Page 101 of The Chemist

Marc’s deep-brown eyes darkened—the color in them faded until all that was left were two black orbs glaring back at him.

For the first time since meeting Marc, Zero actually feared for his safety. Sure, Marc had always kind of creeped him out in that sort of Norman Bates, still lives with his mother in a creepy motel kind of way. There was such darkness, such anger, trapped behind those blackened spheres.

They always say to watch out for the quiet ones; well, Marc was the king of the quiet ones.

“First off, that was a prototype that I gave Matteo to test out. Second, I built the device to monitor one’s movements, not track a human trafficker and his gang of kidnappers!”

Zero swallowed hard. They couldn’t give up. They needed to find Diesel.

“So what do we do? How do we find out where they’ve taken him?” Zero asked, rubbing his hand over his buzzed hair, hoping a genius idea would pop in his melon.

“We wait until the tracker comes back online. In the meantime, I’m going to see if I can hack into the traffic cams and try and find a location for our boy.” Marc swiped his tablet from the hood of the car and made his way around to the passenger-side door. “Oh, and you might want to tell your daddy that his son has been kidnapped. I’m sure Matteo would want to know.” Marc was speaking to Chase, no doubt glad that he was not the one to have to tell the big guy that one of his favorite boys had gone missing.

Zero looked at them all like they were crazy. There was no fucking way that he was going to sit around waiting for a tiny red dot to suddenly appear. Not when Diesel needed him.

38

DIESEL

Asteady humming overhead brought Diesel’s mind back into focus. His head hurt, and his body felt numb. There was a weird sense of sinking, as if his body was in quicksand, and there was nothing he could do to stop himself from being swallowed by the earth. Slowly, he tried to open his eyes.

The room around him was dim, save for the fluorescent lights that kept flickering overhead, providing just enough light to keep the darkness at bay.

A groan beside him made Diesel jump. His body jerked forward but was held in place by straps wrapped around his chest and thighs.

What the fuck?

Panic set in. He glanced to his left.

Beside him, a young woman, groggy and sweaty, was bound to a gurney. The woman let out a groan, eyes still shut but struggling to open just as he had moments before.

Heart pounding in his chest, Diesel glanced to his right. Another man lay strapped to a gurney. This one looked like it had been taken out of a 1980s Frankenstein movie. The side ofthe gurney was falling apart and looked like it might collapse at any moment.

The man next to him was staring at him, wide-eyed, with a look of fear and confusion on his face.

What was going on?

Diesel struggled against his binds, fear and panic taking hold. There was nothing worse than knowing that you were trapped and not in control. This was one of the reasons that he didn’t like doing BDSM with guests. He didn’t like giving up control and being at the mercy of someone else. He had trust issues at the best of times; he wasn’t about to let some person tie him down and have his way with his junk. If a guest did ask him to partake in a little bondage, he always insisted that the guest be the one to be tied down. That was one of his hard and fast rules.

“What the fuck?” Diesel snapped, kicking and thrashing, trying to break free of his constraints.

“Wh-where am I?” someone to the right asked, his voice scared and shaky.

“Help! Someone, please! Let me go!” the woman to his left cried out.

Shifting himself, Diesel was able to glance around the room.

Three.

Three others were strapped to outdated hospital gurneys, each looking more wrecked than the last.

Where was he?The last thing Diesel remembered was chilling outside the club with Jared, watching the entrance to see who was going inside. He looked down at his arms, which had been strapped to the bars at the side of the bed.

What the fuck was going on?

“Please, help me! I don’t want to die,” the woman beside him cried in between sobs.

Die? They were going to die?

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