Free Redemption (The Penton Vampire Legacy) by Susannah Sandlin

Someone had given her an injection. Had Aidan drugged her? That would certainly explain her uncharacteristic (slutty) behavior. But no, she sort of remembered him
taking
blood, not injecting her. Maybe he wasn’t the Godfather. Maybe he was Frankenstein.
    Panic faded to numbness. This was rural Alabama, for God’s sake, not exactly a hotbed of freaky abductions. Crime here most often involved domestic abuse fueled by a lot of alcohol.
    There had to be a rational explanation. Krys stood and pulled a pair of jeans and a sweater from the hangers, then looked around the room, trying to inject a smidgen of logic. She crossed to the dresser, opened the top drawer, and found the rest of her clothes, the neatly folded panties and socks. Great. Someone had handled her underwear.
    She changed her clothes in the small bathroom after looking around for video cameras. The idea of cameras was no crazier than waking up in a strange bed, locked up aftera night of hot almost-sex with a stranger who’d probably drugged her and left her in this room that was...underground, maybe? No windows, and it had a cool, muffled feel. Now that she thought about it, when she’d shouted and pounded on the door, there had been no echo or vibration. Her voice had been absorbed into the room. Definitely a basement.
    Running shoes and clean clothes dulled the fear and made way for anger. It seeped into her muscles like liquid fire, energizing them. Who the hell did Aidan Murphy think he was, anyway? Maybe he
was
a freakin’ mob boss. God knew that monster-size Mirren Kincaid would be a good enforcer. She should have run over Aidan last night and kept driving.
    Or at least she thought it had been last night. She looked around and spotted her watch on the bedside table. Two p.m. She’d lost almost twelve hours.
    Krys paced, trying to turn the anger into something she could use. She walked the edges of the room, looking for vents. Heroines in suspense movies always climbed through vents to escape their kidnappers. But the only vents she could find were the size of a prescription pad and located in the ceiling.
    That damned son of a bitch, with his blue freaking eyes and silky, dark hair. She’d like to snatch every strand of it out of his head. And inflict some pain a little lower, too.
    While her mind ranted, she kept her hands busy. Put her dirty clothes and dress heels in the empty suitcase. Threw the torn pantyhose in the trash can. (Make that the ornate, expensive-looking trash can.) Stuffed the contents of her purse back into the shoulder bag and hung it off the edge of a chair. Brushed her teeth. Brushed her hair.
    Finally, her restless gaze fell on the TV. She punched buttons on the front but nothing happened, so she jerked open the nightstand drawer.
    Bingo.
No Gideon Bible, but there was a remote.
    She aimed it at the TV and flipped channels. Not a big selection. Ellen DeGeneres held court on one channel; a TV judge chastised moronic criminals on another; a soap opera ran on a third. She recognized the show as
General Hospital
, which her coworkers liked to watch in the break room. The main character was a mob boss named Sonny, and he had dark hair and dimples. Krys hoped somebody would shoot him.
    Running on the fourth and final channel was what appeared to be local-access footage filmed with someone’s flip-cam, complete with bad lighting and uneven sound. The fuzzy picture showed a large room filled with people, all sitting in folding chairs turned toward a dais. Facing them from behind a long table on the raised platform sat three figures.
    Krys frowned and moved closer to the screen as she recognized Mirren Kincaid sitting on the left and Aidan in the middle. A striking, black-haired woman sat to Aidan’s right.
    A man in the audience asked a question, and Krys strained to catch it. She raised the volume as Aidan spoke into a microphone.
    “Jerry, I can’t tell you how many there are.” His voice was deep and masculine, and the sound of