gut-wrenching crack as she violently shoved my pinky flat against the back of my hand.

I might've screamed, but the cotton had returned to my brain. I was sure I had tipped over in my chair from the world listing so sharply to the side, but I never felt myself hit the floor.

I continued to sob as my body worked through the shock and my pinky began to throb.

"For some reason," she began to pace around my chair, "I thought you'd be stronger than this. I'm disappointed in how little fight there was in you. I expected thrashing and swearing and yelling, but all you've done is mumble and whine and beg. You don't deserve him. You know it, I know it, and he knows it. That's why he's not here. He's probably happy I'm taking you off his hands. I'm not sure what he thought he saw in you but clearly, the illusion has been broken. Now Ryder can get back to his normal life-the life that didn't have you in it. The life he made with me."

Who the f.u.c.k is this crazy b.i.t.c.h?

My brain kicked into survival mode and I tried to think of ways to keep her talking without actually engaging her in conversation. The only thing I could think to do without the ability to speak was to struggle. I had to put up the fight she wanted and keep her from getting bored.

I tried to rock the chair side-to-side and back and forth. I pulled against the restraints holding me in place as hard as my exhausted limbs would allow, but nothing budged. In the end, I was only able to violently shake my head and scream against the gag in my mouth.

It wasn't much, but it seemed to do the trick.

"That's more like it," she leered, "still a pretty pitiful display, but at least it's something!" A tiny electronic beep went off somewhere in the room and she clicked her tongue, "Another five minutes down and still no Ryder. Shall we just go in order?"

She pried the ring finger out of my weakly balled fist and without waiting for me to stop fighting, slammed it backward until my fingernail touched my wrist.

The larger bones filled the air with a louder crack than my pinky had and sent an immediate blaze of pain up my entire arm. I screamed until my voice gave out and tried, against my better judgment, to lash out at her with my feet. I'm pretty sure I lost consciousness at some point. However, when the agony of my middle finger being snapped five minutes later wracked my body, I was most definitely awake.

She had my thumb gripped firmly in her hand when a door somewhere in the distance slammed. We both froze. I even held my breath, straining my ears in hopes of hearing something, anything, that would tell me my savior had come.

The silence hung in the air between us like darkness, deep and seemingly impenetrable. I didn't need someone to drop a pin to tell me how quiet it was, I could hear the b.i.t.c.h's heart pounding in her chest.

The longest ten seconds of my life pa.s.sed in this manner before the best sound in the world finally rang through the s.p.a.ce as clear as a bell.

"Holly?"

It was Porter's voice.

He had finally come for me.

"Holly?" I yelled into the shadows of the ma.s.sive warehouse. My voice echoed loudly off the walls as I strained my ears for any kind of response.

I thought I heard a m.u.f.fled voice, but by the time my own voice had faded it was gone.

"Holly, babe," I shouted, "If you can hear me, I need you to make some noise! I can't see anything in here! Tell me where you are, sweetheart!"

The loud hum of industrial lighting filled the air as a single bulb against the far wall blazed to life. I could make out two figures-one was slumped over in a chair, and the other was standing beside the first holding its hand.

My feet pounded against the concrete before I even realized I was moving.

When I was close enough to make them both out clearly, my heart stopped as I skidded to a halt.

Holly was bound to the chair, limp and bleeding from the corner of her mouth and nose. I could see the sickly yellow of a fresh bruise forming beneath the blindfold over her eyes. Duct tape held her wrists, ankles, and shoulders to a heavy steel chair that had been bolted to the floor. Four of the fingers on her right hand were bent at grotesque angles and her thumb was captured in the palm of a finely manicured grip.

"Vanessa?"

"h.e.l.lo, Ryder."

My brain struggled to comprehend what I was seeing. I looked back and forth from one woman to the other, trying to make sense of it all.

"We've been waiting for you," Vanessa announced happily, "We can finally put an end to all of this madness now! You don't have to retire anymore! I've taken care of it! You can come back to me and we can go back to the way things were!"

Vanessa jerked Holly's thumb backward and dropped her hand like it was an empty hamburger wrapper. The weak yelp of pain that came out of Holly shot straight through me, shredding my heart like razor blades through paper.

"What the f.u.c.k Vanessa?"

I moved to help Holly, but before I could take two steps Vanessa had reached behind her and pulled out a handgun. She pointed it at Holly's head.

Okay... So too much coffee can make aerobics instructors snap. Good to know.

I froze and put my hands in front of me.

"Woah," I placated, "Vanessa, what are you doing? This is crazy!"

"It's not f.u.c.king crazy!" she screeched frantically, "You need this, Ryder! We had a life! You had a life! Then this b.i.t.c.h came along and tore it all apart! You're blinded by her, Ryder! You can't see what she's done to you! We had everything!"

"Vanessa," I pleaded, "what the h.e.l.l are you talking about?"

"Before you met this wh.o.r.e," she spat the last word like venom, "you were the leader of an empire, Ryder. The world was yours. We were happy together! We made love! I invited you into my home, into my bed, and you made me believe I was your queen! She took that away from us, Ryder!"

The gun in her hand trembled with fury. I needed to get her away from Holly before she could do anything stupid. I took a single, careful step forward.

Vanessa pressed the barrel of the pistol into Holly's temple, causing her head to loll to one side under the pressure. A quiet whimper escaped through the gag in her mouth and I knew then that I would do anything to save her.

"Vanessa, come on, baby," my brain was going a million miles an hour trying to figure out how I'd get us both out of this alive, "We can still have that! You know me. Nothing can stop me from getting what I want. I can make it happen for us, V. Put the gun down. Let's talk about this."

"Don't f.u.c.king placate me!" she shrieked, slamming the b.u.t.t of the pistol down on Holly's forearm, "I saw the press release today, Ryder! You're retiring! You're throwing your life away for this little home-wrecking s.l.u.t! I can't let her take your life away from you! I won't! The only way I can stop her and break whatever hold her c.u.n.t has over you is to end her and we both know that! I wanted you to be here for it! I want to see you realize what she had done to you! I want to see your face when you realize that what we had is exactly what you need. You need someone who will support you and encourage you and love you for who you are, Ryder! Not someone who strips away your dreams and forces you to give up the life you've worked so hard to build for yourself!"

"Vanessa! For f.u.c.k's sake! She didn't force me to give up anything! I still have everything I want! I've wanted to get out of the p.o.r.n industry almost since the first day I got into it! It was a stepping-stone for me the whole time! I never meant to make it a life-long career! Do you understand that? I don't want to be a glorified prost.i.tute for the rest of my life! It's always been my plan to retire early and chase my dreams in another direction! You want to be a part of that, don't you?"

"Of course I do," the fury in her face gave way to something more gentle, but equally psychotic, "but she took that away from me."

"Vanessa," I reached a hand out toward her, "Put the gun down and come with me. Let's get out of here. Thanks to you, I can see what she did to my life. You broke her spell on my and saved us. She's powerless now. Leave her. Let's go."

The b.i.t.c.h had clearly snapped and my only hope was to play into her delusion and make her believe that she had already won. If I could get her close enough that I could get the gun away from her, I could knock her out or break her wrist or give in to the urge to rip her throat out with my bare hands.

I choked down the terror that threatened to burst out of me like water from a broken d.a.m.n and managed to hold my outreached hand steady.

She stared at the limb like it was her salvation, a gentle smile softening the madness into an almost-pathetic sense of longing.

"I can't," the hardness returned to her face as she snapped back to the present, "We can't leave her here to be found alive. It's too risky, Ryder. She could find us again and ruin everything. I can't live like that. I can't live with the constant fear that she might take it all away from me again. She has to die."

A single shot rang out in the darkness.

Time froze right along with the beating of my heart.

The sound of dozens of heavy footsteps was the only thing that told me I wasn't dead. I was physically and emotionally numb and barely felt the cool brush of sharpened steel against my flesh as my arms were cut free.

Someone jerked the blindfold off my head and the harsh, overhead light blinded me. Everything was fuzzy as half a dozen black figures moved around me in slow motion. The world slowly rocked back and forth making me feel seasick.

I tried to make out Porter's voice in the rumble of the crowd, but someone flipped a light switch somewhere in the distance and flooded the entire world with a brilliant, burning glow. The pain shot into my skull like a hot poker just before everyone vanished and everything went black.

When I finally came to my brain was foggy once more, but the lights were low and it didn't hurt to open my eyes. There were strange, quiet noises and the room was unfamiliar, but when my eyes fell on Porter, none of it mattered anymore.

"Hey," I tried to say. It came out as more of a croak, but it was enough to get his attention.

He jumped to his feet and took the two steps from his chair to my side, tenderly brushing his hand over my forehead. "Hey," he crooned, "How you feeling?"

"Thirsty," I rasped.

"The doctor said you might be," he gently slid a spoonful of ice chips into my mouth, "He thinks you were chloroformed and one of the side effects is severe dry mouth."

I sucked on the frozen water and relished the soothing, hydrating sensation as it melted and slid down my throat.

"What happened?" I asked when the ice had finally moistened my throat enough that I could talk without feeling like I was breathing sandpaper.

Porter slid another scoop of ice between my lips before he pulled the recliner over to my bedside and gently took my left hand in his, "You were kidnapped and held in a warehouse for a few hours. Your car was still parked outside your office, so they think she grabbed you on your way out." His eyes misted and I could hear the tears strangling his voice, "I'm so sorry, Holly. I never meant for this to happen."

"Not your fault," talking was still difficult and there was a dull pain creeping into my right arm, "Who?"

"It was my fault though. The woman who took you was a crazy fan and someone I'd met a few times. She taught Jazzercise at my gym. If it hadn't been for me, she wouldn't have even known who you were. When she saw the press release announcing my retirement, she snapped. Apparently, she'd been following us for weeks. The police say it was her who threw the rock through your window. They found a stack of magazines with letters cut out of them in her car and photos of us all over her apartment. She'd been obsessing about it since our second date. I'm so, so sorry, Holly."

I cringed as a new wave of pain washed through my arm.

"She broke all the fingers on your right hand and fractured your ulna," he pressed the b.u.t.ton to call the nurse, "It's probably about time for another dose of pain killers."

I squeezed his hand with what strength I had and tried to smile at him. I could see the worry and the guilt etched on his face as clear as day. He was beating himself up over it and looked like he hadn't slept in days.

"How long?" I asked.

He blew out a heavy breath as the first tears spilled over his eyelashes and traced wet trails down his cheeks, "She had you for just over three hours. You've been in the hospital now for two days. After they put everything back where it belongs, they kept you pretty heavily sedated. You've been barely conscious for the last forty-eight hours."

Two days? How was that even possible?

"Becks?"

"I called her and Mitch when you didn't come home that night. They met us here after everything went down and the three of us have been taking shifts at your bedside. They're down in the cafeteria getting coffee and food right now." His tears were flowing in full force at that point, "It's all my fault that this happened to you. I'm so sorry."