I had maybe ten seconds; I could feel the drug draining me as though it had opened a tap. Sean was tensed for what he assumed was coming next: a kick to the groin. I had one chance...
I let my eyes flutter; it was all I could do not to let them close right then and there, and my feigned stumble forward nearly unbalanced me, but it worked: Sean hesitated, his body relaxing as he thought I was falling... and with everything I had left, I ducked low and threw myself forward, my head catching him squarely in the groin… not much irony there, nope.
He made a sound like vomiting, and crumpled. My head spun as I tried to step past him and make for the door. I shouldn't have looked down, but the wounded voice that croaked out of him caused me to hesitate.
"No, Lani."
I'm not sure just what he meant by "No". That I wasn't going to get away? That he wished I hadn't hurt him? That we'd never had what I'd thought we'd had?
In the next second, it didn't matter… because Kim was there.
Of course. Not even Sean would try this alone.
I hadn't heard her light tread on the carpet, and there was no sound as she launched a sharp kick at the back of my left knee, which collapsed like a cheap umbrella. To keep my legs from splaying painfully wide, the right one followed it, sending me to the floor, on my knees, in front of Sean… irony clearly not finished for the evening.
The impact of my knees hitting the floor sent colors dancing in front of my eyes. As I tried to clear my head, there was a "zip" sound and I knew Kim had whipped a few lengths of binding cord from her belt.
I'd once asked Kim why she preferred rope over handcuffs. She said that a person trying to escape from handcuffs is working largely with their intellect and instinct, and has to be watched carefully... but that not even Houdini could escape from well-tied rope without some very obvious struggling... and struggling was something Kim would easily notice... and punish.
My hands were confused: trying to fend off Sean... trying to keep my balance... Kim simplified it all for me.
She caught my flailing right wrist first. Kim knew how to twist a joint so that pain was actually secondary to control. I must have stood a full head taller than she, and outweighed her by close to thirty pounds, but I could no more resist her now than could have any of the dozens of women she had taken before.
I doubt if any person alive knows more about ligature of the female form than Kim does. There's not a curve, indentation or joint that she can't use to effect immobilization. Once she had started tying me up, the rest was almost anticlimax--there was no doubt as to my fate.
The left wrist joined the right now. She had them both trapped in one hand as she leaned into me, using her leverage, to whip the cord around them with a speed that I had always had trouble believing, even when I could see it. Three turns between, then three back again, cinching it off, my slackening muscles starting to sag in the bonds already.
I don't know if she regarded the next move as a necessity, or a flourish (I'd seen her in both moods), but I felt a large loop of cord passed around my upper arms, then slipped back through itself, pulling my arms and elbows together, hard. The elbows didn't quite touch, but Kim had a sure instinct for knowing just how far they would go. She knotted the cord off, leaving me with no leverage, no way to apply any of my failing strength to the cords at my wrists.
As she leaned forward, I could see the Taser hanging from her hip. Anyone else, I might have made an attempt for it. With Kim, though, there was no point. Even undrugged, I couldn't have got it off her-- that would have taken two or three Navy Seals with little regard for life and limb. No, it just hung there, reminding me of how much more she could do to me if I made it necessary.
I doubt twenty seconds had elapsed since she'd kicked me to the floor, and my hands were already useless behind my back. I felt the slickness as the cord whipped around my waist, giving her someplace to anchor my wrist bonds. My body took less convincing than my mind did: I didn't even bother pulling at the cords as she fastened my bound wrists tightly at the small of my back… my arms already knew it was pointless.
I'd nearly forgotten Sean-- which I'm sure he would have thought fairly typical of me. Back on his feet, his huge hand spread its fingers wide and he pressed hard on the back of my head, forcing me to look down at the floor, the strain on my neck muscles making it impossible for me to attempt to rise, or even look up. I tried to utter some sort of plea to him again, but it was just drug-impaired babble that I addressed to the carpet.
Kim knelt down beside me, and I felt her winding more cord around my ankles. Once again, her deft fingers completed the task almost before I realized that she'd begun, the cord digging into skin that was almost devoid of feeling by this point.
Kim had left about a foot of cord between my bound ankles, with a ring dangling in the center. Evidently, the drug would not put me under... I was expected to walk to my own doom.
Sean's massive paw now rocked my head backwards, and, for the first time that night, Kim and I were face to face.
Kim had hair! Glossy dark tresses danced around her tiny face... so different from her usual buzz cut... that's what I had seen tonight! Back there in the bar-- light shining off her hair, as she'd disappeared out the door. The back of her head-- so familiar to me, but with hair, just different enough that I didn't recognize her... which, of course, was the idea. Must have taken her months to grow it out... which means they began planning my recovery as soon as they'd realized I was gone.
"Ki-Kim...?" My voice was thick and stupid. No matter. Kim wasn't a talker.
I'd worked with partners who enjoyed taunting the prey, gloating over them, telling them all the mistakes they'd made, how they'd been caught.
Not Kim.
There was not the remotest chance of her ever giving me even a hint of how she'd found me. She was the definition of "all-business."
As I looked at her, her dark brown eyes were utterly blank... if she felt my betrayal as keenly as I would have in her place, she didn't show it.
She already had the thick rubber ball in her left hand and moved her right to my jaw. Vise-like pressure at the joint caused my drugged mouth to gape foolishly, and her fingers snapped the ball in place between my teeth.
Her left hand swept my hair aside, her right pulled on the leather straps, forcing the ball more deeply into my mouth. My nerves were still working well enough to feel the bite of the leather, my cheeks collapsing in on themselves, as she buckled the gag tightly in place.
Sean's hand had left my head now, to be replaced by Kim's slender fingers wrapping themselves in my hair. She twisted them into a fist, and for the first time, in that grip, I thought I felt some hint of her fierce anger... as though the feelings she wouldn't allow her face to show were, instead, radiating through that painful grip, straight to my brain.
I think that was when my first tear fell.
By her hand in my hair, she yanked me to my feet. She held my head close to her hip, face-down, so that I was bent over painfully, not even the drug masking the ache already starting in my lower back and legs. She pulled at me, and I was forced to waddle mincingly in her wake; it's a good position for disorienting a prisoner, but I hadn't been on this end of it since training classes, years ago.
As I was dragged toward the door, I saw my home for the last time. So much that I had made here for myself... and the last I would ever see of it would be the carpet rushing along under my feet as I was dragged out the door and into the dark night.
I don't think I really believed there was any chance of rescue-- I had no close neighbors, and Sean and Kim could have handled anything short of a SWAT team if they'd been interfered with.
But I still found my mouth trying to form cries for help. They were faraway, gurgling sounds. Held face-down as I was, at least the saliva was not dribbling down my throat, as I was finding it harder and harder to control the muscles down there. Instead, it came out in a spray around the rubber in my mouth as my brain issued its last attempts at speech. The fact that Kim and Sean made no attempt to stop me showed just how much good it was doing me.
And then we were at the car.
Vans can be conspicuous... people watch a lot of TV. They always report vans.
Passenger cars, though, can pass almost unnoticed.
This one was a 3-year-old Taurus, some dark color I couldn't make out in the night. I had no doubt it had been tricked out with the modified version of the SHO engine that Sean had been the first one to test. Sean liked to drive fast. No one had ever caught him. No one would catch us now.
Sean opened the back passenger-side door, and Kim used the momentum of her pulling me along to fling me headlong to the floor, folding me over the lump of the the drivetrain . As Sean reached from the driver's-side door to hold me down, Kim yanked at the length of cord between my legs. She pulled it through the ring, drawing my ankles together with a sharp "crack" that would leave a bruise that my drugged muscles couldn't feel. This left her with about ten inches of cord which she now drew up to meet my bound hands, fastening wrists to ankles. Once tied, there was no appreciable slack between my wrists and ankles. I lay, face-down, trussed like poultry, gagged, my fate now in the hands of two people I had loved... and betrayed.
Kim got in back, settling herself with the soles of her boots resting against the back of my neck. Sean got in, and the powerful engine quietly turned over. The car purred its way down my driveway and out into the sparse traffic.
There was no blindfold... there was no hood... there was no need. We all knew where I was going
.
I was going back.
To Be Continued...…