Page 203 of My Unhinged Alphas
At first it’s only supposed to be for a minute. Just long enough to lie still in the heat we made, in the wreckage of sheets and damp skin and the heavy, almost unreal quiet that comes after too much pleasure. The bed is enormous, absurdly so, wide enough to hold all four of us without anyone having to edge away, though no one seems interested in distance anyway.
When I wake, I know something is wrong before I know what it is.
Not sound. The room is quiet. Too quiet, maybe, but that isn’t it.
Absence.
I reach for Lena without opening my eyes fully and touch only warm sheets.
My body comes awake in one hard jolt.
I sit upright, disoriented for half a second by the size of the room and the stale gray light filtering around the curtains. Havoc is still asleep, flat on his stomach now, one arm flung wide. Knox is on his back, not quite motionless, but deep enough under that he hasn’t felt me move yet.
Lena is gone. The blanket beside me is thrown back, the place where she had been already cooling.
I look toward the bathroom first. It’s dark. My heart starts beating hard enough that I can feel it in my throat.
“Lena?” I say quietly at first, because some stupid part of me still expects her to answer from somewhere nearby. The dressing room. The bathroom. The other side of the bed.
Nothing.
I get to my feet.
The room smells faintly of sleep, sex, steam from the earlier shower, and under all of that something else. Sharp. Sweet in a chemical way. Wrong enough that my body recognizes it before my mind supplies the word.
Chloroform.
Every bit of warmth drains out of me.
There’s no doubt in my mind—she was taken.
Chapter 33
Lena
I wake into darkness.
For a few seconds I don’t know where I am, only that I can’t see and I can’t move properly and my heart is beating frantically. The blindfold is tight enough that it presses at the corners of my eyes. My wrists are bound behind me. My ankles too. The surface under me is hard, not a bed, not anything familiar, and the air smells faintly of dust and something industrial. Metal, maybe. Concrete. A place built for storage, not comfort.
Then memory comes back in one ugly rush.
I was asleep.
Warm, half turned into someone else’s body, deep enough under that I didn’t hear anything at first. Then I woke for one thin, unnatural second and saw a shape standing over the bed.
The guys didn’t move around me.
I opened my mouth.
A hand caught the back of my head and something wet pressed over my nose and mouth before I got any sound out. Chemical sweetness.
I remember trying to twist away, trying not to breathe, lungs burning, the shape above me turning into blur at the edges.
After that, nothing.
Now this.
My breathing starts to run from me and I force it down before it gets worse. In through my nose, shallow because I still don’t trust the air, out through my mouth. Again. Again.
