Bargain With the Beast (2 page)

Tobias pulled his arm away from Paul
on the pretext of crossing his arms. As he did so he wished he
could just tell the other man to fuck off, but Tobias had so little
experience of dealing with male attention that he didn’t quite know
how to do it. So instead he shrugged. “Like I said, I’ve been
busy.”

“
Well let me know,” Paul
said. “You have my number.” He paused and let out a chuckle. “And
you know where I live.”

“
Yeah,” Tobias said. “I
do.”

Paul grinned and headed
out the door. The moment he was gone Tobias rested his head against
the mailbox. Why couldn’t he just tell Paul he wasn’t interested?
Why couldn’t he just tell
all
of them he wasn’t interested? Tobias wished he
knew the answer, wished that along with all of his new muscles he’d
somehow grown more of a backbone, maybe even learned how to deflect
the attention he was getting.

Because it was the
wrong
kind of
attention.

Tobias didn’t want a quick fuck or a
fling...he wanted something more than that, and yet, what were the
chances of that happening?

“
Idiot,” he muttered.
“Idiot.”

He lifted his head and let out a sigh.
That TV show was looking more and more appealing with each passing
minute, as was the prospect of being by himself, tucked up in his
apartment, with just the view of the bay for company.

Tobias nodded to himself,
and, mail still in hand, crossed the lobby and jogged up the stairs
to the second floor. As he did so, he couldn’t help but shoot an
admiring glance at the huge window that overlooked the sweeping
staircase. It was made of stained glass, and it was this feature
out of all the others in the building, that suggested church-like
origins. Of course the pictures on the stained glass would
never
have graced a
church, as they were erotic in the extreme. More than that, they
featured men and women in the clutches of a variety of odd
animal-type figures. In Tobias’ favorite pane a robed male was
being embraced by some sort of wolf creature and he seemed to be
quite happy about it, in fact his painted features were pretty damn
happy indeed...

Tobias shook his head as he passed the
window, wondering for maybe the hundredth time who had created it,
and what it meant. Trouble was, his curiosity was never going to be
sated, because he’d researched it, and no one seemed to know.
Tobias hated not knowing.

Once at the top of the stairs he took
a sharp left before heading down the long corridor that ran almost
the width of the left side of the building. It branched off into
two other, smaller corridors, and one of those led directly to his
apartment. The corridor, all of them in the building, had subdued
lighting at intervals after each apartment, and was covered in red
carpeting. Tobias couldn’t even hear his own footsteps...but he
could hear the voices at the very end of the corridor. A moment
later, once he branched off into his own, almost private walkway,
he saw the people they were coming from.

They stood outside of his apartment,
in the shadows of an oval window, just a few yards from his front
door.

Two people in all.

Tobias slowed his pace, wondering as
he did so, who would be visiting at this time of night. Not to
mention how they had managed to get inside. Only residents of the
building had a key to the front door.

“
Hey there,” he said. “Can
I help you?”

They both turned at the sound of his
voice. Tobias did not recognize the woman. She was maybe five foot,
had startlingly red hair, and was dressed in a floor-length green
cloak. Whatever she wore underneath it was black, but Tobias got
the impression of lots of flowing material.

The male, because it had to be a man,
was something else entirely. If the woman was five foot, then he
had to be about six and a half. He wore the hood of his cloak
pulled low over his head, almost like a cowl, and Tobias was sure,
just from a brief look, that he wouldn’t recognize him either. Paul
aside, theirs was a friendly building. Passing your neighbors daily
on the steep steps outside naturally led to conversation. Tobias
knew everyone in the building, and he was damn sure that these two,
whoever they were, were not residents. So, again, how the hell had
they gotten inside? And more to the point, what were they doing
outside of his apartment?

He looked around, wondering what to
do, when the woman stepped forward.

“
Help me?”

Tobias paused, wondering if he had
heard her right, when, a mere moment later, the man took hold of
her arm and pulled her to him. She let out a little shriek and
tried to pull away.

“
Help me,” she said again,
and her eyes—her strange yellow eyes—were pleading.

A swift, sharp kick of adrenaline
filled Tobias’ body then. Danger was suddenly in the air, he could
taste it. Despite that, he took a step forward, though in truth, he
had absolutely no idea what he was going to do.

“
What’s going on here?” he
said.

“
None of your
concern.”

Those words came from the male, and
his voice sent shivers up Tobias’ spine. He stood still, in the
exact same place he had been when Tobias had spotted him, only now
he had one hand clasped around the woman’s upper arm.

“
It’s my concern when it’s
right outside of my apartment,” Tobias said, and then he turned to
the woman. “Are you okay?”

“
No,” she said. “I’m not.
He won’t let me go. He’s trying to make me go back with
him.”

Fuck.

Tobias clenched his fist around his
pile of mail, his heart racing at speed. What the hell was he
supposed to do here? How was he going to handle this situation? For
one painful moment he even found himself wishing that Paul were
with him. At least between the two of them they’d have some chance
of dealing with this man. Only Paul wasn’t with him...Tobias was
alone...and he couldn’t just let this woman be manhandled by some
hooded brute. His parents might have been dead for some time, but
they’d raised Tobias right. He couldn’t simply ignore what was
happening.

“
You need to let the lady
go,” he said slowly. “Right now.”

The male tilted his shadowed
head...and then he laughed. The sound filled the space around them
and made Tobias shudder. Did he work out at the gym? Yes. Was he
toned and muscled? Yes. Could he take this man? Tobias feared the
answer to that would be a resounding no. He’d never gotten into a
fight in his entire life...and he didn’t much want to start now.
And yet, was he going to have a choice?

“
Let her go?” the man
asked, pretty much confirming Tobias’ thoughts. “The only place she
is going is with me.”

“
No,” he said, and the
adrenaline was pumping so hard it made Tobias feel slightly sick.
“She’s not.”

The man straightened up. He looked
from the woman to Tobias and then between them again. No one said a
word. Tobias could swear the air was actually pulsing with
danger...and then the man moved, and he moved so quickly that
Tobias could barely take it in.

He planted his feet firm, lifted his
fists, tried to draw in a deep breath...but Tobias didn’t have a
chance to do a single thing. A scream sounded, something like a
bang ringing in Tobias’ ears. He felt his feet leave the ground,
and his face seem to rise up to meet it.

Thoughts raced, feelings shot through
him, sensation after sensation, all of them jarred and out of
place...and the next thing Tobias knew a hand was muffling his
mouth...and then blackness descended.

Chapter Two

The moment Tobias awoke he
knew that something was wrong. Usually his alarms would wake him,
alarms
plural
,
because no matter how hard he worked to keep to his fitness
routine, he still loved to sleep as late as possible, he always
had. It had been a brutal transition at first, getting up at five
in the morning, and in the beginning he’d needed three alarms to
rouse him. He was down to two now, but so used was he to reaching
out to shut the first of them off, that he panicked the moment he
realized it
wasn’t
going off.

Had he forgot to set them?

Had he overslept?

Would he be have time to go for a run
before heading out to work?

He shot up and drew in a deep
breath...his thoughts oddly jumbled and out of place...a moment
later and everything came back.

The pleading
woman.

The hooded
male.

A fist on his
jaw.

And then
nothing...

And now? Tobias gasped as the view
around him came into focus then gasped again as the complete
unfamiliarity of it hit home.

His first thought? That this wasn’t
his bedroom.

His second? That it wasn’t a hospital
either.

And his third? It wasn’t anywhere he
had ever been, or seen, before.

Quickly, Tobias took it all in, his
thought processes almost paused as he did so. The walls were gray
stone, decorated in various places by lighted wall-sconces. The
ceiling was arched with beams of thick, dark wood, a huge,
multi-faceted chandelier falling from the centre-point. A huge,
equally as dark door was right in front of him and the
furniture...heavy pieces were spread about the space. A dark wood
dresser, a dark desk with a brown leather chair pushed against it,
and something that looked almost like a riding saddle molded across
a cabinet at waist height.

Tobias shook his head as
he tried to work out not only what that piece of furniture was, but
also where
he
was. It was almost like a castle, or at least what he would
imagine the inside of a castle would look like...and he had no idea
what the hell that meant!

He made to lift himself up, to jump
up, to try to work out what was going on. Only Tobias couldn’t jump
up...and that was when the confusion turned to absolute horror,
because he looked down, at his left arm first, and then at his
right, and that was when he saw them.

Manacles.

He shook his head again, let out a low
sound from the back of his throat, sure that he must be dreaming,
still asleep in his bed somewhere, or maybe even on the
red-carpeted floor of his building. Only everything was now in
sharp focus. The adrenaline was already running through his body,
making everything brighter and clearer.

He was
not
asleep.

He was
not
dreaming.

He
was
manacled on both
wrists.

Heart pumping in his chest, Tobias
twisted his body so that he could look behind him. A chain led from
each manacle. The chains were made of thick, linked metal, and they
led to the wrought iron railing that made up the headboard of the
bed.

He tugged on them.

Hard.

They did not give. He twisted some
more, trying to get a view of where they met the iron, whether he
could un-hook them in some way, and that was when the sound of
clinking metal met his ears.

With rising disbelief, combined with
the mounting horror, Tobias looked down and saw two more manacles
around each ankle. Like the ones around his wrists, they were maybe
two inches long, and linked chains led from them to the iron legs
at either side of the end of the bed.

Tobias lifted his knees and pulled.
The chains did not give.

With something that might have been a
panicked moa, he lifted each limb and pulled as hard as he could.
The bed did not move, the chains did not even creak, nothing
happened!

Fuck.

He thought about trying to
twist and turn off the bed, only Tobias understood enough of angles
and physics to get that the four chains held him in perfect
position. That if he pulled against one, the other would hold
tight. There was nowhere he
could
move. He was well and truly stuck...and someone
had made sure of this...

Tobias had to bite down on his lip
then, because as well as the adrenaline, and the confusion, and the
horror, was something that felt like the most intense panic Tobias
had ever experienced.

His thoughts raced like
lightning, Tobias summed the situation up in his mind before he
could even think to do otherwise. Someone had bought him here,
wherever
here
was, whilst he’d been unconscious. Once they had him here,
they had chained him up so that he couldn’t escape. And they were
planning to...

To what, his frantic mind
asked.
What
are
they planning to do?

He had no answer to that, because
Tobias couldn’t quite believe this was happening! He thought about
the couple that had been outside his apartment door.

Who were they?

What did they want?

Why had the woman needed
help?