CRACK!

The ice shatters and something long and sleek pushes through, slithering toward her like an endless black tongue.

She tries to swim away but it encircles her legs, her hips, and squeezes. She opens her throat to welcome death, icy black water flows into her as the brittle black tendril wraps tighter and tighter until her ribs snap. Hip bones crack. Organs are crushed as blood presses into her head. Her eyes bulge as hot bile shoots up her throat. She gags, her body convulses ….

And she wakes.

JESSIE FINDS HERSELF IN A strange bed.

The room is cold, and dark.

She turns her head into a pool of something wet, sticky. It reeks to high heaven, assaults her nasal passages like acidic gas, and she realizes with a sick shame that she’s vomited onto her pillow.

How much did I drink?

Her mind swims anxiously as she recalls moments of the dream. Of drowning. Of being burst like a grape by that thing. The memory conjures a deep dread, a feeling of danger. She starts to lift one hand, wanting to wipe the vomit from her cheek … and finds she cannot. “Huh?” she mumbles, her tongue thick, lips crusted with bile.

Confused, she tries to lift her other hand. But that, too, resists.

As streaks of panic infiltrate her dulled mind, Jessie’s senses sharpen, her reasoning wakes, and logic takes over the controls of her sleep-addled brain, knocking aside the muddled, half-assed navigation run by fear and confusion.

She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, holds it, then lets it out. Then again. And again. A mind-clearing, nerve-settling routine from her rowing competitions, a way to sync her mind and body—one unit, one tool, one weapon.

When she opens her eyes, her head feels clearer, her body more tuned into what’s happening.

She lifts her head off the soiled pillow, ignores the stench of whatever her last meal was, the sticky residue—now dried to a crusty film—on her lips, cheek, and chin. The room is dark, but her eyes are adjusting. She takes a quick glance around, recognizes it as her bedroom; the one she picked at Brad’s country home. Moonlight seeps through the window that faces the rear of the house; the one facing the lake.

Jessie’s brain hits her with a flash of the nightmare—those moon-like eyes opening across an expanse of black ice—but she forces it away, focuses on the here and now. On reality.

She tries to lift her hands again, but something restricts them. She raises her head as high as possible, the muscles in her shoulders straining, to look down the length of her body—which is uncovered and, unlike the dream, at least partially clothed. Her jeans and flannel button-down had been removed, along with her socks and shoes, leaving her stripped to nothing but underwear and her favorite tank top—a flimsy thing she’d had since high school that bore a faded, ridiculous (and totally hilarious, she’d always thought) image of a winking black cat with a knife in its teeth, a skull-and-bones pirate hat on its furry head. Her bare legs are spread in a way that brings heat to her cheeks, but she pushes that shit away as well.

Focus, Jess. This is very, very bad.

She pulls at one ankle, feels a taut rope dig into her skin.

“Fuck,” she says, confused and terrified and distantly angry. In the dim light, she sees a black line running across each ankle, both tied to the bedframe, the dark rope coiled around the fat, decorative knobs perched at each corner. She can’t see her hands because they’re tucked against her hips, but she feels that same bound sensation against her wrists when she tries jerking them up and assumes they’ve (whoever they might be—something she would get to in a hot minute) tied her hands to the same bed knobs as her feet.

There’s a clump from the hallway, and Jessie twists her head to see a bar of light underneath her closed door. A shadow moves past it. Hushed voices.

Men’s voices.

Jessie waits a beat, thinking. Tries to remember ….

We were on the deck. Brad gave us his fancy cognac. And then ….

Nothing.

The dream.

Drugged? By who? Brad? Tom? Impossible.

She hears the voices again, followed by the sound of a door opening down the hall. Someone laughs.

“Okay … enough of this shit,” she murmurs, then turns her right ankle so the heel of one foot is aligned with the wooden bed knob. It’s an old granny-style frame, probably oak or pine. Everything in this place is an antique, Brad had said when showing them around.

Good, I hope it’s old as fuck.

She gives a couple trial tugs on her foot, and sighs in frustration. She’ll get no more than a couple inches of runway before impact, but she thinks it’ll be enough.

It has to be.

Letting out a quick breath, Jessie kicks down, her right heel driving straight into the bed knob. There’s a crack, and she thinks maybe it cocked a little. Quickly, she repeats the kicking motion and this time the knob vanishes, followed by the bump-bump of the knob bouncing on the hardwood floor. Her foot, having passed through the space previously occupied by the bed knob, kicks into air, scraping her ankle along the splintered wood of the broken bedframe. She hisses in pain, but follows it with a breath of ecstasy, relishing the feeling of freedom on the right side of her body. Twisting onto her side, she kicks at the other knob, this time with the full thrust of her freed leg. It snaps off on the first try.

Her heart racing, Jessie has the unnerving feeling that time is of the essence, that her window of freedom is closing. She sits up, claws at the thin rope dangling from her wrists and throws it aside, then pulls it from each ankle. Part of her is surprised at how poorly secured she was, and then thinks of the vomit on her pillow.

They think I’m still out. Whatever they gave me, however they drugged me, I puked it up. I ….

A chill runs through her as she looks again toward the door. The voices of men in the hallway. The opening door down the hall, in the direction of her friend’s room.

Blake.

Jessie rolls from the bed, fights off a wave of lightheadedness, and staggers across the room. She takes a steadying breath, listening … then slowly twists the handle and cracks open the door.

The hallway is dim, but she can make out two doors near the end of the hall to her right. Between them sits a moonlit window. The door on the opposite side is Brad’s room. The one sharing a wall with her own is the bedroom Blake had chosen.

Both doors are open.

Jessie hears a noise to her left and flinches. She looks toward the sound, clocks the banister between her and the stairs, and two more doors. One, she knows, is the bathroom. The other is the room where Tom was sleeping. Both are closed.

What’s happening here?

A sudden noise pulls her attention back to the right, toward the hallway’s dead end. On bare feet she walks softly, one hand rubbing the wrist of the opposite arm, where the tight, thin rope has abraded her skin. She hears what sounds like…whimpers. The sound a woman might make if a hand is pressed against her mouth. It’s followed by what she can only think of as sounds of a struggle: the jerking scrape of furniture, panting breaths, a hard slap, a grunt.

Jessie takes a few more steps, the noises coming from Blake’s open doorway broken only by the sound of her own pounding heart.

There’s a moment of quiet and Jessie instinctively stops, waiting. Then, a second later: “Ow! Damn it, you bitch!”

Then Jessie hears Blake. She’s crying, straining against someone. Jessie takes three quick steps and pushes open the door.

Blake is on the bed. From what Jessie can see in the dim light, she’s naked, legs splayed, ankles tied to tall bed posts. Jessie’s not sure if Blake’s hands are tied, but she knows at least one is free because it’s reaching upwards, wrist held tightly by the man on top of her.

Brad.

Like Blake, he’s also naked, except for a pair of boxer briefs, luminous white against his tanned legs and back.

Jessie breaks from her shock, slowly coming to terms with how dangerous the situation is. She looks around the room for something to use as a weapon, fighting the slow, thick responses of her brain, aftereffects of whatever drug Brad slipped into her drink. She doesn’t spot anything obvious but notices a small antique table against the adjacent wall. She imagines lifting it high and crashing it down onto Brad’s fucking skull ….