Six(16)

Pulling out his trusty knife, the immortal words of Crocodile Dundee came to mind, but I had a feeling Six would not appreciate them. He kneeled down in front of me and slipped the tip under the edge just below my knee, slicing the sticky gray bindings. Once the other side was done, he pulled both sides at the same time. My eyes bugged out of my head and I cursed him and the woman that bore him due to the tape practically ripping my skin off.

Once he finished doing the same to my ankles, my freed legs stung, causing me to whimper.

“I told you to put your pants on,” he said as he moved up to do the same to my arms.

I f*cking hated to admit it, but he was right.

Every muscle was stiff and sore. He’d left me around eight, and I wondered how long I’d been stuck in one position as I turned to look at the clock.

“Jesus, you were gone for six f*cking hours?” It was almost two thirty.

He didn’t answer, which didn’t surprise me. With each step over to the bed and the bag of food, I stretched, trying to get blood flow back to all my muscles.

It took five minutes, maybe less, to devour the two cheeseburgers and fries. For those few, brief minutes, I paid no attention to Six or what he was doing. They were the best minutes since he’d burst into my lab.

I slumped back against the headboard and patted my full stomach. It was then I focused in on him and what he was doing. He’d set a few things on the bed, one of them being a set of large metal rings—two small, two medium, and one large.

I’d seen sets like it before. Digby and I made many trips to the local sex shops for some fun toys or movies. They were for restraints—wrists, ankles, neck—but the set Six found wasn’t for the light fun I would’ve had with Digby.

Thick metal with what looked to be a built-in lock and a large gauge exterior ring.

Suddenly, the food wasn’t sitting very well.

There was a multitude of other things, one being a bundle of wire.

“What is all that for?” I asked, though I already had an idea.

“We might be here for a while.”

I nodded. Good news was I was going to be alive longer. Bad news was instead of tape, it looked like I was going to be hog-tied or worse. The key was not to panic. Keep the yellow flag flying, no red.

It took him over an hour to complete, but once done, there was a long wire connecting the legs of the bed to the base of the toilet. Attached to that was about four more feet, and at the end of that, one of the ankle restraints.

He grabbed hold of my right ankle and dragged me to the edge of the bed. Then cool metal wrapped around my bare ankle. The lock was set and he pulled out the key, stuffing it into his pocket.

I guess I should have been happy he didn’t strap me down to the bed or something. A little bit of freedom was better than taped to a chair.

The long wire had a little bit of give, allowing me to lie in the middle of the bed without tugging, but not allowing me to get to the door or phone. If the phone was still there, that was. He ripped it out of the wall and took it outside. The bed and bathroom were the only areas I had access to.

Six turned on the TV and being that it was after five, found nothing but news on the limited channels.

All the water I’d caught up on wanted out, so I tried out my bound freedom and went to the bathroom. My head fell into my hands as I resigned myself to my purgatory, wondering what life was like on the outside. For the first time, my thoughts drifted to the aftermath.

Would they find bodies, or just pieces? Then identifying them and contacting next of kin. All the husbands and wives, parents, siblings, children…everyone in their lives. The emotional devastation.

It wasn’t just the people I worked with. In the explosion, he probably killed everyone in the building.

What about mine? Would my parents find out from a knock on their door? I wanted to call them, but at the same time, I didn’t. At that moment, I was being held against my will with little chance of escape. I would tell them how much I loved them. Thank them for everything they’d done for me all my life.

Then who? Digby? Right then, I kicked myself for not going with him. If I had, I wouldn’t have tears rolling down my face, thinking of how my mom would take the news of my death.

After finishing up and wiping the tears from my cheeks, I made my way out. Six was standing at the foot of the bed, eyes glued to the TV.

I glanced over, my eyes going wide as a picture of the motel we’d been at flashed on the screen along with the headline “Couple found dead in small-town motel.”

Something didn’t sit right. We were far away in another state. Why would we see that report where we were? Then it hit me. It wasn’t a local news station—it was national.

But why would that make national news? Murders happened all the time around the country.

“Fingerprints were found at the grisly crime scene of the small motel just inside the Tennessee border, identifying twenty-eight-year-old Paisley Warren, a laboratory technician from the Hamilton County Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Cincinnati, Ohio.”

Oh… Shit! A picture of me, next to the building I spent five days a week in, filled the screen as the newscaster’s voice continued.

“The same building in which she was thought to have perished in the day before when an unknown explosion destroyed the building. The cause of the explosion is under investigation, but police are not ruling out foul play and are listing Warren as a person of interest in both cases. If you have any information or see Paisley Warren, please contact your local police department.”