only to discover the person behind me was definitely not Letty.
Not unless she’d changed into all black and pulled a ski mask over her face in the past five minutes. Which, I supposed, given Letty’s job, was entirely possible.
I’d opened my mouth to crack a joke about that when I felt a prick on my upper arm and looked down to see a syringe sticking out of it.
“What the—”
I couldn’t even finish my sentence before the world went black.
Which brought me back to the closet. Which, as an out and proud bisexual guy, I felt was a bit rude, if we’re being honest. Couldn’t they at least have put me in a powder room or something? Whoever they were.
I had no recollection of what had happened between getting jabbed with that needle and waking up here, but if the rumbling in my stomach was any indicator, I’d been out for a while. Which meant that unless Letty was exacting a particularly disproportionate punishment for that piece of hákarl, something serious was going on.
That was when I began to panic.
You’d think that would have happened the minute I woke up blindfolded, handcuffed, and gagged in a janitor’s closet, but sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake. There’s a reason my sisters both have kickass careers and I still live at home with my parents a year and a half after graduating college. They got the brains of the family and I got the…well, chutzpah, if you’re being polite, and cheerful idiocy if you’re not.
Still, I tried to reason with myself. A terrorist plot to seize and kill all current inhabitants of Reykjavik seemed a little unlikely, as did the idea that some enemy of my parents had decided to abduct and murder my entire family. If I were being rational—no mean feat, tonguing a gross, non-porny, non-jockstrap as I was—the most likely scenario was that I’d been kidnapped.
The fact is, my parents are rich. Very rich. And as their youngest—and let’s be honest, least competent kid—I was the ideal target if you wanted to extort money from them. That had to be what was going on.
The thought should have been comforting. After all, if people wanted to get money from my parents, they needed to keep me alive and moderately unharmed.
But what I lacked in smarts, I also lacked in pain-tolerance, and made up for in anxiety, and suddenly I couldn’t stop thinking about all the parts of my body that could be sliced off without technically killing me, and sure, I might be a bratty bottom, but that didn’t mean I didn’t like my dick, and want to keep it attached to me.
How air-tight was this closet, anyway? Was it possible I might suffocate before any dick-slicing took place? And why oh why did ammonia have to smell quite so similar to fermented shark meat, and what if I puked and then drowned in it before I could even suffocate?
I mean, I was twenty-three years old. I was, by society’s standards at least, an adult. If ever a situation called for being strong and calm and competent, this was it. It was time to think of a way out of here.
Unfortunately, as an English literature major, I’d always been a little more Henry James than James Bond, and the only way I knew to get out of handcuffs was to beg for Daddy’s load and to promise to be a good boy.
Somehow, I doubted that would work in this situation.
And on top of that, I was pissed. Not on my own behalf, but on my parents’. My parents were good people. They weren’t cartoon billionaires who twirled their mustaches and concocted plans for world domination. They were trying to do good in the world, and they loved their kids, and they’d probably pay any amount of money to get me back, and it wasn’t fair to put them in this kind of situation.
I’d just tipped over the line from impending-panic-attack to how-dare-you-make-my-mom-worry-about-me when the closet door opened abruptly. That was probably why, instead of waiting and assessing the situation, I launched myself at the person who’d opened it, and tried to take them down.
Operative word being tried, because blind and cuffed as I was, I couldn’t do much more than hump their shoes. And I’m not here to judge anyone’s kinks, but the whole boot-licking thing has never been my particular cup of tea, so it was more embarrassing than anything else.