Elephants.
There was a small herd of elephants stomping all over his head. Or at least it felt like it.
He groaned, rubbing at his pounding temples. Had he had too many drinks last night? He felt nauseated and dizzy. It almost seemed like the ground was moving under him. Speaking of the ground, he was lying on something hard and uncomfortable. Why was he on the floor?
“Hey, you, are you finally awake?”
A female voice. One he didn’t recognize. It definitely didn’t belong to his sister or mother—and he currently didn’t have any other woman in his life. Where was he?
He opened his eyes blearily and turned his pounding head.
A windowless room.
There were eight other people in the room. And the ground definitely was rocking.
Also—his hands were handcuffed together.
Handcuffed.
He stared blankly at the handcuffs.
Unless he’d suddenly developed a penchant for kinky, exhibitionist sex overnight, this was more than a little alarming. He couldn’t remember how he could have possibly ended up handcuffed.
What did he remember?
Aiden. That was his name. He was Aiden Gates, a twenty-year-old, a junior at Northeastern University, the youngest son of Edward and Veronica Gates.
The last thing he remembered was… He’d been… He’d been walking home after hanging out at his friend’s house for a little get-together before Christmas. He remembered footsteps behind him—and then nothing.
“Are you mute or something?” the same voice said.
Aiden shifted his gaze to the person addressing him: a young woman around his age. She was very pretty, with shiny golden hair and wide blue eyes.
She was handcuffed too. Actually, all the other people in the room were, as well.
Aiden really didn’t like the implications.
Fuck, this was too much, even by his standards. He’d always had a history of getting into scrapes. Trouble simply had a way of finding him. His mom never tired of telling the story of how a three-year-old Aiden had toddled out of the house and somehow ended up at the other end of the city. It had gone downhill from there over the years, and Aiden could only laugh at his misfortunes, but this… this was something else.
“I’m not,” Aiden said belatedly, hauling himself into a sitting position, which was unexpectedly difficult without using his hands. “Sorry—it took me a few moments to get over waking up handcuffed in a room full of handcuffed strangers. It doesn’t happen to me every day.”
“Point,” she murmured with a small smile. “I’m Janice.”
“Aiden,” he said, waving his cuffed hands. “I would shake your hand, but…” He took a deep breath and dropped his light tone. “Do you know what’s going on here?”
Janice’s lips pursed. “I’ve been here for two days, so yeah, I’ve overheard some stuff when they brought you guys in. They’re in the human trafficking business.”
Aiden grimaced. He couldn’t say he was surprised. Just his luck, really.
“We’re on a ship, right?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Do you know where they’re taking us?”
Janice’s expression darkened. “They want to sell us in the Middle East. One of them mentioned the UAE.”
Great. What were the chances of them being found halfway across the world?
Aiden screwed his eyes shut. All right, there was no need to panic yet. The authorities might catch these assholes any moment now, for all he knew. It would take the ship, what, weeks to get to the UAE? There was still plenty of time for their kidnappers to get caught.
His family was probably already freaking out.
Aiden winced at the thought, but pushed it away to focus on the more pressing issues.
He looked at the other people in the room more carefully. There were five women, including Janice, and three other guys besides Aiden. All of them were young and incredibly good-looking. And all of them were blond, which was a weird coincidence.
Or maybe not a coincidence at all.
“Is there a reason we’re all blonds?” Granted, their hair color ranged from dark blond to Aiden’s strawberry blond, but still.
Janice wrinkled her pretty nose. “Apparently perverted sheikhs like exotic pets, and natural blond hair is rare and valuable.” She pursed her lips. “Yes, they actually checked if I was a natural blonde. They checked all of us. And never mind that some of us don’t even have hair down there.”
Aiden pulled a face, glad that he’d been unconscious for that.
“Did they say anything else?” he said, trying to ignore the crying girl in the corner. She was the only one crying, but the others didn’t look much better. The guy with dirty blond hair seemed on the verge of crying too, his eyes wide and freaked out, his breath coming in loud, ragged gasps.
“No,” Janice said. “Most of the assholes don’t speak English, so I have no idea what they were saying.”
“Does anyone here know their language?” Aiden said, raising his voice a little.
No one replied.
Sighing, Aiden sagged back against the wall and tried hard not to think about what would happen to them if their kidnappers didn’t get caught.
Aiden had never been a worrier. There was no point in worrying about things he couldn’t change. He was normally good at adapting and flying by the seat of his pants, no matter how uncomfortable the situation was.
But being kidnapped and taken to the Middle East to be sold was… something else entirely. He had no delusions about what kind of future was awaiting him: even if Janice hadn’t confirmed their kidnappers’ plans, with his looks, it could only be one thing.
Aiden wasn’t vain, but he knew he was good-looking. A bit too good-looking. It had always attracted people’s attention, and not always in a good way. Kids were cruel. High school had been… tough until he had filled out, and even after that his face was a little too pretty for his comfort.
Frankly, Aiden used to hate his looks. Growing up, Wolverine had been his favorite superhero, and Aiden had wanted to look like him. Instead, he looked like a blonder, prettier version of boy scout Scott, sans the tragic backstory and laser-shooting eyes. His hazel eyes might not shoot lasers, but he’d been told they were uncommonly pretty, with ridiculously long eyelashes like something from an anime. His face had annoyed the teenage him so much that he even had a phase when he’d dyed his hair black, but with his pale skin, he’d looked like a lame emo vampire instead of Wolverine, so he’d stopped doing it and learned to live with his face. Some girls were into it even if he wasn’t. And it wasn’t like he was alone in this. It was a family curse. Jordan, his older brother, even had to act like a hard-ass who didn’t understand jokes in order to be taken seriously at work.
But now it seemed Aiden’s blondie looks were responsible for this mess.
Maybe he should have kept the black hair.
***
It didn’t take their kidnappers weeks to get to the Middle East. It took them two months.
The ship had taken several detours to avoid the authorities and pick up more cargo from cities in South America. Aiden wasn’t sure how many more people these assholes had kidnapped—the others were kept separately from them—and they seemed to have been sold faster than them, too.
“Each of you will make us more money than dozens of them,” one of the assholes had told them, his eyes flashing with greed as he scrutinized them. “Premium goods fetch premium prices. We’re not in any hurry to sell you.”
Time seemed to drag. Aiden only knew that it was the end of February already—which meant his birthday had come and gone without his noticing—when one of the girls, Amelia, passed away. She’d gotten progressively sicker during the voyage, and even the doctor the dickheads had eventually brought couldn’t do anything for her. Apparently it was a heart condition. She passed away in her sleep two days before their arrival in Dubai.
Aiden didn’t know what the assholes had done with her body. Had they simply thrown it to the sharks? The thought made him ill, but he couldn’t help but wonder if her fate was a mercy compared to what awaited the rest of them. It probably was.
Their kidnappers weren’t happy about having fewer premium goods to sell. They held a long, heated discussion, only some of it in English, but Aiden thought he got the gist of it. It seemed they were supposed to deliver five beautiful blonde women for a specific high stake auction at the beginning of March, but now they were one woman short and they were panicking.
“They aren’t good enough!” their leader snapped when one of his goons suggested that they replace her with one of the pretty girls they had kidnapped in Argentina. “Simply ‘pretty’ isn’t going to cut it! I’m supposed to deliver exquisite jewels for that auction, worthy of the sheikhs! That auction is famous across the Middle East! The auction organizer will have my head if I deliver subpar goods!”
Good, Aiden thought vindictively, but then one of the assholes pointed at him and said something in Arabic. His buddies got a speculative look in their eyes and then started nodding.
Aiden got a very bad feeling about it.
