Page 6 of Pulse Zero
Nothing.
I knock again, harder this time. The sound rings through the room and dies.
I wait, giving it a few seconds.
Still nothing.
Okay. New approach.
I raise my fist and start pounding on the door witheverything my sluggish body will give me.
“Hey!” I shout. “Those shoes were limited edition DCs, asshole. I better get them back.”
Nothing again. Not even a shift in sound on the other side.
My heart starts to race, adrenaline slamming into whatever’s left of the sedative like they’re having a turf war inside my bloodstream. I keep banging anyway because stopping would mean thinking. And thinking feels dangerous right now.
“Okay, fine,” I say breathlessly, leaning my forehead against the cool metal. “This is about money, right? My uncle’s rich. Like, disturbingly, filthy rich. This could’ve been an email.”
That’s what this has to be about, right? My family’s pretty fucking rich because of the Institute. It’s not like I have any enemies, and I can’t imagine my dad or Malcolm having any either. It has to be a simple case ofkidnap the Bellrose heir for money.
I slide my hand down the door, fingers leaving faint smears of sweat behind. My arms feel like lead. My head swims harder, the edges of my vision darkening and blurring like someone’s slowly dimming the lights. I take a step back, then another, my balance finally giving up the fight.
“Rude.”
My weak whisper gets lost in the air as I sink down the wall behind me until I hit the floor. I pull my knees loosely to my chest, my breathing uneven, shallow and fast, like my body’s finally caught up to the idea that something is very, very wrong.
My eyelids grow impossibly heavy. I blink once. Twice. The room pulses softly, all the gray darkening.
The drugs win.
The last thing I register is the floor against my cheek and the faint, ridiculous thought that I should’ve read the fine print on being a Bellrose.
Then everything goes black.Again.
The next time Iwake, it’s to a sound I don’t recognize. Metal moving, a soft, hydraulic hush followed by a heavy scraping. All my senses drift in and out like a bad signal. There’s an ache in my jaw. My mouth is drier than before. Something cold is pressed against my cheek.
Right. The floor.
When I realize the sound was the door opening, my eyes snap open, heart lurching hard enough that I feel it in my throat.
Light from the other side of the door spills in, casting a long rectangle across the hard floor. A shadow cuts through it, faintly human-shaped.
I push myself up on my elbows, every movement sluggish, as though my body is still negotiating with gravity.
Gravity wins.
With a groan, I give up and let my body collapse back onto the ground.
“I was nice enough to give you a bed.”
The voice is deep and smooth. Maybe it’s just because everything else is still coming to me in broken, uneven pieces, but I swear he sounds like velvet.
“Yet you sleep on the floor like a dog.”
I don’t look at him. I can’t. If I look at him and see a real person, then all of this becomes real too.
“Wow,” I manage, my voice rough and slow as though it had to wade through syrup on its way up. “You kidnap a guy and immediately start critiquing his sleeping habits. Way to kick aman when he’s down. The floor was closer.”
