Then, apparently, dragged me inside and sicced his brainwashed female friend on me.
"How about no?" I shot back, jaw tight.
I should have been scared. But I found a surprising amount of anger coursing through my system, making my skin feel electric, my jaw tight.
"What are you going to do? Hit me again?" I added.
"You hit your own fucking head," he reminded me, looking infuriatingly amused by that fact.
I didn't want to think it, but it was impossible not to notice, even in this situation.
The man was gorgeous.
Like Adonis, Greek sculpture, belongs in an art gallery or fancy cologne ad kind of gorgeous.
It was the perfect, classical bone structure with a chiseled jaw, a Greek nose, a high, proud forehead, and stern brows over ice blue eyes that almost seemed to have flecks of a different color in them, but he was too far away to make them out.
His hair was blond and perfectly styled even after having worn a ski mask to kidnap me.
He was dressed like he was planning on spending time outdoors with a tan grandpa sweater over a hooded sweatshirt.
It was hot in the house. Like uncomfortably so. How he wasn't sweating like crazy was beyond me.
"Maybe I wouldn't have hit my head if I wasn't trying to escape a violent psychopath kidnapper," I said, shooting him my best mean face.
He completely ignored me, looking over at the other woman instead. "Lenore, go on. Ly has been waiting impatiently in your room," he said as the woman gave me one last long look before moving away.
"Let me go," I demanded, trying for strong, but with the absence of the woman, I was feeling a lot less comfortable.
Why would he send her away?
So he could do terrible things to me without an audience?
"No," he said, moving over toward the bed, looking down at the woman there.
"What did you do to her?" I demanded, anger rising again as she writhed in pain.
"Nothing."
"Oh, so she hit herself all over and cut herself all over too?" I asked. "How coincidental that things like that keep happening around you, huh?"
"You're not here to run your mouth," he informed me in that cool tone of his.
"Why am I here then?" I asked, trying to wriggle my wrists around, get them loose, but he had the cuffs on me too tight.
"To heal her," he said, wincing a bit as the woman on the bed shrieked against her gag when he tried to brush her bloody hair out of her face.
"Why wouldn't you bring her to the hospital?" I asked.
"For reasons that are none of your fucking business. Just get over here and look her over. Tell me what you need to fix her, and I will have someone get it."
Not sure I had a choice, I rose from the couch, feeling my vision swim for a moment before it settled and I could continue across the room, going to the opposite side of the bed than him.
The woman was completely covered in blood.
And it was no wonder.
Because her back looked like it had been whipped, the lacerations deep and long, criss-crossing her entire back from shoulders down to lower hips. There was even one deep lash mark across her butt.
"How long ago did she get these?" I asked, somehow able to think past my kidnapping and focus on the task at hand. But as I raised my hands to try to push her hair out of the way, the cuffs were a painful reminder of my situation.
I raised them at him, giving him a hard look.
To that, he searched my face for a long moment before moving around the bed, coming around to tower over me, reaching out with one hand to encircle my wrist to see the lock, then pulling out the key.
There was not—was absolutely not—a strange little electrical current that coursed over my skin when his fingertips brushed me. Because that would make no sense whatsoever.
"Don't even think about running," he told me, voice low, lethal, drawing my head up to look at his face. "I have men everywhere," he added, holding my gaze for a long second, making me realize that those specks I'd seen in his light blue eyes were actually, well, red. Except that made no sense. Because people didn't have red accents in their eyes.
"I'm not going to promise to be a good little captive," I told him, watching as his lips twitched ever so slightly before they fell back into their stern line.
"Fix Red," he demanded, pulling the cuffs off fully, then moving toward the other side of the room, leaning back against the wall near the door.
I tried not to notice, but there was no way to avoid feeling his gaze on me as I reached out toward the woman—Red—moving her hair, so I could see the outer edges of the wounds better.
They weren't puffy and red like they were older, like they had time to get infected. They seemed fresh.
"These all need to be stitched," I told him, checking out each individual slice for any tiny sign of infection that would need to be left open to drain.
"Give me a list of items," he demanded, curt, no-nonsense.
"A suture kit. Gauze. Saline solution. Antibiotic cream. Some actual antibiotics. Oral. She needs to be in a hospital," I insisted, looking over at him, shaking my head. "This is bad. She needs medical attention."
"She has it. That's why you're here."
"This isn't a sterile environment. I don't have—"
"I told you to give me a fucking list," he interrupted me. "Whatever it is, I can get it," he told me, not a hint of uncertainty in his words. And I guess if you were willing to kidnap a nurse to treat someone, stealing medical supplies wasn't a big deal.
"Everything I just mentioned," I said, feeling it was useless to argue. If she wasn't going to go to the hospital, then I had to treat her to the best of my ability. "Pain medicine. She's screaming. You don't hear her screaming?" I asked, voice tense.
"I have someone getting her pain medicine," he told me, shrugging. "What else?"
Ignoring him, I moved around the bed, inspecting some minor cuts and bruises under the blood on the woman's thighs, legs. They were worse on the bottom of her feet.
"Oh, God," I hissed, feeling my stomach flip over, making me need to take a steadying breath.
"What?" the man asked, not sounding any more concerned than he'd been a moment before.
"Someone removed... did you do this?" I asked, whipping around, ignoring the swirling of my vision, shooting daggers at him.
"Did I do what?" he asked, voice just as cutting as mine.
"Remove all her toenails," I clarified, even thinking of it making me feel sick again. I had a tough stomach when it came to all the various injuries a body could have inflicted upon it.
Two things freaked me out.
Toenails broken off.
And piercings being ripped out.
It was probably because they reminded me of horror movies I'd seen at way too young an age, ones that had stuck with me no matter how hard I tried to shake them.
"What?" he asked, pushing off the wall, taking long-legged strides across the room, moving to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me, bending forward to inspect her feet.
I felt a wave of relief when I realized he hadn't done this. He wouldn't need to inspect his handiwork if he had.
So maybe I wasn't going to end up on a bed covered in my own blood after all.