Not in my life.

So I had plans.

I had good friends.

I had an awesome boyfriend.

I had a bright future.

I had it all.

Finally.

I had it all.

And goddamn it, I wasn’t losing any of it.

“They will,” Pepper assured. “Won’t they, Evie? They’ll rescue us. Right?”

“He hit the deck,” I stated.

“What?” Pepper asked.

“Axl,” I said. “Ryn, honey, he hit the deck. He’s a commando. He’d know once he showed himself that they were going to fire on him, and he’d be prepared. He was thinking five steps ahead. He was thinking, better they take you without any holes in you so when they come and get us, we’d all be all right. That’s what happened. Yeah? Okay?”

“Y-yeah,” Ryn replied on a sniffle.

“Um, I mean, I don’t wanna be Debbie Downer or anything, but how are they gonna find us?” Hattie asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I was in an abandoned warehouse the last time, and I don’t know how they located me then. But I wasn’t there for very long, so obviously, they have ways.”

“I’m totally taking kickboxing courses when this is over,” Pepper muttered.

“Me too,” Hattie said. “Though they had guns on us and I’m not sure I’d kickbox a dude with a gun.”

“It slots in, you know, the instinct,” Ryn said, thankfully sounding like she’d gotten herself together. “Even if he has a gun, when someone has you by your hair and it’s clear they intend to do something to you that you don’t want, the instinct takes over.”

Pepper sounded pissed when she asked, “They had you by your hair?”

“When we’re rescued, first thing I’m gonna do after I down five gimlets is go to the Dry Bar and get a scalp scrub and a blowout,” Ryn declared.

Okay.

Good.

They were talking about blowouts.

We were all keeping it together.

So we’d have it together when the guys found us.

Right.

Good.

Onward.

“This is a long shot as a bright side, but just sayin’. I hope this serves to communicate that you all need to get the lead out and go out with your respective commando,” I announced.

“How about instead, we talk about how we can escape,” Ryn suggested.

Escape?

She wanted to try to escape?

I wasn’t sure that was a good idea.

“They should have zip-tied us,” Hattie noted. “They didn’t. I can start picking at these ropes and I’ll totally get them undone. I’m hell on wheels when the chains on my necklaces get tangled. I went on vacation once, and they all got messed up in my jewelry thingie. Like, seven necklaces. I had them separated in ten minutes flat.”

“I think maybe ten minutes is a bit longer than we should remain tied here,” Ryn remarked.

“Gotcha,” Hattie mumbled and kept mumbling, “On it.”

I was still feeling this was not a good idea.

Before I could impart that, Pepper did.

“Okay, I, for one, do not want to attempt to escape.”

“Why not?” Hattie asked.

“They have guns,” Pepper replied. “They might get testy if they show before we get loose, and see we’re trying to get loose. I don’t want a guy testy at me who’s also a guy holding a gun. And anyway, we all came in wearing hoods. We don’t know the lay of the land. Whatever’s beyond that door might be filled with bad guys. Testy bad guys. With guns. So, Hattie, stop doing that.”

“One thing I learned in the movies, if they wanted us dead, they’d kill us on the scene,” Ryn told us. “They certainly had enough bullets to make that happen.”

I looked to the ceiling.

No effigy for Mick.

Voodoo doll.

Absolutely.

“I’m relatively certain the training the guys had did not come from watching Bruce Willis movies,” Pepper retorted. “And sisters, I have a kid. We can just say my main priority right now is the same as it always is. That being, going home to Juno, alive and kicking. So, stop picking, Hattie.”

“Right. Juno,” Hattie said quietly. “Maybe we shouldn’t try to escape.”

“Okay, I hear you, Pepper,” Ryn said. “It just feels stupid, sitting here, doing nothing but waiting to get rescued.”

“Did anyone read those Rock Chick books?” Hattie asked. “Those women got kidnapped all the time. Maybe they’re like an…I don’t know. A how-to. As in, how-to-behave-when-kidnapped type a thing. Or how-to-know-whether-you-should-attempt-to-escape-or-not.”

“Nope,” Ryn said. “Haven’t read them.”

“Me either,” Pepper said.

“I only read part of the first one,” I told them. “And to where I got, Indy had been kidnapped twice, she didn’t know what to do either, but before she figured it out, Lee rescued her the first time, and Tex rescued her the second.”

“Well, you’ve been kidnapped,” Ryn pointed out. “What did you do?”

“I’m learning there are various forms of kidnappings. The last time, after the guy tied me to a chair, he interrogated me then hit me. Although the numbers involved in this one do not make me happy, in ranking them, so far this is better than the last,” I shared.

“Well, we got that going for us,” Pepper noted. “I’ve never been hit and I never wanna be hit.”

“Me either,” Ryn said.

“I hadn’t either, until I was kidnapped,” I told them.

Hattie said nothing.

In fact, it was weird how Hattie said nothing.

I knew I wasn’t the only one who thought that when Ryn prompted softly, “Hatz?”

“I, uh…you know, my dad really wanted me to be a successful ballerina,” she said.

I knew she was a dancer, and a good one, what with our occupation and all.

I also knew she’d wanted to go professional with that, and not in a zone where she had to take her clothes off to earn her money.

But a ballerina?

Hattie was naturally curvy. Very curvy. I’d never seen a ballerina that was curvy like she was.

Oh boy.

I didn’t have a good feeling about this story.

“How does that factor into whether you’ve been hit or not?” Pepper asked a question she knew the answer to already, we all knew the answer to it, but she asked it gently.

“Well, you know, early on, it’s known whether kids are gonna…make it. Obviously, I…didn’t.”

“So, he…hit you?” Pepper asked carefully.

“He was frustrated. He invested a lot of money and time in my training,” Hattie replied.

Pepper’s voice had risen when she repeated, “Invested a lot in your training?”

“You are fucking kidding me,” Ryn spat.

“Oh, honey,” I whispered.

“So, you’ve got an asshole dad,” Pepper started, now sounding fit to be tied. “Evan has an entire asshole family. I have an asshole ex who brought out the asshole in most of my family. Or maybe it was me getting pregnant young and unmarried and them being high-horse, judgmental, Bible-thumping dickheads and they’d just held their tongue before and not exposed it. And Ryn has an asshole brother.”