The martini had actually been on the strong side for me, and I’d been planning on switching to something lighter, but the bartender was gone before I could say anything.
Louis turned sideways to face me, and the crowd immediately took advantage of the extra space, pressing him closer to me. “So tell me about yourself, Tanner. You from here?”
“No, I’m actually from Canada.”
“Ca-nay-dia, huh? What brings you to Chicago?”
I started to tell him the truth—I had met with a potential client and successfully signed them for a big ad campaign, with me creating both the graphics and the marketing plan, and I was out celebrating signing the contract—but something stopped me. “Oh, just visiting friends. Needed a break from the same-old same-old.”
“I hear that.”
The bartender deposited our drinks in front of us. The couple to my left crashed into me, making out hardcore. The taller one giggled and apologized, then they slid away from the bar, quickly replaced by someone else. When I turned back to my drink, Louis picked up his bottle and tilted it toward me. “To friends, old and new.”
I clinked my glass against his. “To friends.”
His eyes lingered on me as we sipped, and heat crawled up my neck. “How about you? From Chicago, visiting, or what?”
“Oh, I’m here. For now. I kinda go wherever the wind takes me. Pick up a job anytime I need a little cash, stay until I get bored, move on.”
“That sounds interesting. I have the ability to work from anywhere, but all that moving sounds like a lot of work, so I haven’t taken enough advantage of it.”
“So how long you in town?”
Man, his eyes were intense. They almost looked like they were swirling. “I leave tomorrow, actually.”
“That’s too bad. But maybe we can make your last night fun, huh? Your friends won’t mind if you’re back late. Not if they let you come out on the town all by yourself on your last night.”
Warning bells started blaring deep in my mind, but I was having trouble focusing. “Did you know a group of ferrets is called a business?” Was that my voice? I sounded so… slurry. “I mean… of course you do. You’re a fer-fer… a ferren… that’s what you are. But did you know…” How had I gotten so drunk so fast? “Bamboo grows thirty-five feet—I mean inches!—in a day?” I giggled. “Can you imagine if it grew thirty-five feet?”
“You’re just full of tidbits, aren’t you?”
I was. I loved trivia, and I had the worst habit of blurting it out when it was completely inappropriate, running through lists of strange facts when I was insecure or uncomfortable.
I hadn’t had enough alcohol to feel this drunk.
Louis put his hand on my arm. “You wanna get out of here?” he said seductively. “My apartment isn’t far.”
Oh. Shit. I couldn’t prove it, but I knew in that moment that Louis had put something in my drink, whether I could prove it or not, and if I didn’t get out of his clutches now, nothing good would follow.
“I gotta go to the restroom first,” I managed to say, grateful I had at least some portion of my brains left. I slid off my stool and wobbled a little. “The average person goes to the bathroom two thousand and five hundred times a year.”
“Do you want some help?” Louis asked.
I waved him off, maybe too eagerly. “No, no. Nope. I’m good. Sssolid. Jusst need a…”
My tiny size gave me an advantage as I ducked through the crowd, using the bodies surrounding me as handholds to pull myself through. A couple hands smacked at me for being handsy, and if I’d been alert enough, I would have felt bad, but I just needed to get out.
Instead of heading for the bathroom, where I knew Louis would look for me, I headed toward the first Employees Only door I found. It opened into an empty hallway. I was losing control of my feet. I lurched into the first door on my right. It was dark, lit only by the light of the hallway, which was just enough for me to see rows of shelves. A storeroom. I crawled to the back and curled into a corner.
Shift, I tried to command myself. Surely if shifting would help me heal, it would help my body get rid of whatever drug Louis had slipped me. Shift! But the drug had already taken hold, and all I could do was ride it out.
I must have fallen asleep. I startled awake when the storage room door opened, the light from the hallway searing my eyes after who-knew-how-long in the dark. I leaned out of the light, hiding in the shadows, from the voices in the corridor. I felt like a semi-truck had hit me and left me for roadkill.
“Just remember, we were never here,” a gruff voice said.
I leaned forward to peer through the shelves as the silhouette of a big man tossed a large sack into the room. The light made my head throb.
“As long as I got my money, I ain’t seen nothing,” a voice said. The door closed with a soft click, and then a thunk as the men outside locked the door.
Oh no. How long had I been here? How was I going to get out in time to make my plane in the morning?
The sack moaned, and I jumped, knocking a can over on the shelf, metal clanging against metal, making my head throb.
“Help,” the sack said.
I couldn’t see anything in the pitch dark of the storeroom. I shifted easily and the pain and confusion melted away. Good. At least the drug was out of my system enough, and shifting should take care of the last of it.
My shifted eyes were perfectly suited for night vision, and I scrambled out of my clothing to investigate the sack. It was definitely human shaped. I could scent wolf, omega, and male. But there was nothing I could do to help the person inside with my tiny squirrel hands.
I glanced around the room for inspiration. Duh, of course! The light switch! I ran up the edge of one of the shelves until I was just a little higher than the light switch, then I leaped into the air, spreading my arms and gliding toward the switch, hitting the raised side—thank god it wasn’t an up-down—and landed nimbly on the floor.
The fluorescent light hurt my night-adjusted eyes and I shifted back into human form quickly, running to untie the bound man.
As soon as my hands touched him, he began thrashing.
“Hey! I’m trying to help you. My name is Tanner. Just stay calm. The guys who threw you in here are gone now.”
The man stilled, and I went to work on the ropes binding the sack around his feet.
“What’s your name?”
“Pavlo,” he said. “What family are you with?”
That was a strange question. But chances were he was drugged, though I suspected for completely different reasons than I had been. “The Wongs.”
“Wong… Wong…”
I giggled a little, a combination of adrenaline and amusement. It sounded like he was telling me I was “wrong.”
“Pretty sure that’s my name. That’s what it says on my driver’s license, anyway.”
“Are you part of one of the tongs, or are you a prisoner too?”
I freed his feet and pulled the sack up over his legs. “There’s a Jewish story that says that God created tongs right before he rested on the seventh day, because a blacksmith needs tongs to create more tongs, and so God got them off to a good start.”