His Virgin Stripper

24- Lacking Cedarwood

Sienna

The sudden jolt of the vehicle forced my weight forward, the seatbelt cutting sharply into my collarbone as the tires crunched against gravel.

I looked out the tinted window, trying to figure out where I was, but there was nothing recognizable in the dimming light.

The car had pulled into a completely lonely, narrow back street, a desolate stretch of cracked asphalt hemmed in by decaying concrete walls and overgrown weeds. It felt like the edge of the world.

The two men in the front seat turned around simultaneously, their massive shoulders blocking out the remaining light from the windshield. Their expressions were entirely blank, wiped clean of any human empathy.

"Get down from the car." the driver commanded, his voice flat and heavy.

For a fraction of a second, a desperate spark of defiance flared in my chest. Every instinct I had yelled at me to fight, to lock the doors, to dig my fingernails into the leather upholstery and refuse to move.

I thought about resisting them, about screaming until my throat tore. But as I shifted my head, a sharp, throbbing ache pulsed behind my temple, and a warm, slow trickle of wetness slid down the side of my neck.

I reached up with trembling fingers, touching the skin just below my ear lobe, and brought them back away.

Blood.

The sight of that small trickle of crimson from my injured ear drained the fight right out of my veins. The reality of our situation was too heavy, too violent. My body was already failing me, and the exhaustion of the past few hours settled deep into my bones.

I lowered my hand, swallowed the lump of terror rising in my throat, and chose to listen without questioning. I couldn't risk making them angry. Not yet.

I pushed the heavy door open, the humid air of the back street rushing to meet me.

The very second my legs hit the ground, the fragile equilibrium holding me together completely shattered. The simple act of supporting my own weight was too much for my nervous system to handle.

A violent wave of dizziness hit me with the force of a physical blow. My vision blurred instantly, the sharp edges of the street melting into a smear of grays and blacks. The world seemed to spin with an unnatural, terrifying force, rotating so rapidly around me that I lost all sense of where the sky ended and the pavement began.

The ground felt soft and unstable under my boots.My knees buckled and the darkness that had been creeping at the edges of my mind rushed in, swallowing everything whole.

"Sienna? Oh my god, Sienna, are you okay? Stay with me!"

Roxy's voice was a jagged blade slicing through the blackness, frantic and laced with a rising panic. Her words sounded distant, as if she were shouting from the end of a long, echoing tunnel.

A dull impact shuddered through my side as my shoulder met the dirt, though the pain felt distant, muted by the numbness spreading across my limbs.

Just before the dark closed in completely, Roxy’s voice tore through it again, a desperate scream ringing through the quiet alleyway.

“Hey! Don’t just stand there! She’s unconscious! Help me lift her!” her voice cracked as she called on the buff guys to help her.

Then something jolted me awake– a violent vibration.

The deep rumble of an engine shook my skull. I was moving. I felt the car swerve, tires screaming as we took corners too fast. My eyes were still useless in the dark, but Roxy was right beside me. Her voice was broken, frantic, almost hysterical.

“Drive faster! Damn it, step on the gas!” Roxy slammed her palms against the front seat. “She’s bleeding from her ear! Something’s wrong — just go! Don’t slow down, keep driving!”

The calm in her voice when she said the last sentence, mixed with the sound of a gun being c****d dragged at my consciousness. But my eyelids were too heavy. Gravity pulled me back down into the quiet before I could even take a full breath.

The heavy roar of the engine softened, shifting into a rough, uneven jolting.

Consciousness hit me like a slap.

My eyes fluttered open for a split second — just long enough to see a chaotic blur of dark, towering shapes rushing past a bruised night sky.

The heavy roar of the engine had softened into a rough, uneven jolting. The smooth hum of asphalt was gone. Now it was twigs crunching, branches scraping the undercarriage. We weren’t on a road anymore.

We were deep inside some dense, forest-like property. The thick canopy cut off the moonlight and drowned the car in absolute shadow. The isolated silence of the woods pressed against my dull awareness — a wordless hit of how far we were from safety.

Then the fog rolled back in and swallowed everything.

The next sensation I felt was pain.

A spike drove behind my eyes and tore me up from the dark. The shaking seat was replaced by cool night air slashing across my skin.

I was locked against a broad chest. Held in bulky hands that didn’t strain under my weight. For one disoriented second my mind betrayed me, drifting to the only man who’d ever held me with that kind of absolute authority.

A treacherous flicker of comfort hit my chest. I almost buried my face in his jacket. But the scent was wrong. It lacked the one scent I would recognize anywhere… cedarwood.

This wasn’t Marcello.

A cold alarm shot through my gut but my limbs were dead weight. I tried to move, tried to scream.

Nothing.

The void slammed back down and dragged me under before panic could even form.

When the darkness finally broke, the transition was sharp, leaving no room for the fog to return.

My senses rushed back all at once, starting with the texture beneath my body. It was completely wrong. I wasn't on the stiff, coarse bed in the rental house, nor was I in my own bed at home.

The surface beneath me was impossibly deep, a luxurious, soft mattress that seemed to swallow my frame as if I were sinking into a cloud.

The sheets pressing against my bare arms were cool, expensive silk, completely different from the gritty, survival-driven environments I had been trapped in for days.

My heart rate spiked instantly, its frantic, rhythmic thumping loud against my ribs as the realization of the foreigners forced my eyes to snap open.

The room was vast and softly lit, completely unfamiliar. I blinked against the low light, my focus darting from the high, detailed ceiling down to the immediate edges of the mattress.

My breath caught violently in my throat, freezing in my chest.

Sitting on a chair right by the side of my bed was a strange man. He was remarkably handsome, with sharp, aristocratic features and an aura of quiet, dangerous privilege that radiated off his perfectly tailored clothes.

He had been watching me, his eyes locked onto my face with a cold, calculating intensity. The moment he saw my eyelids flutter, his lips curved into a faint, unreadable expression.

He leaned forward slightly, his voice smooth, low, and eerily calm as he spoke the words that confirmed my worst nightmare.

"You're awake, finally."

The sound of his voice ; wrong and unfamiliar broke the last thread I was holding for dear life.

Terror hit like a wave. Waking up somewhere strange. Captured by someone I didn’t know. Everything familiar stripped away

A scream ripped from my throat before he could finish the sentence.

Deafening and animalistic.

It tore out of my chest as I flung myself backward into the pillows, desperate to put space between us.