Chapter 1

Dylan Gomez’s day sucked.  As he swam into consciousness, he realized he was once again stark naked.  He curled on his side practically in a fetal position inside a cage too small for him to stretch his aching limbs.  The top of the cage banged his shoulder when he tried to leaver himself up on one elbow.  Against his back, he felt the wire mesh squares with the other side barely inches from chest and knees.  Yep, Dylan’s brain foggily decided, his day definitely sucked. 

Then he saw the black barrel of a gun pointed at him.  His day just got worse.

"Who the hell are you?"  Despite the shakiness in the woman’s voice, the GLOCK she held didn’t quiver.   Dylan knew how much that gun weighed with a full load.  He knew from experience her solid hold on the semi-automatic pistol took long, concentrated hours of practice at a firing range.  

He used a GLOCK first in his part-time college job as a police officer in his town, then during his military stint.  With World War Three raging, everyone under the age of forty-five served in some capacity in the military for a minimum of two years.  Deferments belonged to his great-grandfather’s generation of sixty years ago in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  He was only able to complete his Ph.D. because he did it while being employed as a cop. 

Weird how his mind drifted when he came out of those damn blackouts, Dylan thought to himself.  He needed to figure a way out of this cage.  He definitely didn’t want to run the risk of ending up in Hell Hospital again.

Instead, he fixated on the short, clean fingernails of the tanned hands holding the gun with only a mesh wire cage door separating him from the barrel’s eye. 

Her hands mesmerized him.  She had long, intensely feminine fingers on large hands attached to strong wrists.  Nicks and scratches marred the rosy perfection of her skin.  Her tanned skin was still shades lighter than his.  She wore no rings, just a plain watch on a leather band peeked out from under the cuff of her long sleeved uniform shirt. 

He’d live in uniforms for years.  From the khaki shade of the uniform, he thought she was in Wildlife Control, maybe. 

His thoughts floated to the snow-kissed queens of the Norse myths and legends he used in his theses, both for his Masters and Ph.D.  Christened Dylan Thomas Gomez, he ate up poetry with his pabulum.  He already had a Doctorate in European Literature before he realized it didn’t do him any good in the police officer job he’d taken to postpone his military service.  He loved the job enough to make it his life’s work.  But all the memorized stories from college brought him comfort in the evil world he’d existed in for several months. 

His dick reminded him the nurses in the Hell Hospital weren’t as good looking as Brunhilde holding the gun on him.  As usual after one of his black-outs, his muscles and joints acted like they were stretching after being tied tightly and he had an aching hard-on, making him want a woman more badly than any teenage hormonal fantasy. 

His dick wanted those lovely hands wrapped around it.  It pulsed with exquisite pain.  What it wanted, it wanted now.

With sheer will, he overrode his blind eye and forced blood to his brain.  He needed to think.  "I asked you a question.  Who are you?  Como se llamas?"  Her Spanish held the accent of classroom lessons, unlike his bilingual skills that came with his mother’s milk.

He cleared his throat.  "Water?  Please?"  The gun and the pretty hands disappeared from view. 

The cage sat near the edge of the back of a van.  The van’s doors were open.  An aluminum ramp extruded downward.  Its bright metal reflected the sun with the heat of summer into the van and through the mesh wire cage.  South Texas didn’t care the calendar said mid-May. 

Dylan checked his internal clock.  This blackout lasted barely two days. 

Hell Hospital put him through sleep deprivation and tried to mess up his concept of days and nights by keeping him in windowless rooms with lights and meals at odd intervals.  They even placed him in complete sensory deprivation.  Despite their best efforts, his internal clock took the licking and kept on ticking.  His culendero uncle told him it was because he was in tune with Mother Earth.  Because he always knew when he was, he always kept of kernel of who he was.  He was grateful his clock kept him sane.

He cringed away from the jumbled memories since the last time he’d been fully aware of himself.  This waking up naked with no idea where he was had to stop soon.  He wanted to go back to being a cop since his military service was now kaput.  The damn blackouts got him invalided out of his military duty and Special Forces, despite his protests. 

The lovely hands came back into view, set a bottle of water and pile of clothes beside the cage.  On top of them, she placed a digital camera, then efficiently unsnapped the clasp on the cage.  Damn, he hadn’t realized it wasn’t locked.  Of course, he didn’t exactly have the strength to cut and run. 

He heard the subtle click of a double-barrel rifle being cocked into ready position.  Shit, even if he tried to run, Brunhilde would probably shoot his balls off before he got three feet away.  The woman had a freaking arsenal.  In addition to the GLOCK and the rifle, he spotted a second, smaller gun.  

Slowly, feeling joints creak and pop with strain, Dylan squirmed from the cage far enough to grab the water bottle.  He gulped it down, easing the dryness and being absorbed into his system almost immediately.  He took a deep breath, then emptied the bottle down his throat. 

The nice hands exchanged a second bottle for the first one.  Dylan was falling in love with those hands.  He drank the second bottle more slowly, but still finished it quickly.

"More?" The feminine voice circled around his head.  Her light scent held no perfumes, just the pleasant odor of sun-warmed woman in starched clothes.  His dick assured him he was still alive and it was fully functional.

"Maybe in a minute.  Thanks."

"You’re not an illegal.  Your accent is South Texas, not Mexican.  Who the hell are you and where is the jaguarondi?  Did you have a falling out with your poacher buddies?"

Dylan propped himself up on an elbow and tilted his head up to see his captor who sounded more confused than he was.  "What are you talking about?  I just regained consciousness.  Who the hell are you and where do you think you’re going to take me?"